Author: Aaron Weber

This week, Representative Paul Gosar (Q-AZ) posted a cartoon depicting him as a hero fighting against monsters including the president and Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Violent rhetoric and death threats are nothing new on the right, and Jared Yates Sexton has a good concise explainer about it:

This isn’t by accident. The political environment we inhabit has been systematically and relentlessly prepared for violence as an option, creating a base prepared for eventual bloodshed or overthrow by force, but also necessitating that meaningless and principle-less politicians like Gosar embrace ever-increasingly dangerous rhetoric as a means of gesturing to that radicalized base.

But it’s not confined to the right. These sorts of nasty jokes are plenty common on the left:

I would pay a reasonable amount of money to watch a 10-week series where 12 contestants take turns beating the living shit out of JD Vance in a tent while the original GBBO hosts announce how much time they have left and make quips, if netflix is listening. — Mass for Shut-ins (Podcast) (@edburmila) November 10, 2021

The one that made me truly concerned, though, was a recent post on Gawker titled “The Joe Manchin Trolley Problem:”

A trolley problem is usually just a thought experiment, but in this case it happens to be a remarkably robust analogy with regard to Manchin and the doomsday blanket situation. On one track we have the millions of people living and bound to be born in coastal areas who will find their homes and lives literally underwater in 20 years, plus the various social and political implications of displacing them at roughly the same moment we radically diminish nature’s capacity to support life. And on the other track we have Joe Manchin. The normal person who feels some obligation to the future and comes face-to-face with this seemingly total failure of our usual systems must ask him-/her-/themself: Would it help if I killed somebody?

The author immediately clarifies that this is a thought experiment, please don’t literally kill a senator. But it’s not a great rhetorical trend, and who knows how close it brings us to “will no one rid me of this turbulent priest” territory – especially given the remarkably strong power of of parasocial influencer relationships.

Extended Metaphors

I’ve been watching my motorsports and I’ve been reading my political theory, and I can’t stop noticing how success feeds on success, how each team or person or family wants to keep the best for themselves, how an external rule-making body has to step in to level the playing field or it’s a pointless experience for everyone. In MotoGP, there was a period when Michelin would make special tires the Saturday before each race and ship them overnight to their top sponsored riders, giving them a key advantage of tires tuned perfectly for their riding style and the day’s predicted track conditions. This was wildly expensive for Michelin and a major setback for everyone who didn’t get their special tires. It made the sport worse to participate in and worse to watch, and that’s why the sport changed the rules to put everyone on the same tires. Today, the field is somewhat more even, although competition + money continues to produce weird expensive advantages for some teams (don’t ask me how ride-height and launch control systems work, but apparently they were very expensive to develop, and lack of them was a key reason Suzuki had such a terrible season this year).

But wouldn’t you want the very best, if you could make it happen? If you knew the super-rich were buying university admission with seven-figure donations, wouldn’t you be tempted to spend hundreds of thousands bribing a coach? Or tens of thousands for actual sports and international volunteering and tutors and coaches? Maybe a bigger mortgage to move to a better-ranked school district? Or if you don’t have the money to buy your way into a good elementary school, what about enrolling your child in the better school district a relative lives in, even if you don’t live there?

This isn’t just an American problem. China’s recent crackdown on cram schools is a bid for equality (and also increased state control over education, and a possibly counterproductive impetus to the creation of illegal underground tutoring rings, while South Korean regulators spend a great deal of time trying to limit hagwon hours.

(Illegal underground tutoring rings. Illicit math smugglers. A rough crowd, you know. Maybe the spice of the forbidden will make homework more appealing?)

Meanwhile

I had a much-delayed annual physical recently, and the NP asked me if I was in therapy. I said no, are there any therapists available? She laughed and said of course not, have you considered an app instead?

Reading

• Toronto Life profiles an international drug lord
• Climate trauma
• How to plan for your first few weeks as a ghost

Joy

• Zen cat
• Cat contemplates leaf 
• Dog friends 
• Cat takes the big bed

Here’s what I’ve been reading.

Books

• Evicted, by Matthew Desmond. Engaging, readable, and heartbreaking profile of families on the edge and the landlords who exploit them. I don’t usually cry at nonfiction.
• High-Risers: Cabrini Green and the Fate of American Public Housing, by Ben Austen. Similarly engaging history of public housing in Chicago. Profiles people who lived there, people who administered the program, and the reasons it all fell apart. I’m only about halfway through this one.
• Race for Profit, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. Scholarly analysis of the failures of housing policy post-redlining. Studiously, almost stolidly analytical and yet still leaves me simmering with rage. Also only about halfway done with this.
• A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers. A short, sweet novella about what it means to find purpose, and what it means to be a person.

Articles

• The Squamish nation has reclaimed ten acres of downtown Vancouver that were stolen from them in the early 20th century. As a tribal nation they’re exempt from municipal zoning laws, which means they can build six thousand new homes in an incredible sort of indigenous-art-informed solarpunk style. Their official project site is here and it’s beautiful.
• Related to the novella, a lovely profile of Becky Chambers in Wired. Chambers is one of my favorite writers of speculative fiction, and has a distinctly non-bleak take on fiction, humanity, and the future. She drinks a lot of herbal tea.
• The Guardian on American households without plumbing: “…a studio apartment without a working bathroom in San Francisco’s Mission District… The sink spewed yellow colored water, and the toilet wasn’t properly connected to the building’s plumbing system… rent was $2,300 a month.”
• Robert Kagan on the constitutional crisis: “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.”
• Climate refugees in Chico, California: “About a quarter of Chico’s unsheltered residents lost their homes in the 2018 Camp Fire which burned the neighboring town of Paradise to the ground… Chico’s war on the unhoused may be providing a grim glimpse into an eco-authoritarian future, in which the poor victims of climate change-fueled disasters are treated like human refuse by those whose wealth has protected them, at least in the short term, from the worst impacts of planetary warming.”
• This headline alone: “New Florida Surgeon General Appeared at Demon-Sperm COVID Conspiracy Summit With Future Capitol Rioter.”
• This incredibly touching portrait of Kurt Cobain, in The New Yorker, by his biographer and friend.
• When Dasani Left Home: An update to a 2013 profile of a homeless child from the New York Times Magazine. This story made me very uncomfortable and I’m not sure how to address that aside to sit with it for a while. It’s borderline poverty porn.

Fwd: Good Newsletters

• Darrell Owens on gentrification. One of the best voices you’ll find today about cities, housing and racial justice.
• Noah Smith on the US/China cold war. It’s not just the guns and butter, it’s the culture.
• Charlie Warzel on “all this rage.”: “The main question occupying my mind is: Where does all that rage go? Eventually, the pandemic will subside. Health care workers will have a slight reprieve from this hell. But the immense grief and PTSD will stick around. I imagine the anger and resentment will, too. What happens then?”
• Will Wilkinson on Beverley Hills: “An amazing case study in NIMBY entitlement that merits our close attention and withering scorn.”
• Voudou Economics: How did 30,000 Haitians get to Texas? (Well, first they went to Brazil to build stadiums for the Olympics & World Cup…)
• Ann Helen Peterson on the Worst of Both Work Worlds: Includes analysis of the failures of the Academy as an institution, the nature of office work, the suckage of commutes, and more.

Joy

This bearded dog.
Spooky szn.
Puppy’s first visit to the beach.
Emo dog.
CATLOAF.
Dog suspicious of beach water.

Has it been a whole month? It’s been a whole month.

Here are some good things to read:

From The Verge: An absolutely incredible account of New York City delivery workers uniting to defend themselves from theft and violence in the face of absolute indifference from police and city government.

From Substack: A letter from a photographer and military veteran who took portraits of other veterans on a retreat that used psychedelic therapy to treat PTSD.

From the New Yorker: The always-informative Atul Gawande on Costa Rica’s public health success. My econ 101 class taught me that GDP and lifespan are generally correlated, but the US and Costa Rica are the counter-examples. US lifespan is down despite all our wealth because we have such enormous inequality and such terrible public health systems. Costa Rican lifespan is up despite being a middle-income country because it has less inequality and excellent public health systems.

From Stereogum: Revisiting the 20th anniversary of Prefuse 73’s debut album Vocal Studies & Uprock Narratives. I picked up a copy at Other Music back when it came out (record stores were a thing, I’d never have found it without the clerk recommending it), and loved it. I’ve been listening to it all week on repeat and it’s still incredible.

Twitter

I have taken
the medicine
that was in
the stables

and which
you were probably
saving
for your horses

Forgive me
I am a fucking
whackjob

alex halpern (@HalpernAlex) September 1, 2021

I’m so fucking old, I remember when the weather was small talk

Rachel McCartney (@RachelMComedy) September 2, 2021

Bad News

• Police are like a box of chocolates: they’ll kill your dog.
• Minnesota state police data purged data right after protests.
• Predictably depressing report about Aurora, Colorado police.
• School authorities are concerned students will get “addicted” to eating lunch.
• Texas legislature watched Mad Max and doesn’t want workers addicted to water.

Joy

Cabinetful of labrador puppies. Filing the lab results if you will.
A cockatoo having a croissant. Like you do.

“Snowclones” are a templates for cliché, and therefore discouraged by, for example, official journalism style guides. I love them. My current favorite, “the existence of X implies the existence of Y,” has been spinning around as a series of Twitter jokes for quite some time now:

• The existence of an oubliette implies the existence of a larger, scarier oobly.
• The existence of biscuits and Triscuits implies the existence of the elusive moniscuit.
• The existence of casual sex implies the existence of ranked competitive sex.

Buzzfeed’s got a pretty good roundup that includes more of those, and also one about “deleting my dating apps because I want to meet someone the old fashioned way” (he throws giant parties for me in hopes I’ll show up and stares at a green light on a far away dock)/(feigning madness and accidentally stabbing her father while avenging the death of my father, the King of Denmark)/etc.

Long and/or Thoughtful

• Donald Antrim on suicidal ideation, hospitalization and ECT – Movingly written description of a journey out of darkness
• Cicadas, loss, and caring for your estranged sister’s children after her sudden death – Not actually a super long essay but you may need to sit with it for a minute after you read it
• NYT deep dive on history, power and civil liberties in Taiwan and Hong Kong – A lot of things I did not know about Taiwan, colonialism, and the fault lines that may define the next couple decades of geopolitics
• A Society of Holiday Inn Express Guests – On the nature of overconfidence online and the need for everyone to shut up and listen for once
• The Transhuman Olympics – A blog called “Applied Divinity Studies” on why we should stop worrying and learn to love doping (see also: snowclones)
• The Parallel Parking Job that Ignited the Internet – A great exploration of vitriol and context collapse

Never Tweet

There are two wolves inside of you. Look at their cute little noses and paws 🥺

sleepy jo (@jojipaints) August 8, 2021

• Robert Frost x Dunkies:

Joy

• Now put on your thinking cat
• Dog not very good at obstacle course
• Death-metal-loving baron rewilds his Irish estate (not cute but definitely fun)

In lieu of any writing from me, I strongly recommend this in-depth piece in Harpers by Barrett Swanson about TikTok influencer culture, critical thinking, the decline of liberal arts education, the nature of celebrity, fascism, and misinformation. It’s absolutely full of gems.

You may also find the following things interesting/worrying:

• How social media tracks you – no, the app isn’t listening. It just knows who you’re near and how they shop.
• The ivory tower intellectuals at The Atlantic worry that Democrats are sliding directly into the collapse of democracy.
• The neoliberal shills at Vox worry that Democrats are sliding directly into the collapse of democracy.
• Centrist former labor secretary Robert Reich worries that Democrats are sliding directly into the collapse of democracy.
• Former prosecutor and mainstream liberal Noah Bookbinder, writing in USA Today, worries that Democrats are sliding directly into the collapse of democracy.

Joy

Just check out this dog with hilarious turtlenecks. And this tiny kitten trying to play with a very large dog. And this cat who steals socks, and a dog trying to play with a tennis ball that for some reason just won’t move, and this baby anteater, and this tiny cat who looks giant in a model landscape, or  this one cat who appears to be psyching herself up for a big meeting, and the story about how ten percent of the world’s California condors are all hanging out on one woman’s porch being incredibly rude. And the cats of brutalism. And this cat, duck, and hen who are all incubating an enormous clutch of eggs together.

For a twist, consider this horse singing the intro to an exceptionally filthy hip-hop anthem, and a marvelous picture of Miss Idaho 1935 posing almost entirely buried in a pile of potatoes. Also a thread of absolutely hilariously terrible sign layouts.

And finally, some COVID-19 announcements:

Coronavirus restrictions are being eased way too quickly pic.twitter.com/rjio7Ga6jZ

Zo (@Zo_Zahid) May 14, 2021

The CDC says you can now sail right past sirens without earplugs or tying yourself to any mast. pic.twitter.com/seQzuO5Qm9

Gregory Stringer (@GregoryStringer) May 14, 2021

If you know me you know I don’t Amazon. I quit shopping at Whole Foods because of Amazon.

Recently, the behemoth and its abuses of power have come under the spotlight a little more. Enough that Jimmy Fallon, his generation’s most anodyne entertainer, had to hastily stop John Oliver from making a Zoom guest spot interesting when he asked “Alexa, what’s union busting?”

Here’s some more reasons you shouldn’t shop at Amazon:

• Vice: Amazon Denies its Workers Pee in Bottles. Here Are the Pee Bottles.
• Buzzfeed: The US Labor Board Isn’t Strong Enough to Protect Workers from Amazon.
• Gizmodo: There’s something fishy about Amazon’s Anti-Union Twitter Army.
• Reveal: Amazon says its warehouses are safe for workers. But the numbers reveal that workers are getting hurt much more often than the company claims.
• NYT: Amazon Illegally Fired Activist Workers.

So, you know. Stop giving Alexa all your personal data and stop giving extra money to ol’ Piss-bottle Jeff. Thus endeth the harangue.

Just Kidding, Here Is More Harangue

• Report confirms what we already knew: mishandling of BLM events was a nationwide phenomenon.
• Where we do need more cops: the IRS and general white-collar crime enforcement.
• If your blood pressure happens to be low, check out this map of deaths in police custody.
• The National Humanities Medal-winning Claremont Institute has a new essay claiming that to save America we must destroy democracy, because liberals and moderates don’t truly count as Americans, and only the right wing can claim to be the true voice of the people. Nothing to see here, just an explicit Herrenvolk screed wearing a suit and tie. And of course Tucker Carlson is singing the same song.

Joy

• Boxcar cat.
• Sloth dragging its toes in the water.
• Dog nuzzling a windchime.