It’s a macroeconomics truism that rising GDP is generally correlated with rising life expectancy, but the US is an exception to that rule. A 2017 UN report on extreme poverty in the US explained that inequality here is so great that a lot of Americans effectively live in a much poorer country. One key example the report cited was the lack of proper sewage and sanitation systems in the Black Belt. This week, the New Yorker profiles the followup efforts and the overall public health impact of poverty. It’s not a happy story at all. The solution isn’t quite as simple as laying some pipe (provisioning municipal sewer service to rural areas is impossibly expensive; the soil in the area is incompatible with many standard septic systems; sanitation is only one part of the ongoing public health disaster) but it’s a web of problems the US knows how to solve and just prefers not to.
We Need to Talk About Kyle
Kyle Rittenhouse, charged with two murders, is out on $2 million bail, with major contributions from right-wing celebrities. He does not, however, have a product endorsement from his favorite brand of right-wing militant coffee (yes, right-wing coffee is a thing now). People thought he did, though, because right after getting out of jail, he was featured in a photo wearing a Black Rifle Coffee t-shirt, embracing a right-wing influencer/podcaster who does have an advertising relationship with Black Rifle Coffee. The tactical coffee company had to issue a statement disavowing Rittenhouse, and …. well, some people got angry that their breakfast beverage does not sufficiently endorse vigilante gunfire.
Rittenhouse actually seems to have a great deal of support from the right, including a major endorsement from Florida State Representative Anthony Sabatini. Sabatini, interestingly, says that abortion is bad because it’s murder, but killing leftist protesters is just dandy. So, remember, fetuses are people, but leftists aren’t.
One of my favorite stock photo clichés turned niche internet phenomena is “women laughing alone with salad.” It’s great. KnowYourMeme explains the turn from showing up an awful lot in boring stock photography to a viral Hairpin blog post to, I am not kidding, a theatrical adaptation. In news coverage of the play, author Sheila Callaghan told the Washington Post that “nobody likes salad that much; it’s not built for that.”
But there is always an exception! And someone does in fact love salad that much! Her name is Emily Nunn, she’s an author who’s written about food for the New Yorker and Chicago Tribune, and in addition to her book-length projects produces a weekly newsletter called The Department of Salad. It’s delicious!
We’ve previously compared the current US situation with the decline and fall of the USSR (teetering gerontocracy, shortages and bread lines, quagmire in Afghanistan…) but here’s Noah Smith last year comparing it to the 1990s in Japan.
What is a coup? It’s literally a blow, a strike. Someone hitting your normal processes of government, trying to knock them over. The blow doesn’t have to succeed. It still wounds. In our case it was occupying Parliament without a majority. In yours it’s denying the President-Elect after an election. Whether it fails or not, deep structural damage is done. At the time, however, it just feels dumb. …. You can just roll it back, right? Right? No. No no no. Oh God no. The tragic thing which you do not understand — which you cannot understand — is that you’ve already lost. You cannot know exactly what — that’s the nature of chaos — but know this. You will lose more than you can bear.
He closes his grim warning with a wish that we Americans get the benefit of the only thing that has kept him and his family safe so far: luck.
The sci-fi epic series The Expanse features humanity spreading throughout the solar system and developing political, cultural and linguistic faultlines as it goes. The poorest and most marginal cultural group, scraping by in asteroid colonies and long-haul ships, spend enough time in full environment suits that their gestural communication has had to adapt as well: facial expressions are meaningless, while shrugs are whole-arm affairs that can convey uncertainty at a distance and through bulky safety equipment. (The language system got complicated enough, and central enough to the plot, that they actually hired a linguist for the TV adaptation).
Just thinking about that, you know, for no reason.
Arbitrage
Back in May, Ranjan Roy’s Substack post about DoorDash went mildly viral: a friend of his owned a pizza joint, and DoorDash had started offering delivery from his restaurant without consulting him. Only they had gotten the prices wrong when they scraped the website and were losing like eight bucks on every sale before even paying the drivers. Roy and his friend started ordering as many as ten pizzas at a time, and wound up taking DoorDash for a couple hundred bucks before the typo got fixed and the game ended.
Except it didn’t. DoorDash kept on spending huge amounts of money to acquire customers and influence regulations that allowed it to underpay its workers. Roy’s back with followup, now analyzing S-1 filing as DoorDash prepares for its IPO.
It’s all within the rules. The regulatory rules. The labor rules. The antitrust rules. The consumer protection rules. Full credit to Tony Xu and their team – they have out-executed every competitor. They are winning this weird and twisted game of heavily-funded food delivery apps.
But this is less a ‘good for them’ than a ‘bad on us’ sentiment. … While we were laughing about $8 in pizza arbitrage profits, Doordash built a $25 billion business powered by a combination of regulatory and labor arbitrage. While Doordash’s messy financial controls ended with us swapping a few pizzas, our broken regulatory system has fundamentally reshaped the economy in a way that allows Doordash to extract billions in revenue during a time of national crisis.
This democratic backsliding is hilarious through the lens of the petty shit the US has overthrown governments around the world over, our president is screaming “Fake election! I won!” like dude we overthrew Allende because *the phone company* wanted him gone — Mass for Shut-ins (Podcast) (@edburmila) November 10, 2020
I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before, but the lyrics to the Galaxie 500 song “Strange” seem to fit well with the current moment:
Why’s everybody acting funny? Why’s everybody look so strange? Why’s everybody look so nasty? What do I want with all these things?
I find myself humming the song whenever I leave the house or go into a store these days. Everybody does look nasty in ill-fitting masks and DIY quarantine haircuts. What do I want with these things? Did I actually just risk my life to buy this bag of Peanut M&Ms?
I was mildly disappointed to discover that the song is actually just about going out to buy snacks while royally stoned. It kind of works anyway, though.
Anyway, speaking of looking nasty, check out this article in the Paris Review about the digital face, facial recognition algorithms, GIF-based digital minstrelsy, the a-reality of face-tuning, and so on.
Trump has liberated a lot of people from the last vestiges of the Sermon on the Mount. A lot of people turn out to have been sick and tired of pretending to be good. The fact that the leader of one of our two parties—the party, in fact, that has for many decades represented what was normal, acceptable, and respectable—was not ashamed to reveal his own selfishness, was not ashamed to reveal his own indifference to the suffering of others, was not even ashamed to reveal his own cheerful enjoyment of cruelty…all of this helped people to feel that they no longer needed to be ashamed of those qualities in themselves either. They didn’t need to feel bad because they didn’t care about other people. Maybe they didn’t want to be forbearing toward enemies. Maybe they didn’t want to be gentle or kind. In a world in which the rich want permission to take as much as they can get without feeling any shame, and many of the not-rich are so worried about their own sinking fortunes that they find it hard to worry about the misery of anyone else, Trump is the priest who grants absolution.
For some reason the other day I woke up thinking about Bikini Kill’s 1992 rager “Feels Blind.” It’s mostly a cri de coeur about the cultural pressures of femininity, but it’s an inspiration to anyone who’s trying to break free from something but can’t quite imagine what’s outside of it. How do you even know what you don’t know?
If you were blind and there was no braille… If you could see but were always taught What you saw wasn’t fucking real yeah How does that feel? It feels blind … What have you taught me? Nothing Look at what you’ve taught me Your world has taught me nothing
And it’s clear we’re at a tipping point, where the old rules are falling away. Which ones do we need to keep, and which ones do we need to discard? Trump got booed at the memorial for Ruth Bader Ginsberg and lots of people said it was inappropriate to heckle a mourner at a funeral. But it’s clear to me we’re way past the point of inappropriate. Last night should prove that. Norms and politeness have gotten us nowhere.
Columbo-based writer Indi Samarajiva has an illustrative Medium post this week titled “I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There,” about what it’s like living mostly normally while the structure of society shakes and rattles around you.
If you’re waiting for a moment where you’re like “this is it,” I’m telling you, it never comes. Nobody comes on TV and says “things are officially bad.” There’s no launch party for decay. It’s just a pileup of outrages and atrocities in between friendships and weddings and perhaps an unusual amount of alcohol.
Perhaps you’re waiting for some moment when the adrenaline kicks in and you’re fighting the virus or fascism all the time, but it’s not like that. Life is not a movie, and if it were, you’re certainly not the star. You’re just an extra. If something good or bad happens to you it’ll be random and no one will care. If you’re unlucky you’re a statistic. If you’re lucky, no one notices you at all.
Collapse is just a series of ordinary days in between extraordinary bullshit, most of it happening to someone else. That’s all it is.
Or, as the (naturally, Russian) proverb has it:
Last night, I was talking to my dad and telling him I was concerned that 2021 would make us miss 2020. He responded with a Russian saying I’d never heard before: “On average, we live pretty well: worse than last year, but definitely better than next year.” — Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) September 28, 2020
Lee Drutman, writing in Foreign Policy, notes that this sort of cultural and political upheaval happens in the US fairly regularly, due to our voting system tending towards that strong two-party system. He suggests ranked-choice voting may be necessary to build future stability. I hope that works. I hope it’s not too late.
Remember: In the past 27 years, Republicans presidents have been in office for 12 years, but have won the popular vote only once. 2/3 of Republican time in executive power has been fundamentally illegitimate, and that’s only if you discount the fact that George W. Bush would never have won a second term if the Brooks Brothers Riot hadn’t bullied him into his first.
Or take it from Jeet Heer:
Thinking a lot about the USSR in the 1980s, a decrepit gerontocracy, unable to meet the basic human needs of many citizens, trapped in a nostalgia for its achievements in World War II while mired in a futile conflict in Afghanistan. How does a nation end up like that? — Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) September 25, 2020
Rhetorical Question
Kind of illuminating that you can’t actually tell what the original rhetorical question was about:
(i mean racism is why but it’s a rhetotical question) — Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) September 24, 2020
In this case, it’s about new rules that propose to deny 4-year student visas for people from dozens of countries, notably including Afghanistan and also most of Africa. But really it could be a footnote to any “what’s the reasoning behind this Trump administration policy?”
The government of the City of Portland, OR issued a statement repudiating right-wing paramilitaries, and the District Attorney’s office has defended the first amendment rights of protesters. In response, the city police department arranged to have huge numbers of officers deputized as US Marshals, to help raise the usual trumped-up charges to the level of federal felonies.
Amusing Ourselves to Death
Driven mad by quarantine, a woman who re-enacts scenes from Sex & The City, playing all the parts except Samantha, who is played by a cat.
Business management types like to say that there’s not really any such thing as a dysfunctional organization. Every organization, they say, is already exquisitely tuned to function in the way that it does and achieve the results it achieves, and those functions and results work just fine for somebody there.
What we call dysfunction is often something formerly positive that’s now outdated, or a flaw it was easier to overlook in the past. Either way, it persists for a reason: it benefits someone. No matter how poisonous the ecosystem, something lives in it. Thrives in it. If you want to change something, you have to understand who benefits from the status quo, and what they might lose by changing it. The things that are lost might be financial or procedural, or more abstract losses of status or self-image.
Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?
How can we even begin to fix these glaring problems when doing so would require acknowledging that they exist, acknowledging that we are not exceptional or great or universally admired or even particularly free?
Americans have grown up boasting about our nation being the land of the free and the home of the brave, and here we are, in thrall to capital and terrified, and our sole consolation is insisting against all evidence that we are free and brave. Just not free or brave enough to face our failings and do the work to fix them.
Some radicals say that the system is producing the results it was designed to produce. But “design” isn’t entirely accurate. Like almost all enormous systems, our society is built piecemeal, almost everything an unintended consequence of something else. A lot of people are doing their best within it.
Twitter reminded me last week of this article from 2018, when California was facing its worst-ever fires, floods were rising everywhere else, and global temperatures broke record after record.
The whole thing is worth a read, but here are two key grafs:
As we made our way across a broad bay, I glanced up at the electronic chart above the captain’s wheel, where a blinking icon showed that we were a mile inland. The captain explained that the chart was from five years ago, when the water around us was still ice…
In 1991, [an Exxon researcher] found that greenhouse gases were rising due to the burning of fossil fuels… the rise in the sea level could threaten onshore infrastructure and create bigger waves that would damage offshore drilling structures. As a result of these findings, Exxon and other major oil companies began laying plans to move into the Arctic, and started to build their new drilling platforms with higher decks, to compensate for the anticipated rises in sea level.
I can’t find the origin, but there’s a little warning floating around my feeds these days: “Don’t think of this as the hottest year in the past century. This is the coolest year in the next century.”
Today’s post is about genocide, with a bonus set of links to important articles about economic crisis, climate crisis, and voter suppression. There’s also some nonhorrible stuff in it, like funny Tweets and some very cute dogs, but mostly it’s very upsetting and you shouldn’t read it:
I keep opening this draft and trying to write something nice. I really do. I keep failing. I have written and deleted lengthy paragraphs full of horrific news. But you know all of them. The west coast is on fire. The ocean is teeming with cyclones. The president is openly calling for armed vigilante violence against his opponents.
And there are some very serious allegations about some truly horrific stuff going down in Georgia. The Intercept, The Guardian, and other sources are covering a whistleblower’s report that an ICE detention center is forcing sterilizations on detained women.
I first saw it blowing up on Twitter with links to a blog I’d never heard of before. I didn’t want to share it – it had all the hallmarks of a moral panic – it’s an outrage, and sterilizing the ‘undesirable’ is something we’ve got a LONG history of doing in this country, and yet… also it seemed too horrible to be true.
Excess surgeries? In a shoestring-budget detention center, in a medical system that’s so expensive? In a region where so many hospitals are Catholic that it’s hard for a patient to get a hysterectomy when she actually wants and needs one? That’s like jumping from the knowledge that child abuse exists straight to the 1980s Satanic Panic, isn’t it?
But of course, if a someone can bill for it and be sure they’ll get paid, that’s an incentive.
As more publications have picked it up, the story has gotten more attention and more fact-checking. The whistleblower is no longer anonymous, and the doctor in question seems to have been been identified as one previously involved in a Medicaid/Medicare billing scam that led to a $500,000+ settlement.
Man, that Dune trailer was so great I felt like I was the one walking through a desolate landscape, wearing a mask to stay alive, while political machinations that threaten the planet are at work in the background of my life.
I recently came across the Reddit community /r/ShermanPosting, dedicated to sharing hastily-made visual jokes (“shitposting”) insulting the Confederacy. Most were predictably terrible but I did spot his gem:
I don’t remember if we learned much about John Brown in high school. I really don’t. I remember a textbook glossing over the failure of Reconstruction. And I remember another that didn’t quite gloss it over so much, but also didn’t go into a ton of detail. American History classes tended to focus a lot on wars. But I don’t know when I learned about John Brown. I definitely remember learning the Battle Hymn of the Republic in elementary music class, but we definitely didn’t learn what it was originally about, any more than we learned the context of other songs we sang, like “Pick a Bale of Cotton” and “Jimmy Cracked Corn.”
(Nothing says “awkward memory” quite like recalling that you and your almost-exclusively-white classmates routinely sang a song about slaves picking cotton with an enthusiastic “oh lordy” in the chorus. Was it worse that there were in fact a handful of Black kids in the class who probably did know what it was about, and sang along with us anyway, because that’s what you do, go along with the other kids and the teacher, just like I bowed my head in Wednesday morning chapel service and mumbled the prayers that everyone else seemed to automatically know? I can’t tell. I don’t remember. Probably.)
Here’s one made by a group of New York’s finest to celebrate discovering that a fellow officer had taped discussions of their crimes and was going to report them, so they had him locked up in a mental hospital. It features a rat in a straitjacket. Get it? Hahahaha. Just to celebrate our participation in a crime and its subsequent coverup. You know. For fun.
(Extra credit: What would happen if you got caught stealing thousands of dollars a year from your employer?)
This completely bizarre Portsmouth, VA case in which the chief of police is actually facing some consequences for abuse of authority after trying to bring charges against a state senator for causing injury to a Confederate statue.
(Extra extra credit: Doesn’t it remind you a little bit of the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, when armed white folks overthrew a Black government that was promising to promote equality?)
And for good measure:
In 2015, Kenosha cop Pablo Torres shot and killed a man armed with a bucket. It was his first day back after another shooting 10 days earlier. He had a 200-page disciplinary file, with 9 excessive force complaints. The Kenosha police union paid tribute to him with this billboard. pic.twitter.com/2OBGqoD1Zz
And of course, then there’s Kenosha, WI, where police shot Jacob Blake in the back seven times, prompting protests and forcing the AP Stylebook to issue a reminder about how to properly report on police violence:
Avoid the vague “officer-involved” for shootings and other cases involving police. Be specific about what happened. If police use the term, ask: How was the officer or officers involved? Who did the shooting? If the information is not available or not provided, spell that out. — APStylebook (@APStylebook) August 25, 2020
That subtweet didn’t do much, since CBS and other mainstream outlets went on to report that the protests “turned violent,” as though they hadn’t begun with a man getting shot in the back seven times while his children watched.
The chief of police described the incident with a perfect example of the past exonerative tense: “an individual … was involved in the use of firearms to resolve whatever conflict was in place.”
The very existence of Brady Lists – often-secret lists of police officers who commit perjury so much that prosecutors won’t call them as witnesses. Of course, since the lists are secret, the false convictions they perjured themselves for often still stand. And of course the officers still keep their jobs, and sometimes even still get called to testify. (See coverage in Gothamist, Detroit Free Press,Boston.com, WNYC, Christian Science Monitor, and USA Today).
During grad school I was literally picked up off the street in Harlem by plain clothed police officers who didn’t show me a badge, put me in the back of unmarked van, parked in a single spot for like an hour as I sat in van. Thought I had been kid napped. They been doing this.
This is going to sound like an exaggeration but it is literally true that instead of funding testing and food and rent and schools and preventing layoffs and evictions republicans proposed a full write-off for the three martini lunch and more money for the F-35.
And of course there’s that genocide in China right now – The Atlantic has excellent coverage of just how extreme the surveillance and control in Xinjiang are, and illustrates the growing threat that they will be expanded.
Secretly Ironic 