In late August of 2020, protestors took to the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin to make noise about the August 23rd police shooting of Jacob Blake, which made big splashy news as more unjustified police violence against an unarmed black man, but was, upon reflection, not exactly that, and no charges were brought against the officers. The protests eventually led to the whole awful Kyle Rittenhouse affair, a classic situation of bad shit piling on bad shit piling on bad shit until a couple of very dumb people climb to the very top of that mountain of shit and declare that this is where they would like to be remembered forever. The most enduring thing the protests in Kenosha gave us—besides the lifelong aggrieved victimization of a person who shot two people to death with a rifle at extremely close range—is the “mostly peaceful” meme.
It’s a pretty good meme, and one that will definitely never die in the world of media criticism. “Mostly peaceful” is easy shorthand for journalism that is more interested in selling a particular narrative than it is in simply relaying the facts, combined with their absolutely insatiable appetite for the most sensationalistic imagery available. It is self-satire of the highest order, and too easy to understand by even the dumbest of people for it not to be latched onto by people with an axe to grind. Here is a good take on the format:
The coverage was widely lampooned at the time, and has become easy shorthand since. I bring it up now only because last night Tucker Carlson released what he considers to be definitive proof that the public has been lied to about the January 6th chaos at the US Capitol Building. Tucker says he has reviewed 40,000 hours of surveillance footage from that day and determined that the events that unfolded were, in fact—wait for it—…mostly peaceful.
Maybe this is an elaborate troll, designed both to give his viewers the permission structure to defend the riot as Constitutionally-protected free speech and dismiss the furor over what happened that day as little more than a partisan media freakout (as if they needed permission), and also to throw the CNN chyron back in the “mainstream media’s” face. Tucker certainly presents it all very sincerely, as he is wont to do.
His whole point seems to be that the “Q-Anon Shaman” guy could have been more violently confronted by the police, rather than seemingly escorted around the building, and that across 40,000 hours of footage, things are mostly peaceful. The first is asked and answered already—the police were trying to avoid escalating the situation any more than it was already escalated, and felt dangerously outnumbered and unable to control the situation. The rest of the point—that the public has seen only the inflammatory parts of the footage, and not the peaceful parts—is just a fundamental fact of the world. Things are peaceful, except when they’re not. The news shows you the action, because it can’t help itself, even if it’s trying to tell you that what you’re seeing isn’t actually what you’re seeing.
I have seen many hours of January 6th footage. I’ve watched the long Frontline documentaries about it, the Congressional hearings, the HBO documentary. I have a pretty good handle on what happened that day, and why, I think. But Tucker insists I’ve been lied to, that I’m wrong because I have ingested too much propaganda. There is a staggering amount of “journalism” out there that seeks only to soothe its audience with the promise that they are correct to believe the things they already believe. There is already a CNN article posted this morning that promises to tell its audience “what to know” about Tucker’s reporting, which could of course simply be achieved by linking to the piece and trusting the audience to figure it out. But very few outlets really seem to trust their audience to do that, anymore—they would rather “explain the news” to you than report it. Tucker was doing that last night, when he insists that you can’t trust your lying eyes when Congress shows you footage of rioters breaking windows and bashing Capitol police officers with flagpoles, just as CNN was doing it when they insisted the fires over their reporter’s shoulder was some sort of unimportant aberration.
These sorts of stories aren’t trying to give you information, they’re giving you ammunition. They seek to feed your appetite for confirming that the world is as you already think it is. If you believe January 6th was mostly peaceful, it was. If you believe January 6th was an insurrection, it was. And all you have to do is tune the television to the right channel to tell you that you’re absolutely correct.
NPR: TikTok to limit the time teens can be on the app. Will safeguards help protect them?
Those safeguards include default settings for users under 13 that require parental permission to continue using the app after 60 minutes on TikTok in one day. Users between the ages of 13 and 17 will be asked to enter their own passcode to continue using TikTok after 60 minutes of daily use. Users under 18 will be asked to set their own usage limits if they opt out of the default setting.
I suspect that as my children get older, I will have to make a choice between giving them a smartphone and giving mine up. My own abiding aversion to being a known hypocrite will prevent me from simply denying them a smartphone forever while I remain tethered to my own. I suspect that if I were to fully examine and unpack my reasons for being nearly completely sober these days, I might find similar reasons for that decision—I want to be able to have honest conversations with them about drinking and drugs and not feel like an awful hypocrite about it. They are still young, and these conversations are hopefully a while off, but I think it might play a role. Once I start thinking about changing something, I usually can’t just ignore it forever. This is how and why I quit smoking cigarettes—it occurred to me at some point that I was being very stupid, and eventually I despised myself for my own stupidity enough to stop. A similar seed has long been germinating in my head about the smartphone—that I should smash it—and eventually I will succumb to it. I will install a landline and find a kickass dumb flip-phone that I would have been thrilled to own in 2006. And like every other marginal life improvement, I won’t be any happier, because I’ll still be me, but at least I won’t be constantly berating myself for succumbing to things that I know are actively bad for me.
NYT: Need to Write Your Vows? A.I. Can Help.
If you have to ask the robits to help you write your wedding vows, just go instead with whatever boilerplate bullshit has served everyone else who came before you, you maniac. For the same reason that every grocery store still has an aisle full of greeting cards with trite nothings suitable for every occasion from birthday to funeral, there exist perfectly acceptable pre-existing formats for expressing your love and commitment to your partner. These traditional vows have the added benefit of having the weight of history and tradition behind them, so if you lack the spark of originality necessary to express yourself in interesting ways, at least you can fall back on how everybody else has always done it. And there’s nothing wrong with that! Not everybody needs to have special artisanal expressions of their unique love. Robit AI-crafted wedding vows lead to robit AI-crafted divorce proceedings. Everyone knows this.