Sundown Towns in 2023, Country Music Culture Wars, Bad Clinical Trials, and Black Love - Dinner Table Digest № 58
The Dinner Table Digest is an intermittent collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley at Dinner Table Don'ts. Subscribe today!
This Digest addresses the cultural furor of the week, country music star Jason Aldean’s thinly veiled right wing call-to-action dressed up as a music video. I’ve included in a New Yorker piece on the culture wars within country music, published a few days before the Aldean video came out. Also in this digest is a piece about the increasing untrustworthiness of medical clinical trials, a story about the African Caribbean Black Network of Waterloo Region, and a few thoughts on Meta’s Threads, complements of yours truly.
Look for another edition of Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant coming soon - right-wing extremism never sleeps! I’m also hoping to introduce a series in the near future on some of my favourite longform musical pieces. If that sounds interesting to you, please let me know!
Sections: Jason Aldean’s Dogwhistle / Culture Wars and Country Music / Untrustworthy Clinical Trials / Black Radical Love in Waterloo / Thoughts on Threads
Try That In A Small *cough*Sundown*cough* Town - Jason Aldean
I was going to post this in the next edition of the Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant series, but it entered the cutural consciousness pretty quickly after it was released, so I figured it was worth sharing here. This song by country music star James Aldean is a fantastic example of the use of 'dogwhistles,' which are words or phrases used to communicate a particular idea or thought such that a) those who don't know what the phrases mean remain (mostly) oblivious to the actual content of the message being communicated and b) there exists plausible deniability on the part of the speaker (in this case, singer) to the broader public.
Sure enough, and true to form, Jason Aldean has responded to accusations of fascist sympathies by a) denying that he said anything offensive and b) offering an supposedly innocuous alternative explanation. See Also: Harry Frankfurt, “On Bullshit”
Before I move on, I want to draw my reader's attention to one of the pieces highlighted in Dinner Table Digest № 56 about the design principles of propaganda. Through this lens, the Jason Aldean song hits all the important visual components of effective propaganda design: simplicity, emotional appeal, repetition, symbolism, idealization and demonization, and association.
Country Music’s Culture Wars and the Remaking of Nashville - Emily Nussbaum - The New Yorker
Days before the above racist Jason Aldean propaganda piece was released to the general public, this brilliant story about the on-going culture war within the Nashville Country Music Scene was published in the magazine of the east coast liberal elite The New Yorker. Included was this paragraph featuring Maren Morris:
Morris had recently had a few skirmishes online with right-wing influencers—notably, Brittany Aldean, the maga wife of the singer Jason Aldean. Morris had called her “Insurrection Barbie”; in response, Jason Aldean had encouraged a concert audience to boo Morris’s name. Both sides had sold merch off the clash. The Aldeans hawked Barbie shirts reading “don’t tread on our kids.” Morris fans could buy a shirt that read “lunatic country music person”—Tucker Carlson’s nickname for her—and another bearing the slogan “you have a seat at this table.” (She donated the proceeds to L.G.B.T.Q. charities.) A few months before “Love Rising,” Morris had done an interview with one of the event’s organizers, Hunter Kelly—a host on Proud Radio, a queer-themed channel on Apple Music—and had told him that she wanted to be known for her songs, not her Twitter clapbacks. But, she added, she wouldn’t apologize for having political opinions: “I can’t just be this merch store on the Internet that sells you songs and T-shirts.” Within the context of Nashville, she explained, “I come across a lot louder than I actually am, because everyone else is so quiet.”
Medicine is plagued by untrustworthy clinical trials. How many studies are faked or flawed? - Richard Van Noorden - Nature
One of the biggest flaws in the peer review publishing process for scientific research is the general inability (or, perhaps even a lack of desire) to spot dodgy data. Even if the paper is rejected at a top-tier publication, there are many predatory journals that are more than willing to unscrupulously publish bad research.
For more than 150 trials, Carlisle got access to anonymized individual participant data (IPD). By studying the IPD spreadsheets, he judged that 44% of these trials contained at least some flawed data: impossible statistics, incorrect calculations or duplicated numbers or figures, for instance. And in 26% of the papers had problems that were so widespread that the trial was impossible to trust, he judged — either because the authors were incompetent, or because they had faked the data.
Carlisle called these ‘zombie’ trials because they had the semblance of real research, but closer scrutiny showed they were actually hollow shells, masquerading as reliable information. Even he was surprised by their prevalence. “I anticipated maybe one in ten,” he says.
When Carlisle couldn’t access a trial’s raw data, however, he could study only the aggregated information in the summary tables. Just 1% of these cases were zombies, and 2% had flawed data, he judged (see ‘The prevalence of ‘zombie’ trials’). This finding alarmed him, too: it suggested that, without access to the IPD — which journal editors usually don’t request and reviewers don’t see — even an experienced sleuth cannot spot hidden flaws.
If the reliability and integrity of scientific research is to be trusted, dodgy data must be eliminated.
Black Radical Love in Waterloo - Phillip Dwight Morgan - Briarpatch Magazine
This piece talks about one of the Waterloo Region’s most effective activist organizations the African Caribbean Black Network of Waterloo Region. Known locally as ACB Network, which is, I am sure, not an accidental acronym, they have been at the forefront of anti-racist activism in the Waterloo Region. One of the organizers of the area’s highly successful BLM March in 2020, the ACB Network is also known for their work with other local activist organizations. In this feature, Phillip Dwight Morgan talks with two of the organization’s leaders about the dose of radicalism that they bring to the Black community in Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge and the Townships:
“There were times where we were met, I think, with kind of bewilderment because we would state facts,” [Ruth] Cameron recalls, “and this in and of itself was seen as radical, and I have to laugh.”
The ACB Network often names and indicts policing and white supremacy in its public statements. Last February, the group criticized the inclusion of police in Black History Month celebrations, tweeting, “Police are given space to centre their death-dealing institution and collectively wash their reputations during a month intended to focus awareness on Black community. In our discipline of hope, we maintain a vision for new histories, free of policing.”
“If we would state that an incident of violence within another system was unacceptable, people sometimes would act as though that speaking, just speaking, that truth was somehow going to change things,” Cameron explains.
For some members of the community – particularly those who want to “go along to get along” – this kind of language feels too confrontational. Wilson recalls that advancing an explicitly anti-racist approach was challenging for many members of the community, regardless of race.
“I think that not only amongst non-Black but also even the larger Black community, it’s terminology that can be really politicized, right? It’s politically charged, and in some cases polarizing,” she says.
“Folks weren’t sure if they wanted to invoke language around anti-racism or racism at all, when talking about some of those issues in the broader community.”
Some Thoughts on Threads - Peter Thurley
To conclude, I wanted to offer a few of my own thoughts on the newest social media sensation, Meta’s Threads.
I've figured out why I don't like Threads, and it's simple: the counterfeit is never as good as the original, no matter how bad the original gets. Indeed, this is the problem with Meta as a tech company: they're copycats. Aside from Instagram and WhatsApp, which Facebook bought once they were already popular, the only unique thing that FB has created is the original New Feed. Since then, they've pinched from other platforms, and mostly played around to see if any of the other stuff works on its main product, the News Feed. They can't do that with Threads, which, due to its design, must remain a stand-alone feature - being primarily text based, it is too similar to the News Feed for integration there. So now Meta has a single user base, but fragmented over apps.
When you signed up for Threads it probably asked you if you wanted to automatically follow your Instagram feed. Saying yes was a terrible decision, because my Instagram feed is primarily image and video based, whereas Threads is a Twitter copycat.
Suppose someone asks you if you want a Coke. You say yes, and they scurry off, returning with a drink. Taking a sip, you notice that it's not quite right, but you can't figure out why. You just know it's not what you asked for. You ask the person if they brought you a Coke, and they say "Yeah, I did! I mean, the bottle said Diet Pepsi, but it's pretty much the same thing, right?"
That's how I feel when I go onto Threads - I wanted a Coke, but I got a Diet Pepsi. It's close enough to the thing I wanted to be in the same general universe of drinks-that-are-colas, but lacking in all of the little things that make Coke the King of the Colas. If I'm really thirsty, I might drink to the end of the glass, but the next time I want a cold cola I'm going to make sure I get myself a Coke.
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