Alabama Knows How to Party

(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

Huffpo takes a look at the curriculum Betsy DeVos and co are trying to make us pay for: Environmentalism is witchcraft, Mandela was a Marxist agitator, mental illness is caused by demons, all Muslims hate America, Catholics are definitely going to hell, and so on. Many former students refer to themselves as “survivors” rather than alumni. Apparently they’re strong on basic arithmetic and phonics, though, so at least they’ve got that going for them.


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.

Trust Me

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.

Repay, Your Way (Repost from Saltmoney.org)

Note: This article originally linked each short explanation to longer pieces on the site. I have included it in my portfolio as an example of my ability to write very short explanations of complex issues.

Federal student loans allow you to change your repayment plan at least once a year. Doing this can decrease your monthly payments; however, it can also increase the amount you repay overall.

What You’ll Learn

  • Payment plans that can lower your monthly payment.
  • Benefits and disadvantages of different plans.
  • How to apply for these options.

 

If you have federal student loans that are not in default, you may be able to change their repayment plan. Some plans depend on your situation—like lowering payments based on your income and family size. However, the key is to look at the following options to figure out which best fits your financial needs.

Your First Option: Standard Repayment
When you start repayment, you automatically enter this plan, which has you make the same monthly payment for 10 years. This plan repays your loans faster than most other plans—and the faster you pay off a loan, the less interest builds up. So, with standard repayment, you may pay less overall than with other plans; however, to do this, your monthly payments may be higher.

Income-Driven Repayment Plans
If you’re having trouble covering a standard payment, you may qualify for an income-driven repayment plan. There are several types of income-driven plans, but you generally only qualify for one or two based on the loans you borrowed and when you borrowed them. Any of the following plans could lower your payments and keep you on track.

Revised Pay As You Earn (REPAYE)
Revised Pay As You Earn (REPAYE) is the latest income-driven repayment option for federal student loans, and most federal student loan borrowers can take advantage of it.

REPAYE reduces your monthly payments to no more than 10% of your discretionary income. After 20 years of eligible payments under REPAYE, your remaining balance would be forgiven (25 years if you have any loans from grad school), but that amount is taxable.

Income-Based Repayment (IBR)
Income-based repayment (IBR) can lower your payment based on your income and family size. While not everyone qualifies (you need to prove financial hardship), IBR generally decreases your monthly bill. There are two kinds of IBR. Depending on which you qualify for, you may be able to have your debt forgiven if you haven’t paid it all off after 20 years or 25 years. Just don’t forget that this amount is taxable.

Pay As You Earn (PAYE)
Pay As You Earn (PAYE) is very similar to New IBR. Both require you to prove a financial hardship, and both offer loan forgiveness after a set period of time (20 years for Pay As You Earn). However, the plans do have their differences. For starters, only specific new borrowers can qualify for PAYE.

Income-Contingent Repayment (ICR)
ICR works similarly to IBR and PAYE, except your monthly payments may be slightly higher. Under ICR:

  • Only Direct loans or Consolidation loans (Consolidation loans may include Parent PLUS loans) qualify.
  • Your monthly payment will be lowered.
  • After 25 years, your remaining Direct loan balance is forgiven.

Income-Sensitive Repayment (ISR)
ISR is very different from the other income-driven repayment plans. You can only use ISR for a maximum of 5 years—then you have to switch to a different plan. For ISR:

  • Only FFELP loans qualify.
  • Your monthly payment will be lowered for up to 5 years (based on your choice between 4%—25% of your discretionary income).
  • After your 5 years are up, you have up to 10 years to finish paying off your loan.

 

Other Repayment Options

Graduated Repayment
If you want lower payments right now, but don’t want to make payments for the next 15-25 years, graduated repayment might be the option for you. With graduated repayment, you don’t need to provide your income information.

Graduated repayment is available for all federal student loans.
Your monthly payment will be lowered during the first couple years of repayment—but after that it’ll go up significantly.
You finish paying off your loan in 10 years (120 payments).
Learn More

Extended Repayment
If you have a lot of federal student loan debt (more than $30,000), but you don’t qualify for low payments under an income-driven repayment plan, extended repayment may be your only option.

Extended repayment is available for FFELP, Direct, and Consolidation loans.

Your monthly payment will be reduced so you pay one low amount for a longer period of time. You can have up to 25 years to pay back your loan (300 payments) or 30 years and 360 payments for Consolidation loans over $60,000.

Dog whistle

This weekend I mentioned in passing that “everyone knows the phrase States’ Rights is a dog whistle.” And one of my friends replied “I didn’t know that.”

I guess that’s the point of a dog whistle. Not everyone knows the whole story. It’s a sign only to the initiates. As an anonymous right-wing messageboard strategist explains: “Leftists will recognize dog whistles and know we’re crypto, but normies won’t listen to them.”

But I was still surprised to hear someone say they didn’t recognize that one. Look up Dog-Whistle Politics on Wikipedia: “States’ Rights” is the canonical example.

In 1980, Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign at the Neshoba County Fair, near Philadelphia Mississippi, a town famous as the site of several civil-rights-related murders in 1964. So, how did he open his campaign? Praise of states’ rights. This was as clear a signal as possible to anyone who knew anything. Newspapers condemned it. I mean, sure, liberal out of touch coastal elite newspapers, but the New York Times is still a national newspaper. This was a longstanding pro-segregation slogan, used in a major political speech, in a town known for bloody battles over segregation and civil rights.

The use of racist dog-whistles is a deliberate Republican strategy, famously described by Reagan adviser Lee Atwater:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “N*****, n*****, n*****.” By 1968, you can’t say “n*****” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N*****, n*****.”

I thought people knew this. I thought it was obvious. But I think I have just been blind to how effective that dog-whistle really is. Because somehow, after all that, people think the Republican party doesn’t have anything to do with racism, even though Nixon, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Trump all swept to office on tides of racism. It was most explicit for Nixon, Reagan, and Trump, and somewhat less so for the Bush boys. But not that much less.

If you think David Brooks is right, check again

David Brooks has a pretty decent column, for once, in the Times today. He discusses Trump’s strange lack of “theory of mind” and notes that the world is over-analyzing his work.

But Trump seems to have not yet developed a theory of mind. Other people are black boxes that supply either affirmation or disapproval. As a result, he is weirdly transparent. He wants people to love him, so he is constantly telling interviewers that he is widely loved. In Trump’s telling, every meeting was scheduled for 15 minutes but his guests stayed two hours because they liked him so much.

…
We’ve got this perverse situation in which the vast analytic powers of the entire world are being spent trying to understand a guy whose thoughts are often just six fireflies beeping randomly in a jar.

This seems pretty insightful! And it would seem more insightful if I had not read a nearly identical piece from David Roberts, writing in Vox, four days ago:

On Twitter I talked about “theory of mind,” a basic capacity humans develop around the age of 2 or 3 to recognize that other people are independent agents, distinct minds, with their own beliefs, desires, fears, etc. We learn to “read” behaviors as evidence of those internal states.

…
Much of the dialogue around him, the journalism and analysis, even the statements of his own surrogates, amounts to a desperate attempt to construct a Theory of Trump, to explain what he does and says through some story about his long-term goals and beliefs.

…
But what if there’s nothing to understand? What if there’s no there there? What if our attempts to explain Trump have failed not because we haven’t hit on the right one, but because we are, theory-of-mind-wise, overinterpreting the text?

In Which I Am Enraged By Lazy Beverage Journalism

It's hard to remember now, but in the 70s and 80s, whiskey was the outdated old man drink, the sort of thing squares and hillbillies drank. It started to come back a little in the 90s with the single-malt Scotch trend, but it wasn't really until the 2000s that American whiskeys became fashionable again. It's only in this decade that rye has come into its own; it hadn't really been a major factor in the industry since before Prohibition.

Which is something of a long-winded introduction to the fact that Southern Comfort is returning whiskey as an ingredient to its liqueur, instead of "grain neutral spirit." The New York Times covers this marketing update as though it's an interesting development in the product. 

It's not.

First off, the definition of whiskey is flexible enough that there's precious little difference between the two. It's not "straight bourbon" they're adding to the mix – it's just unaged white dog whiskey, grain spirits that are only slightly less purified than what they'd been using before. The new SoCo will be essentially the same product, but with whiskey-soaked brand appeal.

Not only is this just a brand update, it's actually way behind the trend. Fireball Cinnamon Whiskey, following a 2007 rebranding that moved it out of the lineup of Dr. McGillicuddy's schnapps, has completely supplanted Southern Comfort as the leader in the "underage binge-drinking vomit instigator" product category. They're playing catch-up a decade late with this product.

The Times article is by Robert Simonson, filling in for Eric Asimov's usual wine column this week. That may explain why it's such a low-effort regurgitation of a press release. It's basically written by the only person quoted – Kevin Richards, Senior Marketing Director for Southern Comfort. Did Simonson talk to a bartender anywhere? Did he taste both versions of the liqueur? No. This is lazy, lazy writing. 

That doesn't exactly matter for something as trivial as a beverage marketed primarily at undergraduates.

But if I can't trust the Times to do a decent job reporting on a trivial subject I happen to know about, how do I know they're doing a good job on important things?

They've certainly been dropping the ball in the opinion section. They published two op-eds by people from one of those bogus "Crisis Pregnancy Centers" without disclosing that they are, in fact, paid employees of an operation that tricks women into thinking they're getting healthcare when they're actually getting some prayers and condescension. I mean, the fact that Ross Douthat still has a job is appalling.