Just as I was sending last week’s newsletter about how absurd it is for commentators to only now pretend to notice the racism and violence inherent in the conservative movement, Joseph Epstein published, in the Weekly Standard, an appallingly vile piece of garbage titled “Chicago, Then and Now.”
It’s about how blacks are going to have to bootstrap themselves up out of this bad spot they’re in, just like the Jews and Italians and Irish did back in the day, bwah bwah bwah you’ve heard this one before.
This is a mainstream Republican “intellectual.” An icon of the movement. A respected scholar.
Sure, you may write off his statement that “homosexuality is a curse” because he said that years ago, right? But what of his claim this month that “with the advent of the pill and the sexual revolution, nice girls have all but put prostitutes out of business?” That, tossed off as an aside on the way to his real point, that “few people are likely to note any valuable advances in [black] culture over the past 60 years.”
The Weekly Standard brands itself as an upstanding, respectable sort of conservative journal, but they feel no qualms whatsoever publishing an article to the effect that “negroes haven’t improved themselves enough to merit my respect.”
Good news, everyone Headline: The 99 Best Things That Happened in 2017. A lot of good things got overshadowed by disaster. But we’re making some important progress: Public health, carbon emissions, conservation… There’s some good stuff in here.
Jeff Bezos is creating a planned economy, with algorithms instead of a politburo. Amazon seeks efficiency and growth more than profit, and the result is this juggernaut. It’s optimizing something… but it’s optimizing away humanity.
Everyone is focused right now on the fact that Dinesh D’Souza is a horrible person, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that he’s also not very bright.
Bari Weiss, the New York Times opinion journalist who first came to fame after being outraged that Twitter would be rude to her over a minor gaffe, is shocked, shocked, at how quickly conservative intellectuals have fallen to the level of Dinesh D’Souza:
I know I should be over it, but the speed at which the organized conservative movement became the ideological home of Marion Le Pen, Seb Gorka, Nigel Farage, Dinesh D’Souza and their ilk remains shocking to me.
Of course, this has been their swamp for a very long time. As Jeet Heer and many others point out (again and again and again and again, to no avail) D’Souza is and has been a mainstream conservative intellectual since he was an undergrad at Dartmouth in the 1980s writing appallingly racist articles about affirmative action and outing gay students. Fascist sympathies? Here? In the … wait, the National Review endorsed Franco, didn’t they? Yes, they did.
“Mainstream media,” although that term has been smeared to meaninglessness by the right, confuses neutrality with objectivity. And in trying to remain neutral they forget that there are, in fact, evils in this world. And that the Republican party has sided with them again and again for decades. Why are random teens better at asking questions of Marco Rubio? Because they’re not afraid to sound biased when they ask Marco Rubio what he plans to do to keep them from getting shot to death.
Meanwhile, Rebel Media, a right-wing outlet, have started their own investment fund, because of course they have. And Milo, his “feminism is cancer” t-shirt sales flagging, is now hawking supplements on Infowars. As Jeet Heer notes (again and again and again, to no avail), “Much of North American right-wing politics is best seen as a grift rather than an ideology.”
I suppose it’s true that a lot of people are mocking him. But they’re not mocking him for his religion. They’re mocking him for being a dipshit. (And what is it with right-wingers wanting the state to teach theirchildren about Jesus, anyway? I thought they were all in for personal responsibility and families inculcating children with their own moral values?)
Why? Why are some sports for “ladies” and others for “women?” Well, a lot of historical baggage, of course. In some cases it’s actually a result of the translation stylebooks used by different French-dominated international sports federations.
The International Olympic Committee is corrupt, as we all know. And the national-level organizations… well, pedos and doping are the most recent headlines, but we all know FIFA’s dirty, and the NFL’s dirty, and every stadium funded by taxpayer money is dirty, so let’s go ahead and assume that all sports management is in some way crooked.
Malcolm Gladwell’s 2001 New Yorker article “Drug Store Athlete” was the first to introduce me to what turns out to be a line from Brecht: “Competitive sport begins where healthy sport ends.” (It’s also cited in Modern Sports Law: A Textbook, which … hey, there’s a textbook about sports law.) But it’s not a surprise. We know it’s sordid.
We know that fandom is simply the way that managers and owners hack the human need for belonging and identity to siphon our dollars while they distract us from our daily boredom.
We know that large public events are an opportunity both for terrorists and the global panopticon. This year’s celebration will feature drones with facial recognition software to identify malefactors, and also drones with drone-recognition software to identify drones that aren’t supposed to be there. Yes, anti-drone drones.
We know concussions and CTE and plain old injuries are inevitable in our love of the game. We watch athletes cheat death to do incredible things knowing that one of these days, an Olympian snowboarder or ski aerialist will land face-first and die on camera, and when it happens we’ll be complicit in that death.
At … points, onlookers burst into the spontaneous laughter of babies. I love that laughter. It happens when the viewers overlap so completely with the athlete, with one another, that they don’t know where their own bodies end anymore. We watch sports for these moments. They’re why, every two years, the planet stops spinning and everyone turns their eyes to the spectacle of the Olympics.
Sport is metaphor, ideal, goal, inspiration. Even curling. I mean, the Finland/Korea mixed-doubles match, which took place on Wednesday, was as thrilling a shuffleboard-on-ice match as you’ll ever see.
Tonight I’ll be eating Korean takeout and drinking soju and watching the Parade of Nations to celebrate the fact that the Republic of Korea has gone almost 100% over budget and blown 13 billion dollars on this beautiful, corrupt display of glitz and fireworks and human toil. It’s wasteful and terrible and beautiful and inspiring and I love it.
The persistence of paper jams is fascinating (also: the first recorded fatal paper jam happened in 1867).
Smart homes are really dumb: Your vacuum can now ask you to help it clean your house. Your bed will only make you coffee in one kind of coffeepot. Your vibrator is keeping track of your orgasms. And your TV is definitely watching you.
A lengthy eulogy for Lil Peep, who seems to be taking a place in the generational pantheon like ODB and Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse — gone far too soon, and on the verge of so much more, undone by his own fuckups and his self-destructive persona and the monsters of fame and addiction and mental illness.
Here’s a real example of illegal immigrants marrying for citizenship and bringing their talentless family over to mooch off the government: Melania Knauss and her parents.
My friend Jodi is a guidance counselor at a school in Brighton, and she recruited me to help out in the writing lab today. As it goes every time I come into a high school these days, I was intimidated by the metal detectors, impressed by the school’s devotion to anti-bullying and anti-prejudice posters, and not entirely sure which young adults were the students and which were the teachers.
Then a diminutive young woman said EVERYONE, IF YOU ARE NOT HERE FOR WRITING LAB IT IS TIME TO GO and a bunch of people who looked just as old as her, many of them twice her size, scrambled to leave or sit down at their desks. One young man needed a couple quick bits of grammar and style advice before an orthodontia appointment. Another was dawdling on his phone until I tried to talk to him, and the threat of having to have a conversation with some random adult was enough to get him to turn to his homework. Then I helped a girl revise an essay about going to visit family in Somalia and the perspective on privilege and language that she’d gained from trying to attend a Somali school for a few months. After about an hour, Jodi asked us how we were doing. My student was justifiably proud of her work: “Miss Jodi it’s going great, I want you to read my essay!”
Miss Jodi replied immediately with “I wanted to read your essay last month when it was due.” Lesson: do not waste Miss Jodi’s time.
Before I left, I introduced myself to a couple more students and told the I’d be around if they had any writing questions. One asked me if I had any advice about researching the history of hip-hop and dance music, since you’re not supposed to use Wikipedia as a primary source. He may have been trying to test whether I was actually hip enough, and he may have actually wanted to know. I advised him not to cite Wikipedia, but to look up the books that Wikipedia cites, because they are valid sources. And then I told him to check WhoSampled.com, because I love that site.
For example, the Notorious B.I.G’s still-popular track Juicy owes a huge debt to Mtume’s 1983 Juicy Fruit, a song remembered less for its quality or enduring popularity than for how many different artists sampled it.
I have only ever heard Juicy Fruit once outside of samples, but was a #1 hit.
On Billboard’s “Hot Black Singles” chart.
“Hot Black Singles” was a chart category from 1982-1990 on Billboard.
I was going to do an entire short essay on sports allegiance and I just don’t have the energy. Please proceed to the links section. Go Pats. Roll Tide.
These things are actually happening Trump tried to fire Mueller last June. It took the Times seven months to figure it out because they believed every lie coming out of the mouths of manifest liars:
Asked why it took seven months for this to come out, @maggieNYT, who broke the story, says, “I’m a little surprised at how effective people in the White House were at lying to us…” — Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) January 26, 2018
Susan Collins had to haul out an actual “talking stick” to make conversation possible.
Today a woman told me she didn’t approve of building affordable housing in Millbrae because it was “too much change, too fast.” She was wearing a shirt that said ALL IMMIGRANTS WELCOME HERE.
Let’s welcome them by building affordable homes. — Leora Tanjuatco (@leoraorlee) January 21, 2018
In 1905, Swiss patent office clerk (3rd Class) Albert Einstein published 5 papers in academic journals, 3 of which combined, without hyperbole, to change the course of human history. In 1906 he applied for an entry level university lecturer position and was rejected. Non-academics would say this is baffling. But in the university’s defense, what else did he have in the pipeline? Who were his letter writers?
Reassurance Rumors that fentanyl and carfentanil are so dangerous that mere skin exposure can kill you are urban legends. Avoid hysteria. The opioid crisis is bad enough without it.
With the government on the verge of yet another partial shutdown, funding for children’s healthcare funding running out, the number of uninsured Americans spiking, and a poorly-vetted tax bill hurtling toward implementation of unknown loopholes, The New York Times devoted its editorial page to letters from Trump supporters yesterday, demonstrating yet again its commitment to allowing everyone to have their own personal set of facts rather than focus on actual reality. They also did a feature piece on the folks in western Oregon who support armed takeovers of wildlife reserves, think that the government is out to get them, and cannot process the fact that their well-documented armed takeover of federal buildings ended in acquittal for no apparent reason.
(For contrast, recall the 1985 MOVE standoff, in which police burned a city block to the ground and shot anyone trying to escape the fire).
I don’t know why I keep reading the Times or giving them money. They’ve “both-sides-ed” themselves into a hole, and won’t stop digging.
I finally understand Bitcoin
update: she has explained bitcoins in a way I now understand. bitcoin is math beanie babies. thank u. — łopatologia (@mslopatto) January 17, 2018
Nothing to see here Trump Organization owes Deutsche Bank a lot of money. Trump Administration grants them waivers after criminal activity.
To defend the president, the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security just said under oath that she does not know if Norway is predominantly white. — Daniel Dale (@ddale8) January 16, 2018
It’s not headline-making the way stars and celebrities and famous folks are, but the #MeToo Moment is giving non-famous women more and more license to stop putting up with condescending banter, casual harassment, or simple failure to even consider the value of their interests, desires, or priorities.
Victoria and I were in line at Starbucks and witnessed a break up that was amazing.
Guy: I don’t understand why people are mad Wonder Woman wasn’t nominated. It was just some model fighting in a swimsuit.
Ominous Department of Justice has successfully revoked naturalization from at least one immigrant citizen. It’s not clear if the application anomalies cited as the reason for revocation were lies or simple errors.
Correction Last week I sent a link to an article about a voter registration drive among Puerto Ricans living in Florida. It was an old article about a different voter registration drive. I should have sent this article or this one or this one.
Cultivating curiousity A new paper argues that the Sicilian Mafia arose primarily as a result of market shocks related to rising demand for lemons after the discovery that they could cure or prevent scurvy.
TIL: Earliest known use of #shithole, according to OED, is this amazing line from the 1629 ‘Liber Lilliati’: “Six shitten shotes did I shoote in thy mowth that I shot from my shithole.” — Kristina Killgrove ☠ (@DrKillgrove) January 11, 2018
Cultivating joy Soccer hilarity: 3 Japanese national soccer team players vs 100 school kids. Mlem 13/10
I’ve now been unemployed for a week, and it’s been a roller coaster. I started an intensive business class and picked up a part-time job, and between homework and catching up on everything I need to know for a new project, I’ve had less free time than I did when I was working 40 hours a week. It’s kind of thrilling.
I haven’t lost all my cynicism, though. Filing for unemployment is a truly miserable process. A more conspiracy-minded friend of mine is convinced that the process is deliberately opaque to keep people from getting benefits. I blame incompetence rather than malice, but when the outcome is the same, the cause doesn’t particularly matter to the person struggling to pay rent.
I actually wrote to my state rep to ask if she knew how bad it was. Apparently, yes, she did: the system went into operation in 2013, several years late and several million dollars over budget, and was an immediate disaster. It’s a failure that’s still felt keenly around the statehouse. Deloitte Consulting was the vendor behind the debacle, although it didn’t seem to hurt them at all. (If I’ve learned anything from the first week of my project management class, it’s that nobody knows how to manage projects and they’re almost always disasters. The bigger and more important the project, the bigger and more horrific the disaster).
Collateral damage in the drug war Jeff Sessions is reversing Obama-era guidelines that allowed states to regulate marijuana on their own terms. If it were not obvious before, this should underline the fact that “states’ rights” means only those rights that involve enslaving, incarcerating, abusing, and disenfranchising people of color. The drug war is not effective at stopping drugs. It’s effective at locking up and marginalizing minorities. That’s why Sessions likes it.
Fire & Aim Everyone’s talking about it endlessly, but if you read only one take on “Fire and Fury,” j/k nobody’s gonna stop at just one. Hot takes are the opiate of the commentariat. Anyway, N+1 has a pretty good one, comparing it to the Edgar Allan Poe short story “The Purloined Letter.”
Cultivating deep thoughts Trump’s botched Puerto Rico recovery efforts have meant that a lot of Puerto Ricans have moved to Florida. Voter registration drives aim to make sure their voice is heard in the 2018 elections.
Gin & Tacos linked to The Presidential Spectacle, which brings to bear on political science my favorite essay by Roland Barthes, about the spectacle of professional wrestling, how the outcome is preordained but everyone cheers it on anyhow.
Cultivating oddity The Awl describes the H. J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sport as “The Most Homoerotic Little Archive In Texas.” They do not appear to be wrong.
Bloomberg columnist and former econ prof Noah Smith takes us through his analysis of why racism is fundamental to understanding the applications of economics in the US: A nation-state is a machine that facilitates human wellbeing by maintaining functional institutions, distributing wealth, and creating public goods. To do those things it needs the citizenry to have some sense of national cohesion.
And that means citizens have to act like citizens. They have to have a sense of shared responsibility, and shared respect. And in the US, we’re not moving in the right direction. The wealthy regard themselves as above the law, and think they shouldn’t have to pay taxes or interact with the common people. Think about all those supercars registered in Montana, all those private jets and private schools and first-class lounges and dinners in Davos.
The central fact of U.S. political economy, the source of our exceptionalism, is that lower-income whites vote for politicians who redistribute income upward and weaken the safety net because they think the welfare state is for nonwhites.
If economists don’t take this into account, and citizens don’t regard each other as fundamentally on the same team, then their mathematical models of the economy are going to fail. They can design an ideal tax or infrastructure or other economic policy, but if they don’t take into account that some citizens will oppose anything that helps anyone brown, they’re not going to be able to make useful policy recommendations.
For Noah Smith and the other pundits, professors, and advisors, this is a reminder that they need to address racism as well as math in their economic models.
For the electorate at large, this is a warning: If the US is going to continue to be a functional nation-state, we need to do more to overcome racism and keep the top 1% from running away from the rest of us. We need to foster inter-racial and inter-class cohesion. Instead, we’re re-segregating our public schools and supporting segregated private schools. We’re cutting the safety net and giving breaks to the rich. We’re building wildly regressive policies and stoking racial resentment.
To be blunt: a social democratic middle-class society is much better society in which to have a large stock of entrepreneurial, inherited, or rent-derived wealth than is a communist society. But it is also a much friendlier society to the wealthy than is a fascist society. And social democracy and fascism—hard or, if you are lucky, soft—are the only options the future will allow: tertium non datur.
Smith provides a rather less stark series of options. We might develop a social democracy. Or we might just sort of muddle along through a series of crises in which coalitions collapse as soon as the immediate Trumpist threat abates. He hopes for a durable coalition.
Each time America has successfully come through a major crisis – the Civil War, the Depression/WW2 – it was because leaders created a vision to unite a disparate collection of American out-groups into an enduring coalition that became the in-group.
A commenter whose provenance I cannot determine has a pretty good point that we’re going to have to make some ugly compromises:
It’s worth remembering those outgroups included Catholic and Free Mason baiting paranoid conspiracy theorists for Lincoln and corrupt, unreconstructed Southern racists for FDR. We are doomed if we pretend this is going to be pretty or wholly edifying.
Gritty reboots Fresh off the success of his darkly thoughtful Flintstones reboot comics (Fred has PTSD, the appliance-animals are an oppressed proletariat plotting revolution, etc), Mark Russell is issuing a gritty new reboot of the Snagglepuss character from 1970s-era Hannah Barbera. The panther is now a closeted playwright under investigation by HUAC. Sort of if Tennessee Williams were a pink panther. People have some issues with the portrayal, in that they’re fine with bestiality but grossed out by gay bestiality. But come on. Snagglepuss was always gay.
Reading I just finished reading Sing, Unburied, Sing yesterday. If you haven’t read it, you should. Although I spent most of the day after I put it down in a tear-stained funk.
I don’t want to give away the whole plot, but if conventional ghost mythology holds that ghosts are the souls of those who die bad deaths and leave unfinished business behind, then it stands to reason that America is littered with the ghosts of centuries of Black people who died in terrible ways. Although it’s not a ghost story per se — it’s about a family struggling to get by in bayou Mississippi — Ward still makes the phrase “haunted by the wrongs of the past” terrifyingly literal.
My wife says she finds the ending, in which the two youngest children and their grandfather confront and commune with their spiritual legacy, uplifting. I cannot see anything but the accumulation of wrong upon wrong upon wrong, bayou trees haunted with the ghosts of the unhappy dead keening at us to fix what cannot be made whole.
Secretly Ironic 
