The latest on the podcast network: on Creedal Catholic, Casey Chalk and I talked about the Reformed Protestant doctrine of Total Depravity (the first in a five part series on TULIP), and Josh Goldman and I continued our deep dive into Breaking Bad.
Good Monday! I trust that your Independence Day weekends were fantastic, filled with hot dogs, burgers, apple pie, and more. I have to say, my weekend would have been better with baseball, but since Rob Manfred has done a terrible job navigating the COVID-19 pandemic as MLB commissioner, we’ve been deprived of that.
I’m also guessing that your weekend did not include a bicycle ascent and descent of Mt. Elbert, whose ultra-prominent 14,440-foot summit clocks in as the tallest in Colorado and the second tallest in the contiguous 48 states (behind only Mt Whitney). My brother Schuyler and I spent almost four hours on Thursday pedaling up the mountain and about forty-five minutes flying down. My trusty Raleigh hardtail made it in one piece but there were a few moments of sheer terror on the descent. Nonetheless, it was totally worth it. A panorama shot from the summit is below, with my biking companion at right.
One Historical Thing: Frederick Douglass
What to the Slave is the 4th of July? by Frederick Douglass
If you haven’t read the great abolitionist’s most famous speech, I urge you to do so. Douglass delivered this oration in 1852, nearly a decade before the Civil War kicked off and more than a decade before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them . . . To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world.
I really wish we hard political orators today who could do this. The following is probably the most famous paragraph Douglass ever wrote:
What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
But perhaps most notable for our current era is the streak of optimism running through the whole speech. Douglass, as aware as anyone of the horrors of slavery and the racism that perpetuated it, refuses to despair. Would Douglass, I wonder, be similarly optimistic about the American project today?
Allow me to say, in conclusion, notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented, of the state of the nation, I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. "The arm of the Lord is not shortened," and the doom of slavery is certain. I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope.”
One Big Thing: A Reckoning for Pornhub
Pornhub has a Serious Problem by Neville Lahiru (Medium)
MindGeek might be the most influential company you’ve never heard of. The internet behemoth’s official website describes itself in inane—even charming—terms: “To deliver a world-class portfolio of entertainment experiences and IT solutions to a global customer base, utilizing our expertise to drive innovation and build new solutions exceeding customer expectations.” That’s an interesting way of describing a company that connects over a hundred million people per day to porn. As of this writing, MindGeek owns popular porn aggregators Pornhub, YouPorn, RedTube, Thumbzilla, and more, in addition to some of the biggest and most popular pornography studios.
Pornhub’s own “Year in Review” for 2019 claimed over 42 billion visits to the site—an average of 115 million visits per day. (Or as the company gleefully says: “that’s the equivalent of the populations of Canada, Australia, Poland and the Netherlands all visiting in one day!”) Every minute of 2019 there was an average of 2.8 hours of video uploaded to the site. And that’s just for Pornhub—the most popular of the MindGeek sites but certainly not its only one.
A 2014 article in Slate described the company this way:
MindGeek is a porn provider. Or more accurately, the porn provider. MindGeek has become the porn monopoly . . . The MindGeek hydra exerts so much force that people in the online-porn industry are scared to talk about it for fear of blacklisting. And MindGeek’s dominance should serve as a cautionary tale of the dangers of consolidating production and distribution in a single monopolistic owner.
In 2019, a paper in the New York University Law Review posits that MindGeek has “constructed a business model that is not merely resistant to piracy but, at times, leverages it.” But that is far from the end of MindGeek’s sins. Its flagship site Pornhub has been called out by activists and former porn performers this year for fostering a toxic environment, refusing to take action against child pornography on the platform, ignoring takedown requests for videos of rape, and more. The hard-hitting #Traffickinghub campaign video below explains more.
I’m publicly on record (see below and this episode of Vernacular) articulating the harms of pornography, but my previous published work has focused on what I’ll call the “demand” side of the equation—the men and women who are harmed, primarily or secondarily, by the consumption of pornography.
But this new round of criticism towards Pornhub (and MindGeek more broadly—and, by extension, the entire world of for-profit internet porn) focuses on the “supply” side of pornography: production studios, hosting sites, and aggregators that routinely disadvantage, dehumanize, and degrade the onscreen “performers”—mostly women—who they peddle to the world. In all cases this is morally wrong; in many cases it is criminal.
The Bottom Line: Here’s to hoping that in a year of cancellations, MindGeek is next.
ICYMI: Behind the Scandals, A Dirty Little Secret by Zac Crippen (LA Times)
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I’m also grateful to several readers for sending along interesting articles they found this week, and am always interested in your submissions for future installments. You can email me directly or click the button below.
One Interesting Thing.
Tim Scott Didn’t Ask for This by Declan Garvey (The Dispatch)
Garvey has crafted an excellent profile of a rising star in Washington, who to many is a walking contradiction: a Black American but a member of the GOP, a man who denies the existence of systemic racism but acknowledges being pulled over seven times in one calendar year, a man of extreme humility who once put “United States Senate” vanity license plates on his car (he had a good reason). Senator Ben Sasse told Garvey for the piece that “American politics, in my view, would be a lot healthier if there were a lot more people like Tim Scott.”
Scott—the lone black Republican in the Senate, and the only black person in either party to ever serve in both chambers of Congress—did not set out in the mid-1990s to have a political career defined by his race. Former Rep. Trey Gowdy—Scott’s best friend in Washington—shared with me the go-to introduction South Carolina’s junior senator has come to deploy: “I am a Christian, who is a conservative, and you may have noticed that I’m black.” But like most Americans with Tim’s complexion, that last part of his identity has often drowned out the other two—whether he wants it to or not.
One Fun Thing.
The Neuroscience of Optical Illusions by Brian Resnick (Vox)
Which dot is farther ahead when the green dot flashes on your screen? Brian Resnick is here with the answer—and the explanation of why reality is not always as it seems.
P.S. The dress is blue and black. No question. My wife and kids see white and gold but…they’re obviously wrong.
Afterwords
It’s time for some recommendations for this week.
Watch: I watched the 1928 silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc last night. It’s powerful, and only $2.49 (on sale) to rent on Amazon or free with an HBO Max subscription. Watch it with the Voices of Light audio soundtrack.
Listen: North Korea has been in the news lately—a defector from the state talked to the WSJ (paywall) about problems in the DPRK military; a few weeks ago North Korea demolished a DPRK-ROK liaison office in the border town of Kaesong with missiles; most recently, North Korea has said that it isn’t interested in continuing denuclearization talks with Washington. In light of all this, I’d like to recommend the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ The Impossible State podcast.
Read: I just wrapped up Lawrence Wright’s The End of October. It’s a highly engaging and deeply prescient read about a global pandemic—I think I’ll have more to say about it in next week’s installment.
Have a great week!
I would love to hear your feedback: zac@vernacularpodcast.com.
Passing without comment.
Facebook is out of control. If it were a country, it would be North Korea by Carole Cadwalladr (The Guardian)
There is no power on this earth that is capable of holding Facebook to account. No legislature, no law enforcement agency, no regulator. Congress has failed. The EU has failed. When the Federal Trade Commission fined it a record $5bn for its role in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, its stock price actually went up. Which is what makes this moment so interesting and, possibly, epochal. If the boycott of Facebook by some of the world’s biggest brands – Unilever, Coca-Cola, Starbucks – succeeds, it will be because it has targeted the only thing that Facebook understands: its bottom line. And if it fails, that will be another sort of landmark.
So there’s that.