Secretly Ironic

We’re on our way to the heist the Republican party calls tax reform. That’s exciting. I guess.

Sic transit gloria etc etc
Just as the center of hip-hop has shifted from New York to LA to Atlanta, so the centers of culture and joy shift. The US may still be the global cultural hegemon, but people are beginning to chip away at it. We all fail to learn from each other.

On second thought
Actually, go back to the New Yorker article about Atlanta hip-hop. I really like this one. The way it mentions the ever-present downside and danger of the music business, stating things without really stating them, is clever. And it’s just an interesting angle on the music and culture industry generally. 

Thomas is relatively new to the music industry, having evidently been successful in his first career, which he declines to discuss. “He come from the streets,” Lee says, by way of explaining why neither of them will explain more. Unlike Lee, who grew up in Indianapolis, Thomas is from Atlanta, and, when the two began working with Migos, Thomas’s local reputation was a great asset—he was known to the proprietors of the city’s clubs as a generous patron, and an unusually well-connected one.

And then compare to this Nat Malkus New York Times editorial which leaves unstated and unimplied those things which really should be made explicit:

Congressional Republicans, traditional defenders of states’ rights, will deliver an unexpected one-two punch to state tax systems if the current version of their tax bill becomes law as expected.

As though “states rights” were ever a principle. As though federalism had ever been anything other than a cudgel to disenfranchise the minority. 

It’s one thing to say “a mysterious past” and leave implied that a gentleman was once an investment banker (what “streets” do you think he came from to get that kind of cash? Wall Street, obvs) and has now moved on to a more reputable and ethical career as a music promoter. It’s quite another to take for granted that manifestly bad-faith slogans are in fact good-faith principles.

Tropes
Year in review, aerial photography edition.
Year in review, general photography edition.
Year in review, archival digitization progress edition.
Year in review, poetry edition.
Year in review, year-in-review edition.

Voting
After a recount, Democrats have taken one additional seat in the Virginia House of Delegates, bringing it to exactly evenly split between them and Republicans. Margin of victory for that last critical seat: One vote. NEVER SKIP VOTING.

Twitter interlude
AI can’t quite tell whether a photo is of pornography or of a desert. Thirsty bros everywhere say “send dunes.”

Um…okay Google…not so sure about this one pic.twitter.com/fgkmKlV7d0
— Sulome Anderson (@SulomeAnderson) December 19, 2017

Cultivating joy
Fence is no obstacle.
Baby fox playing.

I’m losing my job in 10 days. It’s an unpleasant (but not disastrous, in my case) side effect of living in a dynamic market society: sometimes you’re on the destroyed side of creative destruction. 

I’ll be fine (although I would appreciate any referrals, lovely audience). I am in the right place and have the right skills, and I should be able to make the transition to the next thing and the next thing and the next. It feels a bit ridiculous to be constantly jumping and hustling, like some kind of 8-bit video game character. It’s not forever, but 40 or 50 years is quite a long time to keep Mario in the air and out of a bottomless pit.

But given the Hobson’s choice of endless jumping or endless falling, well… better jump and try not to think about what happens if you don’t stick the landing. Tertium non datur. If you’re lucky, the music will keep going longer than you do.

If you’re still dancing when it stops, the dislocation can be profound. Between 1890 and 1950, the skilled craftspeople of Gloversville, NY made 90% of the gloves sold in America. It was a good run for anyone who lived there before the industry died. Notwithstanding that one guy doing couture mittens for $450 a pop, they don’t make much there these days.

Anyway, forgive me if my holiday spirit is dampened, but I’ve been humming along with the Pedro the Lion song Penetration, which may be one of the best ever written about personal, professional, artistic, and moral failure:

We’re so sorry sir but you did not quite make the cut this time
And we’d appreciate it if you cleared you stuff on out by five
Don’t take it personal
Everyone knows you did your best
If it makes it easier
You should look at it from our perspective

The whole album, in fact, is excellent (see Genius.com for annotated lyrics). Released in 2002, it may be one of the last concept albums made before streaming services made albums as a concept almost entirely irrelevant.

Ominous warnings
China is developing a nationwide credit scoring system with truly Orwellian implications: it measures not only creditworthiness but also patriotism, quality of social interactions, shopping habits, and social media usage.

So the system not only investigates behaviour – it shapes it. It “nudges” citizens away from purchases and behaviours the government does not like.
… 
A person’s own score will also be affected by what their online friends say and do, beyond their own contact with them. If someone they are connected to online posts a negative comment, their own score will also be dragged down.

Oh, and we’re dangerously close to an ill-considered war with North Korea. Just throwing that out there.

Epistles
Brad Delong writes a stark warning to the plutocrats:

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.

Vincent Bevins writes a stark warning to the productive and industrious:

LinkedIn is a death cult. Becoming a guy that posts on Linkedin is essentially like joining a religious extremist group, but for first-world people that went to Stanford. You’re lost, you don’t know what to do with yourself, so you latch onto the dominant ideology, and throw your life into its service.

Jeet Heer writes a stark warning to Third Way Democrats noting that, well, tertium non datur:

Suburban ex-Republicans are worth pursuing, but not at the risk of diluting liberal policy commitments. While opposition to Trump is helping to swell Democratic ranks, the truth remains that excessive centrism will dishearten core voters. Watering down the party’s identity only ensures more defeats further down the road, when Trump won’t be around to scare up an ad hoc Democratic coalition.

Cultivating joy
This year in animal achievements.
One of these dogs is not like the others.
TFW you’re not sure if you missed your stop.
First contact.
… Wait, instead of ornaments?

Krampus is coming. This newsletter is more likely to be delayed, absent, or incomplete for the remainder of the month. (Traditionally, Krampus comes at the beginning of December, but let’s be real, we are living in an all-Krampus-all-the-time world right now. For evidence: the inevitable “Trump Scandal Year In Review” article  has arrived and it is long.)

Centrism is dead
More from Ed Burmila: Republicans fire up the base by giving them what they want. Their base wanted racism, false piety, and tax cuts, and goddamnit they’re getting that. Democrats, if they’re going to succeed beyond 2018, need to listen to their base and start giving them what THEY want: healthcare, progressive taxation, immigration, civil rights enforcement, and so on. At the very least, when you’re Doug Jones and you win an election on a wave of enthusiasm for keeping sexually abusive creeps out of office, don’t try and downplay the allegations against a sexually abusive creep.

Meanwhile in bad news: Alabama sheriffs, New Jersey medical examiners, California rehabilitation centers, water quality in the DC offices of the EPA.

Culturing culture
The Awl has a recurring Monday bit with kind of ominous trance music and it’s pretty good for when you’re in the mood for ominous trance music and a really bleak caption. 

Before consuming a cultural product, you can now check Rotten Apples to see if there’s a sex predator involved. (See also the service provided by Does The Dog Die? which allows you to avoid movies including any number of unpleasant things, including animal suffering, clowns, and seizure-inducing strobe effects).

Did your elementary school gym class ever contain square dancing? Is your state’s official dance square dancing? It’s probably because Henry Ford was an incredibly virulent racist and antisemite. I’m not kidding. He hated black people and jazz so much that he spent vast sums of money funding country music and square dances to promote white music. 

Cultivating joy
Cat being a jerk.
Boop.

Hurricanes happen even without global warming, even large ones, and we can’t be certain that the damage of any of this year’s storms was caused by human-driven climate change.

But at least three weather data points this year were so far outside the realm of normal that we can be reasonably certain that this particular weather isn’t just weather, but climate: The record-high global temperature average, the record-high summer temperatures in Asia, and the record-high temperatures of the North Pacific.

The good news is that it’s quite likely that many people alive today will be alive to see just how crazy the weather gets! We’re going to be living in some interesting times.

Fortunately, our leadership is up to the… no, wait. It’s not. The president filled out his absentee ballot wrong in last month’s NYC elections. Actually the whole family did: Jared forgot to mail his ballot, Melania forgot to sign hers, and Ivanka mailed hers too late. But the president got his own birthday wrong on the form. Don’t worry though, he’s got a very good brain. Best brain. Still good. Yes.

It’s OK though, because they dynamism of the American economy and the children are our future and here’s a must-read article titled FML: Why millennials are facing the scariest financial future of any generation since the Great Depression.

This is why the touchstone experience of millennials, the thing that truly defines us, is not helicopter parenting or unpaid internships or Pokémon Go. It is uncertainty. “Some days I breathe and it feels like something is about to burst out of my chest,” says Jimmi Matsinger. “I’m 25 and I’m still in the same place I was when I earned minimum wage.” Four days a week she works at a dental office, Fridays she nannies, weekends she babysits. And still she couldn’t keep up with her rent, car lease and student loans. Earlier this year she had to borrow money to file for bankruptcy. I heard the same walls-closing-in anxiety from millennials around the country and across the income scale, from cashiers in Detroit to nurses in Seattle.

This also goes a long way to explaining why anxiety and panic have replaced depression as the touchstone American mental illness these days. (Hey remember when it was hypomania? Those were fun times.) 

Twitter Interlude

Set Up Your Optimization Process. I Will Meet You There, In The Crack Between What You Want And What You Ask For. https://t.co/KtGrmHXKz6 — Moloch Chan (@MolochChan) November 23, 2015

These claims about the future implications of Go AI are {species_data(‘human’).adjs_by_target_state[:complacent].sample(2).join(‘ and ‘)}. — Steven Kaas (@stevenkaas) March 11, 2016

Omg friends, TIL the term for ‘mansplain’ in French is ‘mecspliquer’.
Mec = bro
“expliquer” = to explain
“M’expliquer” is reflexive; it literally translates to “I explain myself.”
This is such a *delightful* portmanteau I can’t even. — Renée Stephen (@ReneeStephen) December 14, 2017

Takedowns
No, you dumbass, that’s not how fraud works.

Moar Politics
Mention Our Revolution, the group that arose from Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign last year, to a moderate voter, and they’ll say it’s terrible branding for a political movement. Revolution? Socialism? When are progressives going to realize that conservatives have 49% of the votes, more of the electoral college, and 99% of the guns? How can liberals be so out of touch?

Michael Tomasky argues that it’s Republicans who are out of touch, at least with the parts of America where innovation and opportunity happen. Hillary Clinton, he points out, may have won only 15% of the counties in the US, but those small physical areas contribute 64% of the US GDP.

Personal essays
Mimi O’Donnell on her marriage to Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Professional climber Beth Rodden on her personal journey of obsession and fear and love (the kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan is only part of it).

Cultivating hope
Alabama makes it really hard for poor rural black people to vote. Fortunately for Lowndes County residents, a former sharecropper named Perman Hardy has the almost superhuman energy and dedication it takes to overcome those obstacles, get voters registered, and get them to the polls.

Cultivating despair
You can now buy a Christmas-themed dummy surveillance camera to emphasize to your children that just like the cops, Santa is literally watching them at all times.

Cultivating joy
Elusive.

USA Today is the definition of a middle-of-the-road newspaper. They’ll give you some stats, some weather, some info, but they’re not known for a strong editorial platform. So when they start going HAM, something is very strange. So here’s the latest official USA Today middle-of-the-road moderate editorial board opinion about the president:

A president who would all but call Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand a whore is not fit to clean the toilets in the Barack Obama Presidential Library or to shine the shoes of George W. Bush.

See also: Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) voted against Trump’s candidate Roy Moore in the special election this week, and even Jeff Sessions, the Klan-sympathizing right-wing lunatic and former senator who vacated the seat to bring injustice to the Justice Department, won’t say whether he was willing to put his vote down in Moore’s column.

A significant number of conservatives went with a write-in vote for University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban. I can’t say I really blame them. Unlike Moore, Saban, who is both the best-loved and best-compensated public employee in the great state of Alabama, at least has some idea of how strategy, planning, and management work.

AI hype cycle
Botnik Studios has been posting some pretty hilarious AI-generated stuff over the past few months, including this Dear Abby video which advises us that “It is important to be ashamed of the members of your family.” But how much of this is actually neural networks learning to speak almost like people, and how much of it is clever marketing?

For a bit of perspective, let’s go to Actual Data Scientist and pal Alex Baker: 

I don’t doubt they use neural networks to generate word sequences, but I think that there is a lot of human curation, and I think they basically use their tech as a lightly-skewed die roll and cherrypick the best stuff from it and say “an AI made this!”

In general they’re very Buzzfeedy about how they put things. The clickosphere figures that saying “We used readily available tech to barf nonsense. Here’s the best nonsense we found.” didn’t generate enough clicks, so they label it as “We trained a typewriter to control monkeys, and the result’s better than Shakespeare!”

Pensive
How Chinese scholars view Western elite institutions, especially global views of the role of luck and hard work and merit.

If you like the sad/funny shows, the frequently animated adventures of guys (and it’s usually guys) like Bojack Horseman, Rick Sanchez, and Sterling Archer, you owe it to yourself to read this article in The Awl about comedic portrayals of depression, addiction, and dysfunction. 

Our willingness to believe that sadness in an intelligent affliction actually helps elide the fact that addiction is a perfect, classic sitcom trope: because addiction is a cycle, and the point of the sitcom is that nothing will ever change. The same cast of characters will have essentially the same conversations about different situations, perhaps in different settings. Archie Bunker will be racist; Rachel Green will want to go shopping; Rick Sanchez will be an asshole to his grandchildren and everyone else, too.

Cultivating optimism
The world’s top motorcycle racing competition has announced an electric motorcycle race series for 2019. It’s only a few races for the first year, and the bikes are a little heavy, but they go 0-60 in 3 seconds and top out at 140 mph, so it should still be real racing. Auto racing series Formula E is also making strides.

Why does this matter? If we’re going to decarbonize the auto industry, we need to go electric. Because racing is both a branding exercise and a technology testbed for manufacturers, a racing series is a pretty good sign that electric is coming. (For example, as motorcycle manufacturers began developing 4-stroke motors, MotoGP phased out 2-strokes, which accelerated a global switch to the cleaner 4-stroke combustion process).  

A successful racing series means more attention from consumers and more investment from manufacturers. If Moto-E and Formula E can eventually become even half as popular as MotoGP and Formula 1, that’s a really good sign for electric vehicle success and carbon output reduction.

Cultivating joy
Christmas dog!

Big dogs meeting little dogs: adequate replacement for therapy?

What was Doug Jones’ walkoff music as he finished his victory speech? “Teach Me How to Dougie.” (Errybody love me you ain’t messin’ with my Dougie).

Reminder: Christmas lights and palm trees don’t mix.

Volcanoes are amazing. Here are some photos.

What’s peak 2017? In the 2020s, what will we look back on as a emblematic of this tire fire of a year?

Was it the sort of year when you wonder how a white supremacist winds up as an EEOC compliance officer at a minority-owned company?

Was it the nostalgia for the merely terrible national discourse and leadership of the George W. Bush years?

I bet there was no point in 2008 at which you thought, “Nine years from now the leading voices in the GOP will make Joe the Plumber look like Voltaire.” — Ed Myrrh-mila (@gin_and_tacos) December 12, 2017

Was it when the Republican party started fighting with the American Bar Association because they disagree about whether judges should be competent?

Was it when an Army buddy of an alleged pedophile Senate Candidate tried to give an example of moral behavior and it still involved underage prostitutes? Or when the candidate’s wife tried to claim they weren’t prejudiced because they have “a Jew” as one of their attorneys?

Between Kayla Moore rebuffing anti-semitism by citing her “Jew” lawyer and the president rebuffing sexual assault charges by sexually harassing a sitting senator, this has been a great 12 hours for own-goals. — Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) December 12, 2017

Was it something more subtle, like this analysis from The Awl of what went wrong with Dilbert as Adams began to love the boss more than the worker, loving in Trump all the same things he used to mock about managers.

Or maybe Scott Walker wearing a festive Christmas sweater to celebrate the season of generosity while gutting the state’s safety net and drug-testing food-stamp recipients. 

Or the technological absurdity of Waze and Google Maps directing people down roads that are empty because they’re on fire.

Realistically it’ll probably be the constant drumbeat of sexual harassment being uncovered. The long-delayed acknowledgement of something that men have known about but not quite understood, and women have long understood but not been able to get taken seriously. The year when you see a male celebrity or professional role model mentioned somewhere and wonder if he’s dead, or just dead to you now. (Read the Ken Friedman rundown. It’s horrifying.)

That and the collusion. Yeah, that’ll be in there.

#RollTide
Reports from Alabama yesterday included active voters suddenly marked as inactive and voting machines breaking. And cops showing up to check voters for outstanding warrants. Yet somehow decency and the colossal strategic mistakes of the Republican party ran together and Doug Jones won the special election.

Cultivating amusement
Massachusetts Gothic: “Why is that field red? The children ask. It’s a cranberry bog, the adults repeat. Just a cranberry bog. The eyes in the bog do not blink.”

The 2017 Hater’s Guide to Williams Sonoma.

A collection of rejected New Yorker covers called The Not Yorker.

What if we made twee indie romances in the Star Wars universe?

What if you took a neural net and asked it to write a Harry Potter novel?

Cultivating joy
Snow day elephant

Unable to operate the straw on the iced coffee, a dog falls asleep with his nose in the cupholder.

Shoulder-mounted kitten.

(This whole newsletter is much funnier autotuned and sung to the beat of California Love)

The Alabama special election is today, so it’s worth taking a look back at a 2014 piece from the New Republic on how the accomplishments of the civil rights movement are being reversed, especially in Alabama. Basically, the Republican party is wrecking everything like some kind of right-wing parody of Social Distortion lyrics.

We have to go
The neighbors have complained
We have to go
The walls have all been stained
They have to know
They can’t stop us now
They have to know
We could burn this town

It’s almost comical how bad a candidate Moore is. At a recent rally, one of the candidate’s (very few) friends from his service in Vietnam told a tale of upright moral behavior: When Moore accidentally went to a brothel with underage prostitutes, he turned around and left. Didn’t shut it down or anything, didn’t stop other officers from going there, but, you know, he didn’t personally patronize that brothel.

See also – Why Roy Moore supporters can’t/won’t change their minds.
See also – Alabama makes it hard to vote. On purpose.
See also – UN officials tour Alabama, are appalled.
See also – what comedians are gonna do with this material.
See also – Judge preemptively orders Alabama not to delete any records or images of this election.

Education policy gets less boring

Even less/more boring: Network policy
For more than 100 million Americans, internet access is available only through companies whose adherence to existing net neutrality regulations has been… subpar. And the rules, such as they are, are about to get looser. Call or write your legislators. 

My milkshake brings the ducks to the yard
Anti-bullying campaign comes to screeching halt as victim’s family revealed to be racist as hell. #MilkshakeDuck never dies.

Twitter interlude

SOME CALL IT INTIMACY ISSUES

OTHERS CALL IT EMOTIONAL CAMOUFLAGE

EITHER WAY I AM NOT COMING OUT FROM BEHIND THIS BUSH PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE — NOT A WOLF (@SICKOFWOLVES) December 11, 2017

Cultivating interest
JStor celebrates obsolete words.

Cultivating joy
Steve Mnuchin is non-awful with this one weird trick.
This is the bravest, cleverest chipmunk.

Imagine working as a food inspector. And an air quality measurement expert. And a drug purity chemist. And a supply-chain HAACP consultant. Imagine doing all of those things every single day for everything you eat, breathe, swallow, or purchase. Imagine living in a country where the assumption is that at any point, you’re going to get cheated, and it might kill you. Imagine shopping like a regular civilian in China.

The people trying to cheat you only have to get good at cheating in one way, but you have to deal with dozens of people trying to cheat you all the damn time. The asymmetry means that one civilian food-safety enthusiast might catch the melamine in the milk and the industrially recycled grease in the cooking oil but will eventually miss the lead in the tea and the cadmium in the butter… and that’s just food. They’re playing this game in every aspect of their lives. 

It sounds exhausting and infuriating and terrifying. When you can’t trust anyone or anything, everything is a threat. 

It also sounds a lot like the experience of being a down-and-out opioid addict in the US. Except I suppose that in the US, you only have to worry about the purity of your street drugs. You can be sure that the bottled water you buy to shoot up with is actually purified, for example. The harm-reduction clinic down on Methadone Mile knows the needles it buys aren’t haphazardly autoclaved or pre-used and repackaged. The alcohol you buy to knock yourself out when you can’t get a fix isn’t tainted with lead and methanol. 

When you can’t trust anyone or anything, everything is a threat. 

One of the few other areas of American consumption that’s tainted by extreme levels of distrust is media. I gotta get my news fix, but I only trust Steve and Ainsley… And when Fox tells you nothing is trustworthy and you can’t trust anyone, everything is a threat. And when everything is a threat, and you’re living in fear, demagogues take power. 

I wonder whether, in coming to China, I have stepped into America’s future, not its past.

Most people do not realize just how deeply their expectations run, nor how profoundly they believe that they are universal. It is existentially shattering to find that this is not the case. These divisions about what we want our government to do have always been there, but they have led us to a peculiar place.

In conclusion, capitalism is destroying the fabric of social trust in communist China, and Fox News is the fentanyl of the masses.

Cultivating Despair
Once again, let me restate the wonders of the EJI Calendar of Racial Injustice. I’ve been looking up all my friends’ birthday injustice. Some of the dates are inspiring, especially if you get a birthday wrong by one day.

Yeah, turns out my friend’s birthday isn’t an initial setback in the fight for true love conquering all. It’s an incident where an entire town was destroyed in 1923, and nobody’s quite sure how many people were murdered because a mob just burned a mostly-black village to ashes and killed anyone who didn’t run.

Now who wants some birthday cake?

Serve and Protect
On Friday, an officer was acquitted in the shooting death of an unarmed man lying facedown on a carpet begging for his life. Video footage of what is somehow not counted as murder is public record.

Cultivating hope
This meditation on sperm whales: “And so they go on. Not because they are brave, or curious, or pioneering – but because evolution has simultaneously damned them to daily katabasis, and given them the monstrous power to overcome it.”

Cultivating joy
You can stop wearing deliberately ugly Christmas sweaters now, because NOTHING will ever top this one.

I guess this human is harmless, I’ll go ahead and lie down OH NOooooooooooo.

This giant cat bed has some drawbacks… Cat in cat-shaped cat-scratching cat-house… curly-haired  kitten.

Snowball-catching dog… puppy not quite coordinated enough to play.