Sunday, 26 June 2022 - 10:37pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Big Tech’s Kafkaesque Approach to Censorship Is Driven by an Abiding Contempt for Its Audience — Ryan Grim at the Intercept:
The politics morning show “Rising,” produced by The Hill and which I currently co-host, was suspended by YouTube on Thursday for allegedly violating the platform’s rules around election misinformation. Two infractions were cited: First, the outlet posted the full video of former President Donald Trump’s recent speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on its page. The speech, of course, was chock full of craziness. Second, “Rising” played a minutelong clip of Trump’s commentary on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which included the claim that none of it would have happened if not for a “rigged election.” […] The crime, we learned, that got the show suspended for seven days from its platform was that neither I nor my co-host, Robby Soave, paused to solemnly inform our viewers that Trump’s phrase — “a rigged election” — referred to his ongoing claim that the election was stolen from him in 2020 and that this claim is false. […] The notion that any viewer came away from watching that segment with the mistaken idea that Trump — whom we described as a fraudster and “an actual madman” — had indeed won the election and that it had been stolen from him can’t be taken seriously. It’s absurd, and The Hill is appealing the decision, so far with no success. But YouTube’s approach reflects a broad problem with Big Tech’s approach to censorship: It has nothing but contempt for the viewer. If we had paused to note that Trump’s gripe about his election loss was unfounded, what voter who previously believed that claim would be convinced by my simple rejection of it? And who was the person to begin with who was not previously aware that Trump disputes the election outcome? It might possibly be the most known political fact in America.
- If Trans Kids Are Able to Transition… — Seth Rubin in McSweeney's Internet Tendency:
If trans kids are able to transition, that would mean that I would also need to transition. I would need muscles as big as Dwayne Johnson’s in order to pass as a man, and then I would get cast in a Fast and Furious movie against my will, and then I would get fired from my job for taking three months off to film car stunts. […] If trans kids are able to transition, they’ll expect me to get their pronouns right. And then they’ll expect me to know other things, like how to crack into a high-tech safe, and then I’ll be forced to come out of retirement to join a ragtag crew of misfits on one last heist. It’s not that I don’t support trans kids; it’s just that I don’t know if I have one last heist in me. Go ahead, explain that to the woke mob parked outside my house.
- Biden's SOTU Mentioned the Deficit Six Times :( — Stephanie Kelton:
First, government deficits were the key to ending the pandemic-induced recession. They are the reason the recession was the shortest on record. They are the reason poverty fell to its lowest rate on record in 2020. They are the reason President Biden was able to boast about presiding over an economy that has created more jobs in a single year—6.5 million—than at any time in in the history of America. And they are the reason Fed Chair Powell was able to declare that “we have the strongest economy in the world now.” Instead of making deficit reduction a centerpiece of the president’s agenda, we should embrace the healing power of fiscal policy and work to educate the American people about how deficits can (and must) be used to deliver an economic agenda that tackles the many intersecting crises we face today.
- Bizaro — by Dan Piraro:
- Rejoinder to Robert Skidelsky: Keynes is on the side of the workers — Geoff Tily in the Progressive Economy Forum:
It is all too easy to revert to the orthodoxy of the industrial revolution, that somehow technology alone set us on the trajectory to today’s prosperity. And even ‘Keynesian’ economists impose the same underlying scenario on their gravely diminished Keynes. But Keynes’s theory and the view from the labour movement tells us that causality is the other way around. Advanced technology hasn’t created more prosperity, more prosperity has advanced technology!
- The American Empire self-destructs — Michael Hudson:
The basic assumption of economic and diplomatic forecasting is that every country will act in its own self-interest. Such reasoning is of no help in today’s world. Observers across the political spectrum are using phrases like “shooting themselves in their own foot” to describe U.S. diplomatic confrontation with Russia and allies alike. For more than a generation the most prominent U.S. diplomats have warned about what they thought would represent the ultimate external threat: an alliance of Russia and China dominating Eurasia. America’s economic sanctions and military confrontation has driven them together, and is driving other countries into their emerging Eurasian orbit. […] The recent escalation U.S. sanctions blocking Europe, Asia and other countries from trade and investment with Russia, Iran and China has imposed enormous opportunity costs – the cost of lost opportunities – on U.S. allies. And the recent confiscation of the gold and foreign reserves of Venezuela, Afghanistan and now Russia, along the targeted grabbing of bank accounts of wealthy foreigners (hoping to win their hearts and minds, along with recovery of their sequestered accounts), has ended the idea that dollar holdings or those in its sterling and euro NATO satellites are a safe investment haven when world economic conditions become shaky. […] Trying to force Russia to respond militarily and thereby looking bad to the rest of the world is turning out to be a stunt aimed simply at demonstrating Europe’s need to contribute more to NATO, buy more U.S. military hardware and lock itself deeper into trade and monetary dependence on the United States. The instability that this has caused is turning out to have the effect of making the United States look as threatening as Russia.
- Matt Wuerker:
- How Did This Many Deaths Become Normal? — Ed Yong in the Atlantic:
While epidemics flow downward into society’s cracks, medical interventions rise upward into its peaks. New cures, vaccines, and diagnostics first go to people with power, wealth, education, and connections, who then move on; this explains why health inequities so stubbornly persist across the decades even as health problems change. AIDS activism, for example, lost steam and resources once richer, white Americans had access to effective antiretroviral drugs, Steven Thrasher told me, leaving poorer Black communities with high rates of infection. “It’s always a real danger that things get worse once the people with the most political clout are okay,” Thrasher said. Similarly, pundits who got vaccinated against COVID quickly started arguing against overcaution and (inaccurately) predicting the pandemic’s imminent end. The government did too, framing the crisis as solely a matter of personal choice, even as it failed to make rapid tests, high-quality masks, antibody cocktails, and vaccines accessible to the poorest groups. The CDC’s latest guidelines continue that trend, as my colleague Katherine J. Wu has argued. Globally, the richer north is moving on while the poorer south is still vulnerable and significantly unvaccinated. All of this “shifts the burden to the very groups experiencing mass deaths to protect themselves, while absolving leaders from creating the conditions that would make those groups safe,” Courtney Boen, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. “It’s a lot easier to say that we have to learn to live with COVID if you’re not personally experiencing the ongoing loss of your family members.”
- Don’t Say Straight — Devorah Blachor in McSweeney's Internet Tendency:
Don’t say straight! When kids are small and impressionable, they believe the world is full of possibilities. One kid might want to grow up and live in a house with their two best friends and make bead loom handicrafts, for example. Another might want to create a universe structured around their favorite manga comic. Still another might want to solve crimes by leading a pack of emergency service specialty puppies. It would be a shame to expose children to heterosexual relationships so early and ruin their chances for happiness and fulfillment. Look where all this heterosexual madness has gotten us! Society is breaking down. The heterosexual agenda is responsible for what happened when 62 million Americans voted for a man accused by dozens of women of sexual assault, and who bragged about assaulting women to other men. Kids are way too young to learn about that without becoming traumatized. Let’s protect our children from this terrible knowledge so they can feel safe, and while we’re at it, let’s make sure they don’t know about the existence of Brett Kavanaugh either. What kind of twisted mind would want our children to learn about these degenerates?
Sunday, 19 June 2022 - 6:32pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Farewell to P.J. O’Rourke, America’s Only (Semi-)Funny Conservative — Jon Schwarz at the Intercept:
The conservative writer P.J. O’Rourke, author of 20 books, died on Tuesday at age 74. For decades O’Rourke appeared constantly on television and radio shows because they always needed someone both right-wing and funny, and he was the only such person available. […] if we’re being honest — and O’Rourke would probably say we should be, even the day after he died — we should acknowledge that his prominence was fundamentally due to him being graded on a curve. Conservatism has never lent itself to being funny and never will. Saying “This is as good as humans can manage so let’s never change the structure of power” will generally only make the powerful laugh. But the “liberal” media had to book someone like him, and there he was.
- The cryptovangelist — This Modern World, by Tom Tomorrow:
- Sandy Hook, Uvalde and the Exploitation of American Paranoia — Micah Sifry:
A 2013 poll by Fairleigh Dickinson University found that a quarter of all Americans thought that the facts about Sandy Hook were being hidden, and an additional 11 percent were unsure. Joe Uscinski, a University of Miami political science professor who studies conspiracy theories, tells Williamson that according to his research, as of 2020, one-fifth of all Americans believed that every school shooting was faked. And not just school shootings; Uscinski says virtually all high-profile mass shootings draw this level of doubt. As a Politifact article on the ongoing skepticism about mass shootings points out, “Search queries for the term ‘false flag’ over the past five years have spiked during mass shootings, including those at Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs (November 2015) and the Pulse nightclub in Orlando (June 2016). Interest peaked during the week of the Las Vegas shooting in October 2017, which inspired widespread false flag conspiracies. And searches for the term shot up again after the El Paso and Dayton attacks.” One out of every five of us is living in another reality, where mass shootings can’t be real.
- “Prove to the World You’ve Lost Your Son”:
How a Tulsa grandmother became a vicious Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist—in her own words — Elizabeth Williamson in Slate:
Joe Uscinski, the political science professor, said that in most research, partisanship and ideology are less predictive of conspiratorial beliefs than are “dark personality traits.” People who embrace and defend “antisocial” conspiracy theories like Sandy Hook and QAnon often exhibit traits that psychologists call the “Dark Triad”: narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, meaning the willingness to manipulate others to gain a certain result. Once isolated, now they bond online, deriving enhanced status and self-esteem as social media rewards them with likes, shares, and more conspiracy content. The survival of these virtual communities depends on their members’ defending these falsehoods, sometimes with confrontation and violence.
- Doonesbury — by Gary Trudeau:
- The year Australian progressives abandoned the national commitment to full employment — Bill Mitchell:
At present, the unemployment rate in Australia is 4.2 per cent and falling. If the rate of new immigrants remains low for a while as our external borders open, then it is likely the unemployment rate will fall into the 3 per cent range soon. What people are learning is that the claims made by mainstream economists that full employment was anything between 5 and 8 per cent (at various times to suit their arguments) was a lie. It just suited their ideological agenda and flawed theoretical framework to maintain that narrative. Of course, underemployment is still very high, which means that even if the unemployment rate falls further, we are still a way from being at full employment. But with prices accelerating at present, we are seeing calls for government to pursue an austerity fiscal approach, which would prevent the unemployment rate falling further. We have been here before. Today, I document a major turning point in Australian politics, when the Labor government became the first to abandon the national government’s commitment to full employment, a policy approach that had defined the post Second World War period of prosperity. So … back to 1974 we go.
- The Neoliberal War on Dissent in the West — Glenn Greenwald:
This last decade of history is crucial to understand the dissent-eliminating framework that has been constructed and implemented in the West. This framework has culminated, thus far, with the stunning multi-pronged attacks on Canadian truckers by the Trudeau government. But it has been a long time in the making, and it is inevitable that it will find still-more extreme expressions. It is, after all, based in the central recognition that there is mass, widespread anger and even hatred toward the neoliberal ruling class throughout the West. Trump, Brexit and the rise of far-right parties in places where their empowerment was previously unthinkable — including Germany and France — is unmistakable proof of that. Rather than sacrifice some of the benefits of inequality that have generated much of that rage or placate or appease it with symbolic concessions, Western neoliberal elites have instead opted for force, a system that crushes all forms of dissent as soon as they emerge in anything resembling an effective, meaningful or potent form.
- Putin’s Century of Betrayal speech — Branko Milanovic:
Vladimir Putin’s speech on 21 February 2022 at the occasion of the recognition of Donbas and Lugansk republics is one of the most extraordinary political speeches of the present time. It consists of more than 6,000 words, and it was delivered over 55 minutes without the help of a single piece of paper or without a single hesitation. To the extent that one can judge there was no teleprompter either. It is a speech that lays bare, and intends to do so, Putin’s own philosophy of history. It covers the past one hundred years of Russia’s history. It gives one, not unreasonable, but very narrow version of that history, where historical events with multiple causes and multiple meanings are simplified to a single cause and single meaning. It is a form of “J’accuse” speech that tells, according to Putin, a story of a century of betrayals of Russia: by Communists, by Russia’s own elites, and by Russia’s pretended friends.
- The Oatmeal — by Matthew Inman:
Sunday, 12 June 2022 - 6:52pm
This… Sigh. Here's some stuff to read:
- Who owns Einstein? The battle for the world’s most famous face — Simon Parkin in the Guardian:
Albert Einstein died in 1955. In article 13 of his last will and testament, he pledged that his “manuscripts, copyrights, publication rights, royalties … and all other literary property” would, upon the deaths of his secretary, Helen Dukas, and stepdaughter, Margot Einstein, pass to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an institution that Einstein cofounded in 1918. Einstein made no mention in his will about the use of his name or likeness on books, products or advertisements. Today, these are known as publicity rights, but at the time Einstein was writing his will, no such legal concept existed. When the Hebrew University took control of Einstein’s estate in 1982, however, publicity rights had become a fierce legal battleground, worth millions of dollars each year. […] Despite the university’s repeated successes in taking on alleged infringers, critics remain unconvinced that Einstein would have wanted any of this. In life, he resisted attempts to commercialise his identity. Why would he have changed this position in death? One American law professor, writing in the New York Times, described the institution and others like it as “the new grave robbers”. A lawyer for Time Inc called agents acting for the university a “group of tribal headhunters”. The manufacturer of a children’s novelty Einstein costume is among the scores of businesses to have protested against the university’s position, telling a reporter, “[The university] cannot ‘inherit’ rights from Albert Einstein which did not exist at the time of his death.” The university, meanwhile, claims it has not only the legal right, but also a moral duty to protect Einstein from those who would besmirch his name with dubious associations.
- Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
- The Cantillon Effect and Stock Market Crashes — Matt Stoller:
Financial markets are critical in any free society, because they enable flexibility in production and distribution. Without the ability to borrow money, speculate, and go bankrupt, it is very difficult if not impossible to systemize innovation, kill off old and inefficient firms, or cater to consumer tastes. Yet, finance should be a small part of the economy, because speculation isn’t intrinsically valuable. Banks should serve production, providing capital to ventures that will eventually generate income. Sometimes, however, financiers are able to take control of production, and that leads to wild inefficiencies, speculation purely on asset price inflation, and eventually authoritarian politics. As economist John Maynard Keynes wryly put it, “When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done.” That’s where we are now. Compensation for financial intermediaries has historically cost about 2% of GDP; today it’s at 9%. To put it differently, a small number of people are collecting hundreds of billions of dollars in fees running private equity funds, but private equity is no better (and probably worse) in terms of returns than public equity indexes. This is no way to run a country. In a society with a coherent social vision, people would get rich investing in baby formula production, or medical dye, or generic pharmaceuticals, all of which are in shortage. But instead, money has been flooding into cryptocurrencies, weird obvious scams like SPACs, and a manic art market. Christie’s, for instance, just sold a famous Andy Warhol painting, a 1964 silk-screen of Marylin Monroe. The work went for $195 million to an anonymous bidder, which is the size of the annual budget for a small city, like Norman, Oklahoma. When baby formula is in shortage and art markets are insane, the economy has clearly become the byproduct of a casino. […] Essentially, if you own assets or intangible capital assets, you’re doing great. If you rely on your income making or moving something, you’re not. Hence the shortage in stuff that needs to be made or moved like baby formula, and the surplus in bullshit like cryptocurrency.
- xkcd — by Randall Munroe:
- Male economists are freaking out over a NYT profile — Emily Peck at Axios:
A handful of prominent male economists, including former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, are freaking out — mostly on Twitter — about a weekend New York Times profile of economist Stephanie Kelton, known for her work on Modern Monetary Theory, or MMT. Why it matters: This Twitter-based econ fight is about more than one economist. It's an argument over a natural economic experiment — the U.S. government spending unprecedented sums to keep the economy from free-falling during COVID. And the gender dynamics — male economists piling on against a female economist and a female journalist, Times' reporter Jeanna Smialek, in ways distinctive from typical academic arguments — look terrible here.
- This Modern World — by Tom Tomorrow:
- The Rules of Commas — Ginny Hogan at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency:
You’ve probably used too many commas. In fact, I would go so far as to say you definitely have. As the last stage in your editing process, delete half of them. It doesn’t matter which ones. […] Commas should go in between items in a long list of things. If you don’t have a long list of things, stick the commas in between cushions on your couch. Someplace where they’ll be easy to find later. No one will care if you forget to use a comma unless you’re a woman with a Twitter account.
- The Oatmeal — by Matthew Inman:
- Elon Musk Reveals Jaw-Dropping Ignorance About Social Security — Jon Schwarz at the Intercept:
“Unfunded obligations” is the difference between Social Security’s current projected income and its current projected promised benefits. If these projections are correct, taxes will have to be raised by $60 trillion or benefits will have to be cut by that amount, or some combination of the two. But then there’s the “through the infinite horizon” part. This means that $60 trillion is Social Security’s unfunded obligations between now and the end of time. In other words, we don’t have to come up with $60 trillion right this second, as implied by Musk’s comparison to the present-day U.S. economy. We have an infinite amount of time to pay for this — or more conservatively, 5 billion years, when the sun will turn into a red giant and consume the Earth, at which point we’ll have bigger problems than Social Security. […] A reasonable person might ask whether humans can accurately predict the future over the next hundred, thousand, or million years. The answer, of course, is that we can’t. So why does the Social Security report do it? The infinite horizon number was first included in the annual Social Security report in 2003, thanks to pressure from right-wing wonks who hoped to see the program cut or dismantled.
- Doonesbury — by Garry Trudeau:
Sunday, 22 May 2022 - 12:31pm
This month, I have been mostly starting my life over from scratch (aka #ThePlan):
- “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting,” Ten Years On — John Scalzi:
Ten years ago this week I thought I would write a piece to offer a useful metaphor for straight white male privilege without using the word “privilege,” because when you use the word “privilege,” straight white men freak out, like, I said then, “vampires being fed a garlic tart.” Since I play video games, I wrote the piece using them as a metaphor. And thus “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is” was born and posted.
- Cartoon Copy Shop — by Keith Knight:
- DeSantis Betting That Republicans Want a Stupider Version of Trump — Andy Borowitz:
According to a source close to DeSantis, the Florida Governor has decided to “run to the stupid of Trump” to pick up the support of voters who now consider the former President too intellectual. “When Trump recently said that he got the booster, that was the last straw,” the source said. “In the eyes of a lot of Republicans, Trump is basically Fauci now.”
- Censorship By Algorithm Does Far More Damage Than Conventional Censorship — Caitlin Johnstone:
Arguably the most significant political moment in the United States since 9/11 and its immediate aftermath was when Democrats and their allied institutions concluded that Donald Trump’s election was a failure not of establishment politics but of establishment narrative control. From that point onwards, any online media creator who consistently disputes the narratives promoted by the same news outlets who’ve lied to us about every war has seen their view counts and new follows slashed. By mid-2017 independent media outlets were already reporting across ideological lines that algorithm changes from important sources of viewership like Google had suddenly begun hiding their content from people who were searching for the subjects they reported on.
- This Modern World — by Tom Tomorrow:
- As Florida Attempts to Make it Illegal, an Argument for the Sacred Work of White Discomfort — Robert P. Jones in Religion Dispatches:
The beloved hymn, “Amazing Grace,” captures this dynamic. In the very first stanza, a Christian singing that hymn identifies as “a wretch” in need of salvation. The familiar refrains—“I once was lost, but now I’m found/Was blind but now I see”—begin with lament and confession. Grace is amazing precisely because God accepts us despite our own shortcomings. But we don’t come to salvation, nor do we grow in discipleship, without honesty and this experience of exquisite discomfort. Moreover, the sacred role of discomfort isn’t limited to sin in individual hearts. The Bible is replete with language about the sins of one generation being visited down three or four generations (Exodus 20; Numbers 14; Deuteronomy 5; Jeremiah 32). This transmission isn’t mystical but is both genetic and cultural. Just as abuse begets abuse and addiction begets addiction, prejudice begets prejudice.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — by Zach Weinersmith:
Sunday, 1 May 2022 - 11:40am
This month, I have been mostly working on #ThePlan:
- Bizarro — by Dan Piraro:
- Your Man in Saughton Jail Part 1 — Craig Murray:
Once in the yard, the new prisoners (who on this occasion arrived individually, not all part of the same case), immediately started to call out to the windows of Glenesk block, shouting out for friends. “Hey, Jimmy! Jimmy! It’s me Joe! I am back. Is Paul still in? What’s that? Gone tae Dumfries? Donnie’s come in? That’s brilliant.” The realisation dropped, to be reinforced every day, that Saughton jail is a community, a community where the large majority of the prisoners all know each other. That does not mean they all like each other – there are rival gangs, and enmities. But prison is a routine event in not just their lives, but the lives of their wider communities. Those communities are the areas of deprivation of Edinburgh. Edinburgh is a city of astonishing social inequality. It contains many of the areas in the bottom 10% of multiple social deprivation in Scotland (dark red on the map below). These are often a very short walk from areas of great affluence in the top 10% (dark blue on the map). Of course, few people make that walk. But I recommend a spell in Saughton jail to any other middle class person who, like myself, was foolish enough to believe that Scotland is a socially progressive country.
- Non Sequitur — by Wiley Miller:
- I never saw exceptional “hard work” or “intelligence” among the members of the class I was born into — Meghan Bell in Passage:
An economic system based on ruthless competition inevitably fetishizes extreme skill and effort, thus incentivizing monopolistic and gatekeeping behaviours. This has led to an increasingly polarized labour market, consisting of what author Daniel Markovits, in his book “The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite,” refers to as wage-stagnated “gloomy” jobs and high-paying “glossy” jobs, such as those described above, which, by design, displace middle-class labour (Markovits uses as an example loan officers who were deskilled by financial technology; a way to climb the wealth ladder is to design or implement technologies that wipe out jobs a few rungs down). The concentration of decision-making power in fewer hands actually lowers overall production within companies, because the monopolization of power and technical knowledge diminishes the potential productivity of all the workers who are pushed to the bottom. In other words, “merit” is not about talent, ability or production so much as it’s about narcissistic control — think of the Wall Street bankers who were bailed out after the 2008 crisis because they were perceived as too big to fail.
- What Scott Morrison’s really saying by aligning with Pentecostals — Roderick St George in Pearls and Irritations:
It must be clearly understood that according to Morrison and his Christian ilk there is a literal spiritual war being waged over Australia – a war between good and evil, a war being fought in the heavens between angelic and demonic powers. Morrison’s own language confirms this as evidenced by his speech at the Australian Christian Churches conference on the Gold Coast in April. Social media, he warns is a, “weapon used by the evil one.” (I am not making unsubstantiated accusations; I was myself indoctrinated by Morrison-style church culture for many years.) This ardent belief system explains – in part – why Morrison, as immigration minister, introduced a host of dictatorial and ruthless changes to Australia’s immigration policy, the like of which this country has never known. But, as an Evangelical Christian he was doing God’s work, keeping “those types” out of this Christian nation. One of his first moves was to bar all media coverage of the maritime arrivals on Christmas Island, making it easier to implement his cruel and unusual new edicts. Morrison’s claim to be called by God “for a time and a season” might be a recent revelation to the Australian public, but make no mistake; he likely believes this mandate was “given” to him many years ago.
- Dinosaur Comics — by Ryan North:
- America is now in fascism’s legal phase — Jason Stanley in the Guardian:
Chapter 9 of Carter G Woodson’s 1933 book, The Mis-Education of the Negro, is called Political Education Neglected. In it, Woodson describes how history was taught “to enslave the Negroes’ mind”, by whitewashing the brutality of slavery and the actual roots and causes of racial disparities. In Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, Jarvis Givens documents the strategies Black educators used to convey real history in the constricted environments of Jim Crow schools, strategies that, tragically, will again become necessary for educators to take up again today. Fascist ideology strictly enforces gender roles and restricts the freedom of women. For fascists, it is part of their commitment to a supposed “natural order” where men are on top. It is also integral to the broader fascist strategy of winning over social conservatives who might otherwise be unhappy with the endemic corruption of fascist rule. Far-right authoritarian leaders across the world, such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, have targeted “gender ideology”, as nazism targeted feminism. Freedom to choose one’s role in society, when it goes against a supposed “natural order”, is a kind of freedom fascism has always opposed.
Sunday, 10 April 2022 - 10:14am
This month, I have been mostly reading:
- Bloom County — by Berkeley Breathed:
- Art Spiegelman Loses His Glasses: As the latest fight over Maus erupts, its artist-creator searches for his spectacles. — Abraham Riesman at Vulture spins what appears to have been a very short interview into a slightly longer article:
As Spiegelman sees it, the real reason for the board’s decision may be that the narrative of Maus offers no catharsis, let alone comfort, to readers. There are no saviors. No one is redeemed. The characters — Spiegelman’s family — remain the imperfect people they were to begin with. “It’s a very not-Christian book,” Spiegelman says. “Vladek didn’t become better as a result of his suffering. He just got to suffer. They want to teach the Holocaust. They just want a friendlier Holocaust to teach.”
- Mum & Dad Bank to keep interest rates steady at 0% — Callum Wratten at the Shovel:
Despite increasing anxiety about inflation and out-of-control housing costs, the Bank of Mum and Dad announced this morning that they will keep interest rates at 0%. It is the 110th month that the central bank has kept rates unchanged. Bank of Mum & Dad Governor, Mum, said the decision wasn’t made lightly. “We looked very carefully at all the data, the impact that it was having on the cost of living for working Australians. But then we thought about our little baby boy, the apple of eye, our little prince, and how he just wanted an investment property so badly.”
- Bizarro — by Wayno and Piraro:
- Why does Australia still sell weapons to human-rights abuser Saudi Arabia? — Dechlan Brennan in Pearls and Irritations:
In 2016 the UN reported that “Since the beginning of this conflict in Yemen, weddings, marketplaces, hospitals, schools – and now mourners at a funeral – have been hit, resulting in massive civilian casualties and zero accountability for those responsible.” […] In 2018 Australia sought to break into the top 10 defence-exporting countries. Various Australian defence ministers have courted more weaponry sales towards both Saudi Arabia and the UAE. The Australian government does not provide data on where its weapons sales go —only mapping it in regions. Unhelpfully, they lump the Middle East in with Asia. It is shocking is that Australia is involved at all. […] Other abuses perpetrated by the Saudi military include “civilian populations being deliberately starved, medical supplies being blocked, rape, murder, enforced disappearances, torture, and forcing children to fight.” Human Rights Watch (HRW) stated that Australia risked complicity in war crimes if it continued to supply the Saudi-led coalition with arms.
- Those Who Support Internet Censorship Lack Psychological Maturity — Caitlin Johnstone:
Arguably the most significant political moment in the US since 9/11 and its aftermath was when liberal institutions decided that Trump’s 2016 election was not a failure of status quo politics but a failure of information control, which just so happened to align perfectly with the agendas of the ruling power structure to control the dominant narratives about what’s going on in the world. We saw this exemplified in 2017 when Google, Facebook and Twitter were called before the Senate Judiciary Committee and instructed to come up with a strategy “to prevent the fomenting of discord”. […] The danger of this is obvious to anyone who isn’t a stunted emotional infant. The danger of government-tied monopolistic tech platforms controlling worldwide speech far outweighs the danger of whatever voice you might happen to dislike at any given moment. The only way for this not to be clear to you is if you are so psychologically maladjusted that you can’t imagine anything bad coming from your personal preferences for human expression being imposed upon society by the most powerful institutions on earth.
- The K Chronicles — by Keith Knight:
What I Did on my Holidays, Part Two
You would think there'd be somewhere open for breakfast in Chinatown on a Saturday morning. You'd be wrong. What are noodles for, if not for breakfast?
I wanted to pick up a hat from Paddy's Markets, just behind my hotel, before setting out. Apart from fruit and veg stalls, they're not open till ten o'clock, so I and my bare old bonce brave the ultraviolet unprotected.
At the north end of Chinatown is Sydney Trades Hall, nowhere near as grand as the Melbourne one. The ground floor used to be the Trades Hall Inn, but no longer. I love political activism that you can do from a pub. In here I used to sip beer and nod earnestly in the cause of stopping the introduction of the GST (Australia's VAT), and the Iraq War (or at least Australia's involvement therein).
On the heels of these stunning triumphs for the mildly-organised left, I remember somebody asking Ian Rintoul what he thought the next urgent issue would be, and he said it was refugee rights. I found this hard to credit. Who on earth could object to taking in a few refugees every now and then? In my defense, it was a slightly more innocent time.
Further up (latitudinally) and down (geologically, as the land descends to meet the harbour) Sussex Street, things get grimly prosperous.
It's all grand gaudy f-off facades, designed to destroy the streetscape, plus the grimy parking garages of posh hotels disgorging their contents with a clanking of grates and barriers. It's as ugly as sin. From my own much more modest hotel, you at least step out onto a living street. Nobody walks down here. It's death by wealth.
Nothing to see but the occasional ghost of a more productive past. I wonder what these buildings were for. I used to work down in this part of town thirty years ago and probably walked past them hundreds of times, but I can't remember.
I get to Circular Quay to meet my family with enough time to purchase/regret a breakfast snack at McDonalds. By the water, the buskers have yet to set up, but there are huge plastic tigers which I just realise I've been seeing all over town. Oh, right; it's Chinese New Year. I don't think I look at the things you're supposed to look at. Quite pleased about that.
The family thing works out as family things do. It's nice. I'm not used to seeing all these people without my dad in the background, either benignly amused or becoming tetchy about things not progressing according to schedule. From here on, it looks like I'm standing in the background by myself. I miss him.
Formalities done, we've enough time before lunch to wander round the Rocks Markets, which seems to be suffering from Covid. Not a lot of international tourists, and pretty slim pickings from a reduced number of stalls. Can't find a hat.
There's a stall selling coins. I expect to find a selection of pennies, ha-pennies, and shillings — Mum says she still has a huge jar of them at home — but holy cow! Vespasian! Trajan!
If I had a few hundred bucks I had no use for (ha!), I would be tempted. But then my inner Indiana Jones kicks in: These belong in a museum! Ideally, in a huge glass pickle jar.
My family is chemically gaseous. That is to say they expand to occupy the available space. We've a booking for lunch, but now it's down to my brother's teenage girls and their mobile phone skills to corral everybody. I notice with some envy that a couple of nephews have been lounging in the Mercantile Hotel for a while.
We have lunch at the German restaurant which nearly twenty years earlier hosted my wedding reception. A bit of icing on top of the grief cake just for me. Still, sausages and sauerkraut and a couple of glasses of quite agreeable rosé later, I'm feeling bulletproof.
Half the party head for market stalls promising gelato and chocolate, and the other half head for the Orient Hotel. I'm with the latter, sipping beer at a picnic table on the street, getting sunburnt. Wish I had a hat.
They're all going to miss their express train back down to the Shire. Not everybody makes the rendezvous point back at the quay at the appointed time. My sister volunteers to find/join her two errant sons at whatever pub they happen to be holed up in — no rush; still plenty of time. My father would be beside himself at this stage. Greatly amused, I give the assembled remnants of my family a cheery wave, and I'm free to enjoy a whole afternoon and evening in the big city, Mary Tyler-Moore style.
I just need a hat to fling in the air.
I make a beeline for the Paragon Hotel, the former public bar of which is now the McDonalds where I had my self-inflicted breakfast. A quarter of a century ago I went in there on a Sunday afternoon and was surprised to hear Bix Beiderbecke playing as muzak. There was a jazz band setting up in the back corner, so I stayed.
They were blistering. Hard-edged 1920s/30s Chicago-style jazz. Absolutely magical. I was mesmerised by the clarinet player, a strikingly tall, thin, grey, birdlike fellow who didn't seem to register that he had an audience at all, and just fidgeted away in his own little world. He's surely long dead now, like the pub. So it goes. The half of the back bar where they played is now for gambling zombies, and the tiny slice of pub remaining between that and McDonalds is pretty dismal. I sit outside and watch the Sydney Bin Chooks going about their business, all thin and birdlike with long black protuberances.
At the Matrix Woman In Red Fountain in Martin Place, there are white limos reversing off the street and up to the fountain. A bunch of burly blokes in white suits get out and prepare for photographs with the cars. There's also a young woman, in a big white dress. Not sure why she's there. She's holding a bunch of flowers. I expect a bit of skin and a posy is a nice counterpoint to the manliness of the cars and the blokes. Very tasteful.
At my old beloved Edinburgh Castle on Pitt Street, I employ the soon-to-be-fashionable medium of the pub lavatory selfie to immortalise the harrowing (for even the most firm-footed drunk) stairs leading down to the gents. Once upon a time I opened the door at the top of these stairs, saw a crumpled body at the bottom, concerned people gathered around, and heard approaching sirens. Even I, dim as I am, almost immediately clocked to what had just transpired. Thought I'd best go back to my beer and give it a minute.
I take some more self-consciously zany selfies (are there any other kind?) on my way back up to Haymarket, as I'm now feeling the Mary Tyler-Moore vibe.
It doesn't even occur to me that I should plug myself into a podcast, lest one or two of my remaining brain cells get accustomed to slacking off, which I can ill afford. There's enough to see and hear to keep my synapses crackling.
There's a vast, interconnected floating world of clean, gleaming shopping malls running the length of the inner city that I don't enter. In the nineties I became concerned about the state of dereliction that the city appeared to be falling into. As I only ever went into pubs, bookshops, record shops and newsagents, I didn't really notice the metastisizing private-public space below, above, and beside the public space. I was conscious of it insofar as it all linked into the underground railway station concourses, but at some point I realised that it was possible to walk the roughly eight kilometres from Central Station to near Circular Quay without ever seeing daylight, or a homeless person. Now I suppose there are several routes.
So many homeless people, obviously long term. The mattresses, tents, etc. are new to me. Fortunately there are so many derelict shop doorways and alcoves now that the beautiful people live in their floating world. One could get really settled in as a homeless person in Sydney, were it not for the roaming packs of Nazis in the wee small hours. Damn. There goes that Mary Tyler-Moore feeling.
Finally get back to Paddy's Markets, thinking I'll pick up a hat and maybe some cheap clothes. It could always be relied upon for a Bob Marley t-shirt, or something similarly subversive.
Woah! Okay, well. I'd never say never, but not for everyday, and certainly not for visiting my mother tomorrow morning. Apart from the range of mild fetish gear, which is new, Paddy's Markets is a shadow of its former self, but then it always was.
I did however find a hat. It hurt to put it on. Definitely sunburned. Went upstairs (through the mall) to the Market City Tavern, which I should hate because it's so artificial and built for — rather than just retrofitted for — gambling, but I do love the balcony and its glorious view of nothing in particular. I shall have to carry on up George Street to Broadway to get some cheap clothes, because unlike all the teenage boys I work with in my supermarket, I cannot bear to wear the same shirt two days running.
On the way out I take the time to pose for another pub lavatory selfie.
These are the hottest new thing, honestly. I'll be selling NFTs shortly.
If that's not a natural cliffhanger, I don't know what is. Will he get the shirt, or turn up for morning tea at Mum's a bit whiffy? How bad is the sunburn, and what will the morning shower feel like? (Spoiler alert: it really hurt.) And will the latex Wonder Woman costume fit comfortably?
Continued in part three.
What I Did on my Holidays, Part One
TL;DR: I drank. A lot.
We begin on Friday morning at Sawtell station. Yes, that's all of it. No bustling phalanx of porters, no guards or ticket collectors, no dining room serving Devonshire teas, no passengers apart from yours truly. This is not a consequence of Covid; this is normal.
In fact I'm astonished to find that I'm actually able to get the train, rather than a replacement bus service, as was the case for my last trip down to Sydney. That was a nightmare. A tin can full of hillbillies, knees hard up against the seat in front of you, a dozen excuse mes, sorrys, and thank yous between your seat and the stinking lavatory. Thank God I don't have to go through that again.
The train arrives dead on time, stopping for nobody but little old me. I'm drunk with the power to halt an entire train single-handed.
There are some cows to look at. Which is nice. You don't get cows from a car window now that it's all motorway between Coffs and Sydney.
I catch up on podcasts. Really enjoyed this one with Bill Mitchell wandering off core Modern Monetary Theory into politics a bit more than usual.
Not that many people in my carriage, so I'm not bumping elbows with anybody. No screaming babies, and the only yammering hillbillies are some distance away and only going as far as Port Macquarie for a music festival. No prizes for guessing what genre of music it is.
The situation appears altogether too good. I'm prepared for the nine hour trip: a packet of pork scratchings and three plastic soft drink bottles. One is cool from the fridge, another cold from a few hours in the freezer, a third frozen overnight in the freezer. Your classic alcoholics' Goldilocks strategy: take each one in series when it's just right.
My patented blend: cardboard box wine, a splosh of fruit juice to disguise the fact that it's box wine, and if I'm feeling fancy perhaps some herbal tea but otherwise just water to get it down to somewhere approaching beer strength. I hear that in Mediterranean countries it's common to drink watered down wine with meals. Obviously not good quality wine, but with the horrible stuff I can afford to drink, there are no rules.
Well, there is one rule: no BYO drink on NSW Transport vehicles. But that rule obviously only applies to amateurs, not responsible professionals. Moreover, as I trust I need not stress with too much stressiness: nine hours! There is too much Australia. We need a good tailor to take it in. It's really quite baggy.
While looking for an unoccupied lavatory, I find that the front two carriages are completely empty. It actually is a wonder that I'm not on a bus.
It's gone noon, and the entertainment value of the cows is diminishing, so I crack open bottle number one. Bracing, but not technically abusive. You would be within your rights to demand your money back, but no court in the land would award you damages.
We stop to let a northbound passenger train go past. There's only a single track running along the East coast of Australia, and few sidings where trains can pass each other. Accordingly, everything is very tightly scheduled. If your train is more than a few minutes late, it's missed it's "window" and is obliged to make way for everything else. So you get later, and later, and later.
As a natural pessimist, I assumed that in the unlikely event that the train turned up at all, that this would be the case (as it had been on previous trips). From which it logically follows that the scheduled eight PM arrival time in Sydney could only be the product of pure unicorns-and-rainbows thinking. So I had the perfect excuse to book a hotel room rather than change trains for a further fifty minute suburban trip down to the family estate in the Shire.
The ostensible purpose of my journey is to partake in a solemn ceremony involving scattering my late father's ashes from the deck of a Sydney Harbour water taxi. I'm not entirely convinced that feeding the fish of Port Jackson is the sort of thing he'd have been enthusiastic about — at least not in this capacity — but my mother seems to think it a good idea.
I really haven't a clue about the propriety of such things, so I'm more than happy to go along with whatever wiser heads than mine consider appropriate, but I would rather not go back to the old house. I stayed a few days there on my last Sydney trip a couple of years ago as a sort of dare to myself, wandering about the unpaved suburban streets where I spent my childhood, thinking that as a forty-[mumble] year old grown-up I was by now surely immune to the enervating effects of that nasty, violent, ignorant, bigoted environment. (Not the house itself, mind; my parents are/were almost entirely harmless. It's the ghosts milling around it that I cannot exorcise.) I ended up in a massive funk which persisted for weeks afterward.
Also I'm now of a certain age, and I appear to have gone through The Change. I get terribly emotional about things. I must say it's quite unexpected and embarrassing. In this condition I couldn't stand spending even a couple of nights in a house where my father would now consistently fail to be where I expect to find him. I'd be a wreck. So I told my mum that, on the grounds that I would be feeling very much like just flopping into bed on arriving at Sydney Central, rather than embarking on a further long commute, a hotel made perfect sense. I'd meet everybody in town the next day, and pop down for a visit the day after. She seemed satisfied with that excuse.
In fact things are going altogether too well. The train remains stubbornly on schedule. As we get into Wauchope, mobile phone signal returns, and I get an SMS. The train for my return journey has been cancelled and replaced with a coach service. Ah, equilibrium has been restored.
Quaint little country towns flash by, as do the podcasts. The Something About the Beatles podcast has a few episodes of first reactions to the Peter Jackson doco based on the footage and audio recorded in January 1969 for the vague project which the following year became the film/album Let it Be. Titled the Musician’s Get Back, I expected the podcast to be a trainspotter's guide to vintage musical/audio equipment and a complete yawn, but it's (mostly) about group dynamics and those four (or five, or six, or seven) guys who love each other, despite and because of everything. I get quite teary (The Change again - and maybe the wine).
The country around the Hunter Valley is gorgeous. You don't see any of it from the motorway. Rolling green hills which put one in mind of James Herriot and the brothers Farnon rolling up their sleeves and startling a cow or three.
There's a limit to how much of a fifty gram bag of pork scratchings one should consume in one hit if one is to avoid nausea (for the record, it's about ten grams), so I go to the dining car for a sausage roll fresh from the drawer it's been stewing in since dawn, and a can of alleged beer.
It's 330ml of mid-strength lager. Australia likes it's beer flavourless, but this is really the apotheosis of the antipodean brewers' art. To all intents and purposes, the can was already empty when it was sealed. I'll refrain from citing the brand so as to avoid a stampede of connoisseurs rushing to not experience it.
Eight dollars! Eight flipping dollars! Just for the zero point nine standard drinks, then another five for the sausage roll!
I love the name Fassifern. I think it should be a term of mild rebuke. i.e. "Oh, don't be such a fassifern!" You instantly understand what it means by the way it sounds. Never been there. The place, I mean; I've probably been a fassifern for most of my life.
Appear to have mobile signal for most of the time now, which was definitely not the case on previous trips. I briefly wonder if it's because of all the Gates/Soros 5G microchips in my bloodstream, but my old phone is only 4G. Did they stealthily vaccinate my phone as well? The bastards!
So I exchange a few texts with Ruben, which helps pass the time.
Newcastle appears to be encroaching on Gosford, or vice versa, as there is now rather little open space between them. From here on you're essentially in the outer suburbs of Sydney. I used to work with people who would commute into the city from this distance.
As there's more built environment, I'm getting more alert my my surroundings. Multi-story buildings! Public transport! Pedestrian crossings! Pedestrians! All the sinful delights that are foreign and abhorrant to the denizens of Coffs Harbour.
Indulge me for a moment: Imagine being confronted with a vista of the most glorious natural splendour. Gravity-defying geological formations. Waterfalls, ravines, rivers and streams. Lush, luxuriant plant life of unimaginable variety; herds of gigantic herbivorous mammals, placid and graceful; gorgeously sleek and agile predators; eye-wateringly colourful birds soaring and swooping to pluck impossibly bejeweled insects from mid-air. And just off to one side a single squalid shack in the distance, with a thin wisp of smoke rising from an open fire.
I've tried several times, in conversation with self-avowed misanthropic nature lovers, to persuade them that in that situation they could not stop their eyes being drawn to that shack. They refuse to concede this, but I am certain that we are attuned to seeking signs of the presence of other human beings. It tickles us in a way we cannot resist. We are homo sociali. I say this as the most introverted person I know. (Not that I know that many people, what with being the most introverted person I know.)
As a lifelong socialist and an amateur macroeconomist, I should abhor metastasising high rise and construction cranes on the horizon as indicators of neoliberal welfare-for-the-rich and impending economic collapse, but my eyes widen and pulse quickens at the sight of them.
Then suddenly Sydney. Oh, Eddy Avenue! How I've missed you!
A block and a half away from Central Station is George Street and the art deco Great Southern Hotel. They gave me the perfect room for a web developer who doesn't like to be found.
If I ever own a place to live, I'm having hotel carpeting throughout.
Now, about that plan to collapse straight into bed… Sod that!
I drop my bags and head up George Street, or "SYDNEY'S STREET OF FEAR", as the Daily Telegraph memorably characterised it on a front page thirty years or so ago. Utter poppycock! I used to practically live on George Street when it was a solid strip of pubs, bookshops, junk food outlets, and video game arcades, and I've never felt so safe anywhere before or since.
A lot of pubs are now derelict due to the current crisis, or the previous crisis, or in anticipation of the next crisis. The first promising target from a nostalgia point of view is Cheers. In the late 80s it was a modest subterranean dive for people who wanted to avoid going to work or going home, but now it occupies several levels with huge sports-screens for vaping gamblers.
I buy a beer on the ground level and head downstairs to the den where so many of my brain cells sacrificed their all so that I might… well, "live" is perhaps too strong a word. At the bottom of the stairs there's a table with a couple of smiling callow youths who explain that the venue is closed to the general public for a private function. Spread out before them are a few open binders full of things in plastic pockets which appear alarmingly collectable. The youths are anxious to explain the nature of the function, saying that for a nominal cover charge I would be most welcome to join them.
It's at this point that my friend Ruben would have leapt eagerly into the fray, spending the whole night having a whale of a time, aquiring an exhaustive knowledge of a hitherto unfamiliar subculture and a bundle of lifelong friends. Alas, I am not that kind of person, so I make my excuses and head back upstairs.
I carry on uphill, past where there are no longer book liquidation stores, video game arcades, and junk shops all blaring the same tape loop of this one guy bunging on a cockney barrow boy accent, promising "You'll never pay full price again!"
Still, it's home.
One block east of the town hall is the Criterion. I remember in the 90s flicking through a guide to Sydney pubs which said it was the place to go if one happened to be a connoisseur of bulbous red noses. Is that supposed to be a bad thing? It's since been acquired by a particularly noxious pub chain who turned it into just another sports bar, but at least they haven't (yet) smashed out all the tiles and bricked in the leaded windows. Also, it's gone quite pink. Which is nice.
In more affluent times, I would never dream of staying out in town to drink on a Friday or Saturday night, these being the nights when the amateurs would spoil the atmosphere with their uncouth behaviour. However I've only a few days and want to make the most of it.
It used to be common for big hotels to have a number of bars in the one complex. I used to quite like the Tudor Bar on the first floor of the Hilton Hotel in Sydney. As the name suggests, it was all vacuum moulded fake timber and horse brasses, but easy on the eyes and a surprisingly cheap no-nonsense boozer for those in flight from reality.
Alas, there is no longer a first floor of the Hilton Hotel. It's been blasted away and replaced by a vast, glass-fronted empty space saying in effect "We don't need to make money from this real estate, but it amuses us to prevent others from doing so. So if you enjoy setting fire to hundred dollar notes in front of homeless people, this is the place for you." In that respect, it's like the similarly cavernous and glazed Apple store across the road containing a sparse smattering of lecterns with elegantly designed flat things propped up on them.
The one bar which the Hilton Hotel still appears to maintain is the Marble Bar. As the name suggests, every surface is at least faux-marble. It's like swimming in a Jackson Pollock kaleidescope. This is not a place for drinking in. It's a place for briefly gawping at and promptly fleeing. In my day it was pretty consistently empty. I supposed it was kept on as a gaudy monument to 1970s excess. Perhaps middle managers and their secretaries found it useful as a place to meet unobserved, I don't know.
Tonight it is packed with coked-up Hooray Henrys and Henriettas.
If ever there's a portent of an economic bubble about to burst, this is it. In my Sawtell finery, which to the untrained eye is indistinguishable from Sydney hobo rags, I feel distinctly unwelcome. As tradition demands, I gawp and flee.
A stroll past more shuttered venues once dear to my heart, and I find myself near the harbour, in the financial district. Knowing there's little joy to be had here I turn around and head back south up Pitt Street. There's a new pub on the corner of Hunter Street that looks enticingly empty. The girl behind the bar asks whether I want a pint or a schooner. I opt for the latter, and she pours me a half pint, which - not to be pedantic - is a hefty gulp or two shy of a schooner and charges me nearly ten dollars for it. A steady stream of beautiful people coming through the door and heading directly upstairs indicates that I'm just in the foyer of a far grander venue, not meant for the likes of me.
There's always street art. This piece is about as old as me. I used to roam this manor professionally back when mail boys used to carry high-denomination cheques from one place to another. Do digital mail boys meet to skive off in electronic pubs?
You must be this emaciated to shop here. Blimey. I'll stick to KMart.
Now, this is more like it. The Hotel Downing in Castlereagh Street. My ex-girlfriend used to work across the road, and I would occasionally wait for her in the other half of this pub which is now reserved for button-slappers. Thankfully, you can't see any of that from this bar, and the mandatory sport screens cover only two of the four walls, so you can keep your back to them and pretend they're not there. Also most of the customers appear to be staff, so there's a lovely family atmosphere. This pub I like.
And about time, too. There's a time and a place for dancing, and it's at the kitchen sink while doing the washing up. Anything else is an abomination. I can't remember which pub this sign was in…
But apparently I thought a distressed selfie in the mirror of the gents' lavatory would be sufficient to jog my memory later. Clearly it was time to revert to Plan A and flop into bed.
Continued in part two.
Sunday, 30 January 2022 - 12:50pm
This month, I have been mostly reading:
- Inside psychogenic death, the phenomenon of "thinking" yourself to death — Frank Bures at Salon:
Most people who enter this neurological tailspin will emerge from it before they hit bottom. They take in new information. They adapt to the new situation. But the few who don't may find themselves at stage five: Psychogenic death. The light goes out of their eyes. They say their goodbyes. They may perk up briefly as if they finally have a goal they can imagine, a solution to their problem: That new goal is death. And within a day or so, they're gone.
- Highly Paid Union Workers Give UPS a Surprise Win in Delivery Wars — Thomas Black at Bloomberg (via Bill Mitchell, who explains why there should be no surprise):
The massive labor shortage that’s rocked the U.S. since the pandemic and disrupted long-established employment relationships hasn’t had much impact on UPS, which pays its unionized drivers the highest wages in the industry. That’s helped it maintain a stable workforce and rising profits throughout the current disruptions. Meanwhile, lower-paying, nonunionized FedEx racked up $450 million in extra costs because of labor shortages. And while UPS easily beat earnings expectations and predicted a rising profit margin in the U.S. for the fourth quarter, FedEx signaled that its profit margin will fall further. The lack of workers is taking a toll on its reliability, too. FedEx’s recent on-time performance for express and ground packages has sunk to 85%, while UPS has met deadlines on 95% of those packages, according to data collected by ShipMatrix Inc. […] The difference in performance predates the worker shortage. Even while paying union workers almost twice what FedEx Ground drivers make, UPS earns a return on invested capital that’s more than double its rival’s. In the last full year, UPS and FedEx each had sales of about $84 billion; UPS banked $7.7 billion of operating income, while FedEx earned $5.9 billion.
- Renting Sucks — Caitlin Johnstone:
This is where my kids have spent most of their lives. Their heights are drawn on the door jamb in the kitchen. Losing this house is like losing a loved one. I’m also a bit nervous about where we’ll wind up; we can’t afford to buy a house and rent in Melbourne has skyrocketed over the last few years. Mosty, though, I’m just annoyed at this stupid, backwards system which forces people to pay landlords for shelter from the elements if they’re not fortunate enough to be able to afford a home of their own. Rent is largely an extortionate double-dipping scam where renters pay landlords for the privilege of keeping vandals and vermin from destroying their investment property which they’ll generally make a handsome profit off of when they sell, and this practice is held in place by a system which depends on the permanent existence of an underclass who can’t afford to own land.
- Bizarro — by Dan Piraro:
- Seeing the world like Wikipedia – What you should know about how the world’s largest encyclopedia works. — Zachary J. McDowell and Matthew A. Vetter in the LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog:
As acknowledged by Katherine Maher, former CEO of Wikimedia, Wikipedia is a mirror of society’s biases, and nowhere are these biases more visible than the much-discussed gender gap. The fact is that less than 20% of Wikipedia editors identify as women. This leads to all kinds of issues related to content gaps, policy biases, community climate and harassment, which we discuss in detail in our book. Notably, these issues broke into to mainstream in the case of Donna Strickland (the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physics since Marie Curie), who not only did not have a Wikipedia page until about 90 minutes after she won, but as it later emerged had a previous draft of her article rejected for not meeting notability standards. This and other issues are part of a larger systemic bias (eg. the lack of reporting on women in science), but are exacerbated and reflected by low levels of diversity within Wikipedia itself.
- Domino Theory — George Monbiot:
It’s true that within a few years, as the advocates argue, the entire stinking infrastructure of petrol and diesel could be overthrown. But what is locally clean is globally filthy. The mining of the materials required for this massive deployment of batteries and electronics is already destroying communities, ripping down forests, polluting rivers, trashing fragile deserts and, in some cases, forcing people into near-slavery. Our “clean, green” transport revolution is being built with the help of blood cobalt, blood lithium and blood copper. Though the emissions of both carbon dioxide and local pollutants will undoubtedly fall, we are still left with a stupid, dysfunctional transport system that clogs the streets with one-tonne metal boxes in which single people travel. New roads will still carve up rainforests and other threatened places, catalysing new waves of destruction. A genuinely green transport system would involve system change of a different kind. It would start by reducing the need to travel – as the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, is doing with her 15-minute city policy, which seeks to ensure that people’s needs can be met within a 15-minute walk from homes.
- ‘We Remember a United States That Fought the Nazis’: A German Scholar of Fascism Weighs in on Christian Nationalism in the U.S. — Andrew L. Seidel in Religion Dispatches:
When I ask, “Do you think that analogies to 1930s Germany are overblown?” She pauses thoughtfully then answers, “I don’t think they’re overblown.” She brought the receipts to our interview. Brockschmidt lists several signals, structures and characteristics of American Christian Nationalism that overlap in worrying ways with fascism. The “myth of a golden past,” is a big one. “[Calling for a return to] how the country used to be when in fact it’s a version that never was. It’s used to divide the country into us and them.” I found this particularly interesting because it goes to the heart of Christian Nationalism—attempting to return America to a Christian nation that never existed. As I’ve written elsewhere, America can never be a Christian nation because the moment it becomes a Christian nation it will cease to be America. Alongside this myth is the tendency to paint outgroups as “not real Americans.” A third marker is the veneration of “law and order, which really just means being tough on a certain portion of the population, not on crime.” Brockschmidt also mentions other “dog whistles used to stoke fear, resentment, and anger against outgroups [in order] to strengthen the feeling of togetherness of [the] ingroup.” Another marker of incipient fascism is “anti-intellectualism,” which can be seen in the “crusade in universities against wokeness and against critical race theory,” and, more broadly, against science, vaccines, and the pandemic itself.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — by Zach Weinersmith:
- Lab Leaks — Alex de Waal in the London Review of Books:
In 1977 a strain of influenza reappeared after a twenty-year absence, an event with a probability in the natural world approaching zero. It wasn’t particularly virulent and was superseded by another strain the next year, but its appearance was a mystery. The most likely explanation is that it escaped from a Chinese or Russian laboratory during a vaccine trial. Other escapees include smallpox (in Birmingham in 1978), Sars outbreaks after the Sars epidemic (twice), and foot and mouth disease in the UK. Human error is usually to blame. […] The Covid-19 pandemic may well have been a ‘normal accident’; it’s equally possible that ‘Disease X’, the WHO’s codename for the next pandemic, will be another. If so, it will be the by-product of our total war on microbes, our determination, since the acceptance of germ theory 150 years ago, to collect, classify, experiment with and sometimes exterminate them. As with the Manhattan Project, demand for ever more powerful munitions justifies risk-taking of a kind that the scientists involved don’t fully comprehend.
- Georgia student's 'gay is ok' artwork removed from classroom, compared to Nazi flag, parents say — Brooke Migdon at the Hill:
According to parents, school officials at Oglethorpe Avenue Elementary in Athens, Ga. promptly removed a student’s art piece, which featured a rainbow and the words “Gay is OK” written beneath an umbrella, following a complaint from another parent. When a teacher questioned the decision, an administrator compared hanging the drawing to hanging the flag of Nazi Germany in the classroom, according to a group of parents who witnessed the interaction, NBC-affiliate WXIA-TV 11 reported this week.
- Butterfly sanctuary closes as QAnon believers, thinking it’s home to sex trafficking ring, plot caravan there — Mike Rothschild at the Daily Dot:
The email from the Center makes it clear that the grounds themselves are in direct danger from conference attendees who intend to form a “rolling car protest,” described as a ’Trump Train’-style “caravan to the border” that will likely make a stop at the National Butterfly Center. The Center’s location just minutes away from the Rio Grande has made it a hotbed of conspiracy theories and rumors, which claim it’s a hub of drug smuggling and human trafficking. Many of these rumors are pushed by Brian Kolfage, the leader of an eight-figure fundraising effort to privately build Trump’s border wall Kolfage, who has called the Center’s employees “butterfly freaks” running a “sham” sanctuary devoted to profiting off human misery, has pushed the theories hard, including sharing doctored photos of rafts at a dock outside the Butterfly Center. He’s also spammed Wright with violent threats over Twitter, eventually resulting in his account being suspended. Kolfage himself is not speaking at the event, presumably because he’s currently under indictment for wire fraud and tax evasion due to allegedly stealing from the We Build The Wall nonprofit he founded.
- Phil Are Go!:
Sunday, 9 January 2022 - 2:34pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- The Outer Limits Of Corporate Politics — David Sirota and Andrew Perez:
Democratic Party leaders on Thursday united around a plan to halve their economic agenda, which had already been nearly halved a few months ago. The full loaf is really a quarter loaf, but at this point, it’s actually less than that, because they also slashed promised regulatory and tax provisions that might have reduced medicine prices, provided workers some paid leave, and made billionaires start paying taxes. […] There are laudable provisions in the framework released by the White House, such as an expansion of Medicaid, universal pre-K, subsidized child care, the extension of the child tax credit, tougher penalties for employers who violate labor laws, and spending on clean energy programs. These are significant steps beyond the incrementalism and corporatism of the Obama presidency. However, the deal also seems designed to honor the one campaign promise that President Joe Biden appears most intent on fulfilling: the pledge to his donors that “nothing would fundamentally change” in our economy when he is president.
- Leunig, Wellness, and Wokeness — Robbie Moore in Meanjin:
One infuriating Leunig cartoon, published just after the equal marriage postal vote in 2017, encapsulates how discourses of wellness and anti-wokeness have deranged conservative perceptions of power relations in society. In the cartoon, a man, forlorn and curled up, lies on a street with a placard that says ‘ME’. Facing him is a large group of protestors (some with scary nose rings) holding an ‘LGBTQ’ banner. The composition recalls the image that got Leunig into trouble this month: the Tiananmen tank man, looking ordinary and tiny holding his shopping in front of a massed display of state power. A poem embedded in Leunig’s cartoon reads: ‘Lonely little weirdo, minority of one, nothing much to celebrate, not a lot of fun. So much persecution, so much pain and strife, lonely little everyone, trying to make a life.’ Here, the LGBTQ protesters, gathering to fight for equal rights and equal respect, assume the role of the democracy-crushing Tiananmen tanks, whereas the ‘lonely little weirdo’ is the real ‘minority’ suffering ‘persecution’ and ‘pain’. This is how a counter-cultural boomer politics founded on lonely men fleeing faceless corporate oppressors has been rewired, over just a few years, into a reactionary politics of male victimhood.
- Everything We Know About The Windshield Phenomenon — Diana Bocco, Grunge:
This obvious decline in the population of some insects has made scientists take a closer look at insects in general. Along the way, the theory of the Windshield Phenomenon was born. Simply put, this is the observation that when you're driving, you'll notice that not as many dead insects will accumulate on your windshield as they used to years ago. This doesn't sound very scientific, but the Windshield Phenomenom actually gained traction after a 2017 large-scale study in Germany. According to the study, the presence of insects in German forests and grasslands dropped 78% between 2008 and 2017. Some species couldn't be found at all after a few years — this accounted for an astonishing 34% fewer insect species in the areas researched (via Tree Hugger). As scientist Wolfgang Wägele, Director of the Leibniz Institute for Animal Biodiversity, told Science Magazine, "If you talk to people, they have a gut feeling. They remember how insects used to smash on your windscreen." Today, your windows are likely to be a lot cleaner after a long highway drive.
- Surface Tension — George Monbiot:
An analysis by the media sustainability group Albert found that “cake” was mentioned 10 times as often as “climate change” on UK TV programmes in 2020. “Scotch egg” received double the mentions of “biodiversity”. “Banana bread” beat “wind power” and “solar power” put together. I recognise that the media are not society, and that television stations have an interest in promoting banana bread and circuses. We could argue about the extent to which the media are either reflecting or generating an appetite for cake over climate. But I suspect that, of all the ways in which we might measure our progress on preventing systemic environmental collapse, the cake-to-climate ratio is the decisive index.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — by Zach Weinersmith:
