Category: Uncategorized

Swim and Sleep Like a Shark

I usually like to start these newsletter/blog posts off with some of my own thoughts but I haven’t got any for today. Instead, here’s the song “Swim and Sleep (Like a Shark)” by Unknown Mortal Orchestra.

What I’ve Been Reading

Interesting Articles From Sources I Don’t Entirely Trust

Joy

Did You Get You a Haircut?

Today’s song is Haircut by Petey & Miya Folick:

Sure you can touch it, and yes it’s so soft,
No I don’t feel different, I still feel fucking lost.


On Feeling Lost

A personal essay about passive suicidal ideation.
A personal essay about being so depressed you force force an AI to create a thousand portraits of Spongebob Squarepants.


On Politics

A word about Christian fascism from Jared Yates Sexton.
A word about Christian fascism from a town that’s closing its local library rather than allow it to have books about gay people.
A word about Christian fascism in the form of a profile of an NYT profile of Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters.

Related: people feel unsafe and push for police crackdowns not because of crime specifically but because of visible poverty. We could address many of these highly visible, highly upsetting problems by providing more housing, but because we regard them as criminal we do the American thing and just add guns to the mix, to predictably terrible results.


On Joy

Branch manager and assistant branch manager.
Dog learns how to pet a cat (kinda).
This goofy-ass dog.
Dog wears makeshift hat.
This is what yawning elephant shrews look like.
A highly-rated dog.
Cat or potato chip?
Say Anything, carcinization edition.
Pitbull x dachshund.

It Takes You a Long Time to Bleed to Death. But You Do.

Even before this month’s Supreme Court attack on women’s bodily autonomy, doctors in conservative states were refusing or delaying care for women having miscarriages, and with the legality of basic medical care in question, things are about to get a lot worse. Several Kansas City hospitals have already stopped providing emergency contraception for fear of lawsuits. If the history of other places that have banned abortion is any indication, we’re about to see teen suicides rise even beyond their current elevated levels.

Republicans will almost certainly push for a nationwide ban next, which makes you wonder how much more polarized things can get. Ron Brownstein, writing in the Atlantic, sees two historical parallels. The more recent is Jim Crow, when the states of the old confederacy took a “defensive” approach to their anti-rights agenda, enforcing segregation in-state but not trying to codify it nationwide. The other is the “offensive” runup to the Civil War, when the states of what would become the confederacy tried to spread slavery nationwide. Brownstein is careful to note he isn’t saying we’re doomed to an actual all-out war, but offense seems inevitable. As state-level voting rights violations, a hard-right Supreme Court, and the regressive nature of the US Senate itself lead an extremist minority to national power, we’re going to see a good deal of offense and escalation.

We’re already seeing stochastic terrorism. With Iowa and other states making it legal to run over a protestor with your car, for example, it was pretty much inevitable that we’d see some dude driving his F-150 Raptor into a Cedar Rapids pro-choice protest. Nobody died this time, fortunately, but the driver did not face any immediate consequences, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the next time.

And there will be a next time.

Clipping Service

Bill McKibben in The New Yorker on yet another in the apparently interminable series of monstrous decisions:

But, of course, the Court has also insured that “getting a clear statement from Congress” to address our deepest problems is essentially impossible. The decision in Citizens United v. F.E.C., in 2010, empowered corporations to game our political system at will. That explains, in part, why Congress has not passed a real climate bill in decades. The efforts that Democratic Administrations have made to try and control greenhouse gasses have mostly used provisions of the Clean Air Act because it is the last serious law of its kind that ever came to a President’s desk (Nixon’s, in this case).

The Imperfectionist on how to give yourself a break about a challenge that seems difficult but is in fact impossible:

Here’s a surprisingly useful question to ask yourself next time you’re stumped by a problem, daunted by a challenge, or stuck in a creative rut: “What if this situation is even worse than I thought?”
…
Imposter syndrome? Worse than you think – because you think the issue is that you don’t yet have the qualifications to hold your own among your colleagues, when in fact the truth is that everyone is winging it, all the time, and that if you’re ever going to make your unique contribution to the world, you’re going to have to do it in a state of unreadiness.

Ali Griswold on abortion care as a corporate perk (and the hypocrisy of companies offering it):

It should go without saying that turning access to basic life-saving women’s health care into a corporate perk to attract and retain talent is the sort of perverse and dystopian outcome you’d only encounter in a country like the U.S. In addition to making people more dependent on their employers, it’s also a band-aid available to a tiny percentage of the working population and a potential privacy nightmare.

Michelle Wilde Anderson at Lithub on the the downward spiral of insolvent cities:

In public services, as in so much of life, you get what you pay for, which drives the gaping inequality among cities. Decades into a process of fiscal decline, a local government will have no more loans to take, taxes to raise, services to privatize, or assets worth selling. As the city reduces or eliminates staff, local government seems less competent and more irritating. Infrastructure and public space decays. “It’s death by a thousand cuts,” says Reverend Joan Ross of Detroit, referring to the city’s collapse in services. “It takes you a long time to bleed to death. But you do.”

Joy

To Give Up Eating for Fear of Choking

Peter Hessler is one of my favorite writers on just about any subject, and this month he has a story about how he lost his job teaching English in China. Nobody is exactly sure what the real rules are, and everyone denies having said anything when contacted by fact-checkers, but Hessler clearly became slightly too controversial for administrative comfort after one of his comments on a student’s essay was misquoted and went viral on Weibo.

What fascinated me was how the students navigated the Kafkaesque political landscape of nebulous rules with inconsistent enforcement. They all had to use illegal VPNs to do better research for term papers. They all know the cruelty and capriciousness with which success can be granted or taken away, no matter how hard they work. But the system, cruel and capricious and corrupt as it is, still seems too immense to change, and grants them enough rewards that it seems worthwhile. So, they live with it, even though most aren’t strongly nationalistic and don’t believe the propaganda. The idiom that keeps coming up is that one should not yinyefeishi, or give up eating for fear of choking. As long as living standards continue to rise generation to generation, the failures of the current system are acceptable, and radical change isn’t necessary or desirable to most people.

The article doesn’t guess at what might happen if the system fails to deliver, if a gerontocracy refuses to relinquish its hold on power, if standards of living and life expectancy start to drop for the next generation. Perhaps the US will find out before China.

You Were the King of Carrot Flowers

Oh Comely

How Strange it Is To Be Anything at All

This is Not a Place of Honor

In the 1980s, researchers and semioticians began to try to imagine a way to label nuclear waste that would be legible for the thousands of years it would be dangerous. By the 1990s they had come up with a series of symbols, increasingly complex messages, and easy to translate phrases that could be used to at least make an attempt to communicate a danger to a far-future archaeologist.

One key segment begins like this:

“This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.“

Unfortunately, the scholars did not take into account how hilarious it is to just put that shit on everything, which is why for $21 you can buy a cute little yard sign saying just that, but in the text style of those “Everyone as welcome here” signs you see in expensive neighborhoods.

So, good luck to future archaeologists trying to sort out which of our warnings are ironic and which are accompanied by dangerous levels of ionizing radiation. The texts we leave behind will probably make about as much sense as that ancient Sumerian “dog walks into a bar” tablet.

Can’t talk (there’s no signal inside) but I think I just found a place of honor! I bet all kinds of highly esteemed deeds are commemorated here — capsandnumbers (@Capsandnumbers) March 23, 2022

No Highly Esteemed Deeds

The Nation covers a class realignment focused on asset ownership rather than income or relation to the means of production, and specifically real estate asset ownership. One thing they note which I had not known is that homelessness as we know it today really only took off in the 1970s:

Although poor Americans have always resided in substandard housing, street homelessness only became a large-scale urban phenomenon in the late 1970s. A relatively early study of the homelessness crisis, Peter Rossi’s Down and Out in America, distinguishes between “old” homelessness and contemporary “literal homelessness” by noting that in the decades prior to the rise of mass homelessness, “the homeless by and large were familyless persons living in very inexpensive (and often inadequate) housing, mainly cubicle and SRO [single-room-occupancy] hotels.” By 1979, Rossi wrote, “It became more and more difficult to ignore the evidence that some people had no shelter and lived on the streets.”

Not A Place of Honor

This New Yorker article about the Margaritaville Retirement Communities is absolutely worth your time. The proponents note that it’s “like being in college,” in that there’s a lot of people like you (white, financially comfortable, apolitical) and you can get pretty much anywhere you need to go on foot or by golf cart. It actually does sound fun. But it also sounds like a nightmare?

Dangerous and Repulsive

The school newspaper is shut down, bullying and harassment are up, and several beloved teachers are being forced out at a Texas high school following a collapsed initiative to support LGBTQ+ students. Texas is also facing a shortage of high school teachers for some reason.

It’s part of an explicit strategy of vilifying gay and trans people, of systematically eroding support for students and teachers alike, and of bankrupting school districts by encouraging vigilante lawsuits. Don’t worry though, there’s an ultra-right-wing charter school operation ready to take the place of your ruined public school system!

Mainstream Democrats have responded by blaming the gays for being too strident and trying to pivot to the center, as though letting the Child Tax Credit expire and plunging millions of children back into poverty would be a good way to mollify Q-anon cultists who believe Democrats are all satanic child molesters.

Cultivating Joy

A tiny cabinet converted into a tiny apartment for chihuahuas.
Tinycat!

Hey Come Here, Let Me Whisper In Your Ear

Ever notice how a lot of new trucks & SUVs have those sort of weird upturned snouts and big, angry looking faces? That’s not a coincidence.

The upturned snouts are a regulatory trick to make them qualify as off-road or heavy-duty vehicles so they have lower fuel economy and safety requirements. It’s the same phenomenon as putting seats into the back of the Subaru Brat was designed to get around a tax on light trucks known, for complex reasons, as the Chicken Tax.

The angry face is mostly aesthetic, an appeal to buyers who want a truck to look tough. Both design trends result in higher bumpers, greater mass, and reduced forward visibility, and those in turn lead to excess deaths, just like the Subaru Brat killed or maimed more than a few of its fun-loving truck-bed passengers.

Slate, ever the hot-take machine, went ahead and made that subtext explicit:

Whether you bought a Sierra… or a Ram or a Silverado or a Jeep Gladiator or any other megatruck or monster SUV, you’re making an announcement to the world. It’s not the announcement you think it is, though. It’s not about your wealth or your toughness or your masculinity. No, you’ve announced, very clearly, that you don’t care if you accidentally kill a stranger. You’re saying: “I’m totally cool with someone else dying because of a decision I made.”

That’s not theoretical. The NHTSA just released their 2020 stats, and despite decreased vehicle miles traveled (VMT) due to the pandemic, 38,824 people died in traffic, the most since ’07. 

Of course, I also just responded to a recent survey about cycling by saying that the main reason I don’t ride my bike is that I have nowhere to go.

Half of It Is Innocent

99 Percent Invisible covers the rise and diversification of the Chinese factory art scene in Dafen Village, Shenzen. It’s pretty cool.

Half of It Is Wise

Back in the 70s and 80s, right-wingers used to say that environmentalists were like watermelons: Green on the outside, Red on the inside. With the arrival of undeniable climate change impacts, argues a new thinktank policy paper, we’re about to see some avocados: green on the outside, Brownshirt on the inside. It sounds kind of surprising until you recall that in the early 2000s the Sierra Club was nearly taken over by anti-immigrant groups who argued that America had limited resources and should reserve them for native-born whites.

Meanwhile, in some untidy spot, a 2012 interview with former advisor Gleb Pavlovsky about Putin seems prescient.

The Whole Damn Thing Makes No Sense

Me: *sigh* not my monkeys, not my circus

Ringmaster: that’s right. And the hat, give me back the hat.

cap’n watsisname (@capnwatsisname) June 16, 2019

Joy

This dog.
Perhaps this one.
Or maybe this cat.
Or this one.
Regardless, I think I may have found the only good parking lot.
Definitely take a look at this owl trying to act dignified despite being loopy as hell coming out of anesthesia.

Keep Your Wick in the Air and Your Feet in the Fetters

I first heard the phrase “marketers ruin everything” from marketing guru Gary Vaynerchuk, who has since gone on to monetize his brand so hard he’s become just another toxic hustle bro with a podcast. But it’s not really a new insight. Marketing is, after all, how capital appropriates culture. 1940s ads were full of highbrow allusions to the classics because that was where the prestige was at the time. Clumsy appropriation of counterculture and subculture gave us everything from those appalling ads for St. Ides Malt Liquor to the simply embarrassing flop of OK Cola. Less clumsy appropriation slides in unnoticed until J. Balvin is recommending que hagas un beer run antes de la fiesta porque New Year’s Eve es Miller Time. (Balvin himself of course has his own, even more questionable appropriations to answer for).

The confrontational Twitter personas of Steak-Umms and Wendy’s were just the tip of the spear for the market’s advance on internet-meme culture (coincidentally, @Steak-Umm now has a new ad agency notable for letting you have conversations with Moon Pies via your Alexa. Visit Garbage Day for more dirt on that and other aspects of our social media nightmare). Moving beyond those out-of-character brand accounts, Shake Shack and DoorDash are collaborating on a limited-time Valentine’s Day dating app called Eat Cute. There will be prizes! There will be brand synergy! There will be collection of ENORMOUS amounts of personal data about connections, preferences, locations, and spending habits that can be used to maximize sales and also turned into its own monetized stream of ads and database sales to other precision marketers. (Of course, it’s not just dating, those prayer apps are also selling the data of the devout).

Anyway, as the Mekons say, just like prayer and art and personally identifying information, sex is just a commodity to be bought and sold like rock ‘n roll. (“And when I danced and saw you dance, I saw a world where the dead are worshiped – This world belongs to them now they can keep it!)

Mekons aside, today’s song is Australia, by The Shins. It’s a cheerful tune about dread, ennui, and giving up on your dreams, illustrated by a comedic heist in which a semi-competent crew steals decorative balloons from a car dealership.

Happy Friday!

Your nightmares only need a year or two to unfold

  • The LA railyard complaining about rampant thefts had previously fired significant portions of its security team. Same as previous screaming about retail theft, it mostly looks like a corporation trying to duck the expense of guarding private property.
  • One key to success is being willing to face rejection again and again and again, to more or less learn to love it. What’s the worst that could happen? Rejection?
  • A 2018 longread from The Baffler discusses paleoconservativism, David Duke, Pat Buchanan, and how the right-wing revolt of 1992 is still hanging over us today.
  • Click here, then click the headline “How Miami Became the Most Important City in America” to get around the Financial Times paywall and read a top contender for this year’s hotly contested “most scathing thing written about Florida” award.

You haven’t laughed since January

Give me your hand and let’s jump out the window

What We Most Want Is Bad for Us We Know

So many of America’s problems can be attributed to our twin obsessions with cars and guns, but nothing underscores it quite as thoroughly as recent news about John Kuczwanski, a former chief of staff for a GOP state senator and Florida government official. Five years after being arrested for brandishing a handgun during a road rage incident outside of a Tallahassee Circle K, he got into another fight at the same intersection. This time, after ramming his BMW into a Prius, he pulled his gun and fired. He missed. The other driver, also armed, did not.

Of course America, and in particular the Florida GOP, will not learn from this. We build our environment for cars, and cut funding for transit because it’s for people of color, so we get too many cars. We forgive drivers for outrageous behavior and so cultivate road rage. And of course, we let just about anyone have a handgun even when they’ve demonstrated clearly that they should not. If not for the pathological policies Kuczwanski and his employers advocated and enacted, he might be alive today.

Recommended Reading/Listening

In Wired: A Grand Theory of Buying Stuff
A telling anecdote about how we buy things, and buy things for our things, and suddenly we have too many things and we haven’t achieved what we originally set out to do. In the case of author’s anecdote, the extra things are a digital drum pad and all the accessories. “The upshot of all this is that I have absolutely no musical talent… I am not a musician. I am a systems administrator for my digital audio workstation. There will be no SoundCloud for me.” But dialing back the accessories, and listening more carefully, he begins to gain a greater appreciation for drummers and producers, and an understanding of how music is made and heard.
Song pairing: Tonight I’m Gonna Give the Drummer Some, by Amy Rigby. (“He’s cute, if a middle-aged man can be described as cute…”)

In TNR: The Radical Young Intellectuals Who Want to Take Over the American Right
The energy in young right-wingers is leaning into less voting, more whiteness, less corporate influence, more Latin Mass, a familiar set of herrenvolk-democracy policies. “The New Right wants to see Republicans abandon their fealty to free-market dogmas, embrace traditional Christianity, and use the levers of state power to wage the culture war for keeps.”
Song pairing: VBS (Vacation Bible School), by Lucy Dacus. (“When I tell you you were born and you are here for a reason / You are not convinced the reason is a good one“)

On Substack: America’s Top Environmental Groups Have Lost the Plot on Climate Change
Bloomberg’s Noah Smith brings in a guest to cover the reasons groups like the Sierra Club, Extinction Rebellion and the Sunrise Movement are opposing things like efforts to bring green electricity to cities and efficient mass transit. “Conservation is a conservative impulse, but right now, the climate threat calls for sweeping changes to our physical environment. Our best shot at mitigating the impact of climate change is to electrify every process in our economy as quickly as possible.”
Song Pairing: A punk cover of Little Boxes, because the genre and the song were once critiques of conformity and are now wielded in opposition to everything new and different.

Joy

Bunny x Snowman.
Turn the sound on to hear this kitten learn about gravity (he’s fine).
This cat bopping to New Order.

Freeze Peach

Good news everyone, the following post has been reviewed by Twitter operations and does not violate the terms of service, so we know that free speech and a robust discourse is alive and well in America:

Nazis on Twitter

Other bastions of free speech include Penn Law professor Amy Wax, the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, back in the news again for doubling down on her ongoing advocacy for a whiter, more gentile America. The New Yorker profiled her back in 2019, after she was quoted saying that Black or Latino law students are always below average; she’s recently expanded to insult Asians as well.

Not to say that internet pile-ons are good, but there are some things that should be outside the bounds of polite society. I don’t think this is particularly controversial, but here we are.

Good news for people who like bad news

Joy

Whine Pairings

Let’s check in with the intellectual right over at The American Conservative! This week the special is a super spicy take about how antifascists are the real fascists, but also fascism isn’t bad, actually. It pairs nicely with a short essay by Jeet Heer titled “You Don’t, In Fact, Have to Hand it to Mussolini.”

Meanwhile, in the face of increased public scrutiny, police are shaping up and working more to… oh, sorry, no, I meant a police officer killed a pedestrian with his cruiser, then put the body in his trunk and took it home in a vain attempt keep it a secret. And a pair of officers in Columbus, Ohio just got busted trafficking eight kilos of fentanyl. And this obvious and avoidable shitshow.

At least we’ve started cracking down on prosecutorial misconduct. I mean, sure, it just took a murder, a viral video of said murder, and a national outcry to get justice, but that’s cool. We’ve got a total panopticon and lots of time on our hands, so we just have to watch endless murder videos and start letter writing campaigns every time we want justice for anything. Besides, everyone enjoys watching murder videos.

Meanwhile, in Atlanta:

To understand the current fight over housing in Atlanta, you have to go back almost 100 years. Before 1929, Atlanta was divided into two residential zones: “R-1 white district” and “R-2 colored district.” After a U.S. Supreme Court ruling prohibited such explicit segregation, “R-1” became a “dwelling house” zone and “R-2” became an “apartment house” district. To this day, much of Atlanta is still organized this way, leading to a lack of affordable housing — and housing in general — as the city expands.

This_is_fine.gif

Meanwhile, in crime: A man stealing a couple hundred bucks worth of stuff from Walgreens gets widespread news coverage, and the thief lands in jail. But Walgreens itself recently admitted to stealing more than $4.5 million from its employees. Nobody will go to jail, although the company will be required to pay back some of the stolen money. (Also worth reading: Darrell Owens’ take on the Bay Area crimewave, which addresses  whataboutism and root causes and economic precarity).

Plus: