Secretly Ironic

I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this before, but the lyrics to the Galaxie 500 song “Strange” seem to fit well with the current moment:

Why’s everybody acting funny?
Why’s everybody look so strange?
Why’s everybody look so nasty?
What do I want with all these things?

I find myself humming the song whenever I leave the house or go into a store these days. Everybody does look nasty in ill-fitting masks and DIY quarantine haircuts. What do I want with these things? Did I actually just risk my life to buy this bag of Peanut M&Ms?

I was mildly disappointed to discover that the song is actually just about going out to buy snacks while royally stoned. It kind of works anyway, though.

Anyway, speaking of looking nasty, check out this article in the Paris Review about the digital face, facial recognition algorithms, GIF-based digital minstrelsy, the a-reality of face-tuning, and so on.

Climate

As Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A. & M. University, recently put it, “If you don’t like all of the climate disasters happening in 2020, I have some bad news for you about the rest of your life.”

What Rough Beast

So, yeah, they’re replacing the American flag with the cop flag at rallies now. Because it’s not about patriotism. It’s about obedience to power.

Wallace Shawn, writing in the NY Review of Books, has what may be the best take on the entire thing:

Trump has liberated a lot of people from the last vestiges of the Sermon on the Mount. A lot of people turn out to have been sick and tired of pretending to be good. The fact that the leader of one of our two parties—the party, in fact, that has for many decades represented what was normal, acceptable, and respectable—was not ashamed to reveal his own selfishness, was not ashamed to reveal his own indifference to the suffering of others, was not even ashamed to reveal his own cheerful enjoyment of cruelty…all of this helped people to feel that they no longer needed to be ashamed of those qualities in themselves either. They didn’t need to feel bad because they didn’t care about other people. Maybe they didn’t want to be forbearing toward enemies. Maybe they didn’t want to be gentle or kind. In a world in which the rich want permission to take as much as they can get without feeling any shame, and many of the not-rich are so worried about their own sinking fortunes that they find it hard to worry about the misery of anyone else, Trump is the priest who grants absolution.

The Old College Try

On October 26, Philly police gunned down a mentally ill Black man as his family begged for mercy. Protests have ensued, as they do. Police escalated the situation, beating protesters and bystanders alike, as they do. The administration of my beloved alma mater, known for requiring students to study social justice alongside math, science, and literature, sent out a profoundly counterproductive letter asking students to stop protesting. The students are now on strike.

Doomscroll

Slate on Kavanaugh’s incompetence as a jurist
Buzzfeed on white nationalists preparing for the post-Trump America
Brooklyn cops prohibiting people from handing out masks & PPE at a polling place
Austin cops encountered a right-wing revolutionary “Boogaloo Boi” with illegal firearms and turned him loose
The incredibly sad tale of Lauren Southern, the alt-right’s most famous woman
A comparison of US and European street safety (spoiler: we’re fucking it up over here)
Reuters on people who die in jail before trial

Joy

Adorable possum
Kind of creepy forty-thousand-year-old worms
Giant anteaters are really cool looking
Corgi x any other dog equals hilarious & adorable

Playlist

Here are some additional songs:
Deerhunter, “He would have laughed” (interesting rhythmic use of strings)
Fugazi, “I’m so tired” (a piano ballad, quite the departure from the usual sound)
M|O|O|N, “Dust” (chillwave excellence)

Business management types like to say that there’s not really any such thing as a dysfunctional organization. Every organization, they say, is already exquisitely tuned to function in the way that it does and achieve the results it achieves, and those functions and results work just fine for somebody there.

What we call dysfunction is often something formerly positive that’s now outdated, or a flaw it was easier to overlook in the past. Either way, it persists for a reason: it benefits someone. No matter how poisonous the ecosystem, something lives in it. Thrives in it. If you want to change something, you have to understand who benefits from the status quo, and what they might lose by changing it. The things that are lost might be financial or procedural, or more abstract losses of status or self-image.

The application of this principle to our current situation is left as an exercise to the reader, but this article in the Catholic intellectual mag Commonweal struck me as particularly relevant to the issue:

Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.” Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores. An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover). One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?

How can we even begin to fix these glaring problems when doing so would require acknowledging that they exist, acknowledging that we are not exceptional or great or universally admired or even particularly free?

Americans have grown up boasting about our nation being the land of the free and the home of the brave, and here we are, in thrall to capital and terrified, and our sole consolation is insisting against all evidence that we are free and brave. Just not free or brave enough to face our failings and do the work to fix them.

Some radicals say that the system is producing the results it was designed to produce. But “design” isn’t entirely accurate. Like almost all enormous systems, our society is built piecemeal, almost everything an unintended consequence of something else. A lot of people are doing their best within it.

On the other hand, some people are definitely trying to make it worse, like the folks at Turning Point running a troll farm hiring underage fascists to pump disinformation into the ether.

It’s Getting Hot In Herre

Twitter reminded me last week of this article from 2018, when California was facing its worst-ever fires, floods were rising everywhere else, and global temperatures broke record after record.

The whole thing is worth a read, but here are two key grafs:

As we made our way across a broad bay, I glanced up at the electronic chart above the captain’s wheel, where a blinking icon showed that we were a mile inland. The captain explained that the chart was from five years ago, when the water around us was still ice…

In 1991, [an Exxon researcher] found that greenhouse gases were rising due to the burning of fossil fuels… the rise in the sea level could threaten onshore infrastructure and create bigger waves that would damage offshore drilling structures. As a result of these findings, Exxon and other major oil companies began laying plans to move into the Arctic, and started to build their new drilling platforms with higher decks, to compensate for the anticipated rises in sea level.

I can’t find the origin, but there’s a little warning floating around my feeds these days: “Don’t think of this as the hottest year in the past century. This is the coolest year in the next century.”

Doomscroll

• MA State Police expose, part N. (See also: Dysfunctional organization, no such thing as; Culture change, difficulty of).
• TX deputies got steakhouse gift cards as a reward for use of force.
• Zoom school is just as bad as you think.
• A list of “wellness influencers” who’ve bought into QAnon conspiracy theories. (See also: Venn diagram of potential overlap of fringe internet groups into a reactionary force).
• Official Virginia GOP response to Trump supporters intimidating voters. (See also: national right-wing freakout when two individuals were charged in the 2008 New Black Panther case).
• GOP officials offered Assange a pardon if he would assist with a Russia-interference coverup.
• An explanation of the roots of the Patriotic Education the president’s been pushing.
• NYC, Seattle, Portland, Oregon designated “anarchist jurisdictions,” threatened with loss of federal funding.
• The Department of Education is now conducting an investigation into Princeton University because officials there acknowledged that systemic racism exists. (See above, symbolic loss).
• A new ad for US Senator Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) ad says she’s “more conservative than Attilla the Hun” and closes with a joke about executing “scribes.”
• Florida Governor Ron DeSantis proposes new laws making it legal to hit protestors with your car, and also making even presence at certain protests a felony. (See also: Florida’s Kafkaesque rules on franchise restoration for felony convictions)

Cultivating Joy

An iPhone charger is somehow a shelf for a very small cat.
Cat + synth somehow sounding good.
Fig, again.
This may in fact be the best sports headline.
Baby flamingo.
Kitten, or gazing into an abyss of cuteness?
The photo’s a little low-contrast and all but the dog’s name is Fusilli and I love him.
Sound on for this narrative of joy.

Today’s post is about genocide, with a bonus set of links to important articles about economic crisis, climate crisis, and voter suppression. There’s also some nonhorrible stuff in it, like funny Tweets and some very cute dogs, but mostly it’s very upsetting and you shouldn’t read it:

I keep opening this draft and trying to write something nice. I really do. I keep failing. I have written and deleted lengthy paragraphs full of horrific news. But you know all of them. The west coast is on fire. The ocean is teeming with cyclones. The president is openly calling for armed vigilante violence against his opponents.

And there are some very serious allegations about some truly horrific stuff going down in Georgia. The Intercept, The Guardian, and other sources are covering a whistleblower’s report that an ICE detention center is forcing sterilizations on detained women.

I first saw it blowing up on Twitter with links to a blog I’d never heard of before. I didn’t want to share it – it had all the hallmarks of a moral panic – it’s an outrage, and sterilizing the ‘undesirable’ is something we’ve got a LONG history of doing in this country, and yet… also it seemed too horrible to be true.

Excess surgeries? In a shoestring-budget detention center, in a medical system that’s so expensive? In a region where so many hospitals are Catholic that it’s hard for a patient to get a hysterectomy when she actually wants and needs one? That’s like jumping from the knowledge that child abuse exists straight to the 1980s Satanic Panic, isn’t it?

But of course, if a someone can bill for it and be sure they’ll get paid, that’s an incentive.

As more publications have picked it up, the story has gotten more attention and more fact-checking. The whistleblower is no longer anonymous, and the doctor in question seems to have been been identified as one previously involved in a Medicaid/Medicare billing scam that led to a $500,000+ settlement.

It seems like a uniquely late-capitalist American horror. Not for us the totalitarian order to reduce the Uighur population in Xinjiang, but a distributed series of financial incentives that are less widespread and easier to disclaim. Stochastic genocide, if you will: given the way we’ve set up the interlocking shitshows of immigration policy, racism, and health care billing, it was inevitable, even if we couldn’t predict exactly when and where.

Good News for People Who Love Bad News

Here are three items I think are especially important. I left out the bit about the swarms of mosquitoes large enough to kill livestock.

• WaPo: A pandemic, a motel without power, and a potentially terrifying glimpse of Orlando’s future.
• ProPublica: Climate change will force a new American migration.
• Slate: Not only can Florida force people to pay a tax before voting, but the state doesn’t have to tell them how much to pay.

Bonus rage: a thing about cops in LA beating a journalist and lying about it.

If you want to do something, here’s a list of places where your political donation dollar will make the most difference.

Good Tweets (Some Funny, Some Thoughtful)

Man, that Dune trailer was so great I felt like I was the one walking through a desolate landscape, wearing a mask to stay alive, while political machinations that threaten the planet are at work in the background of my life.

Nick Disband the Police Mamatas 🤼‍♂️🏴 (@NMamatas) September 9, 2020

• Watching the neighbor kid try to hide a dent in his mom’s car.
• Civil War Generals as Muppets. A definitive ranking.
• Baaaaad Science shows us new life forms of the deep ocean.
• Breaking down a digital pregnancy test to reveal that it’s identical to the analog tests, but with a tiny camera and processor to interpret the lines.
• Commercials for increasingly dire situations (“Injured by police at a peaceful protest? Advil has your back…”)
• Jeet Heer’s thoughts on Raymond Chandler.

Cultivating Joy

Octopus eggs.
Bananacat.
This nose with a dog attached to it.
This dog working from home.
Pretty sure this dog’s name is Spot.
Dog learns to use a slide at a playground.

I recently came across the Reddit community /r/ShermanPosting, dedicated to sharing hastily-made visual jokes (“shitposting”) insulting the Confederacy. Most were predictably terrible but I did spot his gem:

I don’t remember if we learned much about John Brown in high school. I really don’t. I remember a textbook glossing over the failure of Reconstruction. And I remember another that didn’t quite gloss it over so much, but also didn’t go into a ton of detail. American History classes tended to focus a lot on wars. But I don’t know when I learned about John Brown. I definitely remember learning the Battle Hymn of the Republic in elementary music class, but we definitely didn’t learn what it was originally about, any more than we learned the context of other songs we sang, like “Pick a Bale of Cotton” and “Jimmy Cracked Corn.”

(Nothing says “awkward memory” quite like recalling that you and your almost-exclusively-white classmates routinely sang a song about slaves picking cotton with an enthusiastic “oh lordy” in the chorus. Was it worse that there were in fact a handful of Black kids in the class who probably did know what it was about, and sang along with us anyway, because that’s what you do, go along with the other kids and the teacher, just like I bowed my head in Wednesday morning chapel service and mumbled the prayers that everyone else seemed to automatically know? I can’t tell. I don’t remember. Probably.)

Injustice System

NY cops have a longstanding system of “get out of crime free” cards for their friends & family.

This is what they do to people who don’t have those cards.

This is how they treat other people they like, right before those people drive their police-car-looking civilian car into a crowd.

They also have a long tradition of issuing commemorative “challenge coins,” gaudy unofficial medals that commemorate things that the NPYD officials then have to claim were definitely fine and normal, like police riots, making racist jokes about hunting Rastas in “Fort Jah” or just generally finding brutality and discrimination fucking hilarious.

Here’s one made by a group of New York’s finest to celebrate discovering that a fellow officer had taped discussions of their crimes and was going to report them, so they had him locked up in a mental hospital. It features a rat in a straitjacket. Get it? Hahahaha. Just to celebrate our participation in a crime and its subsequent coverup. You know. For fun.

The Internet Archive has a downloadable 42MB PDF of them. Some are innocuous. Others joke that people with substance abuse problems are zombies who need to be shot in the head. Good times.

Meanwhile, in some untidy spot:

• The Pasco, FL sheriff implemented a pre-crime system to harass “suspicious” people until they left town.
• LAPD shot and killed a man after stopping him for riding his bike wrong.
• Anne Coulter thinks a teenage vigilante murderer ought to be president.
• Among the Boston police recently charged with overtime fraud is a guy featured on TV’s “Boston’s Finest.” NB: this is the Boston Police Department overtime scandal & coverup from 2020, not the Massachusetts State Police overtime scandal & coverup from 2018-2019 which eventually saw 44 troopers caught, 22 disciplined, and as of July 2020, one fired. Totally different.
  • (Extra credit: What would happen if you got caught stealing thousands of dollars a year from your employer?)
• This completely bizarre Portsmouth, VA case in which the chief of police is actually facing some consequences for abuse of authority after trying to bring charges against a state senator for causing injury to a Confederate statue.
  • (Extra credit: White Portsmouth cops threatening Black government officials is apparently part of a longstanding pattern: back in 2016 the (white) sheriff tried to charge the (Black) mayor with a felony in an incident that started with an expired inspection sticker.)
    • (Extra extra credit: Doesn’t it remind you a little bit of the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, when armed white folks overthrew a Black government that was promising to promote equality?)

And for good measure:

In 2015, Kenosha cop Pablo Torres shot and killed a man armed with a bucket. It was his first day back after another shooting 10 days earlier. He had a 200-page disciplinary file, with 9 excessive force complaints. The Kenosha police union paid tribute to him with this billboard. pic.twitter.com/2OBGqoD1Zz

Radley Balko (@radleybalko) September 2, 2020

Amusing Internet Ephemera

• The Tale of the Death Loafers
• The Brother-in-law Who Accidentally Ordered an Entire Truckload of Rice
• Whatever the hell this is

And Molly Hodgdon:

Some days you’re the unsuspecting archeologist, some days you’re the ancient evil.

Molly Hodgdon (@Manglewood) August 31, 2020

Even if you’re not a fan of the music, you might recognize the lyrics from Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing In the Name Of” — “Some of those that work forces, are the ones who burn crosses.” The song was written following the 1992 brutalization of Rodney King by the LAPD, and it comes up every time a cop is revealed to be a white supremacist (or occasionally when a longtime fan finally pays attention to the lyrics and is outraged he’s been listening to leftist rock).

Which is to say, it comes up all the goddamn time.

Police and right-wing government officials in Oregon have a longstanding friendly relationship with right-wing militias (see news from June 2017, June 2019, June 2020 and August 2020) but have recently completely given up on trying to enforce any semblance of law on them – enforcement is reserved for people who want cops to stop murdering people.

And of course, then there’s Kenosha, WI, where police shot Jacob Blake in the back seven times, prompting protests and forcing the AP Stylebook to issue a reminder about how to properly report on police violence:

Avoid the vague “officer-involved” for shootings and other cases involving police. Be specific about what happened. If police use the term, ask: How was the officer or officers involved? Who did the shooting? If the information is not available or not provided, spell that out. — APStylebook (@APStylebook) August 25, 2020

That subtweet didn’t do much, since CBS and other mainstream outlets went on to report that the protests “turned violent,” as though they hadn’t begun with a man getting shot in the back seven times while his children watched.

And of course, because it’s 2020 and because this is how everything goes now, things took a turn for the worse when a white kid who just loves cops showed up with a rifle. Videos from the evening show police chatting with armed militia groups and sharing water with them, and praising them for showing up. Then the kid (allegedly) murdered two people and walked away, and cops let him walk past. He has since been charged with murder, but gosh, how did they not fear for their lives and shoot him in the back seven times?

The chief of police described the incident with a perfect example of the past exonerative tense: “an individual … was involved in the use of firearms to resolve whatever conflict was in place.”

Kenosha had previously reformed its police internal affairs procedures in response to a fatal shooting in 2004. At the time, the New York Times heralded this development as a way to improve trust in law enforcement.

Reader, it did not.

See Also

• Police harass public defender with bogus warrant & arrest threats
• New Jersey police admit to vandalizing car of man who filed complaint
• Memphis union organizer finds police surveillance camera pointed at his house
• Muslim ICE detainees fed pork; prison chaplain says “it is what it is”
• The very existence of Brady Lists – often-secret lists of police officers who commit perjury so much that prosecutors won’t call them as witnesses. Of course, since the lists are secret, the false convictions they perjured themselves for often still stand. And of course the officers still keep their jobs, and sometimes even still get called to testify. (See coverage in Gothamist, Detroit Free Press, Boston.com, WNYC, Christian Science Monitor, and USA Today).

Cultivating Joy

• Caesar the No-Drama Llama is a goddamn delight, y’all, read the whole story
• Poorly Drawn Lines is amazing as always
• This wrinkly dog
• This appears to be a baby panther

Today’s newsletter has a lengthy metaphor about the Gabriel García Márquez’s novel of that title.

Not that things haven’t been terrible for a long time. The Onion, as always, is almost too perfect with the headline “Defensive Chicago Police Officer Perfectly Capable Of Disappearing Protestors Without Help From Homeland Security.” That’s barely a joke, given that Chicago PD got caught operating literal black sites back in ’15. And it’s not just Chicago: 

During grad school I was literally picked up off the street in Harlem by plain clothed police officers who didn’t show me a badge, put me in the back of unmarked van, parked in a single spot for like an hour as I sat in van. Thought I had been kid napped. They been doing this.

Matthew D. Morrison (@DrMaDMo) July 29, 2020

This article on how police unions fight reform pairs well with this article about the Springfield, MA police force, where officers receive no discipline despite verified allegations of criminally abusive behavior and substantial city liability payouts.

And there’s this, whatever the hell this pointlessly cruel self-destructive behavior is. And:

This is going to sound like an exaggeration but it is literally true that instead of funding testing and food and rent and schools and preventing layoffs and evictions republicans proposed a full write-off for the three martini lunch and more money for the F-35.

Brian Schatz (@brianschatz) July 28, 2020

And of course there’s that genocide in China right now – The Atlantic has excellent coverage of just how extreme the surveillance and control in Xinjiang are, and illustrates the growing threat that they will be expanded.

Which leads us to the question: what if these are the good old days?

Cultivating Joy

Be sure to look at all the photos in this Instagram post of a floofy dog on a glass table.

Of course you need another photo of Fig the dachsund.

And these ducklings.

And this kitten.

A red-letter day, marked in red on a calendar, is an important day. A black letter day, then, must be an ordinary day, an unimportant one. There are several recent-ish songs about it, notably by The Cardigans (“Black letter day, all the joy has gone away”) and Frank Black and the Catholics (“When the morning breaks, I wake and see it’s just another long black letter day”).

Those songs came to mind immediately when I saw this article in Wired about work-from-home fatigue sapping our ability to concentrate, focus, or create:

Every day is the same as the next, they say: stuck at home, which is also work, and failing miserably at being productive. They are experiencing a neurological phenomenon, chronic low-grade stress, which was triggered by the coronavirus lockdown, and has sent our bodies into overdrive and is wearing down creativity and concentration.

Vox of course is here with an explainer of the history and future of videochat.

Normal Activities

BLM protests have faded from the headlines, but in Portland, Oregon, unidentified paramilitary forces brought in by the federal government have been snatching protestors off the street for no apparent reason. I was skeptical of that statement at first, because I saw it from Twitter leftists rather than from reputable news sources. But it’s been picked up by Oregon Public Broadcasting and other major news sources.

What’s interesting is that not only is it unclear which of various federal security forces they belong to, but that state and local authorities have asked the feds to cut it out.

The other interesting thing is that the Department of Homeland Security states that these paramilitaries are necessary to stop “violence” which seems to be defined mostly as… graffiti and vandalism.

Anyway, the mayor wants them out, the governor wants them out, they have no actual justification to be there, and they’re still just sort of out there. The Washington Post describes the cracking of skulls:

The protester, armed only with a speaker, stood across the street from a line of officers clad in body armor in downtown Portland, Ore., on Saturday night. When they threw a canister his way, video shows, the protester calmly rolled it away. Seconds later, shots rang out, and he crumbled to the ground with blood gushing from his head.

The Times is on it as well:

Mr. Pettibone said he was terrified and that at no point was he told why he was arrested or detained, or what agency the officers were with.

US Marshalls denied that Mr. Pettibone had been detained. (I repeat: a man was briefly kidnapped by an unidentified paramilitary force and officials deny that it happened).

Duke Sociology professor Kieran Healy notes:

Quite honestly, if the country gets used to this sort of thing as a normal event that can happen to the wrong people, you’re one and a half steps away from people being thrown out of helicopters and into the sea. https://t.co/bIfTV0H4R2

Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) July 17, 2020

He’s not joking, nor are the fascist memelords hoping to give “free helicopter rides” to “globalists” (i.e. Jews) and liberals.

Interestingly, the cops are entirely focused on left-wing violence, despite obvious and clear indications that right-wingers have been instigating a great deal of it.

“Throughout the documents you see counterterrorism agencies using extremism so broadly as to mean virtually anything that encompasses dissent,” Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, told The Intercept. “There are instances in which people engaging in white supremacist violence get the benefit of the doubt as potential lone offenders, while people of color and those who dissent against government injustice are smeared as threats with guilt by association.”

We’re just out here having a normal one, but now it’s on video and harder to ignore. But we’re still ignoring it as best we can. Studiously. Resolutely.

Look harder. The Times has a compilation of NYPD attacks on civilians, but that’s just the ones that the Times deems important and New-York-Centric enough to highlight. There’s a Google doc of crowdsourced horror here. If you’re not yet nauseous, try scrolling through the Reddit board /r/2020PoliceBrutality, featuring such gems as “LAPD beats man in wheelchair.”

Cultivating Joy

You must be kidding. It’s just another long black letter day.

Ever find yourself unable to look away from the horrors of the news cycle? The term of art these days is “doomscrolling” and it’s a bad habit. Our president is a huge fan of war crimes. He’s in a hole and just keeps digging. Oh look, a profile of those gun-waving jerkasses in St. Louis — perhaps unsurprisingly, they have a history of being jerkasses. Hey, the brain drain caused by immigration restrictionism is really kicking into high gear.

OK, here’s one optimistic take — Maeve Higgins writes about living in the US for the Irish Examiner.

Longer reads

Foreign Affairs has twin articles this month titled “How a Great Power Falls Apart” and “How Hegemony Ends.” The first begins with a short summary of the work of underappreciated Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik and his insights into how impending collapse is invisible from the inside. The second is a rather more conventional geopolitical analysis:

Today, those same dynamics have turned against the United States: a vicious cycle that erodes U.S. power has replaced the virtuous cycles that once reinforced it. With the rise of great powers such as China and Russia, autocratic and illiberal projects rival the U.S.-led liberal international system. Developing countries—and even many developed ones—can seek alternative patrons rather than remain dependent on Western largess and support. And illiberal, often right-wing transnational networks are pressing against the norms and pieties of the liberal international order that once seemed so implacable. In short, U.S. global leadership is not simply in retreat; it is unraveling. And the decline is not cyclical but permanent.

The New York Review of Books is excellent on the topic of fascism’s resurgence here:

As militarized police in riot gear and armored vehicles barreled into peaceful protesters in cities across America, and its president emerged from a bunker to have citizens tear-gassed on his way to a church he’d never attended, holding a Bible he’d never read, many people recalled a famous saying often misattributed to Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here: “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” Because Lewis’s novel is the best remembered of the many warnings against American fascism in the interwar years, he has latterly been credited with the admonition, but they are not Lewis’s words.

Interview speaks with Jia Tolentino:

INTERVIEW: What has this pandemic confirmed or reinforced about your view of society?

TOLENTINO: That capitalist individualism has turned into a death cult; that the internet is a weak substitute for physical presence; that this country criminally undervalues its most important people and its most important forms of labor; that we’re incentivized through online mechanisms to value the representation of something (like justice) over the thing itself; that most of us hold more unknown potential, more negative capability, than we’re accustomed to accessing; that the material conditions of life in America are constructed and maintained by those best set up to exploit them; and that the way we live is not inevitable at all.

Cultivating Joy
Gibbons fascinated by hedgehogs
This dog doesn’t look real
This cat hasn’t quite got the hang of being a cat yet
This dog floating in a pool
Blep