Today’s post includes a substantial section of cuteness at the end to balance just how awful the news is right now.
Political Sewage
The only thing particularly unique about America’s illiberal turn is just how long so many desperately clung to the myth of its exceptionalism. They clung to it, one assumes, bc they could not face up to the depth of the darkness before them. There is no looking away now though.
Jasmin Mujanović (@JasminMuj) January 31, 2020
A map of congressional districts where elections were decided by margins smaller than the capacity of an Applebee’s restaurant
Arizona’s voting laws ruled to be explicitly racist.
A police accountability tool maps police shooting and notes “From 2013-2019, St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department killed 34 black men and Oklahoma City Police Department killed 25 black men. This is an average rate of 7.0 per 100,000 black male population in St. Louis and 8.5 per 100,000 black male population in Oklahoma City – a higher rate than the 2018 US Murder Rate of 5.0 per 100,000.”
Foreign Policy magazine has an article titled “The American Empire is the Sick Man of the 21st Century,” which directs a broad range of invective at… well, everyone who’s gotten us to this parlous state:
Trump, as almost everyone at least privately concedes, is incompetent at fulfilling his most basic responsibilities and a global laughingstock…. Trump’s administration is openly bought by foreign governments …His political party, which still controls the Senate and increasingly dominates the judiciary, has no interest in holding him accountable for any of this. … Trump and the Republicans were at the very least the passive and willing beneficiaries of efforts by a foreign power to influence the election outcome. But Trump is only a symptom, the most blatant and cartoonish example of how the influence of outside money in Washington has become routine over the past generation.
I mean, you know things are bad when Slavoj Žižek is the most relevant political philosopher, as BLDGBLOG argues:
Žižek specifically highlights moments during those politically fake procedures—which were not trials in any real sense, but dramaturgical events, literal theater, administrative stagecraft—wherein Communist Party members broke out in laughter at the earnest replies of people trying to defend themselves against imaginary accusations.
Part of that laughter… was directed at the sheer absurdity of seeing someone take the trials seriously, of watching a person genuinely and truthfully engage with the charges—disloyalty, treason, betrayal, whatever. Party members witnessing these acts of earnest self-defense correctly perceived them as a perverse and comedic misunderstanding of the position those defendants found themselves in. It was the laughter of embarrassed disbelief: wait, you think all this is real?
The last time the Methodists had a schism, it was over slavery… and we all know how that went.
Long Reads
This rather long n+1 article about Instagram is well worth your time. It is subtitled “We all die immediately of a Brazilian butt-lift.”
Twitter Curation
This thread about Star Trek and tech bros and who deserves to be a person
This woman is very disappointed in her congressional representation… in eleven different places at once.
An immigration lawyer explains the standard operating procedure for immigration officials, including their most common official lies
Maybe today the Warren and Sanders people can unite in agreement that Buttigieg is a PowerPoint presentation that got its wish to be a real boy.
True Crime podcasts are counter-revolutionary (@edburmila) January 15, 2020
A public defender recounts a case in which his client faced years in prison based on a police officer’s perjury. The cop got probation and a stern slap on the wrist.
Pretty Good News
You can now delete most of the targeting & tracking data Facebook has about you.
Cultivating Joy
A certain retriever is running for First Dog
Dog steals GoPro
This cinematic masterpiece in eighteen seconds (sound on for soundtrack)
Turn your sound on again for this rapper, who has an entire album of similarly well-produced silly songs about dogs
Dog using a carwash brush to scratch its butt
Finnish reindeer get reflective antler paint for nighttime visibility
Secretly Ironic 