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Salman Rushdie Talks Writing, Democracy, History & More

Posted on by Scott

I recently listened to David Remnick’s interview of Salman Rushdie–his first since barely surviving attempted murder by a young man not even born at the time Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa calling for Rushdie’s assassination in 1989. He took the opportunity primarily to talk about his latest book, Victory City, but along the way talked about the attack on him, the impact of the fatwa on him, and democracy and history in India, England, and the United States. There are many places to listen to and/or watch the full interview, as well as reading Remnick’s piece in The New Yorker. 

Toward the end of the interview, Rushdie’s response to one of Remnick’s questions did an excellent job of summarizing the danger democracy faces in all the places he is connected to by birth, education, and citizenship. I’ve attempted to transcribe Rushdie’s spoken words below, emphasizing what stood out most to me:

The problem in India is this, that the current government, which to people of my way of thinking is alarming, is very popular. It’s the difference for example between India and Trump. Trump was only just about popular. And his level of unpopularity was at least as high as his popularity, that’s not so in India because the Modi government is very popular in India, has huge support. And that makes it possible for them to get away with it.  To create this very autocratic state which is unkind to minorities, which is fantastically oppressive of journalists, where people are very afraid. Which in a way it’s getting to be difficult to call it a democracy.

A democracy is not just who wins the election, it’s whether you feel safe in the country whether you voted for the government or not. India has a problem. The way in which this book just marginally engages with it is that it takes on the subject of sectarianism, and tries to say this is not the history of India. The history of India is much more complicated than that.  It’s not that there was an ancient culture that another culture came in and destroyed, that’s a false description of the past.

And as we know we live in a world in which false descriptions of the past are being used everywhere to justify terrible behavior in the present. England pretending there’s a golden age before any foreigners showed up, and completing ignoring the fact that they were <expletive> over foreigners in their countries in order to make possible their wealth and affluence at home.  America, talking about being great again. I want to know when was that? What was the date? It was obviously before the Civil Rights Act. Was it before women had the vote? Was it when there was still slavery? What are we hark[en]ing back to? A fantasy past becomes a way of justifying bad behavior today.“

David Remnick interview with Salman Rushdie from February 6, 2023

India’s Ministry of Finance searching the offices of the BBC in New Delhi and Mumbai and accusing them of tax evasion so soon after their airing of a show critical of Prime Minister Modi is exactly the point Rushdie was making about oppression of journalists. Shireen Abu Aqla was shot in the head and killed in the West Bank, likely by a soldier in the Israeli military (according to their own investigation). Here in the U.S., police arrested, shot, and tear-gassed numerous journalists covering protests that occurred in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police. Ali Velshi and his team of journalists were shot by rubber bullets from police during a live broadcast. A photojournalist named Lindo Tirado was shot by police with a non-lethal round and lost sight in one eye as a result. At least one journalist was arrested, handcuffed, and taken away while in the middle of a live broadcast. Nearly three years later, I haven’t seen any evidence of disciplinary action against the cops who did all this shooting.

Rushdie’s definition of democracy was an especially interesting one to me. My parents’ native Jamaica has a long history of political violence where the party you supported could have the most serious consequences for your physical well-being. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has written about mob violence and vigilantism occurring w/ the knowledge and consent of political parties not just in India, but elsewhere in southern Asia (https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/09/03/political-violence-in-south-asia-triumph-of-state-pub-82641). Here in the U.S., video from some of these school board meetings, heavily-armed people protesting COVID restrictions, threats and harassment of election workers, voter intimidation, and the insurrection at the Capitol in 2021 make me worry that we’re returning to the sort of political violence which was once the stuff of history books.  

What Rushdie says about false or fantasy pasts being used to justify bad behavior in the present resonated the most strongly with me because of how much present bad behavior it explains. Putin comparing himself to Peter the Great as he rationalizes his continuing invasion of Ukraine is a present example. The MAGA movement led by Donald Trump (though leadership of that movement is being quite vigorously contested now) is certainly another. The conservative Christian groups I’ve written about previously are certainly harkening back to a pre-Civil Rights Movement point in American history as the place to which they want the entire country to return. In retrospect, even some of the rulings of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court are explained by this framing. As I wrote last year after the leak of Alito’s draft opinion which would ultimately overturn Roe vs Wade, black men and women had no rights the government was bound to respect and (white) women were scarcely better off than that. I’m old enough now to remember a culture warrior from decades earlier, Pat Buchanan, harkening back to what (in my memory at least) was probably the Revolutionary War with his “ride to the sound of the guns” catchphrase.

Beyond Rushdie’s clear-eyed views of India, England, and the United States, his life speaks volumes regarding how petty and small what we call “cancel culture” today really is. The list of detractors regarding his novel The Satanic Verses is quite long, and included Prince (now King) Charles, John le Carré, Roald Dahl, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the British Foreign Secretary, and Jimmy Carter, among others. Cat Stevens (now Yusuf Islam) agreed with the fatwa calling for Rushdie to be murdered. Remnick’s piece includes the following shameful remark from the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper:

I would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring his manners, should waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them. If that should cause him thereafter to control his pen, society would benefit, and literature would not suffer.”

The Defiance of Salman Rushdie, by David Remnick, The New Yorker, February 13 & 20, 2023 Issue

Trevor-Roper’s remark can only be seen as more gruesome in the light of attempted and successful murders of translators of the book into Italian and Japanese, the attempted murder of the book’s Norwegian publisher, and the firebombing of bookstores that carried it. In light of the rough reception his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid would receive less than two decades later, I wonder if former president Carter ever revisited and revised his opinion of Rushdie’s book. Rushdie proves far more gracious to at least one of his critics than they were to him:

Meanwhile, the New York Times published a defense of J.K. Rowling–using Rushdie as an example of what could happen to her if she continued to be criticized–just a day after hundreds of current and former New York Times contributors published an open letter critical of the paper’s coverage of trans people. Rowling, like Rushdie, was a signatory of the Letter on Justice and Open Debate published in Harper’s Magazine a couple of years ago. The ways in which the two signatories choose to use their free speech (one to attack trans people, the other to write novels) couldn’t be more different, but the New York Times (predictably, in my view) treats them as the same. I still believe, as I wrote then, that the signatories of the Harper’s letter were asking that “controversial” speech be somehow more privileged than other speech. But Rushdie has paid a far higher price for his art–from other artists and his own government (beyond the one that actually issued the fatwa)–than Rowling has paid (or will ever pay) for using her substantial platform to punch down at a community that has been, and continues to be under siege.

Exploring Mastodon Continued: Moving to Hachyderm.io

Posted on by Scott

After almost 4 months of using Mastodon, I found the community on Hachyderm.io (and its administrator, Kris Nóva) so interesting that I decided to move from the larger instance I initially joined (mastodon.cloud). The advice in my first post about sticking with a larger server unless you come across a particular server/community that really interests you still holds. The specific way I applied it is tied to a Mastodon feature I didn’t fully grasp the utility of back then: the Local timeline. I wrote about timelines later, but what only became clear after creating an account on hachyderm.io and using Local timeline was that because the vast majority of people there are techies like me, there was a much higher volume of interesting toots there than on a large instance like mastodon.cloud.

One of my Mastodon mutuals switched from mastodon.cloud to hachyderm.io due to racist harassment being directed at his account from a domain they don’t block. Not only does hachyderm.io proactively block that domain, they do things like give you a chance to review certain follow requests even if your account isn’t locked, as shown below:

Screenshot of follow request approval on hachyderm.io

The actual steps I followed to migrate were a combination of this article, and this post from Eugen Rochko (in that order). Migrating doesn’t delete the old account, but it does disable the old account so it looks like this:

My disabled account on mastodon.cloud

Migrating to a new account meant updating my account metadata as well to verify that new account belongs to me.

Only the posts from my original Mastodon account can’t make the move to hachyderm.io–but only because I don’t control the instance. If I were willing to run my own Mastodon server, it might be possible to import the archive I downloaded from my previous account and republish them there.

In addition to migrating to hachyderm.io, I provided a small donation to the administrator through ko-fi.com. In addition to the charitable giving I’m doing this year, I’ll be putting more into these tip jars for online services that I find valuable. I contribute a bit to the main Mastodon project through Patreon.

Jamaicans Doing Big Things in America: Susan M. Collins

Posted on by Scott

Susan M. Collins is the new president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. Per the bank’s press release, Collins is just the second woman to lead the organization as well as the first person of color. I didn’t know until reading the Bloomberg piece that 1969 was the year Jamaica put their own dollar into circulation, replacing the pound. That’s also the year both my parents left the island to immigrate to the U.S. Another thing that stood out to me in the Bloomberg profile is her parents–particularly her father. His work for the United Nations reminds me of my own father’s work for another international organization–The World Bank. The bit about his challenges winning arguments against economists (his Ph.D. was in social anthropology) also reminds me of my dad, in that I saw (and would later participate in) many a debate on the issues of the day with family members and friends.

What Do Black Americans Think About Roe v. Wade—and Why

Posted on by Scott

What Do Black Americans Think About Roe v. Wade—and Why

Another excellent piece by Dr. Ted Johnson that makes sense of the disconnect between the voting patterns of black Americans and their personal views.  Johnson touches only briefly on the ways in which black distrust of medical and governmental institutions is informed by a long history of abuses visited upon black people by those same institutions.  It’s bad enough that maternal mortality in the United States is among the worst in the developed world.  The rate of maternal mortality in the US for black women is even worse.  The end of Roe v. Wade will certainly reduce the availability of safe, legal abortion care and will disproportionately impact poor women, black women, and other women of color.

Social “Firsts” and the Supreme Court

Posted on by Scott

A few days ago, Stephen Breyer announced his retirement from the Supreme Court of the United States at the end of the current term.  Because Joe Biden pledged to nominate a black woman to the nation’s highest court if he became president, he now has an opportunity to make good on that pledge.  Predictably, we began to hear and see a lot of high-minded (and hypocritical) commentary about how Biden should be choosing the “most-qualified” justice–regardless of their skin color.  Our attention span as a country is so short, we’ve already forgotten that Trump’s rise to the presidency was powered at least in part by publicizing a Federalist Society-authored list of high court nominees he would choose from if the opportunity presented itself.  We’ve already forgotten that Ronald Reagan promised to name a woman to the Supreme Court.

But the history of using the Supreme Court to accomplish social firsts stretches back much further than we might suppose from current commentary.  This thread by David Frum takes us all the way back to 1887, when President Grover Cleveland appointed Lucius Quintus Lamar to the high court in a bid to gain the support of conservative white southern Democrats for re-election.  Read Frum’s thread in full to get a complete sense of how unrepentant a Confederate Mr. Lamar was.  This dubious social first—the appointment of a traitor to the Union to nation’s highest court–would prove very important for a reason not fully touched on at all in Mr. Frum’s thread.  1887 marked the year the US federal government fully abandoned Reconstruction–and the nation’s black citizens to decades of voter disenfranchisement, terrorism, property theft, murder, and Jim Crow laws.

No discussion of the Supreme Court and social firsts would be complete without mentioning Maryland’s own Thurgood Marshall.  He earned his undergraduate and law degrees from 2 HBCUs (graduating 1st in his class from Howard Law because the University of Maryland School of Law was still segregated).  Out of 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court, Marshall won 29, losing just 3.  He served as a federal appeals court judge for the second circuit for a number of years prior to becoming the nation’s first black solicitor general.  Some months of his tenure as an appeals court judge were served as a recess appointment due to certain southern senators holding up his official appointment, including the same segregationist James Eastland that Joe Biden recalled a civil relationship with.  He would win 14 cases on behalf of the government in that role, losing just 5.  Among his peers both at the time and since, there may not be a more successful justice at winning arguments before the Supreme Court prior to becoming a member of it.

Discussing the legal and rhetorical brilliance of Thurgood Marshall requires discussion of his successor.  Few nominations to the high court are a better demonstration of the hypocrisy of many of today’s conservatives regarding “qualifications” (including those who oppose Trump) than the absence of such concerns being raised when Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court.  In contrast to the years served as an appellate court judge and solicitor general by Marshall, Thomas was an appellate judge for the DC circuit for just 16 months.  Thomas graduated in the middle of his law school class at Yale in contrast to Marshall’s 1st in class at Howard.  The White House and Senate Republicans apparently pressured the American Bar Association (ABA) to give Thomas a qualified rating even while attempting to discredit the ABA as partisan–and this is before Anita Hill’s interview with the FBI was leaked to the press and led to the re-opening of Thomas’ confirmation hearings.  The same GOP that loves to quote that one line from that one speech of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. could not have cared less about “the content of [Thomas’] character”.  They cared that he was both conservative and black.  The way the Senate treated Anita Hill during those re-opened confirmation hearings would in retrospect be a preview of the treatment awaiting future black women appointees to federal roles.

How Thomas fared during his confirmation hearings almost certainly animated the treatment of Lani Guinier after her nomination to become assistant attorney general for civil rights by Republicans.  Her treatment by them, conservative media, and by the White House who nominated her was utterly shameful.  Conservatives lied about her positions.  The same Joe Biden who contributed to the poor treatment that Anita Hill received before the Senate Judiciary Committee he chaired 2 years earlier, reported “grew lukewarm about Guinier”.  President Clinton would ultimately withdraw the nomination in the face of lies and distortions about her writings.  His administration had apparently instructed her not to make any public statements about until after he’d already decided to withdraw her nomination, enabling her opponents to smear her in the press and her “allies” to get cold feet about supporting her.  Particularly now as a wave of anti-CRT legislation, book bans, and attacks on affirmative action gain traction around the country (especially in light of Guinier’s recent death), it is important to remember that Guinier only got to make her case to the public in one interview with Ted Koppel–and the public received her views well.  She never got the Senate hearing that even Robert Bork got for his extreme views because Bill Clinton–her friend from Yale Law School–pulled her nomination instead.

Not even two weeks have passed since the annual hypocrisy-fest that is MLK Day, and a significant majority of Americans surveyed seem to have decided once again that black women should wait for what should be theirs.

The attacks on the first black woman Supreme Court nominee will be fierce (if Biden follows through on his commitment).

When it comes to the Supreme Court and credentialism however, perhaps the best example of the double standard that seems to exist for women generally is the brief nomination of Harriet Miers.  Conservatives in particular dragged this woman for her lack of elite education (she earned degrees in mathematics and law at Southern Methodist University).  Only in looking back did I learn that Harry Reid (Senate minority leader at the time) actually recommended Miers as the successor to O’Connor, and that other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee hoped to see nominees from outside the federal appellate court system.  Perhaps because Reid earned his law degree in George Washington University’s part-time program, he didn’t put as much stock in an Ivy League pedigree as he did in bringing the perspective of an experienced practicing lawyer to the Supreme Court.  Potential conflict of interest concerns raised by Miers’ relationship with President Bush and his staff might ultimately have sunk her nomination anyway had she not withdrawn it.  By contrast, Clarence Thomas has ruled in numerous cases where he had clear conflicts of interest with little or no criticism from his supporters on the political right.

Considering the sorts of cases which will soon come before the Supreme Court, we should remember that as an institution it has been used as often as a tool to remove and restrict rights as it has to grant them (if not more so).  The aforementioned appointment of Lucius Lamar is not the only time that the Supreme Court has been used to undermine full citizenship for black people in the United States.  Before William Rehnquist became associate justice (nominated by Nixon), then Chief Justice of the Supreme Court (nominated by Reagan), he was a “poll watcher” in Arizona under the auspices of Operation Eagle Eye, a nationwide campaign by the Republican National Committee to suppress black votes.  This 2021 piece by Charles Pierce makes a convincing argument Rehnquist tried to pass off his personal opposition to the ultimate outcome of Brown v Board of Education as that of the justice he clerked for (Robert Jackson, Jr).  In this memo, he defended Plessy v Ferguson as good law, and likely lied about it in both of his Supreme Court confirmation hearings.  From the time he became one of Rehnquist’s law clerks, to replacing him as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts has had the Voting Rights Act in his sights as a law to be weakened (if not destroyed).

Contrary to the polls (and numerous previous demonstrations of an utter lack of spine), Lindsey Graham has emerged as a supporter of the idea of a black woman nominee to the Supreme Court.  Current US District Court judge J. Michelle Childs of South Carolina being a possible nominee certainly doesn’t hurt.  If the current shortlist is any indication, any of the black women Biden selects from it will be just as qualified–and likely more so–than any of their colleagues at the time of their selection.  It wouldn’t surprise me if Biden chose Breyer’s former clerk (Ketanji Brown Jackson) to succeed him.  But as a state university graduate myself, part of me hopes that someone with at least one degree from outside the Ivy League gets selected.

The Minimum Wage Debate is Too Narrow and Small

Posted on by Scott

Recently I’ve found myself having variations of the same conversation on social media regarding the minimum wage.  Those to my political left have made statements such as “if your business would fail if you paid workers $15/hour you’re exploiting them.”  Those to my political right–some current or former business owners, some not–argue that minimum wage increases had a definite impact on their bottom line.

I have two problems with the first argument: (1) it oversimplifies and trivializes a very serious issue, (2) these days, the arguers tend to aim it at small business owners.  Worker exploitation is real, and conflating every employer who follows the law when it comes to pay and other facets of employment harms the cause of combatting serious harms.  The outgoing Trump administration has been trying to reduce the wages of H-2A workers.  Undocumented workers in sectors like agriculture, food, home-based healthcare, and others fare even worse.  In some cases, drug addiction treatment has turned thousands of people into little more than indentured servants, with complicity from judges and state regulators.  Until recently, large corporations like Wal-Mart and Amazon evaded accountability for low worker pay and mistreatment despite having significant percentages of workers on food stamps and Medicaid and a high rate of worker injuries.

Another variation of the first argument takes a starting point in the past (like the 1960s) then says the minimum wage should be whatever the rate of inflation would have grown it to be between then and today.  If you go back to when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was alive (for example), the minimum wage today “should” be $22/hour.  You can pick any point in time and say what the minimum wage should be based on inflation, but that’s not the same as grappling honestly with how industries have changed and/or how the nature of work has changed in the half-century plus since the civil rights era.

One challenge with the second argument is that the examples cited are typically restaurants or food services–businesses that operate at low margins and have high fixed costs in addition to being labor-intensive.  Even in that sector, the impacts of a $15/hour minimum wage are not necessarily what you might expect.  But not every business is the restaurant business, and a single sector cannot govern the parameters of debate for an issue that impacts the entire economy and the broader society get a broadly beneficial result.

At this point in the discussion, someone usually brings up automation, followed by someone mentioning universal basic income (UBI).  What I have said in the past, and will continue to say, is that automation is coming regardless of what the federal government, states, and/or localities do with the minimum wage.  As someone who has written software for a living for over 20 years, the essence of my line of work is automating things.  Sometimes software augments what people do by taking over rote or repetitive aspects of their jobs and freeing them up to do more value-added work.  But if an entire job is rote or repetitive, software can and does eliminate jobs.  The combination of software and robots are what enable some manufacturers to produce so many goods without the large number of workers they would have needed in the past.

Talking about UBI enlarges the conversation, but even then may not fully take on the nature of the relationship between government, business, and people.  We do not talk nearly often enough about how long the United States got by with a much less-robust social safety net than other countries because of how much responsibility employers used to take on for their employees.  Nor do we talk about the amount of additional control that gives employers over their employees–or the cracks in the system that can result from unemployment.  The usual response from the political right whenever there is any discussion of separating health care from employment is to cry “socialism”.  But the falseness of such charges can be easily exposed.  Capitalism seems to be alive and well in South Korea, and they have a universal healthcare system–a significant portion of which is privately funded.  Germany is another country where capitalism, universal healthcare, and private insurers seem to be co-existing just fine.

The conversation we need to have, as companies and their shareholders get richer, share fewer of those gains with their workers, and otherwise delegate responsibilities they used to keep as part of the social contract, is how the relationship between government, business, and people should change to reflect the current reality.  The rationale always given for taxing capital gains at a lower rate than wages was investment.  But as we’ve seen both in the pandemic, and in the corporate response to the big tax cut in 2017, corporate execs mostly pocketed the gains for themselves or did stock buybacks to further inflate their per-share prices.  Far from sharing any of the gains with workers, some corporations laid off workers instead.  Given ample evidence that preferential tax treatment for capital gains does not result in more investment, the preference should end.  People of working age should not be solely dependent on an employer or Medicare for their healthcare.  A model where public and private insurance co-exist for those people and isn’t tied to employment is where we should be headed as a society.  

We need to think much harder than we have about what has to change both to account for the deficiencies in our social safety net (that corporations will not fill), and an economy on its way to eliminating entire fields that employ a lot of people today.  Bill Gates advocated in favor of a tax on robots year ago.  The challenges of funding UBI and whether or not it’s possible to do that and continue to maintain the social safety net as it currently exists need to be faced head-on.  Talking about the minimum wage alone–even as multiple states and localities increase it well beyond the federal minimum–is not enough.

What I’m Thankful For

Posted on by Scott

I have plenty to be thankful for this year. My 4-year-old twins are doing well–healthy, happy, and eating everything in sight. My parents, sister, and extended family are doing well. My wife is having some success with her consulting business. I’ve passed the two year mark at my current company and it continues to be the best environment I’ve been part of as a black technologist in my entire career so far.

I’m looking forward to continuing professional and personal growth in 2020 (and beyond) and wish those who may read this the same.

Owning My Words

Posted on by Scott

After Scott Hanselman retweeted this blog post recently about owning your words, I’ve decided to get back into blogging (and hopefully spend less time on social media) after a long hiatus from an already-infrequent blogging schedule. Twitter in particular has probably consumed the bulk of my writing output from 2014 to now, with Tumblr hosting a few longer pieces on topics outside of tech.

I’m finding the process of coming with new topics that merit a blog post on a more regular basis a bit challenging, so I’ll probably start by revisiting older posts and using them as starting points for new work. The topics here will go back to having a clear tech connection, while other areas I’m interested in will get their own site. I bought a new domain recently that I like a lot better than the current .org that I may move this tech content to as well as a subdomain if I’m feeling especially ambitious.

Europe in Winter: Barcelona, Spain (Day 2)

Posted on by Scott

The bus mentioned in yesterday’s post was the Barcelona Bus Turistic.  It turned out to be a lot of fun and would have been an even better value if we’d had the time to book it for 2 days instead of one.  We purchased two tickets for the north-south route via Viator.  Our hotel was conveniently located just a short walk from one of the stops.  The route takes you past every attraction of note in Barcelona, and with the option to get on and off the buses at various points when desired, it’s possible to see a lot of Barcelona this way.  In addition to the bus tickets, we received large coupon books of discounts to a large number of the attractions the bus takes you past.  Another underrated benefit of the bus–good wireless internet access.

One such discount is for the Montjuic cable car, which takes passengers to and from Montjuic Castle.  The views of the city from a cable car are pretty amazing, and the castle at the top is a nice place to walk around a bit, or just sit and relax.  There are many other stops worth getting off to see that I’d like to visit on a return trip, including Camp Nou, the Gothic quarter, and some of the museums.

Tomorrow, we bid a too-soon farewell to Barcelona and fly to Nice, France.