Frears: I don’t think the film has anything to do with conventional questions about monarchy.
Slate: You don’t think The Queen has anything to do with monarchy?
Frears: No.
Slate: OK. Let’s say this then—much of the film explores the contrasts between old styles of reticence and the new emotionalism of therapeutic cultures—
Frears: Yes. It’s about tradition and change.
Charlie Rose: Are you a monarchist?Graham Fuller
Frears: I'm a Queenist.
When Elizabeth last appears, she’s strolling in the gardens at the palace alongside the Labour Prime Minister (who has sardonically been dubbed “Mr. Savior of the Monarchy” by Cherie). That their values have meshed feels like a betrayal.Manohla Dargis
Those who think more crowned heads should have rolled in the 18th century, in the meantime, can cozy up to “The Queen,” a sublimely nimble evisceration of that cult of celebrity known as the British royal family.Fuller and Dargis are describing what they wanted to see. So is Frears. He's hedging. But he made the thing, and that's what counts. Practice precedes theory. Sensibility and opinion are both forms of intention, and in art, sensibility wins.
Do the Right Thing is the newest entry in the expanding catalog of films inspired by Italian-American family virtues. If it is less engaging than Moonstruck, it can be commended for the earnestness of its effort to convey the suffering and final defeat of a rational man by an irrational world.One of the most important scenes in the film. [The title is wrong]
Wisely, Frears films the weeping queen from the back, so that rather than gape at her red face and runny nose (a movie staple these days), we see only the back of her head and heaving shoulders. Then enters the stag, picking his way across the hillside until the queen sees him and exclaims, "O Beauty!" (You'd better believe there's no "h" after that "O.") A moment later, hearing gunfire and voices, she tells the animal "Shoo!" And watching him retreat without yielding one jot of his dignity, she breaks into a smile. The queen is resolved. Assuming her customary expression of stern benevolence, she proceeds to comply with the prime minister's suggestions. But clearly she has been moved less by the talkative pol than by the noble beast.The Queen doesn't watch the stag retreat, she turns away and turns back to realize he's gone. The simplicity avoids the mawkishness that Bayles wants, but also adds a note of ambiguity, as if maybe the stag had been only a waking dream, something that the Queen wanted to see. The next scene as key and I wish it were on the web, but Bayles' description will do. And she recognizes things that everyone involved in the film understood, but many Americans missed. But she simplifies it. The Queen would never be so vulgar as to associate the stag with herself. The stag's nobility is the nobility of the old order in which the Queen, the huntsman and the stag together serve their roles. Diana was both the hunter and the hunted. The investment banker, the culture of money and celebrity, killed her. This is the weakest point of a good film. Diana was killed by the same people who worshipped her, who read the tabloids that hired the paparazzi to feed their need for pictures. If the film treated the monarchy and new money with a mix of irony and deference, the people themselves are untouchable.
The word noble is crucial. While preparing to leave for London, the queen learns that the stag has been shot, not by the royal hunting party but by a guest at "one of the commercial estates." Upon her departure she stops at the estate in question and asks to see the "imperial 14-pointer," which is hanging beheaded in a game shed. From the gamekeeper she learns that the stag was wounded "by an investment banker" and had run 14 miles before the gamekeeper could "finish him off." "Let's hope he didn't suffer too much," remarks the queen. Then with her characteristic dry irony, she adds, "Please pass my congratulations to your guest."
None of this makes any sense if the stag is interpreted as "a mawkish stand-in for the doomed Diana" or "the movie's simplistic reminder to Elizabeth that Diana, too, is dead and deserving of some compassion" (to quote two metaphorically challenged reviewers). Just as roses symbolize love, stags symbolize nobility. If you want to get mythological about it, Diana is the name of the Roman goddess of the hunt, the one who slays the stag. The queen's epiphany is not about her pathetic former daughter-in-law, it's about herself. And not the private self who wants to hide under the covers whenever Tony Blair rings, but the public self who has been raised from birth to be the living residue of an ancient ideal: rule by a person or persons superior in virtue. Watching the stag beat his dignified retreat, the queen realizes she can do the same. And shortly thereafter, we see Blair lose his temper with his wife Cherie and his press secretary, Alastair Campbell, who have been dissing the queen. Whether or not the real Blair is given to eloquent outbursts defending the importance of the Crown to the British system of government, this one certainly comes at the right dramatic moment.
Israeli officials want a public commitment from Washington to protect the Saudi regime should it come under threat.
As always, amazing and absurd to think that Israel just did the local branch of Al-Qaeda a favor by carrying out an airstrike.
— Gregg Carlstrom (@glcarlstrom) January 18, 2015
@glcarlstrom why? Hezbollah+Iran are a much bigger threat to Israel than Al-Qaida have ever been.
— Anshel Pfeffer אנשיל פפר (@AnshelPfeffer) January 18, 2015
At a dinner with a member of Congress last week, I saw a clear sign that Saudi's time in DC is up.
— Trita Parsi (@tparsi) February 10, 2019
Discussing Saudi support for AlQaeda, the lawmaker interrupted me and said: "The problem is that Saudi Arabia IS AlQaeda."
Times have changed...
Israeli officials have "privately expressed concerns to the Trump administration" about the new nuclear facility being built (with Chinese help) in Saudi Arabia. "It is not exactly clear to us what's going on in this facility." https://t.co/FMeiM3jAcF
— Gregg Carlstrom (@glcarlstrom) August 21, 2020
The world has been getting contradictory messages about its class structure. According to one authoritative account, it has reached a ‘global tipping point’—‘half the world is now middle class or wealthier’. This was based on figures marshalled by Homi Kharas, a former World Bank chief economist now at Brookings. More excitably, the Economist has hailed the ‘relentless rise’ of a ‘burgeoning bourgeoisie’ and trumpeted the arrival of a middle-class world. Yet serious scholarship also assures us of the opposite: according to Peter Temin, emeritus professor of economics at MIT, we should be concerned about ‘the vanishing middle class’. Readers could be forgiven for feeling bewildered. What is going on in economics—and in the economic sociology of the real world? This contribution will examine the varying definitions of ‘middle class’ in play and the contrasting trajectories analysed by development economists, sociologists and financial journalists across the different sectors of the world economy. It will go on to outline a rather different future for the world’s middle classes than either of the extremes suggested here. But first, a few historical and conceptual considerations may be in order, for the concept of the ‘middle class’ has long given rise to debate.
...The 2020 pandemic has therefore divided the middle class, while the gap between its upper ranks and the real bourgeoisie is widening further, due to the billions of dollars of pandemic ‘stimulus’ snaffled by the latter. Middle-class aspirations are being thwarted by a surge in youth unemployment, in both North and South. The ‘forward march’ of the Southern middle class, by whatever definition, has halted. Northern nightmares, on the other hand, are likely to continue. The frenetic preoccupation with consumption in mainstream middle-class discourse might appear frivolous in the shadow of the Coronavirus, and under the darkening clouds of climate change.
Further important questions—the processes of contemporary middle-class formation, social development and political potential—lie beyond the scope of this paper. For now, what conclusions may be drawn? First, the world can only be understood through its differences and inequalities, taking a 360-degree perspective. Failing that, the world looks very different depending on one’s vantage point; a vista from the North may look upside down from the South, and vice versa. Second, the middle class has a discursive centrality in the early twenty-first century, corresponding to that of the working class a century before. It should be read symptomatically, as an indicator of profound social change, as well as critically, as an ideology of consumer capitalism. Third, prevailing middle-class discourse is deeply—if not always deliberately—ideological, inflating out of all proportion a nebulous entity with strong political connotations—the middle class—and portraying a world of consumers without producers. Fourth, this discourse is also deceptive in absolutizing both the middle class and poverty. Poverty is always relative, the losing end of the prevailing level of unequal resource distribution; and the middle has to be in the middle of something. Finally, the emergent middle classes of the South are heading into the maelstrom of capitalist inequality, where they look set to converge with the hard-hit middle classes of the North. The covid-19 pandemic is currently shattering the middle-class dream in the South and accelerating the inegalitarian tendencies analysed above. Where this will lead is still an open question.
A disconnect throughout the convention: using black mayors as avatars for the current moment on race when these same mayors are the one being pressured by activists. They are its targets, but nationally presented as the voices— Steadman™ (@AsteadWesley) August 21, 2020
“Goodyear is committed to fostering an inclusive and respectful workplace where all of our associates can do their best in a spirit of teamwork. As part of this commitment, we do allow our associates to express their support on racial injustice and other equity issues but ask that they refrain from workplace expressions, verbal or otherwise, in support of political campaigning for any candidate or political party as well as other similar forms of advocacy that fall outside the scope of equity issues.”
Melissa Monaco, The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company
Protocols of Learned Elders of Zion: https://t.co/BpI5Tc8oKc— FBI Records Vault (@FBIRecordsVault) August 19, 2020
"Update: actually, nobody at the FBI decided this. They just decided to have a twitter bot that tweets, without any context, what people request via FOIA. So today it tweeted, without any context, the Protocols."
FBI apologizesThe replies were what you'd expect.
"For more than a century, the fabricated text “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion” has advanced a persistent anti-Semitic trope: that Jews are plotting to take over the world. From Hitler to Henry Ford, rabid anti-Semites have long shared the notorious text.
On Wednesday, an FBI Twitter account did the same. An account called FBI Records Vault tweeted out a link to a PDF containing the anti-Semitic tome as well as FBI documents related to it, with no other context, leaving critics baffled and outraged.
The FBI later apologized and clarified the account is automated and sends links to records that have been made public via Freedom of Information Act requests."
Ruth Gavison was my teacher and I owe my interest in philosophy to her enthusiastic and energetic teaching style. She also encouraged me to apply for graduate studies abroad and created the contact between me and Professor Joseph Raz who later became my supervisor. So I can praise her (or blame her) for my chosen career path.Tension is now another word for contradiction. Smoove.
Academically she has written breakthrough articles on the issues of privacy and the distinction between the private and the public sphere. She later also published extensively on questions of ethnic diversity, inter-religious conflicts, nationalism and democracy in the Israeli context and her writings have had major influence internationally and locally.
...In 2005 she established Mezila -- an organization devoted to a reconciliation between humanism and Zionism in Israel. These two organizations reflect the inherent tensions in her personality between her commitment to the ideal of Zionism on the one hand and her commitment to liberal rights and humanism on the other. These tensions in her personality gave rise to many bitter controversies between her and many other activists.
No shit
Black Lives Matter sentiment is essentially a militant expression of racial liberalism....Black Lives Matter is a cry for full recognition within the established terms of liberal democratic capitalism.Zionism site:https://nonsite.org
Cedric Johnson is associate professor of African American Studies and Political Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Chomsky on the Harper's letter about free speech and "cancel culture"...
...which he of course signed, but which has been controversial with the wokerati. From the interview:repeats
The letter is anodyne. It's a simple statement that it's worth being careful to preserve freedom of speech. The main attack on freedom of speech was not discussed there. It's the mainstream establishment, which for years has been engaged in massive cancel culture.
Philosophers are idiotsChomsky has the habit of answering email and I wrote him one. He might recognize the name. Family connections.
A university must tolerate, and even welcome, those who follow evidence and argument to conclusions that are false or unpalatable; but it may reject those who seek a platform for hatred or deception. That is why it counts counts against Middlebury College when its shouts down Charles Murray but it counts in favour of Berkeley when it excludes Milos Yannopoulos [sic].Universities would deserve criticism for rejecting a presentation by the authors of the Nuremberg Laws, but would be right in rejecting a speech by a rabble-rousing journalist who promotes them.
Similar from Farrell
The way that the Kennedy School used to think about fellowships, as Elmendorf describes it – which I think is the only sustainable way for it to think about them – is as no more and no less than a way to facilitate debate and conversation. This is one of the things that universities are supposed to do – bring a diverse group of people into debate, reflecting a broad set of constituencies. That Chelsea Manning is anathema to other fellows like Morell should be neither here or there – the job of the university is to provide opportunities for both people like Manning and people like Morell to participate in public debate, without necessarily feeling the need to pronounce on the merits of either.
The authors of the letter you signed defend their own right to cancel speech they don't approve of.
None of this is about free speech; it’s about acceptable speech. Limits on acceptable speech are a fact of life. That's why outsiders get on soap boxes. Normative assumption is a powerful thing. And editors are called editors because they have the power to choose what they print. But the NYT Op-Ed didn’t go through standard channels. It wasn’t edited or reviewed. It didn’t follow even their own formal process. And it included falsehoods that staff saw as blatant.He wrote back and we danced. Four notes back and fourth. The last:
I wouldn’t expect the Times to publish an op-ed that didn’t fit their narrative. That’s why monopolies are bad and free speech is important.
I defend the rights of Nazis, but I wouldn’t expect the Times to publish Hitler without comment. And it didn’t. But the people behind the Harper’s letter think arguments for a one sate solution in Palestine are beyond the pale altogether, with no place in "civil discourse” or blablabla.
You’re allowing yourself to be used as cover for their hypocrisy.
-We’re done.You’ve never understood politics for the same reason you’ve never understood language. It’s not mathematics.
I’d like to reproduce our exchange but I won’t do it without your permission.
-You don’t have my permission. But I agree that we’re done.
The other charge against Weiss — her support last year for a Stanford law student who denounced a campus event with left-wing Jewish cartoonist Eli Valley and assailed Valley as a trafficker in anti-Jewish hate — raises equally thorny issues. Valley’s work frequently uses nasty Jewish stereotypes and Nazi parallels to skewer pro-Israel American Jews as well as Israeli politicians. (In fact, he’s been praised by David Duke.) If people objected to a campus event with a black far-right troll who used blatantly racist tropes to mock black Democrats, I don’t think Weiss or most other signers of The Letter would see that as an outrageous attack on free speech.Valley's book has a forward by Peter Beinart.
One of my favorite linguistics lessons to teach students is on prosody, which is about how intonation, stress, tone, loudness, and other elements do a lot of work to communicate meaning in speech. This Erica Ash video on the versatility of the word “bitch” shows it beautifully. pic.twitter.com/Ws2eexeZTW— Uju Anya (@UjuAnya) August 9, 2020
Cooper
Joe Biden just announced his running mate choice: Sen. Kamala Harris of California. That means Harris, if she can govern well, could be the leader of both the Democratic Party and the country through 2030. If she can't, she might well be the last democratically-elected vice president in American history.
Biden is the heavy favorite against Trump this year. Given his age and his track record of working closely with President Obama when he was vice president, Harris will presumably play a significant role in major governing decisions. It's unpopular for the media to talk about, but there's a decent chance she would need to step in before Biden's term is up. What's more, there is a reasonable chance that Biden would choose not to run for re-election in 2024. If so, Harris would be the overwhelming favorite to run in his place.
The stakes could hardly be higher. Donald Trump is blatantly trying to steal the 2020 election, and the next Republican candidate will very likely try the same trick. A Biden administration would have four years, and perhaps another four or eight under a Harris administration, to address the pandemic, rebuild the shattered economy and federal government, root out Trump's gangrenous corruption, and fortify America's democratic institutions. If Biden and Harris instead muddle through letting everything fester, as happened under the Obama administration, the next would-be authoritarian probably won't be as incompetent as Trump. Let's hope they seize the moment.
Leiter
Biden has made his pick. Like Biden, she is "pragmatic," i.e, she will tilt whichever way the wind is blowing. Unlike Biden, she is a better and more reliably coherent speaker. A Black woman on the ticket should guarantee a huge Black turnout, which is crucial for Democrats. At the same time, like Obama, she won't scare off those white voters whose latent racial prejudices and anxieties might be activated by a more progressive Black politician. I have no enthusiasm for either on substance, but the main issue is to defeat the monster-child decisively, and hopefully they can do it. I do think they will end up being a highly progressive administration if the Democrats can capture both houses of Congress as well.Harris' father was upset his daughter made a joke about Jamaicans and pot. Buttigieg's father was a translator of Gramsci; he didn't disown his son for working for McKinsey. Leiter, Achen and Bartels are realists after Posner and Kissinger; they idealize themselves.
ADDENDUM: A few readers (and some Twitterati) didn't quite get the joke in the post title, above. Senator Harris will be the next President because, on the assumption that the monster-child will be defeated (all bets are off for humanity if that's wrong!), (1) Biden doesn't seem equipped to carry out a full 4-year term, and (2) even if he does, Harris will be his heir apparent (given the huge role name recognition--think "Clinton," "Kennedy," "Bush"--plays in democracy). The best thing about Senator Harris (apart from her ability to pull in votes from crucial demographics) is that her father is a Marxist. That means there is hope for America yet. (Readers who have not should look at Achen & Bartels, Democracy for Realists, which makes a strong case, especially in the American context, that democratic elections are all about group identities, not about policies.)
Mass democratic mobilisations have, in fact, existed at the heart of these regimes: workers’ riots in June 1953 in Berlin, workers’ councils in Poland and Hungary in 1956, the Prague Spring of 1968 (prolonged by the birth of the Czech workers’ councils), the revolutionary trade unionism of Solidarność (Solidarity) in Gdansk, Poland, in 1980. It is this history that the liberal interpretation of 1989 obliterates or falsifies — and tries to appropriate by presenting it as anti-communist. These popular movements fought, not to re-establish capitalism, but on the contrary in the name of socialist ideals.
If the end of the single party was popular; the philosopher Slavoj Žižek recalled that ‘Behind the Wall the peoples did not dream of capitalism’ (Le Monde, 7 November 2009). Capitalism’s triumph did not arise from a mass desire, but a choice made by the communist nomenklatura: to transform its privileges of function into privileges of ownership. Although the elites’ ‘grand conversion’ has been analysed, there are few studies on the social base of the old single party, which, though it became restive, did not demand privatisations.What epistocracy has wrought
The United States Postal Service is removing mail sorting machines from facilities around the country without any official explanation or reason given, Motherboard has learned through interviews with postal workers and union officials. In many cases, these are the same machines that would be tasked with sorting ballots, calling into question promises made by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy that the USPS has “ample capacity” to handle the predicted surge in mail-in ballots.
“They need that money in order to make the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said on Fox Business Thursday morning of the states that are implementing universal mail-in voting ahead of the November election. “But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting, because they’re not equipped to have it.”The rise of American fascism. I blame the 60s, the yuppies, academic theory and John Rawls. Liberals blame everyone else but themselves.
One of the values of Perlstein’s heavily narrative and loosely argued approach is that it restores a sense of randomness to outcomes. In retrospect, Reagan looks like the inevitable product of capital’s alliance with social and religious conservatism. But even in the 1980 primary, the “boardroom Jacobins” favored John Connally. They had to accept Reagan, and they certainly made their peace. But none of this was fated. Conservative activists remade the country with intensity, opportunism, and persistence through defeat. Those hoping to push back against their influence today might take some strange comfort in the story of their success. Studying the past does not tell you what will be possible in the future, nor promise that hard work will be rewarded. But it seems fair to conclude that the work is necessary, if not sufficient, and that many will not feel the tremors as the ground shifts under their feet.And Cooper approves of this shit.
Definitely seems like *progressives* will be locked out of the White House more than a decade now. But whether populists are depends on what happens to the GOP post-Trump. 2024 is probably a good year for Republicans. https://t.co/JgOVBduPj7— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) August 13, 2020
"I wasn’t hostile to May ’68, but whereas the people who participated in it saw it as a beginning, I saw it rather as an end. May ’68 was the first stone thrown into the pond of Marxism. The ideological collapse of Marxism began in ’68. Because I believe that May ’68, paradoxically, cured many people, including perhaps me, of communism and anticommunism. I think that the kind of Marxist fever that took place after May ’68 carried within it its condemnation and its end, it was a last flare-up. That’s how I saw May ’68, and that is why, personally, I remained absolutely indifferent, serene, with regard to what might happen. I continued with my work."
"Perhaps more than an ambiguity, it was an irony of history. The real legacy of May ’68, as we see in France today, is individualism, the rejection of civic sense and ideology, the rehabilitation of the idea that personal and financial success is a worthy pursuit — in short, a revival of capitalism. To borrow an expression of Lenin’s, we were useful idiots. Indeed, the uprising was more a counterrevolution than a revolution."
The conservative dilemma is straightforward: conservatism is not likely to be a politically popular cause in a democracy. Conservatism is the political movement that represents the interests of those who have against those who have not.Political science is always behind the curve, but claims to lead. Scholasticism is "path dependent"
Al-Ghazali, as quoted by Ernest Gellner, puts Mannheim’s point more pithily – "the genuine traditionalist does not know that he is one; he who proclaims himself to be one, no longer is one."Maria Farrell is married to a career military officer, and prays every day for the health of the Pope. She's a traditionalist.
Nice to see Henry's new post has been pretty much shut down by commenters.Corey Robin: "I think people have lots of different interests, and I think an elitist project like conservatism actually offers non-elites certain opportunities for power (though power that is always allied/hitched to subjection), which is one of the reasons non-elites support it." 
“...to defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality.”
Gray morality presents a worldview that states these two poles aren’t that different: a perspective that actually widens the disparity in our fractured world. Our lives are already gray, and these shades seem to keep getting muddier.
The distrust of black-and-white tales may stem from their prominence in many child-friendly franchises: Mario saves the princess, while Bowser kidnaps her. Guybrush Threepwood of Monkey Island fame rescues his lover as the earnest, wannabe outlaw, the antithesis to LeChuck’s scheming, undead pirate captain. Samus Aran blasts aliens to smithereens, versus the ghastly Mother Brain, who’s the ... brains behind the machinations of Metroid, I guess.
Tales of black-and-white morality feature enemies that have always been bad, and will always be bad. While the heroes are good, and always find a way to succeed despite the odds, even if they have to strain against their own moral codes.The author, a "non-binary"[?] corporate gamer geek from Singapore, an authoritarian corporate utopia.
I recently watched a demonstration by the guys from Rockstar Games who did the Western video game Red Dead Redemption. They said that all new technology is essentially run by techies. And then at some point, somebody comes in from another field and makes it universal. And they were hoping that we were getting to that point with video games. We’re not there yet. It’s still in the realm of the techies.Farrell, again
Engineers of shit.John Gray on the disappearance of utopian dreams of social reform in science fiction here. His taste in SF is excellent and he has several good lines.India was an alien environment for the British; Indochina was an alien environment for the French; Africa was an alien environment for the entirety of Europe. Henry Farrell can't deal with Palestine but he can justify "thought experiments" on Mars. Fantasy is escape. It's evasion.
The role of science has been to gauge the limits of the species, with new technologies and extra-planetary environments being used as virtual laboratories for an ongoing thought experiment. If the mainstream novel employs the lens of the commonplace career – birth and education, marriage and divorce, ambition and failure – SF has pursued the inquiry by abducting the human animal and placing it in alien environments.is particularly nice. It captures real (if not universal) differences without fetishizing the one as better than the other.
Science Fiction was created by men trying to get away from the alien environment populated by their wives.
So rather than buying shrimp from Southeast Asia, that retailer might place an order for more salmon from Norway, where it is quite sure there is no slavery going on.
In essence, this becomes a form of trade protectionism against lower-wage countries. The losers will be U.S. consumers, who will face higher prices and less choice.
On Thursday, Christie’s announced it will lend its online platform for a new exhibition devoted exclusively to Black artists. Lead by 24-year-old New York-based curator and art adviser, Destinee Ross-Sutton (@desti.knee) the private selling show titled SAY IT LOUD (I’m Black and I’m Proud) will run from July 31–August 17. Bringing more than 40 works works by 22 emerging and mid-career Black artists to buyers at fixed prices with a total value of $400,000.
Celine Cunha, Post-War and Contemporary Art Specialist serves as Co-Chairman of the Corporate Social Responsibility Diversity & Inclusion Initiatives and led the company’s first collaboration with Ross-Sutton, which also includes a panel series with the Harlem Arts Alliance. The programming, according to a press release, provides “a necessary platform for the Black Art community’s voices to be amplified and empowered.”
There is considerable agreement between Tushnet's arguments and the arguments I make in my own book on the cycles of constitutional time, which is out next month. That is not surprising. First, both Tushnet and I are working with the ideas of Yale political scientist Steven Skowronek about the cycle of political regimes in the United States. Tushnet has long been interested in regime theories-- his Harvard Foreword in 1999 offered a variation on these themes.NFS means No Fucking Shit.
Second, both Tushnet and I think that the Reagan regime that has dominated American politics since the 1980s is on its last legs, and that the country is about to embark on something new. What that new thing is, however, is yet to be determined. That is why the book alternates between describing the constitutional commitments of an extended, Trumpist regime, and the possibility of a new progressive regime.
Third, both Tushnet and I also argue that how people feel about judicial review depends on where they are in the rise and fall of regimes.
Abstract
Collection, analysis, and use of personal data increasingly affect everything we do in the information age, from our personal privacy to our opportunities for jobs, housing, travel, and health care. As algorithms for making decisions based on this data become more powerful, so too will the people and organizations who collect and use the data. Reformers will press for government regulation in the name of protecting personal privacy and preventing abuse and discrimination. In response, businesses that collect, analyze, use, distribute, and sell personal data will likely raise First Amendment defenses. It will only be natural for them to try to prevent what they regard as meddlesome and invasive government regulation by invoking the First Amendment - one of the most central of our constitutional liberties.The First Amendment in the Second Gilded Age
Balkin’s theory has been enormously influential. Scholars, advocates, and journalists have hailed it as a solution that can “make Facebook and Google behave” without crushing the tech industry. Mark Zuckerberg has sounded supportive notes. Lawmakers from both parties have expressed increasing interest; the Data Care Act would inscribe Balkin’s scholarship in the U.S. Code. The conventional wisdom, as Frank Pasquale expressed it in a recent essay, [updated link] is that the information-fiduciary proposal is not just a much-needed breakthrough but “hard to challenge.”Zuckerberg is supportive, as if that's a good sign.
This Balkinization contributor dissents. Uneasy about the fiduciary turn that Balkin has inspired, Lina Khan and I have written an essay arguing that the information-fiduciary proposal is flawed—likely beyond repair—on conceptual, legal, and normative grounds. A first draft of our essay is available here.
