Pump the gas, Morty, we gotta get into the next news cycle

It takes more than just a cute cat to rise above the noise. You have to be a cute cat ringing a bell to get food and create an adorable commentary on wage slavery.

You can’t just have an advice board for home repair, not when creepy-tales board /r/nosleep can leak into /r/homeowners and create discussions about what to do when your house is bleeding for maximum upvotes.

You can’t just post a sad bird, you have to be a minor celebrity MMA fighter releasing an injured bird with disastrous consequences.

And you can’t just be surprised by people getting dressed up in fuzzy outfits and holding enormous conventions. Shit, from Leda and the Swan on up, generation upon generation has focused its formative pants-feelings on foxy anthropomorphized foxes.

To make the news with furries, you have to be an unsuspecting charity volunteer who brings a therapy dog to play with people dressed up as dogs.

Ideally, though, you’ll get something that pumps the gas a little more than that. If you wanna move units, whether it’s cereal or politics on TV or just the latest meme, you need more than one angle.

Ideally you get a remix of as many kinds of suck as possible, like this month’s neo-nazi alt-right furry convention disaster. Let’s count them:

  1. Furries.
  2. Some of them are Nazis.
  3. Someone makes a joke about the now-iconic alt-right getting punched to music.
  4. Twitter anger escalates to threats of gun violence.
  5. Ballooning security costs threaten the entire convention
  6. Convention management, led by a sovereign citizen who believes he’s immune to most laws due to special language and red ink, blames the victims.
    • (Aside: The Sovereign Citizen in charge at least partly because a prior convention organizer was revealed to be a sex offender. There’s an alarming amount of overlap between Sovereign Citizens and pedos, because of course there is.)
  7. And then shady accounting and attention bring the entire thing to a screaming halt and everyone points and laughs, starting with furry-community messageboards and moving on out to national news.

Pump the gas, Morty. We gotta get to at least ten different flavors of suck to make it into the next news cycle.

On Negotiation and Influence

I took a class through work yesterday on how to influence people without having formal authority. It’s not just a workplace skill, though, and when we broke up into groups to discuss one specific scenario, the group I was in wound up working not on “How do we allocate resources to competing software development projects?” but “How do three brothers help their mom move to a new apartment?”

My co-worker, the middle brother, didn’t just need to find an apartment and schedule a move. Mom and all three brothers had to agree on the details about size, price, location, and schedule.

Our conclusion during the fifteen minute training exercise was that it would be critical to finesse the older brother. He’s contrary and doesn’t like taking suggestions or orders from the younger brothers, so the middle brother would have to meet with him separately and make sure he felt that he was really a major part of the decision-making process.

That wasn’t the only problem. The thing was, nobody in the conversation was truly working in good faith. Mom says she’s fine with whatever, she’s ready to move to a smaller apartment, and any of the three or four neighborhoods they’ve been considering would be fine. But the youngest brother is always breaking up with girlfriends and asking to move back home, so she wants a second bedroom just in case. She can’t say that because it seems unfair to the other boys, who are helping her pay for this apartment, and also implies a lack of faith in the success of her baby boy’s life choices.

Similar subtexts and unstated preferences apply to neighborhoods: Mom’s in charge of picking the location, since it’s her house. All the brothers want her to move to the neighborhood which will make visiting her most convenient for them. They won’t say that because, you know, it’s mom’s house.

The relevant analogy for national politics kind of writes itself.

Panic! at the Department of Education

Several times in the past couple of days people have asked me to explain an alarming New York Times article titled Student Loan Forgiveness Program Approval Letters May Be Invalid, Education Dept. Says.

This is not an official statement on behalf of my employer, but I can personally offer some reassurance that it’s not as horrible as it sounds.

The headline is of course very, very upsetting to a lot of people who have been counting on loan forgiveness for their public service. Needlessly so, in my opinion.

The issue, like everything else about our student loan system, is a result of the complex interplay between tax law, the Constitution, personal finance, lobbying by banking interests, and decades of amendments to the Higher Education Act of 1965. There’s a reason it’s easy to get confused about this: It’s stupidly complicated.

Public Service Loan Forgiveness is generally based on whether your employer is an eligible nonprofit. So, whether you’re an accountant or janitor or social worker or doctor, the first question for every applicant is “do you work for a qualifying employer?”

Eligible employers include all 501(c)(3) nonprofits, even church-affiliated groups. Also all government (city, state, federal), police, military, public safety, etc. Those are very clear.

Clearly ineligible are anyone working for for-profits, plus clergy, union organizers and partisan political groups. That is, social workers for Catholic Charities are in, but not priests. (I told you the Constitution came into it: subsidizing clergy would become an Establishment clause issue).

There is, however, one area of ambiguity: There are other kinds of nonprofit organizations than 501(c)(3). They’re helpfully labeled 501(c) 4, 5, and 6. That’s unions, professional associations, and so on. For example, the NFL, until about 2 years ago, filed as a 501(c)(6) nonprofit.

Certain non-501(c)(3) nonprofits ARE eligible for PSLF, but ONLY if they (or possibly just those employees) perform certain kinds of services. The question here is that a handful of people applied based on their work for the American Bar Association. They say they were providing eligible services.

Now we come to another complication: the Department of Education doesn’t administer this program themselves, because in America we believe that government can’t do anything right, so it should pay other people to screw things up.

In this case, FedLoan Servicing approved the application on behalf of the Department of Education. Then the Department of Education came back and overruled them.

This became a whole Big Thing because the Department of Education just pissed off a bunch of well-connected lawyers. So, they’re going to get sued and the suit is going to get news coverage.

So, if you think you’re qualified for Public Service Loan Forgiveness, and you’re worried about it, don’t. You’re probably fine.

It wasn’t 10 albums, it was a couple of mix tapes

That whole “what ten albums meant the most to you” thing went around a few weeks ago, and it got me thinking that it wasn’t really albums that were the soundtrack to my adolescence. Oh, there were albums of course. Some stuff I heard on the radio, like Nirvana. Some I got from friends, like Portishead and (so you know I’m not making up better taste than I had) Sublime.

But it was mix tapes that really sort of opened up the sonic world to me. I got one or two from kids at summer camp – there was an older boy from New York who had a big collection of hardcore tapes by bands like Sick of It All and Minor Threat, which my father described as “music for assholes.”

I must have been in 10th grade when a friend’s cooler older brother, who went to a cool sort of alternative school, got a tape from his even cooler friend (I never met her, but I remember being awed that someone could be named Zee), and made a copy for me. Needless to say, I never saw the videos on MTV or heard the songs on the radio, and the tape didn’t even have liner notes. I didn’t know the names of most of these bands. I found a few over the years and bought some of the albums. And I mean years – I was listening to some of these things for ages before I found out who wrote them.

That tape was the one that introduced me to trippy stuff like The Orb’s “Little Fluffy Clouds” and the oddly beautiful noise of Medicine’s “Arcua” (Give it a moment. Give it several moments. Let it play until you think it’s never going to be anything but screeching… and then it collapses into a melody. It’s beautiful.)

And oh boy, The Drowners, by Suede. It sounded best with the bass turned up way too high, so that fuzz in the lead guitar riff hit you right in the gut, and it sounded positively pornographic. It was transgressive and dirty and bad and you just KNEW your parents were going to hate it. It was perfect.

Doomed to Repeat It

Back in college I took a course on poetry of the Spanish Civil War. To someone from outside academia, that probably sounds irrelevant. But there was some great writing during that time. We also read some pretty terrible poetry, especially the lyric mash notes to Franco.

And it’s more relevant than it’s ever been before today, with the publication of a new poem praising Donald Trump.

You can pretty much guess how it’s going to go. It calls Obama an illegitimate tyrant, specifically calls out academic elitism and women being uppity, and describes a strong immigration policy as necessary:

Lest a murderous horde, for whom hell is the norm,
Should threaten our lives and our nation deform.

Because everyone knows that racism goes better in rhyming couplets.

So, it’s not a surprise that it’s a pretty terrible poem. And it’s probably not a surprise that this is not the first poem the author has written for Trump. The one congratulating him on his election describes liberals as “men of blood with fists for necks” led by a “feral queen.”

The author is former seminarian Joseph Charles MacKenzie. He’s a traditional Catholic and traditional lyric poet. He makes sure you’re clear on the traditional part. Make poetry rhyme again, make students read the classics in the original Greek.

What may surprise you, however, is that at the bottom of the page, where he promotes his book of sonnets (of course, sonnets):

You have boycotted modernist so-called “poetry” for over half a century, but arrogant publishers have ignored your rejection of pseudo-intellectual nonsense in chopped-up prose.

Backward old elites have censored traditional lyric poetry because it clashes with their Marxist-totalitarian world view. The result has been complete censorship of traditional lyric verse and the loss of the ability to produce it.

The only solution to the crisis is the triumphant appearance of Joseph Charles MacKenzie’s Sonnets for Christ the King, the first significant body of traditional lyric verse produced since the poems of W.B. Yeats and Charles Péguy.

Let’s unpack this. He thinks that there’s a vast audience of people pining for old-fashioned poems, but because of a Marxist academic conspiracy, his rhyming couplets are being repressed. That’s certainly a more comforting thought than the fact that nobody wants to read his poetry because it’s terrible, and the whole “Marxist academics” thing is a standard trope on the right that hardly bears examination or thought.

What truly gets me is the last bit: Comparing his sonnets (of course, sonnets about Jesus, because traditional Catholic poet) to Yeats and Péguy.

Comparing yourself to Yeats is hubris, which makes sense because MacKenzie already thinks his poetry is suppressed, not ignored.

Comparing himself to the early-20th Century French poet Péguy is a little stranger. I wasn’t familiar with him, but I looked him up on Wikipedia and the guy is apparently pretty well-known in France and was a favorite of DeGaulle, and so forth. However, his best-known work is free verse, which doesn’t strike me as all that traditional.

Wait, there it is:

Benito Mussolini referred to Péguy as a “source” for Fascism… Robert Brasillach praised Péguy as a “French National Socialist”, and his sons Pierre and Marcel wrote that their father was an inspiration for Vichy’s National Revolution ideology and “above all, a racist.”

So, there you go. Lyric mash notes to fascism. Still a thing.

The very fabric of reality

Like a lot of my friends and family, I’m really upset about the election. Trump seems like an obvious malign force and I keep trying to figure out why anyone would vote for him.

But I remember how the right was convinced Obama was a Kenyan Socialist Muslim anti-white Baptist under the sway of radicals, and also gay and a cokehead and an idiot and an evil genius. Like, all those conspiracy theories. And they were convinced it was just totally obvious. Then when he got voted into office and was really popular, they felt they didn’t recognize their country, because who could vote for someone who’s so OBVIOUSLY just AWFUL?

So, I have to second guess myself.

Is he a fascist? Or just someone I disagree with on the merits? Would I feel this way about any of the other candidates if they’d won?

Like, the pee allegations, right? We joke that even if they’re true, it’s damning that they’re plausible. But their plausibility comes from us- because we hate him so much we think of COURSE he’d pull that kind of nonsense. The same way the right-wing fever swamps were convinced Hillary Clinton was a lesbian, because they didn’t like her or lesbians, so they go together.

I mean, it starts to freak you out. What ELSE that I assume is actually just a weird superstition brewed up in the fever swamps of liberal Facebook? What if my ENTIRE REALITY is something I’ve made up out of epistemic closure and confirmation bias?

And then someone says yeah, the lügenpresse sure is out to get Trump, can’t wait til he ovens those bitches, #maga, and I start to think that my vision is pretty goddamn clear.

Seething Id

A while back I did a little research on companies delivering customer service through social media. You know, how do you manage a corporate Facebook page or Twitter account, should we be on Snapchat, etc. My conclusion was that customer service delivery over Twitter works OK for a lot of organizations but isn’t right for us, that a financial company using Snapchat looks like it’s trying to be hip when it just can’t, and that nobody should ever use YikYak. I don’t mean for business. I mean, ever.

Obviously, I’m still spending a lot of time on YikYak. If you don’t know, it’s like Twitter, but hyperlocal and even more anonymous. The idea is to let college students complain and chat and share their deepest secrets.

Basically it’s a glimpse into a seething id of people mostly 18-25 in your town.

Complaints about the meal plan. Questions about the best place to buy drugs. Occasional thrilling tales spontaneous hookups or drunken debauchery. And of course, this kind of shit:

I carry it around with me like a pocket-size peephole into the abyss. You know what they say: “And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.” And then it calls you a cuck.

Boston Property Brothers

HGTV is more popular than CNN these days, which got me thinking that we don’t have a really good Boston-focused shelter show. And that’s weird, because Boston’s huge in the entertainment biz these days. You can’t have a reality TV show without a Boston contestant, and you can’t go to the movies without tripping over some gritty Boston whatever.

We’ve got Wahlburgers and we’ve got The Town and (ugh) Patriot’s Day. We should have a show like Property Brothers or Fixer Upper, but, you know, Boston-ified.

Like, a couple goes apartment shopping. Their goal is a 2 bed, 2 bath place near transit with room for their dog. They get a room in an illegal boarding house, no pets allowed except bedbugs. It’s “near transit” in that the commuter rail goes right by the back door, but it’s a 2-mile walk to the station.

A couple starts a renovation. The Casey Affleck character from that Dunkin Donuts sketch is the contractor. He doesn’t pull permits, starts demolition, and then disappears.

The inspector’s mother once had an affair with the contractor’s father. The inspector retaliates by nickel and diming every permit until the project is six months behind schedule and $70,000 dollars over budget.

In a Very Special Episode, the tile guy overdoses in a newly finished bathroom.

Someone wants to spend $500,000 on a light-filled condo with Beacon Hill charm. They get a basement studio in Brighton for just under $750,000. It looks good at inspection but turns out to require structural reinforcement and asbestos mitigation. Ultimately the only cosmetic improvement they can afford is buying an unframed movie poster. For The Town. At a yard sale.

Bounce to it

A while back our friend Alex, an inveterate music lover, came by our place and wanted to play us some new hit song. So, he logged into his Spotify account and played it for us.

And then didn’t log out.

Today, I came home and decided it would be funny to play the Jezebel “Sluttiest Christmas Ever” mix that they posted today.

And then I got a text from Alex:

So, “Rudy the Big Booty Reindeer” just started playing in my headphones at work. I assume this (plus some quirk of Spotify) is your doing?”

Anyway, as aggressively difficult-to-listen-to as you might think a Christmas song could be – and a New Orleans bounce rendition of Rudolph with the lyrics changed to be about butts is up there – it’s still better than any version of “Little Drummer Boy” ever.

Shame! Shame! Shame!

So, I wanted to understand people who really thought Trump was better. You know, what policies of his do they like, what is it that appeals to him. It can’t all be racism, can it? There’s all those articles saying I should stop shaming Trump supporters. And I know I live in a liberal bubble. On my ballot, the only non-president candidate with an opponent was running against someone from the Massachusetts Pirate Party. DJT was the only Republican on the ballot.

The problem is, that I’d already unfollowed all… OK, both Trump voters who were in my feed. One after a “what’s wrong with Bay Area house prices” discussion ended with him saying he was OK with density as long as there wasn’t hip-hop dancing at his kid’s elementary school talent show, and one after she posted something insane about how Muslims are all coming to murder us. OK there’s my wife’s uncle from Indiana who’s a single-issue anti-abortion voter. I disagree heartily but at least it’s a coherent explanation. Old-school conservative Catholic, anti-abortion, case closed.

So, in my search for understanding my differences with others, I obviously went and got into a huge fight with a friend of a friend. It’s someone who, I have been assured, is a fundamentally good person. She told me first that a lot of voters voted for Trump because they had been hurt by the Obama administration’s policies.

So I asked her, who’s been harmed by Obama? People who got health insurance? Stock brokers who had to be held to a fiduciary standard? Bankers who had to increase their capital reserves? I know people hurt because they’re out of work now, but what part of Obama’s administration put them out of work?

After all, Republicans blocked stimulus, blocked Medicaid expansion, blocked health care regulation, and then complained there wasn’t enough work, enough Medicaid, good regs on insurers. Break the government, then cry out that it’s broken.

And oh, they hate Obamacare. They don’t feel supported by Obamacare. Remember, Obamacare was a Republican originated policy that Dems adopted because it was better than nothing. And as soon as the Dems picked it up, Republicans claimed it was Kenyan socialism. There’s a branding failure, definitely. Everyone loves the individual components of Obamacare, they hate the idea of it.

They like Trump’s economic policies? Look at Kansas. Brownback and the Republicans wrecked the economy there. And now people are angry at the party trying to help?

And so she went on a tear. I’ve cleaned up the typos but holy shit, you guys, Trump people live in a totally different world.

I’m glad HRC lost because I’m sick of her policies, principles, and her way of life which her supporters are clearly showing to be un-American IMHO. I didn’t like either candidate but no way would I ever vote for her.

HRC has lived off the system for decades. Billions donated to Haiti and not much went there. Why did HRC just move $1.8 billion to qatar? So American she didn’t want to leave the $$ here to be confiscated? And how about the Swiss bank accounts? How about the pedophile ring? Hmmm nice way of life promoting adultery, pedophilia, lying, getting fired from law firms for being unethical LOL.. working the system that’s for sure!!

When I pointed out that those were all lies, she replied with a link to a fake news site about a protest against Hillary over the Haitian earthquake relief effort. I acknowledged that the earthquake recovery was not well done, but that there was no evidence Hillary or the Clinton Foundation were the cause of it.

She sent a link to a New Yorker article about how Hillary’s donors are rich bankers and she has ties to Wall Street. Which, yes, major donors have big money. We know money is part of politics. I said we’ve read her emails and seen her tax returns, which is more than DJT has provided. She’s been far more transparent.

Her: Transparent HAHAH and no Trump’s not my boy but I have to respect who ever is Pres..

Me: How respectful of Obama were you?

Her: I didn’t vote for him and Obamacare has hurt me.. and his policies have hurt my business.. but he is/was the Pres and I didn’t riot, burn business etc. like you HRC supporters are.

Me: Yes, progressives are in the streets. But I don’t see them taking over a national park and threatening to shoot government employees. Protest – even rude and inconvenient protest – is valuable to remind the people in power that they don’t have free reign. And that’s why people are protesting.

But she just went on about immigrants costing us all money. Conspiracies about George Soros paying protestors. Got into a fight about abortion with someone else on the thread, claiming Trump wasn’t really going to cut abortion access. Claiming high property taxes that fund Medicaid hurt her business as a real estate broker,

And I gave up. I guess Northeastern liberals expected too much to hope Florida would do some research somewhere other than Infowars before casting a ballot.

So, I’m going to stop trying to “reach out” and “understand” and just go ahead and be angry.

I’m angry that someone’s going to put a climate denier in charge of the EPA and an evolution-denier in charge of education. I’m angry that people are opposed to immigration when a lot of my friends and co-workers are immigrants or the children of immigrants.

No, my friends aren’t “illegals,” although I wouldn’t mind if they didn’t have papers. But under Trump it will be a lot harder for them to stay, for their families to be here, for other great people to come here and be part of America. My co-workers are from Nepal, India, Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, Haiti, Canada. They have come for work, or fleeing natural and manmade disasters, or because their parents came, or because they fell in love. They contribute to this country. They are on H1-B and O-1 visas or green cards or they are naturalized citizens. And there are some folks I don’t know well enough to ask, and it’s frankly none of my goddamn business. I’d love to have more immigration. I think immigrants are awesome. My great-grandfather was an immigrant and if he’d been turned away his whole family would have been destroyed in the WWI-era pogroms or the holocaust.

And I’m angry that Mike Pence is going to be doing a lot of domestic policy and that he thinks my gay and lesbian friends don’t deserve to have their families recognized. I’m angry that millions of people who got medicaid through the ACA are going to lose insurance. That if some jackhole rapes one of my friends, she won’t be able to get an abortion because Pence and co shut them all down and want to punish her.

I get that Trump supporters are angry. Because I’m not satisfied with the progress we made over the last 8 years. I get that people are hurting. I get that people think it’s a rigged system.

But even if you assume that “all politicians are corrupt” (we’ll see just how much more corrupt DJT is soon enough), look at the stated policies:

Trump is against immigration. He’s in favor of an impossible wall. He’s in favor of trade wars that could plunge the world economy into recession. He thinks NATO, the force which stabilized Europe post-WWII, isn’t worth the trouble. He thinks nuclear proliferation is dandy. He’s in favor of torture. He’s against health care for the poor. He’s in favor of tax cuts for the rich. He’s against abortion. He doesn’t believe in climate change. He’s in favor of gutting the EPA, he wants more coal and oil and less solar.

All of those things are demonstrably, objectively, dumb and bad.

So, yeah, I’m going to shame people who support him because “EMAILS!” or “THE ESTABLISHMENT” almost as much as I shame people who support him because they want their white country back from uppity negroes and foreigners and bitches who demand equality and queers who act all different.

I don’t care if you mean well. I don’t care if you’re “fundamentally good.” You’re supporting shameful shit and you should be ashamed.