Category: Uncategorized

Re: Re: Re: Re: My Previous Email

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

Joy

“Demon-Sperm COVID Conspiracy Summit” (AKA my recent media diet)

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

Joy

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

Disco Tempo Cliché Intro

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

Joy

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

These Are a Few of My Favorite Clichés

“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

Never Tweet

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

sleepy jo (@jojipaints) August 8, 2021
Twitter screenshot: two Dunkin Donuts signs captioned two wicked big roads split apaht and fuckin sorry I could not travel both

Joy

Tick Tock

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:

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

Quit Shopping at Amazon

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:

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

Joy

Abort, Retry, Fail?

I’ve written and deleted a number of drafts of this newsletter in the past couple weeks. Each time I just feel worse about it, and I feel bad about bringing my doomscrolling into other people’s inboxes. But there’s so much doom to scroll through! And all of the new information just happens to confirm all of my prior assumptions, so it’s definitely true!

Image from The Simpsons: one of the bullies saying Videotaping this crime spree was the best idea we ever had

Anyway, The Nation has an amazing piece covering scenes from this week’s shitshow that concluded with this:

“This is not America,” a woman said to a small group, her voice shaking. She was crying, hysterical. “They’re shooting at us. They’re supposed to shoot BLM, but they’re shooting the patriots.””

And I am reminded of course, immediately, of an incredibly insightful little phrase from, of all things, the comment section of a rather neoliberal-leaning blog:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time.


Decline?

Economist Brad DeLong and VC investor Om Malik face off on the question “Is America In Decline?” in a Pairagraph dialog. DeLong takes the “yes” side, noting that life expectancy in the US is lower than it ought to be, and that foreign students coming to study here often go home wondering why they bothered going to such a backward country that has nothing to teach them.

Malik takes the “no” side, arguing that while this year has forced the nation to look at its flaws, and that it’s reasonable to despair over our failings, we can fix them: “We can and will be better. Maybe it is my day job, or perhaps it is the delusion of an immigrant’s mind, but I believe the tradition of dreaming up something from nothing is still alive in this country. And that is what keeps me betting on America.” It’s inspiring, it really is.

I am, for one moment, sincere when I say this: I think that a lot of our flaws can be fixed and that the first step is in fact acknowledging them and recognizing them. We certainly can do better, and it’s possible that we will.

OK, that was excruciating. Back to bleak sarcasm.

Sure, we’re fucking up the distribution of vaccines in an entirely predictable and preventable way, and all of our economic inequities are revealed by how the wealthy stay healthy and the poor get sick, but at least the CIA is running death squads in Afghanistan, so, you know, we’re still in top form on hearts-and-minds foreign policy front. And we sure have some wicked awesome mansions, like this one owned by America’s wealthiest senator, Kelly Loeffler. And our conglomerates and trusts still do conglomerate and cross-subsidize and crush independent competitors like they did back in the day. And we’ve finally gotten Congress to share in the glory of active shooter drills for our school children! And, concentration camps in China notwithstanding, we’re still the number one incarcerator!

Cops

I don’t yet have enough details about the failures of the capitol police to handle this week’s riots, so here’s my recent roundup of other police brutality:

Misc

Kottke calls out a key detail in this article on credit card rewards programs:“The average cash-using household paid $149 over the course of a year to card-using households, while each card-using household received $1,133 from cash users, partially in the form of rewards.”

Patricia Lockwood is always a delight, even when writing about neurosis and elections.

Cultivating Joy

No Launch Party for Decay

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?”

Except for the part where they stifled a report on electrical grid improvements because improving the grid turns out to be helpful for renewable energy generation and bad for coal plants.

Spoils the Whole Barrel

Here’s a lovely video of a cop deliberately crushing someone’s head with a bicycle.

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.

Joy

There is no joy.

Not Currently Anxious? Read This

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

New Year, New War

I intended to assemble a round-up of year-end round-ups. I did not, although Jason Kottke has one. I briefly considered writing something about Iran. I have nothing to say on the subject but instead will recommend the Pome newsletter, which recently sent me the heartbreakingly topical 2013 poem “We Lived Happily During the War,” by Ilya Kaminsky.

In the last edition of this letter, I insulted Maryland governor Larry Hogan and felt bad about it, because what if he’s not actually that awful? Was I just waxing hyperbolic? Nah, he’s really that awful.

Other things that underline awfulness: Noah Smith livetweeting a conference panel about deaths of despair. A parent worrying about how to process the fact that their kid’s toy doctor set includes a debit card and point of sale system. Voting districts over-weighted in power because they’re filled with hundreds or thousands of prisoners who can’t vote. A new and gloomy analysis of Gen Z’s economic prospects by Malcolm Harris, author of the previous gloomy economic analysis Kids These Days.

I can’t tell whether this scathing indictment of the latest Star Wars movie is good or bad news, but I have been very much a fan of the scathing reviews of Cats, which have been numerous enough to warrant multiple summarizing roundups.

Cultivating Joy
99 very good pieces of news we tended to overlook in the gloom.
This dog has been trained to play Jenga.
This very soft looking cat.
This pupper tried to eat a bee, but he’ll be OK.
This list of people struggling with words had me weeping with laughter.