The company (NYSE: EPR) purchased five new charter schools from Imagine Schools Inc. of Arlington, Va., at a cost of $44 million and agreed to finance expansion of two others at a cost of $4 million.
Entertainment Properties Trust, which is based in Kansas City, will lease the five new schools back to Imagine Schools, a leading operator of public charter schools.
Entertainment Properties Trust’s portfolio now includes 27 charter schools that Imagine Schools operates in nine states and the District of Columbia.
“We are excited to add to our public charter school portfolio and enthusiastic about the prospects of Imagine and this investment category,” Entertainment Properties Trust CEO David Brain said in a release.
In an interview, Brain said the Imagine Schools transaction announced Friday fulfilled Entertainment Properties’ 2007 commitment to make at least $200 million worth of acquisitions from Imagine. It also increases Entertainment Properties’ footprint in what Brain called “a huge new category” for private real estate investment.
“Public charter schools are now a 4 or 5 percent slice of a couple trillion dollar public education real estate market,” Brain said.
Heretofore, new public schools have been financed almost exclusively through school-bond issues, he said. But Brain said the move to “decentralize and debureaucratize public education” is creating an increasing number of charter schools, which aren’t as cost-efficiently financed through bond issues.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Imagine Schools Sell Five Schools
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Entertainment Properties: Excited About Charter Profits
One of the few niche businesses that Entertainment Properties is planning to remain in is charter schools. The company owns 27 schools, which are operated by Imagine Schools Inc., and is planning to develop more. [Entertainment Properties Chief Executive David] Brain says the business has great potential because demand and political support for the alternative schools are growing. He said the unlevered returns on charter schools have been between 10% to 12%. "We think there is a major opportunity here" as first movers, he said, saying the company is the only public REIT to invest in charter schools.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Imagine and the Speculators
The Charter Schools Gamble
Speculating on Education
By DANIEL WOLFF
"We’re not speculators. We’re investors.” So says the CEO of a real estate trust that recently sunk some $170 million into 22 charter schools.
Which got me wondering: why charter schools? How do they end up looking like sound investments?
It turns out the buyer, Entertainment Properties Trust (EPR), buys real estate nationwide, with its total portfolio worth about $2.6 billion. Over half of that is in megaplex movie theaters. EPR’s stated goal is to be "the nation's leading destination entertainment, entertainment-related, recreation and specialty real estate company."
So why charter schools?
According to EPR's website: "We understand that education is among the most vital experiences of life. Movie theatres and charter schools are very different in many ways, but they are alike in this respect: People choose to patronize them. Our experience in financing specialized real estate enables us to capitalize on properties that people choose to visit."
Sunday, June 19, 2016
Bolivia Does What AFT/NEA Refuse to Do--Flips the Gates Bird
NOTE: I've done two things Bill Gates has never done:
1) Gone to a Bolivian market with my mother-in-law & bought a chicken
2) Taught in public school for 20 years
Until now, I've never made pronouncements on chickens in Bolivia.
In his blog, Bill Gates pronounces "It's pretty clear to me that just about anyone who's living in extreme poverty is better off if they have chickens. In fact, if I were in their shoes, that's what I would do--I would raise chickens." Gates goes on to give lessons in chicken husbandry, including the fecundity of chickens and the empowerment chicken ownership can bring to women.
In keeping with the Gates Gospel that he knows what people need, on June 7, 2016, Gates announced a gift of 100,000 chickens to impoverished nations worldwide, including sub-Saharan Africa and Bolivia. The Financial Times reported that Cesar Cocarico, Bolivia's minister of land and rural development, was insulted. "[Gates] does not know Bolivia's reality to think we are living 500 years ago, in the middle of the jungle not knowing how to produce. Respectfully, he should stop talking about Bolivia, and once he knows more, apologize to us."
US teachers can only wish that the AFT, NEA, and assorted educational professional groups had the courage of Cesar Cocarico to shout "No!" to Gates' chicken shit. But because the education establishment prostrates itself when money talks, children across the country are condemned to Gates's Common Core, the chicken gizzards of pedagogy.
Plenty of people advise Bill Gates to stop making pronouncements about public schools until he knows more. Instead, he gives millions to the Entertainment Industry Foundation "to elevate the status of the teaching profession."
Entertainment Industry Foundation
April 2016
to elevate the status of the teaching profession, promote students’ feeling of agency in their own learning, and create public will for rigorous, innovative teaching and learning by building a new national narrative about our education system.
$2,700,000
16
College Ready
United States
Los Angeles, California
http://www.eifoundation.org
This is a follow-up on last year's grant:
Entertainment Industry Foundation
July 2015
to support education campaign that ignites a sense of excitement for learning and establishes education as the pathway to opportunity and success
$3,000,000
13
K-12, Communications, Strategic Partnerships
Communications|United States
Los Angeles, California
http://www.eifoundation.org
Reminder where other Gates money went:
American Federation Of Teachers Educational Foundation
June 2012
to support the AFT Innovation Fund and work on teacher development and Common Core State Standards
$4,400,000
38
K-12
United States
Washington, District of Columbia
http://www.aft.org
The NEA Foundation for the Improvement of Education
July 2013
to support a cohort of National Education Association Master Teachers in the development of Common Core-aligned lessons in K-5 mathematics and K-12 English Language Arts
$3,882,600
21
K-12 Education
GLOBAL|NORTH AMERICA
United States
Washington, District of Columbia
http://www.neafoundation.org/
Personal Note: Decades ago, I ate chicken cooked by my mother-in-law in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
Imagine Schools, Inc. Becomes Funnel for Public Dollars to Corporate Investors
These corporate school mercenaries operate with little or no oversight, and CEO principals hire and fire at will--until they, themselves, are yanked by the corporate home office. When parents have a complaint, as they do now in Las Vegas after the third CEO in three years has been yanked without explanation, there is no school board to appeal to because outfits like Imagine Schools, Inc. operate outside the purview of any elected school board. And don't expect a straight answer from Imagine, Inc., especially since its employees like Pat Crain lie at public school board meetings even about Imagine's corporate status. Yet Secretary Arne Duncan, taking his marching orders from Gates, Broad and the Walton Clan, does not want any challenge to the corporate scripted "innovation" that miracle workers like Imagine, Inc. bring to poor children, and he certainly does not want to get in the way of the home office innovative hiring and firing of teachers or their CEO principals. The corporate model has come to school.
Imagine School, Inc., which now boasts 74 stores, er, schools in 13 locations, has recently partnered up with Entertainment Properties Inc., which will act as Imagine's property management arm and, thus, allow one partner to set the amount of rent that will be paid to another partner from public dollars received to run the schools. Perhaps this kind of corrupt siphoning of public funds has something to do with why Imagine Schools, Inc. is still waiting after 3 1/2 years for its application for non-profit status to be approved.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Charter schools, already seeing a surge in students, are getting attention from another group — private investors.
Entertainment Properties Inc., known mostly for sinking its money into movie theaters and wineries, recently bought 22 locations from charter school operator Imagine Schools for about $170 million. The real estate investment trust acts as landlord, while Imagine operates the schools and is using the investment to expand its chain of 74 locations.
"They really are an effective source of long-term financing that we can rely on and enables us to do what we're best at, which is running schools, and do what they're best at, which is long-term real estate ownership," said Barry Sharp, chief financial officer for Arlington, Va.-based Imagine. "It's a good fit."
. . . .
Focusing on large players who know how to operate schools, hire teachers and develop a curriculum, he said, provides the company a more dependable return.
"We're not speculators, we're investors, so I have to invest in property making money for me and my customers today," said Brain, whose trust oversees a $2.6 billion portfolio. "The charter public schools offer lenders/leaseholders a dependable revenue stream backed by a government payer. It's a very desirable equation." . . . .
Sunday, January 07, 2018
A World Without (Much) Work: Building Sancturary Part 2
January 7, 2018
Click here to read the rest of the post.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Imagine Update
There are about 5000 charter schools in place now at about 4% of the total public school system in the United States and it's grown at about 400-500 units per year, which is about a $2 billion dollar annual investment opportunity set. So it's a very big and high growth category that is going to continue to represent opportunities for the company.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
"Click, Clack, Moo": Why the 1% Always Wins
As a high school English teacher for nearly two decades, I came to embrace a need to offer students a wide range of lenses for interacting with and learning from many different texts, but I also learned that coming to read and re-read, to write and re-write the world is both a powerful and disorienting experience for young people. So a strategy I now use and encourage other teachers to implement is reading and discussing children's literature, picture books, while expanding the critical lenses readers have in their toolbox.
My favorite book for this activity is Click, Clack, Moo: Cows that Type. This work by Doreen Cronin and art by Betsy Lewin (view in animated format) presents a clever and humorous narrative about Farmer Brown and his suddenly recalcitrant cows who, having acquired a rickety typewriter, establish a strike that inspires the chickens to join and ends with the neutral ducks joining the revolt.
This story is ideal for asking teachers to consider the traditional approach to text in schools, New Criticism (a focus on text in isolation and on the craft in any story, such as characterization, plot, and theme), against Feminist and Marxist criticism, for example.
This fall, while doing the activity with a young adult literature class, I came against yet a new reading of Cronin and Lewin's work: Why the 1% always wins.
As we explored Click, Clack, Moo recently, the adult members of the class told me they like Farmer Brown, with one student characterizing the striking farm animals as "mean." And here is where I felt the need to consider how this children's book helps us all confront the Occupy Wall Street movement as well as why the 1% continues to own the 99%.
One important element of the story is that the cows and chickens are female workers under the authority of the male Farmer Brown. These female workers produce for the farmer and remain compliant until the cows acquire the typewriter—both a powerful tool of literacy (the cows and chickens cannot effectively strike until they gain access to language) and a representation of access to technology (readers should note that the cows and chickens produce typewritten notes that show they find an old typewriter unlike the cleaner type produced by Farmer Brown).
The cows and chickens, in effect, unionize and strike. Here, members of my classes often fail to notice the unionization, but tend to side with the farmer even when we acknowledge the protest as unionizing—particularly bristling at the duck, as a neutral party, using its access to the negotiation to acquire a diving board for the duck pond.
Like the 1%, Farmer Brown is incensed that the cows and chickens demand basic necessities for comfort, electric blankets, but he eventually secures a compromise, agreeing to give the barn animals the electric blankets for the return of the typewriter (the story ends with the obvious next step that the duck uses the typewriter to trade for the diving board).
What tends to be missed in this story is that Farmer Brown ultimately wins; in fact, the barn animals appear to be eager to abandon their one access to power, the typewriter, for mere material items—the electric blankets as comfort many would see as a basic right and the diving board as frivolous entertainment.
The 1% have the 99% right where Farmer Brown has the barn animals—mesmerized by the pursuit of materialism and entertainment. Consider the recent hordes of consumers lined up to buy the new iPhone 4S, released on the cusp of the passing of Steve Jobs, heralded as a genius for his contribution to our consumer culture.
Just give us our iPhones and we'll be quiet, we'll work longer and harder for the opportunity to buy what the 1% tells us we want.
And when the 1% and their compliant media inform us that the top 20% pays 64% of taxes, we slip back to our barns with our tails between our legs, shamed.
Instead, we should be noting that, yes, the top 20% income earners pay 64% of taxes because they make 59% of income.
We, the 99% who tend to remain silent and compliant, wait patiently for the next generation of technology to occupy our time, our lives reduced to work and amassing the ever-changing and out-dated things that become passe as the next-thing lures us further and further into our sheep lives.
Yes, if we remain eager to trade our voices for things, the 1% will always be the winners.
When we learn to treasure voice over things, however, the chickens may come home to roost.
“One of the violences perpetuated by illiteracy is the suffocation of the consciousness and the expressiveness of men and women who are forbidden from reading and writing, thus limiting their capacity to write about their reading of the world so they can rethink about their original reading of it.” Paulo Freire, Teachers as Cultural Workers
Saturday, October 30, 2010
Responses to Bonnie Reiss, Calif Sec of Education
Bonnie Reiss, California Secretary of Education, published a commentary in the Sacramento Bee, reproduced below.
Here are two letters published in the Sacramento Bee on Oct. 29, responding to Ms. Reiss' commentary:
Re: ("To fix our schools …," Oct 27)
It is offensive that people continue to attack teachers (and unions… aka... teachers collectively) for the issues in education. In addition to being a teacher, I am actively involved in my teachers’ union. Let me share some information with those who don’t seem to “get it.”
Unions are made up of teachers. We are the ones that are in the classrooms doing the work everyday. Teachers are not wealthy business people that have a stake in seeing education fail. In fact, we care about children and choose to work with them to help them succeed.
Teacher effectiveness is hotly debated. Value-added is the cry for some. However, studies show that value-added ratings are unstable. The ratings based on one year are weak predictors of value-added ratings the next year.
Reforming education requires asking help from teachers. Ask us how we know when students are learning. Ask us how we know when they don’t and what we do to support them.
You want to know how to evaluate effective teachers? Ask us how we evaluate ourselves.
Shannon Brown
Sacramento
Bonnie Reiss ("To fix our schools …," Oct 27) thinks that American schools have fallen behind schools in other countries.
The basis for this statement is our low scores on international tests when compared to other countries. Our scores, however, are only low because we have such a high percentage of children in poverty, compared to other countries that participate in international tests. When we consider only middle-class children who attend well-funded schools, our math scores are near the top of the world.
Our overall scores look low because the US has the highest percentage of children in poverty of all industrialized countries (well over 20%, compared to Denmark's 3%).
Our educational system is not "broken," as Ms. Reiss claims. The problem is poverty.
Stephen Krashen
Viewpoints: To fix our schools, unions must let go of status quo
Special to The Bee, OCT. 27, 2010
Bonnie Reiss (California Secretary of Education)
The New York City Department of Education's stunning announcement that it intends to release teacher ratings based on student test scores and academic achievement is the latest example of a growing national movement to fix our country's broken public education system.
Despite legal action from the teachers union, these school leaders in New York are standing strong in their commitment to release this crucial information.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and an inspiring group of reform-driven superintendents representing more than 1 million students here in California pushed this movement forward with our state's Race to the Top proposal and legislation to make student academic growth a factor in teacher evaluations. This work continues, mainly through the courage and determination of these districts.
Parents, business leaders, civil rights groups and many teachers have reached their breaking point in hearing the continued excuses of national and state teacher unions that use their power to fight for the status quo and block significant reforms to our broken system.
Our public education system is flawed today. It does not hold the adults who care for our children accountable; it does not allow teacher evaluations based on whether students are being given the tools to succeed; it does not allow for differential pay for teachers serving in our most challenging schools, and it gives lifetime tenure usually after two to three years – making it nearly impossible to lay off ineffective teachers.
The superb documentary "Waiting for 'Superman' " shows how remarkably difficult it is for school districts to dismiss ineffective teachers. We see how one in 67 doctors lose their medical license, one in 37 lawyers lose their accreditation and one in 2,500 teachers lose their position. In California, a teacher can receive tenure after two years – no other profession provides that kind of job security. "Waiting for 'Superman' " reminds us of two truths – most teachers are good and many are great, even heroic, but the teachers unions are the enemy of reform and work to protect the status quo at every turn.
Fixing K-12 public education in America and in California is the civil rights issue of our day. As our country has doubled the amount we spend per pupil in the last few decades, our students' achievement in English, math and science has remained flat, and our poor and minority children continue to lag behind. As a result, our country has fallen behind every other major country on our planet.
Funding our schools is important; however, we must make sure to keep our focus on fixing our broken system so that funding goes to the classroom and supports a system that is based on the accountability and effectiveness of the adults in this system – the teachers, principals and administrators who serve our students.
The publishing of teacher ratings by the Los Angeles Times, and now soon the New York City Department of Education, will hopefully mark a historic turning point for our state and our nation in our quest to fix our public school system.
In California, let us continue to choose the courageous reforms that are best for our students over the status quo of the system.
Note from SK: Secretary Reiss' background (sources: Huffpost, Miliken Institute)
* Operating advisor to Pegasus Capital Advisors, a private equity firm committed to investing in and developing scarce resources, commodities and sustainable companies.
* Secretary Reiss experience includes careers as an entertainment lawyer, accountant, producer and writer from 1981 to 1988.
* … was president of the Earth Communications Office, promoting environmental causes, and practiced entertainment and public policy law. She serves on the boards of the after-school program Arnold's All-Stars, The California Dream Team and Maria Shriver's California Conference on Women and Family. Reiss received a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Miami and a law degree from Antioch Law School.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Corporate Education Reform's Slime Machine Goes After NRC Report
For example, econometric fantasizing has come to be Hanushek's stock-in-trade, as is evidenced in a number of Hanushek's recent non-peer reviewed "working papers." In a recent one that was picked up and reprinted as if it had been published in a peer-reviewed journal, Hanushek claims that "replacing the bottom 5-8 percent of teachers with average teachers could move the U.S. near the top of international math and science rankings with a present value of $100 trillion."
Really?
This past Monday, Harvard's edu-biz magazine, Education Next, published Hanushek's latest attack piece on the National Research Council's Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education, a report released last spring with the results of a 9-year investigation into the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of high-stakes tests in U. S. schools for raising student achievement. Reported in Ed Week and ignored by New York Times (what's new), the NRC's blue-ribbon panel reached two core conclusions that no one, including Hanushek, has refuted or can refute, regardless of how much magical thinking and statistical hyperventilating they engage in:
-
Some incentives hold teachers or students accountable, while others affect whole schools. School-level incentives like those used in No Child Left Behind produce some of the larger achievement gains, the report says, but even these have an effect size of only around .08 standard deviations – the equivalent of moving a student currently performing at the 50th percentile to the 53rd percentile. For comparison, raising student performance in the U.S. to the level of the highest-performing nations would require a gain equivalent to a student climbing from the 50th to the 84th percentile (NRC Press Release).
- the use of high school exit exams decreases the high school graduation rate without increasing achievement (PDF Summary).
Below are a few clips from the HuffPo story that require some clarification or outright challenge:
The question of the effects of testing has long plagued education. Few dispute the need to have some way to take stock of what students learn from their teachers. But critics assert that an emphasis on test-related incentives, such as grades for students and grade-based funding for schools, has tamped down on creativity in the classroom, treating kids like identical items on an assembly line -- without the product.My dear overworked HuffPo reporter, it is not "the question of the effects of testing that has long plagued education," as you write in your piece. It is the effects of testing, themselves, that have long plagued education, especially since the inception of NCLB and its fanciful testing targets that have blown up so many public schools over the past nine years. These negative effects have been documented in a mountain of research and by good reporting over the past decade. As a place to begin, I highly recommend Tested . . . by reporter, Linda Perlstein. And criticism of the current testing mania is not aimed at criticizing the grading of students, as you clearly suggest. Rather, the criticism stems from the counterproductive use a single test of questionable quality to determine the futures of children and their teachers and their schools.
The 112-page-long NRC study came at a critical point during the NCLB discussion -- and it read as a manifesto against the use of testing as a tool to promote learning, Hanushek claims.Please! A manifesto sets out a platform, a direction, an agenda, a strategy, etc. The NRC Report is anything but a manifesto, and it does not read like one, as Hanushek would have you, dear HuffPo reporter, believe. In fact, one of Hanushek's criticisms in the Education Next piece is that the NRC Report lacks specificity in its recommendations, something never missing in a manifesto. The NRC Report, rather, is the result of a 9-year empirical research study by a group of scholars that the mainstream Education Week called a "veritable who's who of national experts in education law, economics and sciences." Notably, it does not include Eric Hanushek.
Importantly, the NRC Report does not compare effectiveness of NCLB to some other testing universe with low stakes, as the following quote from the HuffPo piece indicates. This is not only misleading--it is dead wrong.
The report found NCLB to be the most effective test-based policy, but even then, it found that the law's programs moved student performance by eight hundredths of the standard deviation, or from the 50th to the 53rd percentile. Other more low-stakes tests were found to show "effectively zero" effects on achievement. According to the NRC report:This is where taking time to read the NRC Report would have been very helpful in reporting on someone else's version of what the Report said.
Test-based incentive programs, as designed and implemented in the programs that have been carefully studied, have not increased student achievement enough to bring the United States close to the levels of the highest achieving countries.
Finally, I take exception with this bit of nonsense from the HuffPo article:
Hanushek, an economist, claims that the .08 standard deviation increase in student learning is not as insignificant as the report makes it sound. According to his calculations, the benefits of such gains outweigh the costs: that amount of learning, he claims, translates to a value of $14 trillion. He notes that if testing is expanded at the expense of $100 per student, the rate of return on that investment is 9,189 percent. Hanushek criticized the report for not giving enough attention to the benefits NCLB provided disadvantaged students.In the very next paragraph, however, HuffPo quotes Hanushek as saying that his wild claim was, indeed, noted in the Report, even though Hanushek clearly believes that his speculations should be regarded as empirical data that the NRC should have highlighted. This kind of extrapolated nonsense reminds me of another testing guru from a hundred years ago, eugenicist and IQ test promoter, Lewis Terman. Terman, too, was an accomplished propagandist, and he got great reception in the mass media by coming up with IQ test scores out of thin air for historical figures, everyone from J. S. Bach to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. While pulling numbers like this out of your, um, hat makes for great parlor entertainment, no one should take these speculations seriously. Pure hokum, but no less so than Hanushek's econometric hyperbole of $14 trillion or $100 trillion in added value for some, otherwise, worthless test scores.
The report, Hanushek said, hid that evidence.
Hill said he was slightly concerned with the report itself, and that its tone was a product of a committee comprised of experts with mixed views on testing. "It said that test-based accountability alone won't raise achievement," he said. "I believe that. Test-based accountability, though, with reasonable supplementary policies … is a good idea."Yes, of course, those ax-grinding educational researchers whose 3 members on the NRC Panel overpowered the other 14 members to hijack a report that would have otherwise presented the worldview of the next generation of testers and tabulators, those visionaries who live for the end of the achievement gap and by its non-arrival.
The apparent anti-testing bias, Hill said, came from those on the committee with backgrounds in education.
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
Gore's Remarks on the Current Threats to Democracy
Associated Press / The Media Center
October 5, 2005
I came here today because I believe that American democracy is in grave danger. It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse . I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America's fabled "marketplace of ideas" now functions.
How many of you, I wonder, have heard a friend or a family member in the last few years remark that it's almost as if America has entered "an alternate universe"?
I thought maybe it was an aberration when three-quarters of Americans said they believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11, 2001. But more than four years later, between a third and a half still believe Saddam was personally responsible for planning and supporting the attack.
At first I thought the exhaustive, non-stop coverage of the O.J. trial was just an unfortunate excess that marked an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. But now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time.
Are we still routinely torturing helpless prisoners, and if so, does it feel right that we as American citizens are not outraged by the practice? And does it feel right to have no ongoing discussion of whether or not this abhorrent, medieval behavior is being carried out in the name of the American people? If the gap between rich and poor is widening steadily and economic stress is mounting for low-income families, why do we seem increasingly apathetic and lethargic in our role as citizens?
On the eve of the nation's decision to invade Iraq, our longest serving senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor asked: "Why is this chamber empty? Why are these halls silent?"
The decision that was then being considered by the Senate with virtually no meaningful debate turned out to be a fateful one. A few days ago, the former head of the National Security Agency, Retired Lt. General William Odom, said, "The invasion of Iraq, I believe, will turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history."
But whether you agree with his assessment or not, Senator Byrd's question is like the others that I have just posed here: he was saying, in effect, this is strange, isn't it? Aren't we supposed to have full and vigorous debates about questions as important as the choice between war and peace?
Those of us who have served in the Senate and watched it change over time, could volunteer an answer to Senator Byrd's two questions: the Senate was silent on the eve of war because Senators don't feel that what they say on the floor of the Senate really matters that much any more. And the chamber was empty because the Senators were somewhere else: they were in fundraisers collecting money from special interests in order to buy 30-second TVcommercials for their next re-election campaign.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there was - at least for a short time - a quality of vividness and clarity of focus in our public discourse that reminded some Americans - including some journalists - that vividness and clarity used to be more common in the way we talk with one another about the problems and choices that we face. But then, like a passing summer storm, the moment faded.
In fact there was a time when America's public discourse was consistently much more vivid, focused and clear. Our Founders, probably the most literate generation in all of history, used words with astonishing precision and believed in the Rule of Reason.
Their faith in the viability of Representative Democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry. But they placed particular emphasis on insuring that the public could be well-informed. And they took great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas in order to ensure the free-flow of knowledge.
The values that Americans had brought from Europe to the New World had grown out of the sudden explosion of literacy and knowledge after Gutenberg's disruptive invention broke up the stagnant medieval information monopoly and triggered the Reformation, Humanism, and the Enlightenment and enshrined a new sovereign: the "Rule of Reason."
Indeed, the self-governing republic they had the audacity to establish was later named by the historian Henry Steele Commager as "the Empire of Reason."
Our founders knew all about the Roman Forum and the Agora in ancient Athens. They also understood quite well that in America, our public forum would be an ongoing conversation about democracy in which individual citizens would participate not only by speaking directly in the presence of others -- but more commonly by communicating with their fellow citizens over great distances by means of the printed word. Thus they not only protected Freedom of Assembly as a basic right, they made a special point - in the First Amendment - of protecting the freedom of the printing press.
Their world was dominated by the printed word. Just as the proverbial fish doesn't know it lives in water, the United States in its first half century knew nothing but the world of print: the Bible, Thomas Paine's fiery call to revolution, the Declaration of Independence, our Constitution , our laws, the Congressional Record, newspapers and books.
Though they feared that a government might try to censor the printing press - as King George had done - they could not imagine that America's public discourse would ever consist mainly of something other than words in print.
And yet, as we meet here this morning, more than 40 years have passed since the majority of Americans received their news and information from the printed word. Newspapers are hemorrhaging readers and, for the most part, resisting the temptation to inflate their circulation numbers. Reading itself is in sharp decline, not only in our country but in most of the world. The Republic of Letters has been invaded and occupied by television.
Radio, the internet, movies, telephones, and other media all now vie for our attention - but it is television that still completely dominates the flow of information in modern America. In fact, according to an authoritative global study, Americans now watch television an average of four hours and 28 minutes every day -- 90 minutes more than the world average.
When you assume eight hours of work a day, six to eight hours of sleep and a couple of hours to bathe, dress, eat and commute, that is almost three-quarters of all the discretionary time that the average American has. And for younger Americans, the average is even higher.
The internet is a formidable new medium of communication, but it is important to note that it still doesn't hold a candle to television. Indeed, studies show that the majority of Internet users are actually simultaneously watching television while they are online. There is an important reason why television maintains such a hold on its viewers in a way that the internet does not, but I'll get to that in a few minutes.
Television first overtook newsprint to become the dominant source of information in America in 1963. But for the next two decades, the television networks mimicked the nation's leading newspapers by faithfully following the standards of the journalism profession. Indeed, men like Edward R. Murrow led the profession in raising the bar.
But all the while, television's share of the total audience for news and information continued to grow -- and its lead over newsprint continued to expand. And then one day, a smart young political consultant turned to an older elected official and succinctly described a new reality in America's public discourse: "If it's not on television, it doesn't exist."
But some extremely important elements of American Democracy have been pushed to the sidelines . And the most prominent casualty has been the "marketplace of ideas" that was so beloved and so carefully protected by our Founders. It effectively no longer exists.
It is not that we no longer share ideas with one another about public matters; of course we do. But the "Public Forum" in which our Founders searched for general agreement and applied the Rule of Reason has been grossly distorted and "restructured" beyond all recognition.
And here is my point: it is the destruction of that marketplace of ideas that accounts for the "strangeness" that now continually haunts our efforts to reason together about the choices we must make as a nation.
Whether it is called a Public Forum, or a "Public Sphere" , or a marketplace of ideas, the reality of open and free public discussion and debate was considered central to the operation of our democracy in America's earliest decades.
In fact, our first self-expression as a nation - "We the People" - made it clear where the ultimate source of authority lay. It was universally understood that the ultimate check and balance for American government was its accountability to the people. And the public forum was the place where the people held the government accountable. That is why it was so important that the marketplace of ideas operated independent from and beyond the authority of government.
The three most important characteristics of this marketplace of ideas were:
1) It was open to every individual, with no barriers to entry, save the necessity of literacy. This access, it is crucial to add, applied not only to the receipt of information but also to the ability to contribute information directly into the flow of ideas that was available to all;
2) The fate of ideas contributed by individuals depended, for the most part, on an emergent Meritocracy of Ideas. Those judged by the market to be good rose to the top, regardless of the wealth or class of the individual responsible for them;
3) The accepted rules of discourse presumed that the participants were all governed by an unspoken duty to search for general agreement. That is what a "Conversation of Democracy" is all about.
What resulted from this shared democratic enterprise was a startling new development in human history: for the first time, knowledge regularly mediated between wealth and power.
The liberating force of this new American reality was thrilling to all humankind. Thomas Jefferson declared, "I have sworn upon the alter of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
It ennobled the individual and unleashed the creativity of the human spirit. It inspired people everywhere to dream of what they could yet become. And it emboldened Americans to bravely explore the farther frontiers of freedom - for African Americans, for women, and eventually, we still dream, for all.
And just as knowledge now mediated between wealth and power, self-government was understood to be the instrument with which the people embodied their reasoned judgments into law. The Rule of Reason under-girded and strengthened the rule of law.
But to an extent seldom appreciated, all of this - including especially the ability of the American people to exercise the reasoned collective judgments presumed in our Founders' design -- depended on the particular characteristics of the marketplace of ideas as it operated during the Age of Print.
Consider the rules by which our present "public forum" now operates, and how different they are from the forum our Founders knew. Instead of the easy and free access
individuals had to participate in the national conversation by means of the printed word, the world of television makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation today.
Inexpensive metal printing presses were almost everywhere in America. They were easily accessible and operated by printers eager to typeset essays, pamphlets, books or flyers.
Television stations and networks, by contrast, are almost completely inaccessible to individual citizens and almost always uninterested in ideas contributed by individual citizens.
Ironically, television programming is actually more accessible to more people than any source of information has ever been in all of history. But here is the crucial distinction: it is accessible in only one direction; there is no true interactivity, and certainly no conversation.
The number of cables connecting to homes is limited in each community and usually forms a natural monopoly. The broadcast and satellite spectrum is likewise a scarce and limited resource controlled by a few. The production of programming has been centralized and has usually required a massive capital investment. So for these and other reasons, an ever-smaller number of large corporations control virtually all of the television programming in America.
Soon after television established its dominance over print, young people who realized they were being shut out of the dialogue of democracy came up with a new form of expression in an effort to join the national conversation: the "demonstration." This new form of expression, which began in the 1960s, was essentially a poor quality theatrical production designed to capture the attention of the television cameras long enough to hold up a sign with a few printed words to convey, however plaintively, a message to the American people. Even this outlet is now rarely an avenue for expression on national television.
So, unlike the marketplace of ideas that emerged in the wake of the printing press, there is virtually no exchange of ideas at all in television's domain. My partner Joel Hyatt and I are trying to change that - at least where Current TV is concerned. Perhaps not coincidentally, we are the only independently owned news and information network in all of American television.
It is important to note that the absence of a two-way conversation in American television also means that there is no "meritocracy of ideas" on television. To the extent that there is a "marketplace" of any kind for ideas on television, it is a rigged market, an oligopoly, with imposing barriers to entry that exclude the average citizen.
The German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, describes what has happened as "the refeudalization of the public sphere." That may sound like gobbledygook, but it's a phrase that packs a lot of meaning. The feudal system which thrived before the printing press democratized knowledge and made the idea of America thinkable, was a system in which wealth and power were intimately intertwined, and where knowledge played no mediating role whatsoever. The great mass of the people were ignorant. And their powerlessness was born of their ignorance.
It did not come as a surprise that the concentration of control over this powerful one-way medium carries with it the potential for damaging the operations of our democracy. As early as the 1920s, when the predecessor of television, radio, first debuted in the United States, there was immediate apprehension about its potential impact on democracy. One early American student of the medium wrote that if control of radio were concentrated in the hands of a few, "no nation can be free."
As a result of these fears, safeguards were enacted in the U.S. -- including the Public Interest Standard, the Equal Time Provision, and the Fairness Doctrine - though a half century later, in 1987, they were effectively repealed. And then immediately afterwards, Rush Limbaugh and other hate-mongers began to fill the airwaves.
And radio is not the only place where big changes have taken place. Television news has undergone a series of dramatic changes. The movie "Network," which won the Best Picture Oscar in 1976, was presented as a farce but was actually a prophecy. The journalism profession morphed into the news business, which became the media industry and is now completely owned by conglomerates.
The news divisions - which used to be seen as serving a public interest and were subsidized by the rest of the network - are now seen as profit centers designed to generate revenue and, more importantly, to advance the larger agenda of the corporation of which they are a small part. They have fewer reporters, fewer stories, smaller budgets, less travel, fewer bureaus, less independent judgment, more vulnerability to influence by management, and more dependence on government sources and canned public relations hand-outs. This tragedy is compounded by the ironic fact that this generation of journalists is the best trained and most highly skilled in the history of their profession. But they are usually not allowed to do the job they have been trained to do.
The present executive branch has made it a practice to try and control and intimidate news organizations: from PBS to CBS to Newsweek. They placed a former male escort in the White House press pool to pose as a reporter - and then called upon him to give the president a hand at crucial moments. They paid actors to make make phony video press releases and paid cash to some reporters who were willing to take it in return for positive stories. And every day they unleash squadrons of digital brownshirts to harass and hector any journalist who is critical of the President.
For these and other reasons, The US Press was recently found in a comprehensive international study to be only the 27th freest press in the world. And that too seems strange to me.
Among the other factors damaging our public discourse in the media, the imposition by management of entertainment values on the journalism profession has resulted in scandals, fabricated sources, fictional events and the tabloidization of mainstream news. As recently stated by Dan Rather - who was, of course, forced out of his anchor job after angering the White House - television news has been "dumbed down and tarted up."
The coverage of political campaigns focuses on the "horse race" and little else. And the well-known axiom that guides most local television news is "if it bleeds, it leads." (To which some disheartened journalists add, "If it thinks, it stinks.")
In fact, one of the few things that Red state and Blue state America agree on is that they don't trust the news media anymore.
Clearly, the purpose of television news is no longer to inform the American people or serve the public interest. It is to "glue eyeballs to the screen" in order to build ratings and sell advertising. If you have any doubt, just look at what's on: The Robert Blake trial. The Laci Peterson tragedy. The Michael Jackson trial. The Runaway Bride. The search in Aruba. The latest twist in various celebrity couplings, and on and on and on.
And more importantly, notice what is not on: the global climate crisis, the nation's fiscal catastrophe, the hollowing out of America's industrial base, and a long list of other serious public questions that need to be addressed by the American people.
One morning not long ago, I flipped on one of the news programs in hopes of seeing information about an important world event that had happened earlier that day. But the lead story was about a young man who had been hiccupping for three years. And I must say, it was interesting; he had trouble getting dates. But what I didn't see was news.
This was the point made by Jon Stewart, the brilliant host of "The Daily Show," when he visited CNN's "Crossfire": there should be a distinction between news and entertainment.
And it really matters because the subjugation of news by entertainment seriously harms our democracy: it leads to dysfunctional journalism that fails to inform the people. And when the people are not informed, they cannot hold government accountable when it is incompetent, corrupt, or both.
One of the only avenues left for the expression of public or political ideas on television is through the purchase of advertising, usually in 30-second chunks. These short commercials are now the principal form of communication between candidates and voters. As a result, our elected officials now spend all of their time raising money to purchase these ads.
That is why the House and Senate campaign committees now search for candidates who are multi-millionaires and can buy the ads with their own personal resources. As one consequence, the halls of Congress are now filling up with the wealthy.
Campaign finance reform, however well it is drafted, often misses the main point: so long as the only means of engaging in political dialogue is through purchasing expensive television advertising, money will continue by one means or another to dominate American politic s. And ideas will no longer mediate between wealth and power.
And what if an individual citizen, or a group of citizens wants to enter the public debate by expressing their views on television? Since they cannot simply join the conversation, some of them have resorted to raising money in order to buy 30 seconds in which to express their opinion. But they are not even allowed to do that.
Moveon.org tried to buy ads last year to express opposition to Bush's Medicare proposal which was then being debated by Congress. They were told "issue advocacy" was not permissible. Then, one of the networks that had refused the Moveon ad began running advertisements by the White House in favor of the President's Medicare proposal. So Moveon complained and the White House ad was temporarily removed. By temporary, I mean it was removed until the White House complained and the network immediately put the ad back on, yet still refused to present the Moveon ad.
The advertising of products, of course, is the real purpose of television. And it is difficult to overstate the extent to which modern pervasive electronic advertising has reshaped our society. In the 1950s, John Kenneth Galbraith first described the way in which advertising has altered the classical relationship by which supply and demand are balanced over time by the invisible hand of the marketplace. According to Galbraith, modern advertising campaigns were beginning to create high levels of demand for products that consumers never knew they wanted, much less needed.
The same phenomenon Galbraith noticed in the commercial marketplace is now the dominant fact of life in what used to be America's marketplace for ideas. The inherent value or validity of political propositions put forward by candidates for office is now largely irrelevant compared to the advertising campaigns that shape the perceptions of voters.
Our democracy has been hallowed out. The opinions of the voters are, in effect, purchased, just as demand for new products is artificially created. Decades ago Walter Lippman wrote, "the manufacture of consent...was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy...but it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technique...under the impact of propaganda, it is no longer plausible to believe in the original dogma of democracy."
Like you, I recoil at Lippman's cynical dismissal of America's gift to human history. But in order to reclaim our birthright, we Americans must resolve to repair the systemic decay of the public forum and create new ways to engage in a genuine and not manipulative conversation about our future. Americans in both parties should insist on the re-establishment of respect for the Rule of Reason. We must, for example, stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public's ability to discern the truth.
I don't know all the answers, but along with my partner, Joel Hyatt, I am trying to work within the medium of television to recreate a multi-way conversation that includes individuals and operates according to a meritocracy of ideas. If you would like to know more, we are having a press conference on Friday morning at the Regency Hotel.
We are learning some fascinating lessons about the way decisions are made in the television industry, and it may well be that the public would be well served by some changes in law and policy to stimulate more diversity of viewpoints and a higher regard for the public interest. But we are succeeding within the marketplace by reaching out to individuals and asking them to co-create our network.
The greatest source of hope for reestablishing a vigorous and accessible marketplace for ideas is the Internet. Indeed, Current TV relies on video streaming over the Internet as the means by which individuals send us what we call viewer-created content or VC squared. We also rely on the Internet for the two-way conversation that we have every day with our viewers enabling them to participate in the decisions on programming our network.
I know that many of you attending this conference are also working on creative ways to use the Internet as a means for bringing more voices into America's ongoing conversation. I salute you as kindred spirits and wish you every success.
I want to close with the two things I've learned about the Internet that are most directly relevant to the conference that you are having here today.
First, as exciting as the Internet is, it still lacks the single most powerful characteristic of the television medium; because of its packet-switching architecture, and its continued reliance on a wide variety of bandwidth connections (including the so-called "last mile" to the home), it does not support the real-time mass distribution of full-motion video.
Make no mistake, full-motion video is what makes television such a powerful medium. Our brains - like the brains of all vertebrates - are hard-wired to immediately notice sudden movement in our field of vision. We not only notice, we are compelled to look. When our evolutionary predecessors gathered on the African savanna a million years ago and the leaves next to them moved, the ones who didn't look are not our ancestors. The ones who did look passed on to us the genetic trait that neuroscientists call "the establishing reflex." And that is the brain syndrome activated by television continuously - sometimes as frequently as once per second. That is the reason why the industry phrase, "glue eyeballs to the screen," is actually more than a glib and idle boast. It is also a major part of the reason why Americans watch the TV screen an average of four and a half hours a day.
It is true that video streaming is becoming more common over the Internet, and true as well that cheap storage of streamed video is making it possible for many young television viewers to engage in what the industry calls "time shifting" and personalize their television watching habits. Moreover, as higher bandwidth connections continue to replace smaller information pipelines, the Internet's capacity for carrying television will continue to dramatically improve. But in spite of these developments, it is television delivered over cable and satellite that will continue for the remainder of this decade and probably the next to be the dominant medium of communication in America's democracy. And so long as that is the case, I truly believe that America's democracy is at grave risk.
The final point I want to make is this: We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Worldwide Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it because some of the same forces of corporate consolidation and control that have distorted the television marketplace have an interest in controlling the Internet marketplace as well. Far too much is at stake to ever allow that to happen.
We must ensure by all means possible that this medium of democracy's future develops in the mold of the open and free marketplace of ideas that our Founders knew was essential to the health and survival of freedom.
Sunday, November 04, 2012
What To Make of a Diminished Thing
Paul's recent post, "Slaying the Two-Headed Dragon...,"points up a kind of fallacy as regards the reformation of the social management of large systems: when one moves towards a "critical" pedagogy one discovers that these systems are manifestations of the the very "evil" we have attempted to move against--the authoritarian state. It is only an evil from a particular orientation of course. The authoritarian state can surely be praised for many advances, even in the realm of humanitarianism. This impulse to rectify injustice for individuals while retaining the machinery of "blind injustice" is our moral paradox.
The disconnect here is that writers and educators like Paul (and I include myself in this as regards "the disconnect") are facing the very real dilemma of trying to convey a way of thinking (our own metaphysic) that is not in the least comprehensible to those Thoreau offered lived lives of quiet desperation and who Emerson proclaimed as performing a foolish consistency. What this means is that most of us cannot understand one another. When we literally cannot make sense of what someone is saying then we often react with a very real vehemence towards that person and those ideas.
Likely this is intellectually apparent though I will admit that it has taken me many years to understand my own desperation and foolish consistency--that is to recognize that my "rational" thoughts were not rational in the least to so many of my friends and acquaintances just as I believed that my friends and acquaintances were no longer making any sense. And that they were at fault.
We live in a polarized nation because we live in an "era" of polarization. We MUST take sides because to admit any aspect of the other side to "mix" with "our" side is to recognize the incoherence of both sides. We are always wrong. And we cannot bear that. And so we bite down hard and believe and are certain that we are not only right but that others are entirely wrong. Facts are not facts if they cannot be fitted to our metaphysic. They must be in error. To protect ourselves we ignore that which falls on the edges of our perceptual field.
To make a distinction, what is commonly called alienation today (1970), particularly by our "alienated" youth and their slaves, the reporters and columnists and article writers of the public press, and far too often educators as well, is not alienation at all, but polarization. The polarized individual has cognitively grasped his culture as incoherent, but is response is not self-ironic. His attempt to become coherent is merely one of fastening on to one set of values already in the culture.Perhaps the "critical pedagogy" inculcates this kind of self-irony, but it will not make an ideal education for a nation of men and women who cannot bear self-irony.
The alienated individual sees himself as part of his culture, sees, though he may not spell this out overtly or even covertly, "personality" and "culture" as two different names for two different perspectives on the same data. To him culture transcendence is the only solution to alienation....To the alienated individual...a self-ironic perspective has already created the mode of a self...Such a self is one for whom none of the roles of his culture is adequate, since each reflects that culture's incoherence. The polarized individual, however, readily accepts a well-established role, that of the rebel, outcast, or social discard, as the case may be. The alienated individual plays his roles self-consciously and ironically, since to exist he must play a role; the polarized individual identifies self and role.... (Peckham, Morse. "The Romantic Birth of Anthropology," in Victorian Revolutionaries, 223-4.)
It would make sense for a community dedicated to a suspension of "absolute" answers. But nations are not communities and nations like absolutes.
For a brief example just look at the term "American" or "Un-American" as it is applied to "policy" or actions by either the state or individuals. The absolute must be defended but will be as easily defended as it is easily defined to suit the "polarized" side that espouses its patriotism, jingoism, xenophobia. It makes no difference whether you call yourself "liberal" or "conservative" or any other term meant to indicate a normative "metaphysic." ("Liberals let Obama get away with Un-American actions")
***
The other day I saw an email from a school that was sent to parents regarding the upcoming election. This note told parents that some of the children had investigated the process of debates in elections and then offered several links to the recent debates which the students found instructive and suggested that parents read or view the clips in order "to better understand" what the candidates support.
If I had been drinking something at the time I would have done a spit-take. Is it possible that this is how one investigates what candidates support? Of course, I don't even have a clue how one finds out exactly what one means by "support" in this context.
Now, I can't say if this is ALL the school did as the results of this pedagogical act were not conveyed. I have read via this post by Eliot Weinberger at the LRB ("The Republic of Entertainment") that the debates are statistically irrelevant to the election outcome. But what do I know?
***
Not too long ago Steven Pinker published a massive tome that defended the march of progress, that is "western" progress, i.e. Enlightenment Progress, and spent much time quantifying the "moral" data on the reduction of war-related murders. That is a severe simplification, of course, but that, as far as I could tell was the point. Reductions make points no matter how absurd. ("Better Angels on Black Ships")
I don't know why, and I ask you offer suggestions, but I'm often reminded of Frost's "The Oven Bird" when I think of the immense amount of data that homo scientificus presents to proclaim this inevitable march "toward" something that must be a "good" because it is us doing the marching. The great and expanding experiment always seems to be gathering data in order to justify the reductive explanation of which we already believe we are the embodied proof.
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
***
Glenn Greenwald wrote a very interesting piece Friday in The Guardian, "Who is the worst civil liberties president in US history?" Greenwald is brilliant and dogged. However, I'd say he was clearly polarized. I sent him an email after I read his column. This is what prompted the response from me:
Ultimately, there are two critical factors that, for me at least, are highly influential if not decisive in determining the proper ranking. The first is the extent to which the civil liberties abuses are temporary or permanent.This is my email:
Most of the contenders for worst civil liberties abuses were "justified" by traditional wars that had a finite end and thus dissipated once the wars were over. Lincoln's habeas suspension did not survive the end of the Civil War, nor did FDR's internment camps survive the end of World War II. The Alien and Sedition Acts were severely diluted fairly quickly, while the bulk of Wilson's abuses which survived World War I lay dormant until the War on Terror. As horrible as they were, these radical erosions were often finite, arguably by design, since the wars which served as their pretext would foreseeably end at some point.
While I agree with your ultimate point (indefinite, codified abuses are very bad)--I think you made several assertions that might not be valid or even defensible. As well you might have made a stronger case that "indefinite" POTENTIAL for war has lived within this nation as soon as it asserted its right to assume "ownership" of territory.I wonder if these are the debates we can have in our high schools and jr. highs?
In one sense the CLEAR truth of this is at least now out in the very wide open: US Presidents openly declare they can and have the will to do whatever they want whenever they want...that is to say, the US Military State can and will. Who calls the shots is important but I think irrelevant to this point.
That is the "newness" that seems to have offended your sense of this nation's "fabled" freedoms and liberties. Fabled is unfortunately the reality.
As you point out, our freedoms are often negated along the way and it is the negation that matters while the "freedoms" are a simply a veil.
I think you started confusing things with this paragraph:
Most of the contenders for worst civil liberties abuses were "justified" by traditional wars that had a finite end and thus dissipated once the wars were over...
But you indicate your own error within it--that "lay dormant" reveals the truth of all of this. I imagine that your sense of precedence must make this clear to you...suspensions of liberties enacted in one era, in one administration, in one "war," simply creates its own future use. You've said this before time and again.
Barack Obama, in this sense isn't a man responsible for abuses...he is the culmination of the American Military character.
***
A friend sent me a note regarding my last post--that post too was about polarization though I didn't say as much. The note was a lamentation upon that very "side-oriented" propaganda that many of us reflexively fall into even as we desire in all sincerity to "fix" the other side's thinking. We WANT the best for everyone--to get it, we need to fix your orientation! This has been my trap as well.
I hope he will forgive me but I am going to share my reply to him here.
I've come to the "no more blogging" decision myself many times! However, as you say, it has "worked" for me personally as it has been an education in itself--I have read so much and I have developed as a writer. I've become a worse blogger and a better writer! (If that wasn't too immodest.)
As for the "sides" in this particular fight: there was a time when I might have said there was a "good fight" and that there were good ideas and I that I wanted to support these and espouse them. But the more I've read, the more I've written, the harder it's been to find them.
I think we will need the failure of electric power to discover the real gift that is reading and discussion (personal, face-to-face). Reading can be (should be?) a kind of meditation and depth psychology (less so an entertainment). We can find our layers within good books. We (and I mean nearly 100% of humans) have lost this and really lost the interest in doing this. All our "industries" or "markets" require a kind of surface "innovation" and speed so that nearly anyone can assert nearly anything and find an audience for it and make a "career" out of a kind of "mis-dissemination." Then if that career "works" then those "innovations" are "right" in the eye of that beholder...no more thought necessary.
To discover another reality often requires trauma or tragedy--things just don't seem the same anymore. Sometimes we can read our way into this and sometimes life will hand it to us. It is a difficult place to find oneself because no one quite understands you and you don't understand why "they" can't get it. The normal avenues to find a place for yourself are closed both by others and by your own sense of them. You can't say what you want; you know there is a game to play but you just can't seem to play it even when you want to...your new sight betrays you in a single word and you are lost again.
Life offered me tragedy, books saved me, then threw me into despair, and I am found again for the time being. I have discovered that no amount of didacticism matters, that no amount of argument matters, that no amount of thinking matters...it is all persuasion and persuasion is reduction and it is false--some justify it like they justify the "noble lie" to serve the greater good. It is a soul-wounding for me.
One must find a way to be an observer and a responder all in the way that most serves one's conscience. Sometimes this means you cannot speak--you cannot be heard. And finally what this means is you must find a different path, must find a way to make these words dance and sing and scream (and whimper and whisper) in another way--for another audience, somewhere else, if not now, then in the tomorrows there are left to come.
You have believed in something. You have found that all belief creates its own betrayal, its own trip-wire. With honest thought, you will stumble over it. You will stare at it, wonder how it got there, touch it, measure its slackness, its tautness. You will devise ingenious ways to avoid it, but it is inherent in your every argument from then on and you find out you are lying in your belief. Then you are in trouble, but then you are free...for a time. Because every belief, every metaphysic, has its own trip-wire, you will stumble again. This is what it means to be a fully alive human.