Secretly Ironic

This March marked the 30th anniversary of the Rodney King beating, an early incident of citizen video capture of police brutality. It does not seem that thirty years of reform, protests, civilian oversight, blue-ribbon commissions, or consent decrees have changed a goddamn thing. Instead, we’ve got cops flying a cop flag over the American flag because they’re loyal to the badge over citizenry.

The Cincinnati police pulled down the American flag at the justice center and replaced it with the thin blue line. Infuriating. Picture from a friend. pic.twitter.com/1bM0ovH0T6

✌Nostradonuts✌ (@P0kes) May 31, 2020

Clearly, if we are to have laws we need some form of law enforcement. But whatever policing is in the United States, it is not law enforcement. It resembles more the standing army that the framers of the constitution warned against, the Redcoats holding their line just before the Boston Massacre.

Some members of the founding generation expressed fears that a standing army would pose a threat to liberty. Police forces as we know them did not exist. Of course, slave patrols policed Blacks in the South. Courts have made us accept a lot in the name of law enforcement. https://t.co/zlMuUMazZ0

Annette Gordon-Reed (@agordonreed) April 16, 2021

Surely, not every cop is implicated in this system? Perhaps we should listen to what they say when they think nobody else is listening. For example, a recent data leak from a right-wing crowdfunding site tell us that numerous donations in support of right-wing vigilante shooter Kyle Rittenhouse came from police officers, including an internal affairs executive in Norfolk, VA who sent the following note with his donation: “You’ve done nothing wrong. Every rank and file police officer supports you. Don’t be discouraged by actions of the political class of law enforcement leadership.”

(It’s not just actions like beating or killing a suspect that earn unconditional support. The Boston police were recently discovered to have been protecting their union president despite very credible child molestation charges going back 25 years.)

When someone tells you who they are, believe them. How do you reform an institution that killed someone in this country almost every single day last year? How do you reform a system that produces multiple separate stories about elderly women brutalized by police while picking flowers?

The media always focuses on when police kill. But there are plenty of days when we don’t. For example in 2020 there were 18 days when police officers didn’t kill anyone at all.

Los Angeles Police Department Parody (@LAPDParody) April 12, 2021

Why is all this happening? Jared Yates Sexton has a lengthy and illuminating essay on the subject, which concludes:

This is not just about training. This isn’t about a few bad apples. It is that law enforcement, with its long history, from knights in armor chopping down serfs and disrupting peasant rebellions, to armored police units in the heartland of America rolling through streets in tanks with 21st century technology meant to suppress the people, has a fundamental problem: the belief that these forces are intended to make war with their own people in order to protect property, wealth, and power.

The problem is the very concept of the thin blue line.

So, by all means, yes, support law enforcement. But end American policing.

Anyhow in a Corner, Some Untidy Spot

Noah Smith of Bloomberg has an excellent and sobering take on the Republican embrace of the “replacement” conspiracy, which has been endorsed by such luminaries as Tucker Carlson and Richard Spencer.

If you’re concerned about gun violence, I have bad news for you about what Americans are doing to each other with cars.

An official word from FEMA:

We’re experiencing high call volume for people applying for Funeral Assistance. We’ve contracted support to provide us with 5,000 agents to help with the huge volume of calls. There’s no deadline to apply at this time. https://t.co/pIFqSEpRAehttps://t.co/YgM3JVSzTq

FEMA (@fema) April 12, 2021

Joy

A very tiny puppy.
Kitten gets a bath. (Click through for before/after).
This very tiny kitten.
Bucket-o-shiba-inus.

Massachusetts legalized recreational cannabis use by ballot measure in 2016, and the state legislature spent two years delaying dispensary openings in order to put together careful regulations to stop weed from becoming … well, too popular. They had some reasonable concerns. When public health types look at alcohol legalization, they see the harms of prohibition replaced by the harms of an alcoholic beverage industry that slowly kills its best customers, leads to plenty of violence & destruction for others nearby, and uses its immense economic power to avoid regulation. There’s a whole genre of stories with the concept “imagine if we covered alcohol the way we cover other drugs,” and they provide a very useful insight into the harms of an underregulated market for abusable substances. Regulators looked at the nascent weed industry and feared that it would wind up building huge profits by generating problematic overusers.

So, they had a lengthy licensing process, plenty of security requirements, high taxes, and restrictions on advertising and promotional deals. The medical market, of course, was considered safe because it treated patients, not recreational smokers, and because access to it was supervised by doctors.

In some ways the regulators have succeeded, because today’s Massachusetts recreational pot customers are mostly tourists, occasional users, and people who haven’t smoked in years (if ever) and want to give it a try. In a rather more important way, that success is irrelevant, because everything they feared about the recreational market was already in place in the medical market.

Getting a medical card costs about $200 and can be done by phone. Mainstream doctors don’t prescribe cannabis, so it’s the realm of specialists who operate cannabis-only clinics, which means nobody is ever denied a card if they ask. Nor is the cost a barrier: medical sales are untaxed, which rapidly makes up the difference for anyone who smokes more than occasionally. Moreover, medical retailers are allowed to deploy a wide range of promotions, including paraphernalia giveaways, Instagram DJ sets, and huge discounts for new and returning customers (excuse me, patients). Many dispensaries offer a 50% discount on the first few hundred dollars worth of purchases, or 5% cash back, or discounts for larger purchases, or all of those. I saw one with coupons for $1 eighths (about a $50 discount) in randomly selected pre-rolled joints, making “buying medicine” into a sort of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory raffle. Imagine Pfizer giving away free Viagra with your Lipitor, or, more alarmingly, the origins of the opioid epidemic in unethical industry marketing.

Fortunately, cannabis is substantially less dangerous than alcohol and opioids. At least, as far as we know. One of the problems with prohibition, you see, is that it was so difficult to study cannabis for so long that we actually don’t know as much as we should about the effects of this very large and rapidly growing industry.

Just wait for the 4/20 holiday specials.

Trademark Madness

Every year around the NCAA basketball tournament, some nontrivial number of urologists do jokey promotions for vasectomies, because it’s a perfect excuse to say “I really should stay on the couch all day watching sports.” Some places include coupons for wings with every vasectomy, or encourage a group of friends to all get snipped together so they can all watch basketball all day. It’s now led to a lawsuit over the trademark “Vasectomy Mayhem” being too similar to March Madness.

Things That Are Bad

Amazon.
Pickup trucks. (See also: stroads and SUVs). (See also: bills to protect drivers who run over protesters).
Somehow, the California Environmental Quality Act.
Police in Minneapolis, London, Chicago, Boston, and Boston again.

Things That Are Good

Resurrecting a fabric lost to colonial depredations.

Twitter

People who think the U.S. is still this all-conquering dominant hegemon remind me of that guy in Mary Poppins who sings “It’s grand to be an Englishman in 1910”

Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) March 14, 2021

Joy

Dog plus net equals derp.
Jewish space laser enamel pin, of course.
A fox napping on a skylight.
This komondor.
Cat “helping.”
Our vegetable love shall grow …. a husky?
A different dog with an alarmingly long nose. (Bonus: video of nose in action!)

The internet-age term Milkshake Duck refers to something delightful that is quickly revealed to be awful. It’s from a Twitter joke: “The whole internet loves Milkshake Duck, a lovely duck that drinks milkshakes! *5 seconds later* We regret to inform you the duck is racist.”

It has, of course, become a verb:  “One of the most bizarre storylines to come out of 2021 thus far has been the recursive milkshake ducking of the Reply All series on the Bon Appetit Test Kitchen.“

The latest milkshake duck to cross my path: non-fungible tokens. These are generated by a clever cryptographic system that allows you to create unique digital items that can be resold, like actual physical art. Digital artists now have a way to generate scarcity, which can help them actually get paid for their work. Lovely. Plus, it’s funny to buy the original of an infinitely reproducible GIF!

We regret to inform you that it uses so much electricity that limited edition GIFs are now a major source of carbon emissions globally.

Reader Input

A reader responds about shame:

But shame is a dangerous emotion; this very unpleasant emotion can easily be projected onto others. Twenty years ago, I would have said that Americans had the virtue of being ashamed of their racism. Trump freed lots of people of their shame—shame over their feelings of resentment, shame over being less successful than they thought they should have been, shame over their hateful feelings in general. He offered them targets on which to project the responsibility for their failures—the “libs,” immigrants, Blacks, feminists.  He gave them a way to redefine shamelessness as masculinity, bravery, honesty. “He tells it like it is” was code for shameless speech.  Shame is a useful social corrective, but it can backfire.”

Speaking of shamelessness, I managed to hold in an “I TOLD YOU SO” for all of fifteen seconds after reading that David Brooks had a second salary funded by Facebook and didn’t disclose it because the rules don’t apply to him. (Give him a break, his research assistant/wife is only 36, he needs two incomes to cover her student loans).

Speaking of shamelessness, everything about Madison Cawthorn.

Joy

Meet Tupelo the borzoi and her very long nose. I can’t get over how much I love/am alarmed by this dog and her nose. She is the embodiment of grace and elegance. She is very friendly. I want to pet her.

Kermit the Frog as David Byrne in concert.

A murmuration of starlings momentarily takes the shape of an enormous bird.

I’ve been thinking about a post-WWI novel detailing the life of a 14th century Norwegian teenager, brazen criminality, contemporary class structure and the concept of shame. I don’t think I understand any of those things well at all. But they all keep bouncing around in my head. Bear with me. I got a point here. I think.

Let’s start with medieval Norway. The Kristin Lavransdatter novels of Sigrid Undset portray a family in 14th century Norway. When the titular protagonist disobeys her father, he laments that she is not “shamefasted.” I didn’t like much of the rest of the book, to be honest, but I’ve carried that word around for a while. It’s an odd and antique sort of word, and possibly an artifact of an awkward translation. But what a word: bound by shame. Being bound by shame probably strikes 21st century Americans as a bad thing, but clearly has been a virtue in other places and other times.

And then, just this week, I saw this tweet from a notable sociologist:

Shame, in particular, is a very middle class emotional landscape.

Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) February 15, 2021

Dr. Cottom isn’t referring to the entire historical sweep of shame, of course. “Middle class” wouldn’t even make sense in 14th century Norway, while honor and shame were probably pretty critical to everyone there. She’s talking specifically about the variance in emotional responses across power differentials in the US right now. And in this place and time, it seems that the elite are just not properly shamefasted. Look at Ted Cruz not even bothering to pretend to help his constituents, or the entire public persona of Steve Mnuchin.

It’s like that classic line from The Wire: “Is you takin’ notes on a criminal fuckin’ conspiracy?” These people have been doing dirt so regularly that it seems normal. They have forgotten to be ashamed, or perhaps think their wealth and power insulate them from needing to even consider it.

Apparently there’s quite a bit of research on the topic, and new power dynamics create new feelings of shame or shamelessness pretty rapidly. Power corrupts, in other words, and it corrupts quickly.

Do we need to bring back some kind of external shame enforcer, like the ancient cobradores del frac that have seen a revival in 21st-century Spain? Like, should we arrange to have someone walk behind Senator Cruz ringing a bell and shouting SHAME SHAME SHAME everywhere he goes? (Anyone want to run a kickstarter to pay someone to do that? Is that even legal?)

I don’t know. I’m not a sociologist. Or a lawyer. But it’s on my mind.

(Incidentally, the lady ringing this particular bell here is Hannah Waddingham, who is just stellar in the warm and hilarious Ted Lasso.)

Content Curation

This NYT article about Garfield and remix culture (yes, Garfield) is quite excellent. Trust me.

This incredible Atlantic piece about deep-sea parasites is worth it for the marine biology alone, but it’s so much more. Trust me.

some ✨personal news ✨

I’m so excited to share that i have no idea what I’m doing with my life ❤️

Jenny (@jennyrdrguez) February 4, 2021

Joy

Voidcat.
Eggcat.
Absolute unit of a bunny.
Incredibly cool iced-up lighthouse.
Lightly vandalized fast-food signs = hilarious.
A very cold bison.
A very clever child misinterpreted some instructions.
A pie chart of what pie charts are called in different languages (in France, it’s a Camembert!)
A very glamorous penguin.
Kitten dressed up for lunar new year.

I subscribe to an awful lot of newsletters and RSS feeds and media streams. Probably too many. I scroll through them all and bookmark things for the newsletter or just to read later. And this week I was looking back at the saved items from the past month and so many of them just made me sad and angry, and I asked myself why I would inflict them on all fifty-nine subscribers to this newsletter.

So, here’s only the good stuff. No doomscrolling. Y’all already know about the cop that maced a nine-year-old. 2020 was a shit year and 2021 isn’t shaping up to be any better. Let’s focus on the better parts.

A Twitter thread of wholesome niche science-themed TikToks (the machinist/woodworking one is mesmerizing). Bonus: a machine that straightens scrap rebar.

A Reddit slideshow of a cat who loves sleeping on/in slippers. A dog alarmed by squirrels on TV. A dog playing in snow for the first time. A corgi nesting inside boxes of various sizes. An epic thread of animals investigating/interrupting wildlife photographers. And somehow, eels being cute.

Which of course prompts this, sung to the tune of Outkast’s Ms. Jackson:

Not Cute but somehow noteworthy: A crab riding on an albino alligator.

Also Not Cute but kinda funny: This editorial decrying sexy rock music and high-production-value movies was out of touch in 1985 and only gets more hilarious with time. What’s amazing about this is that he continues to get mainstream work. His oeuvre is full of hits like a 2011 claim in Newsweek that public transit is a socialist conspiracy and an argument this year that the problem with the vaccination rollout is that progressives are obsessed with good governance. People have been paying this chucklefuck good money to be wrong (but with big words!) twice a week for more than forty years and they just keep doing it. Do his employers not realize that people will be pretentiously wrong online for free?

Sorry, sorry. Back to the good stuff.

The American Conservative attempts humor with what I assume is a “modest proposal” style sarcastic editorial in favor of the Salazar model of dictatorship. Wait, sorry again. This turned out not to be a joke. Apparently they are sincerely in favor of dictators. Right. OK then.

I’m definitely sure this one is sarcastic:

omg sofia coppola’s dad also made a movie 👀 — $V (@not_a_heather) January 30, 2021

Check out this very sweet and inspiring story about someone’s great-grandmother being a total badass. Also the less-sweet and less-inspiring but still badass 21st century TikTok phenomenon known as “Bud Light Grandma.” (Sound on for the musical accompaniment).

Chazo-kun, the mascot for the Japanese Dumpling Association, who is alarmingly sexy bathing in a bowl of noodles and pouring hot oil over his rippling muscles.

Children say the darndest things:

my daughter asked why she can’t just quit school and i told her it’s against the law and they’ll put me in jail and my sweet sweet child looked me in the eye and said “i’ll visit you” — CeciATL (@CeciATL) January 28, 2021

The National Zoo has some great video of pandas playing in the snow. The Oregon Zoo has a roundup of rascally animals doing cute stuff.

It is important to remember the difference between peyote and pierogies. It is also important to remember to remove your pet sugar glider from your bra before your doctor’s appointment. Final reminder, do not leave your pet mink in a sink without supervision.

These two friendly cats. This dog with nose stuck in squeaker toy. An elderly bat named Statler being carried because he can no longer fly on his own. (No word on Waldorf).

Finally, an inspiring story of recovery and the long, slow work of improvement and growth from John Darnielle, who hit a seriously, terrifyingly low point in his life in the mid-1980s and is today a very-well-respected (and sober) recording artist: “this thread is for Howard and Bob, who didn’t make it to the end [of] this year, and for you, who did.”

It’s a macroeconomics truism that rising GDP is generally correlated with rising life expectancy, but the US is an exception to that rule. A 2017 UN report on extreme poverty in the US explained that inequality here is so great that a lot of Americans effectively live in a much poorer country. One key example the report cited was the lack of proper sewage and sanitation systems in the Black Belt. This week, the New Yorker profiles the followup efforts and the overall public health impact of poverty. It’s not a happy story at all. The solution isn’t quite as simple as laying some pipe (provisioning municipal sewer service to rural areas is impossibly expensive; the soil in the area is incompatible with many standard septic systems; sanitation is only one part of the ongoing public health disaster) but it’s a web of problems the US knows how to solve and just prefers not to.

We Need to Talk About Kyle

Kyle Rittenhouse, charged with two murders, is out on $2 million bail, with major contributions from right-wing celebrities. He does not, however, have a product endorsement from his favorite brand of right-wing militant coffee (yes, right-wing coffee is a thing now). People thought he did, though, because right after getting out of jail, he was featured in a photo wearing a Black Rifle Coffee t-shirt, embracing a right-wing influencer/podcaster who does have an advertising relationship with Black Rifle Coffee. The tactical coffee company had to issue a statement disavowing Rittenhouse, and …. well, some people got angry that their breakfast beverage does not sufficiently endorse vigilante gunfire.

Rittenhouse actually seems to have a great deal of support from the right, including a major endorsement from Florida State Representative Anthony Sabatini. Sabatini, interestingly, says that abortion is bad because it’s murder, but killing leftist protesters is just dandy. So, remember, fetuses are people, but leftists aren’t.

The Republican Party in one image:

Ben Yahr (@benyahr) November 22, 2020

Something Delicious

One of my favorite stock photo clichés turned niche internet phenomena is “women laughing alone with salad.” It’s great. KnowYourMeme explains the turn from showing up an awful lot in boring stock photography to a viral Hairpin blog post to, I am not kidding, a theatrical adaptation. In news coverage of the play, author Sheila Callaghan told the Washington Post that “nobody likes salad that much; it’s not built for that.”

But there is always an exception! And someone does in fact love salad that much! Her name is Emily Nunn, she’s an author who’s written about food for the New Yorker and Chicago Tribune, and in addition to her book-length projects produces a weekly newsletter called The Department of Salad. It’s delicious!

Twitter Curation

The ACLU has finally reached a settlement with CPB on behalf of two people who were arrested for speaking Spanish.

We’ve previously compared the current US situation with the decline and fall of the USSR (teetering gerontocracy, shortages and bread lines, quagmire in Afghanistan…) but here’s Noah Smith last year comparing it to the 1990s in Japan.

Followup

Back in September, I linked to an article from a Sri Lankan writer noting the similarities of his nation’s troubles and ours. He’s back with a followup titled “I Lived Through a Stupid Coup. America Is Having One Now.”

What is a coup? It’s literally a blow, a strike. Someone hitting your normal processes of government, trying to knock them over. The blow doesn’t have to succeed. It still wounds. In our case it was occupying Parliament without a majority. In yours it’s denying the President-Elect after an election. Whether it fails or not, deep structural damage is done. At the time, however, it just feels dumb.
….
You can just roll it back, right? Right? No. No no no. Oh God no. The tragic thing which you do not understand — which you cannot understand — is that you’ve already lost. You cannot know exactly what — that’s the nature of chaos — but know this. You will lose more than you can bear.

He closes his grim warning with a wish that we Americans get the benefit of the only thing that has kept him and his family safe so far: luck.

Also Worth Reading

• An excellent Atlantic article about Christmas.
• The odd power of Spotify’s algorithm turning b-sides into hits years after they’re released. (Including the Galaxie 500 track I mentioned the other week).

Joy

Cats as hats.
Dog auditioning for role in Queen’s Gambit.
Fuzzy calf.
You can trick sea urchins into wearing tiny hats.

The sci-fi epic series The Expanse features humanity spreading throughout the solar system and developing political, cultural and linguistic faultlines as it goes. The poorest and most marginal cultural group, scraping by in asteroid colonies and long-haul ships, spend enough time in full environment suits that their gestural communication has had to adapt as well: facial expressions are meaningless, while shrugs are whole-arm affairs that can convey uncertainty at a distance and through bulky safety equipment. (The language system got complicated enough, and central enough to the plot, that they actually hired a linguist for the TV adaptation).

Just thinking about that, you know, for no reason.

Arbitrage

Back in May, Ranjan Roy’s Substack post about DoorDash went mildly viral: a friend of his owned a pizza joint, and DoorDash had started offering delivery from his restaurant without consulting him. Only they had gotten the prices wrong when they scraped the website and were losing like eight bucks on every sale before even paying the drivers. Roy and his friend started ordering as many as ten pizzas at a time, and wound up taking DoorDash for a couple hundred bucks before the typo got fixed and the game ended.

Except it didn’t. DoorDash kept on spending huge amounts of money to acquire customers and influence regulations that allowed it to underpay its workers. Roy’s back with followup, now analyzing S-1 filing as DoorDash prepares for its IPO.

It’s all within the rules. The regulatory rules. The labor rules. The antitrust rules. The consumer protection rules. Full credit to Tony Xu and their team – they have out-executed every competitor. They are winning this weird and twisted game of heavily-funded food delivery apps.

But this is less a ‘good for them’ than a ‘bad on us’ sentiment.
…
While we were laughing about $8 in pizza arbitrage profits, Doordash built a $25 billion business powered by a combination of regulatory and labor arbitrage. While Doordash’s messy financial controls ended with us swapping a few pizzas, our broken regulatory system has fundamentally reshaped the economy in a way that allows Doordash to extract billions in revenue during a time of national crisis.

Social Media Edit

• Tobe Nwigwe performs his viral hit “Try Jesus, Don’t Try Me” at the BET Hip Hop Awards.
• A former “fancy grocery store” worker recounts their worst holiday special order customers.

This:

This democratic backsliding is hilarious through the lens of the petty shit the US has overthrown governments around the world over, our president is screaming “Fake election! I won!” like dude we overthrew Allende because *the phone company* wanted him gone — Mass for Shut-ins (Podcast) (@edburmila) November 10, 2020

May You Live in Interesting Times

• This is why I refuse to call DCA “Ronald Reagan National Airport.”
• Secret renegade superspreader homecoming dance? Are you kidding me? (May I suggest a pairing of “people who deny that COVID is real even as they’re gasping for breath in an ICU?”)
• Foreign Policy prescribes ranked-choice voting as a potential cure to America’s ills. Sure. Good luck.

Joy

• Hot dog wobbler.
• Oooooo tiny cat.
• Now this is my kind of happy meal.