Sunday, 30 June 2019 - 7:35pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- ‘Some Suburb of Hell’: America’s New Concentration Camp System — Andrea Pitzer in the New York Review of Books:
In 1933, barely more than a month after Hitler was appointed chancellor, the Nazis’ first, impromptu camp opened in the town of Nohra in central Germany to hold political opponents. Detainees at Nohra were allowed to vote at a local precinct in the elections of March 5, 1933, resulting in a surge of Communist ballots in the tiny town. Locking up groups of civilians without trial had become accepted. Only the later realization of the horrors of the Nazi death camps would break the default assumption by governments and the public that concentration camps could and should be a simple way to manage populations seen as a threat. However, the staggering death toll of the Nazi extermination camp system—which was created mid-war and stood almost entirely separate from the concentration camps in existence since 1933—led to another result: a strange kind of erasure. In the decades that followed World War II, the term “concentration camp” came to stand only for Auschwitz and other extermination camps. It was no longer applied to the kind of extrajudicial detention it had denoted for generations. The many earlier camps that had made the rise of Auschwitz possible largely vanished from public memory.
[See also: I’m a Jewish historian. Yes, we should call border detention centers “concentration camps.”] - I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle. — Mary Annaise Heglar in Vox:
I don’t blame anyone for wanting absolution. I can even understand abdication, which is its own form of absolution. But underneath all that is a far more insidious force. It’s the narrative that has both driven and obstructed the climate change conversation for the past several decades. It tells us climate change could have been fixed if we had all just ordered less takeout, used fewer plastic bags, turned off some more lights, planted a few trees, or driven an electric car. It says that if those adjustments can’t do the trick, what’s the point? The belief that this enormous, existential problem could have been fixed if all of us had just tweaked our consumptive habits is not only preposterous; it’s dangerous. It turns environmentalism into an individual choice defined as sin or virtue, convicting those who don’t or can’t uphold these ethics. When you consider that the same IPCC report outlined that the vast majority of global greenhouse gas emissions come from just a handful of corporations — aided and abetted by the world’s most powerful governments, including the US — it’s victim blaming, plain and simple.
- The Long, Cruel History of the Anti-Abortion Crusade — John Irving in the New York Times:
Isn’t it as clear now as it was in the Reagan years? Aren’t the same people who sacralize the fetus generally opposed to any meaningful welfare for unwanted children and unmarried mothers? The prevailing impetus to oppose abortion is to punish the woman who doesn’t want the child. The sacralizing of the fetus is a ploy. How can “life” be sacred (and begin at six weeks, or at conception), if a child’s life isn’t sacred after it’s born?
- The Internet Has Made Dupes—and Cynics—of Us All — Zeynep Tufekci in Wired:
Google nukes content farms; Apple rules its App Store with an iron grip; Amazon’s return policy—generous to customers but stringent to vendors—serves as a check against fraud; Facebook and Twitter have been pressured to de-platform the most noxious purveyors of conspiracy theories and fake news. And when they crack down, people cheer. But we should be leery of entrusting power to corporate giants that are largely unaccountable. If you innocently run afoul of them, you may have little or no recourse. A suspension from Facebook can cut you off from friends, allies, and audiences; losing access to Amazon or the App Store can destroy livelihoods. Often all a wrongfully barred person can do is fill out forms and look desperately for a personal contact at the company—much the way people in poorer countries look to family members in the state bureaucracy to solve problems. That’s what a low-trust society looks like.
- How to speak Silicon Valley: 53 essential tech-bro terms explained — Julia Carrie Wong and Matthew Cantor in the Guardian:
cloud, the (n) – Servers. A way to keep more of your data off your computer and in the hands of big tech, where it can be monetized in ways you don’t understand but may have agreed to when you clicked on the Terms of Service. Usually located in a city or town whose elected officials exchanged tens of millions of dollars in tax breaks for seven full-time security guard jobs. […]
Move fast and break things (ph) – Facebook’s original corporate motto. In hindsight, a red flag. Deprecated, allegedly.
Sunday, 16 June 2019 - 5:23pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Corbyn vows to ditch 'social mobility' goal and focus on social justice for all if Labour wins power — Andrew Woodcock, the Independent:
A Labour government would ditch the goal of “social mobility” and instead focus on social justice for all, Jeremy Corbyn has announced. Decrying the decades-old target of increased social mobility as a failed strategy which helped only a “lucky few”, the Labour leader promised a new approach that would aim to give every child the chance to flourish. With shadow education secretary Angela Rayner, he launched plans for a Social Justice Commission to replace the Social Mobility Commission established by David Cameron’s government. The “meritocratic” goal of social mobility has been pursued by governments of all political stripes for many years, with the aim of making it possible for individuals to better themselves through their own efforts and abilities. But under Mr Corbyn, Labour argues that the concept has given credibility to the idea that “only a few talented or lucky people deserve to escape the disadvantage they were born into”.
- Regulating Big Tech makes them stronger, so they need competition instead — Cory Doctorow in the Economist:
In the absence of a political faith in break-ups, modern trustbusters are operating on the assumption that Big Tech will dominate in perpetuity—and placing upon the incumbents the state-like duties to police bad user activities, from fomenting terrorist violence to infringing copyright. Yet this raises a new problem: complying with these rules would be so expensive that only a handful of (mostly American) companies could afford it. This snuffs out any hope of a big incumbent being displaced by a nascent competitor. As a creator who derives the bulk of his living from giant media companies, it has been hard for me to watch those companies—and other creators who should really know better—act as cheerleaders for a situation in which the Big Tech firms are being handed a prize beyond measure: control over what is, in effect, a planetary, species-wide electronic nervous system.
Which leads to: - Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an Elegant Weapon From a More Civilized Age to Slay Today's Monopolies — Cory Doctorow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Facebook's advantage is in "network effects": the idea that Facebook increases in value with every user who joins it (because more users increase the likelihood that the person you're looking for is on Facebook). But adversarial interoperability could allow new market entrants to arrogate those network effects to themselves, by allowing their users to remain in contact with Facebook friends even after they've left Facebook. This kind of adversarial interoperability goes beyond the sort of thing envisioned by "data portability," which usually refers to tools that allow users to make a one-off export of all their data, which they can take with them to rival services. Data portability is important, but it is no substitute for the ability to have ongoing access to a service that you're in the process of migrating away from.
- Why the raids on Australian media present a clear threat to democracy — Rebecca Ananian-Welsh in the Conversation:
The Prime Minister was quick to distance his government from the AFP’s actions, while opposition leader Anthony Albanese condemned the raids. But to those familiar with the ever-expanding field of Australian national security law, these developments were unlikely to surprise. In particular, enhanced data surveillance powers and a new suite of secrecy offences introduced in late 2018 had sparked widespread concern over the future of public interest journalism in Australia. The crackdown of the past few days reveals that at least two of the core fears expressed by lawyers and the media industry were well-founded: first, the demise of source confidentiality and, secondly, a chilling effect on public interest journalism.
- This ID Scanner Company is Collecting Sensitive Data on Millions of Bargoers — Susie Cagle in Medium:
The PatronScan kiosk, placed at the entrance of a bar or nightlife establishment, can verify whether an ID is real or fake, and collect and track basic customer demographic data. For bars, accurate ID scanners are valuable tools that help weed out underage drinkers, protecting the establishments’ liquor licenses from fines and scrupulous state alcohol boards. But PatronScan’s main selling point is security. The system allows a business to maintain a record of bad customer behavior and flag those individuals, alerting every other bar that uses PatronScan. What constitutes “bad behavior” is at a bar manager’s discretion, and ranges from “sexual assault” to “violence” to “public drunkenness” and “other.” When a bargoer visits another PatronScan bar and swipes their ID, their previously flagged transgressions will pop up on the kiosk screen. Unless patrons successfully appeal their status to PatronScan or the bar directly, their status can follow them for anywhere from a couple weeks to a few months, to much, much longer. According to a PatronScan “Public Safety Report” from May 2018, the average length of bans handed out to customers in Sacramento, California was 19 years. […] The same report indicates that PatronScan collected and retained information on over 10,000 patrons in Sacramento in a single day. Within a five month period, that added up to information on over 500,000 bargoers.
- Fans Are Better Than Tech at Organizing Information Online — Gretchen McCulloch at Wired (cookiewalled):
On AO3, users can put in whatever tags they want. (Autocomplete is there to help, but they don't have to use it.) Then behind the scenes, human volunteers look up any new tags that no one else has used before and match them with any applicable existing tags, a process known as tag wrangling. Wrangling means that you don't need to know whether the most popular tag for your new fanfic featuring Sherlock Holmes and John Watson is Johnlock or Sherwatson or John/Sherlock or Sherlock/John or Holmes/Watson or anything else. And you definitely don't need to tag your fic with all of them just in case. Instead, you pick whichever one you like, the tag wranglers do their work behind the scenes, and readers looking for any of these synonyms will still be able to find you. […] Users appreciate this help. According to Tag Wrangling Chair briar_pipe, "We sometimes get users who come from Instagram or Tumblr or another unmoderated site. We can tell that they're new to AO3 because they tag with every variation of a concept—abbreviations, different word order, all of it. I love how excited people get when they realize they don't have to do that here."
Sunday, 9 June 2019 - 4:21pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- 'Robots' Are Not 'Coming For Your Job', Management Is — Brian Merchant in Gizmodo:
At first glance, this might like a nitpicky semantic complaint, but I assure you it’s not—this phrasing helps, and has historically helped, mask the agency behind the *decision* to automate jobs. And this decision is not made by ‘robots,’ but management. It is a decision most often made with the intention of saving a company or institution money by reducing human labour costs (though it is also made in the interests of bolstering efficiency and improving operations and safety). It is a human decision that ultimately eliminates the job. But if the robots are simply “coming,” if they just show up and relieve a helpless lot of humans of their livelihoods, then no one is to blame for this techno-elemental phenomenon, and little is to be done about it beyond bracing for impact. Not the executives swayed by consulting firms who insist the future is in AI customer service bots, or the managers who see an opportunity to improve profit margins by adopting automated kiosks that edge out cashiers, or the shipping conglomerate bosses who decide to replace dockworkers with a fleet of automated trucks.
- The preachers getting rich from poor Americans — Vicky Baker, BBC News in Texas and Alabama:
By summer 2014, Larry and Darcy had exhausted all their funds. They had sold all their belongings to travel from California to Florida to be with their daughter, and ended up homeless. Wracked with guilt for having failed to provide the promised help to his daughter, Larry couldn't understand why he had been let down. It took another year for things to become clear. In August 2015, the couple were channel-hopping in a Jacksonville motel room, when they caught an episode of John Oliver's satirical news show, Last Week Tonight. "I never watched John Oliver. I had never even heard of the guy," says Larry. But his attention was immediately caught by a skit that ripped into money-grabbing televangelists. Larry and Darcy sat up in shock, recognising all the names. They say they felt as though God was lifting a veil. "We had been so ignorant," Larry says, shaking his head.
- War’s Unanswered Questions — Robert C. Koehler:
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, addressing the issue with disconcerting and unintentional candor, told reporters, according to CNN, “What we’ve been trying to do is to get Iran to behave like a normal nation.” How would a “normal nation” respond to endless threats and sanctions? Sooner or later it would hit back. Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, speaking recently in New York, explained it thus: “The plot is to push Iran into taking action. And then use that.” Use it, in other words, as the excuse to go to war.
Sunday, 26 May 2019 - 8:27pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Friendship — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith:
- Love Your Job? Someone May be Taking Advantage of You — by a nameless PR bot at Duke University:
Professor Aaron Kay found that people see it as more acceptable to make passionate employees do extra, unpaid, and more demeaning work than they did for employees without the same passion. “It’s great to love your work,” Kay said, “but there can be costs when we think of the workplace as somewhere workers get to pursue their passions.” Understanding Contemporary Forms of Exploitation: Attributions of Passion Serve to Legitimize the Poor Treatment of Workers is forthcoming in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Kay, the senior author on the research, worked with Professor Troy Campbell of the University of Oregon, Professor Steven Shepherd of Oklahoma State University, and Fuqua Ph.D student Jay Kim, who was lead author. The researchers found that people consider it more legitimate to make passionate employees leave family to work on a weekend, work unpaid, and handle unrelated tasks that were not in the job description.
- Dog breeds are mere Victorian confections, neither pure nor ancient — Michael Worboys in Aeon:
Modern dog breeds were created in Victorian Britain. The evolution of the domestic dog goes back tens of thousands of years – however, the multiple forms we see today are just 150 years old. Before the Victorian era, there were different types of dog, but there were not that many, and they were largely defined by their function. They were like the colours of a rainbow: variations within each type, shading into each other at the margins. And many terms were used for the different dogs: breed, kind, race, sort, strain, type and variety. By the time the Victorian era came to an end, only one term was used – breed. This was more than a change in language. Dog breeds were something entirely new, defined by their form not their function. With the invention of breed, the different types became like the blocks on a paint colour card – discrete, uniform and standardised. The greater differentiation of breeds increased their number. In the 1840s, just two types of terrier were recognised; by the end of the Victorian period, there were 10, and proliferation continued – today there are 27.
Sunday, 12 May 2019 - 1:20pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- A Conspiracy Against MMT? Chicago Booth’s Polling and Trolling — Randy Wray knocks it out of the park at New Economic Perspectives:
For decades the neoliberals have used the threat of taxes to stop any progressive movement in its tracks. “How you gonna pay for it?” killed every proposal that came from the left. It is a foregone conclusion that if you link anything that would benefit the public to a tax hike, it will never make it out of committee. The official left uses this tactic as a “go away and leave me alone” strategy: see, we’ve really been working hard for progressive policy but we just can’t get those rich people to line up and tax themselves to pay for it. Selfish bastards. But money grows on rich people and they don’t want to pay for all the goodies we’d like to get to help the poor. So they’ll just have to stay poor a bit longer. Uncle Sam is broke. But tax cuts for the rich? Oh, sure, why not. Something might trickle down. Campaign contributions, probably. Keep those coming. AOC has cut through all that. We don’t need their stinking money. We’ve got MMT. But let’s tax them anyway. They are too rich. A double whammy against the comfortably privileged. We don’t need you. We’re passing the Green New Deal. We’re saving the environment. Jobs for All. Raising incomes of most people. And reducing yours. We don’t need the rich so we’re taking away your riches. We’ve got Uncle Sam’s purse.
- What Happened After My 13-Year-Old Son Joined the Alt-Right — Anonymous at the Washingtonian:
But the transfer, midyear, to a new school—after he’d been wrongly accused, unfairly treated, then unceremoniously dropped by his friends—shattered Sam. He felt totally alone. I counseled patience, naively unprepared for what came next: when he found people to talk to on Reddit and 4chan. Those online pals were happy to explain that all girls lie—especially about rape. And they had lots more knowledge to impart. They told Sam that Islam is an inherently violent religion and that Jews run global financial networks. (We’re Jewish and don’t know anyone who runs anything, but I guess the evidence was convincing.) They insisted that the wage gap is a fallacy, that feminazis are destroying families, that people need guns to protect themselves from government incursions onto private property. They declared that women who abort their babies should be jailed. Sam prides himself on questioning conventional wisdom and subjecting claims to intellectual scrutiny. For kids today, that means Googling stuff. One might think these searches would turn up a variety of perspectives, including at least a few compelling counterarguments. One would be wrong. The Google searches flooded his developing brain with endless bias-confirming “proof” to back up whichever specious alt-right standard was being hoisted that week. Each set of results acted like fertilizer sprinkled on weeds: A forest of distortion flourished.
- Tragic Employers Have No Way to Find Workers To Do Exactly What They Want — Ted Rall:
- Agnotology and Epistemological Fragmentation — transcript of a talk by danah boyd at the Digital Public Library of America conference:
In 1995, Robert Proctor and Iain Boal coined the term “agnotology” to describe the strategic and purposeful production of ignorance. […] One of the best ways to seed agnotology is to make sure that doubtful and conspiratorial content is easier to reach than scientific material. And then to make sure that what scientific information is available, is undermined. One tactic is to exploit “data voids.” These are areas within a search ecosystem where there’s no relevant data; those who want to manipulate media purposefully exploit these. Breaking news is one example of this. Another is to co-opt a term that was left behind, like social justice. But let me offer you another. Some terms are strategically created to achieve epistemological fragmentation. In the 1990s, Frank Luntz was the king of doing this with terms like partial-birth abortion, climate change, and death tax. Every week, he coordinated congressional staffers and told them to focus on the term of the week and push it through the news media. All to create a drumbeat. Today’s drumbeat happens online. The goal is no longer just to go straight to the news media. It’s to first create a world of content and then to push the term through to the news media at the right time so that people search for that term and receive specific content. Terms like caravan, incel, crisis actor. By exploiting the data void, or the lack of viable information, media manipulators can help fragment knowledge and seed doubt.
- Steering with the Windshield Wipers — Cory Doctorow in Locus:
If we appoint tech giants with the unimaginably expensive civic duty of policing all online speech for copyright infringement (or “extremism” or what have you), that will make it impossible to unbiggen Big Tech: we won’t be able to shrink them into pieces small enough to manage, because those pieces won’t be able to manage their public duties.
- Conan O’Brien: Why I Decided to Settle a Lawsuit Over Alleged Joke Stealing — Conan O'Brien in Variety:
The wheels of justice grind slowly — really slowly — and years started to pass. During this time, we asked our writers’ assistant to monitor our accuser’s tweets to avoid any other accidental overlap, and she discovered 15 examples where he tweeted similar jokes AFTER we had written them for my program. And this is the guy who is suing us?? Did we counter-sue? No, we did not, because I knew he had not “stolen” from us, just as we had never stolen from him. The fact of the matter is that with over 321 million monthly users on Twitter, and seemingly 60% of them budding comedy writers, the creation of the same jokes based on the day’s news is reaching staggering numbers. Two years ago one of our writers came up with a joke referencing Kendall Jenner’s ill-fated Pepsi commercial, and so did 111 Twitter users. This “parallel creation” of jokes is now so commonplace that Caroline Moss of CNBC and Melissa Radzimiski of the Huffington Post have given it a name: “tweet-saming.” And, by the way, the person who sued me also tweeted the same Pepsi joke, but only after our show and 24 other tweeters beat him to it. So why am I telling you all of this? Because I believe that the vast majority of people writing comedy are honorable, and they don’t want to steal anyone’s material because there is no joy, and ultimately no profit, in doing so. However, when you add the internet and an easily triggered legal system, the potential for endless time-wasting lawsuits over who was the first to tweet that William Barr looks like a toad with a gluten allergy becomes very real.
- The evolution of correspondence — Jake Likes Onions:
Sunday, 5 May 2019 - 6:50pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Guantánamo Bay “Forever” Prisoner Speaks Out — to Praise Congress, Lindsey Graham, and Thomas Friedman — Murtaza Hussain:
“My faith in many US politicians and media outlets has recently risen dramatically, because of their courageous stand against the Saudi royals,” al-Sharbi conveyed in letters and communications submitted through normal processes at the prison, and provided exclusively to The Intercept. “The Saudi royal family overtly fights terrorism to please the West, while covertly supporting it to please the clerics and others. They also do this so that they are always desperately needed by the United States and the West.” […] “I’m not blindly optimistic that the change of position by the likes of Senator Lindsay Graham and Thomas Friedman regarding the Saudi royals is not merely pragmatic flip-flopping. I hope that it is a truly ethical correction on their parts,” al-Sharbi stated.
- Death By 1,000 Clicks: Where Electronic Health Records Went Wrong — Fred Schulte and Erika Fry, Kaiser Health News and Fortune:
Electronic health records were supposed to do a lot: make medicine safer, bring higher-quality care, empower patients, and yes, even save money. Boosters heralded an age when researchers could harness the big data within to reveal the most effective treatments for disease and sharply reduce medical errors. Patients, in turn, would have truly portable health records, being able to share their medical histories in a flash with doctors and hospitals anywhere in the country — essential when life-and-death decisions are being made in the ER. But 10 years after President Barack Obama signed a law to accelerate the digitization of medical records — with the federal government, so far, sinking $36 billion into the effort — America has little to show for its investment. KHN and Fortune spoke with more than 100 physicians, patients, IT experts and administrators, health policy leaders, attorneys, top government officials and representatives at more than a half-dozen EHR vendors, including the CEOs of two of the companies. The interviews reveal a tragic missed opportunity: Rather than an electronic ecosystem of information, the nation’s thousands of EHRs largely remain a sprawling, disconnected patchwork. Moreover, the effort has handcuffed health providers to technology they mostly can’t stand and has enriched and empowered the $13-billion-a-year industry that sells it.
- Google is eating our mail — Tomaž Šolc:
Unfortunately, email is starting to become synonymous with Google's mail, and Google's machines have decided that mail from my server is simply not worth receiving. Being a good administrator and a well-behaved player on the network is no longer enough. […] Since mid-December last year, I'm regularly seeing SMTP errors like these. Sometimes the same message re-sent right away will not bounce again. Sometimes rephrasing the subject will fix it. Sometimes all mail from all accounts gets blocked for weeks on end until some lucky bit flips somewhere and mail mysteriously gets through again. Since many organizations use Gmail for mail hosting this doesn't happen just for ...@gmail.com addresses. Now every time I write a mail I wonder whether Google's AI will let it through or not. Only when something like this happens you realize just how impossible it is to talk to someone on the modern internet without having Google somewhere in the middle.
Sunday, 28 April 2019 - 3:12pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- MMT Responds to Brad DeLong’s Challenge — Randy Wray at New Economic Perspectives:
As I said it is hard to think of a general pump-priming; except perhaps sending a $5000 check to every resident. But even this wouldn’t affect all sectors equally. Most Americans, suffering under huge debt loads, would probably pay down some debt. The comfortably well-off would splurge on fancy restaurants and expensive spas that already have long waiting lists. Or add a gold-plated toilet bowl to their third yacht. I’ve long argued that rising tides raise all yachts—not the little dinghies. here and here As Pavlina Tcherneva’s empirical work has proven here , that turns out to be true. More than all the gains from growth now go to the tippy top of the income distribution. No wonder the Neoliberals hate the JG approach and love the pump-priming approach. As Tom Palley complains, the JG would give income directly to the poor and they’d want food. Neoliberals love unemployment—it keeps the “help” hungry and cheap. They are our inflation-fighting force to keep the comfortable classes comfortable.
- MMT Takes Center Stage – and Orthodox Economists Freak — Bill Black at New Economic Perspectives:
If neoliberals want to define as “socialism” an effective government that produces markets in which honest people prosper and we imprison or at least drive from the markets the elite cheaters, then we are all socialists. An economic system without an effective rule of law and with massive negative externalities such as global climate change is a suicidal kleptocracy. If neoliberals want to define that as “capitalism,” they should get used to the public rejecting it as an ideology that is as economically illiterate as it is inhumane and unethical. Kleptocracy and plutocracy invariably corrupt and ruin democracy. The truth is that honest markets and governments are complements and that the most effective economies are ‘mixed-economies.’ Using ‘socialism’ or ‘capitalism’ as swear words is a pointless waste.
- The Truth About Dentistry — Ferris Jabr confirms what we've all long suspected in the Atlantic:
Studies that explicitly focus on overtreatment in dentistry are rare, but a recent field experiment provides some clues about its pervasiveness. A team of researchers at ETH Zurich, a Swiss university, asked a volunteer patient with three tiny, shallow cavities to visit 180 randomly selected dentists in Zurich. The Swiss Dental Guidelines state that such minor cavities do not require fillings; rather, the dentist should monitor the decay and encourage the patient to brush regularly, which can reverse the damage. Despite this, 50 of the 180 dentists suggested unnecessary treatment. Their recommendations were incongruous: Collectively, the overzealous dentists singled out 13 different teeth for drilling; each advised one to six fillings. Similarly, in an investigation for Reader’s Digest, the writer William Ecenbarger visited 50 dentists in 28 states in the U.S. and received prescriptions ranging from a single crown to a full-mouth reconstruction, with the price tag starting at about $500 and going up to nearly $30,000.
- The Reality Behind Trump’s Coalition for Regime Change in Venezuela — Mark Weisbrot at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR):
Even if the Trump team had a global majority—which it doesn’t, with only 50 out of 195 countries worldwide backing Venezuelan regime change—their deadly economic sanctions, theft of assets, military threats, and other actions to topple Venezuela’s government would be no more legal or legitimate than George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq, or the many U.S.-led regime change efforts that have taken place in this hemisphere. That’s unsurprising, given who’s at the wheel: perennial regime-change advocate John Bolton, for example, or special envoy Elliott Abrams, who supported what the UN later found to be genocide in Guatemala, as well as the US-sponsored atrocities in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s. The cast of characters supporting this regime-change effort, whether in Washington or among some of its closest allies, should underline what is already obvious: The United States’ attempt to oust Maduro has nothing to do with democracy or human rights.
- Let people look out of the window — Richard Murphy:
There is an article in the FT this morning that asks how workplaces can foster creative people. […] The whole piece reminds me of the most paradoxical adverts I read. They ask for applicants from ‘original and innovative thinkers’ who are ‘team players’. I am not saying there is no overlap between the Venn diagrams for these two groups. I am saying they are small. […] A few years ago I was given an award for effective campaigning. In the minute or two I was given to note my thanks I gave praise to the Jospeh Rowntree Charitable Trust. They had the courage to fund me for five years to, as I put it, look out of the window. Which is what I did, and still do, quite often. Because inspiration comes from watching the world and wondering why it behaves as it does.
- “Speaking Truth to Power” Is No Substitute for Taking Power — Norman Solomon in Truthout:
While noting that “power without love is reckless and abusive,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out that “love without power is sentimental and anemic.” All too often, progressive activists don’t realize their own potential power when they rely on ethical arguments to persuade authorities. Appealing to the hearts of people who run a heartless system is rarely effective. Humane principles are low priorities in the profit-driven scheme of things, as the devastating impacts of economic inequality and militarism attest. By and large, rapacious power already knows what it’s doing — from Wall Street and the boardrooms of mega-corporations to the Pentagon and the top echelons of the “national security” state.
Obligatory Trump/Mueller Psychopathologising
The sense I get, at second to twenty-third hand inclusive, of the Mueller report is that although Trump didn't conspire with Russian authorities to sway the 2016 US election, he sincerely believes that he did. For that matter, he's always sincerely believed that he's a business genius. Trump consistently thinks that he's playing 11-dimensional chess when he's not even playing chess.
Some commentators are claiming that Trump's focus on "collusion" has been a strategic masterstroke, as it has distracted the media and the Democrats from all his other outrages. On the contrary, I think that Trump simply lacks the wit required to see anything outrageous in anything that he's actually done in the real world, and that all along he has been genuinely worried that what will bring him undone is his unscrupulous but sublimely skillful, and utterly imaginary, playing of global power politics.
It's fascinating to watch the long tradition of imperial presidency stretching from the Monroe Doctrine (recently reaffirmed in the context of Venezuela by the loathsome John Bolton, who has taken advantage of the Trump moment to crawl out from under the rock beneath Henry Kissinger's rock, and once more vomit upon the world stage), through Richard "when the President does it, that means it is not illegal" Nixon, to a bigoted con artist who burned though his inherited real estate wealth and was reduced to playing his own noxious character on reality TV. For Trump's predecessors though, their belief was that although the presidency should in principle guarantee unimpeachable omnipotence, they nonetheless had the good sense to carry out their worst offenses with either a decorative gloss of moral and (quasi-)legal justification, or with considerable discretion and (semi-)plausible deniability. Trump on the other hand, hasn't an inkling that this autocratic dream isn't the law of the land.
Consequently, any criticism of President Trump can only be motivated by the petty personal vendettas of sore losers who failed to win the ultimate prize of untrammelled authority, and is moreover treasonous. Or in the presidential vocabulary: A total witch hunt! Very, very, very unfair. So bad.
It is not merely that Trump has, like so many presidents before him, acted criminally — and has easily cleared the lower bar of "high crimes and misdemeaners" required for impeachment. It is the fact that he is utterly oblivious to the very idea that he might have done anything wrong, or that there is anything he can do wrong in his position, which uniquely disqualifies him from office. The sadistic executive orders, the extraordinary cavalcade of grifters he's appointed for a duration of weeks or months (has anybody, apart from close relatives and Mike Pence, yet lasted a year?), the breathtaking gullibility which has seen him cheerfully execute, without even slightly comprehending, the wildest dreams of the "normal" crazies like Paul Ryan and John Bolton, are all unprecedented.
To permit this halfwitted psychopath to be merely voted out of office in 2020, with no further accountability for himself, his cronies, or his opportunistic political beneficiaries, is to make a precedent of the unprecedented. I don't think the world can afford this.
Sunday, 14 April 2019 - 7:03pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Vital Signs: Australia’s sudden ultra-low economic growth ought not to have come as surprise — Richard Holden of UNSW in the Conversation:
Australia’s big little economic lie was laid bare on Wednesday. National accounts figures show that the Australian economy grew by just 0.2% in the last quarter of 2018. This disappointing result was below market expectations and official forecasts of 0.6%. It put annual growth for the year at just 2.3%. But the shocking revelation was that Gross Domestic Product per person (a more relevant measure of living standards) actually slipped in the December quarter by 0.2%, on the back of a fall of 0.1% in the September quarter. These are the first back-to-back quarters of negative GDP per capita growth in 13 years - since 2006.
[Here's Bill Mitchell's less polished but more insightful review of the figures.] - Future budgets are going to have to spend more on welfare, which is fine. It’s spending on us — ANU's Peter Whiteford in the Conversation:
The social services minister has used point-in-time administrative data to show that in 2018 the share of working-age Australians on welfare fell to 15.1%, “the lowest rate of welfare dependency in over 25 years”. But the longitudinal Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey finds that over the course of an entire year (2016) about one-third of working-age households contained someone who received an income support payment for some of it. The longer the time period, the more common becomes the receipt of payments. Between 2001 and 2015 around 70% of working-age households included someone who received an income support payment at some point (not including the age pension or family payments). It is one of the most important lessons of longitudinal surveys like HILDA – we, our family or friends are in this together.
- Michigan Conservatives Don’t Want to Teach Students That America Is a Democracy — Matt Stieb at New York Magazine on what really the right is really scared by in the term "democratic socialism":
The proposed curriculum update in Michigan also falls in line with another type of push by conservative education advocates: cutting references to America’s status as a democracy. The first draft of the proposed changes in Michigan attempted to nix the word “democratic” from the phrase “core democratic values,” a slogan that defined virtues like equality, liberty, and diversity. Similar efforts were enacted in Texas and Georgia in 2010 and 2016, when state education boards removed “democracy” as a description of American government, or promoted the unwieldy phrase “representative democracy/republic” instead. […] In a compromise, the proposed standards now use the term “American government” as the most-frequent phrase for the nation’s electoral system, but will also include the phrase “constitutional government,” and occasional uses of “democracy.” Patrick Colbeck, the leading conservative voice in the argument, said that the term “democracy” was not “politically neutral and accurate.”
- Pete Buttigieg argues against free college. This is why progressives can’t agree about subsidizing tuition. — Elizabeth Popp Berman in the Washington Post:
The Buttigieg argument goes like this: College increases the incomes of those who complete it. But the people who go to college are typically already better off. By charging them less than the actual cost of their education, we’re using the tax dollars of poorer non-college-goers to pay for the education of their richer counterparts — whose earning potential will only increase with their shiny new bachelor's degree. However standard this position seems today, historically speaking, it’s relatively novel. Making it requires two intellectual moves that didn’t take place until the 1960s. First, you have to think of college in human capital terms: as an investment that produces future earnings. Second, you need a cost-benefit approach to evaluating policy: spending the least possible money to achieve the maximum desired benefit — in this case, education. […] Not all progressives, of course, buy the “free-college-is-regressive” claim. One common counterargument is that this undermines the case for all sorts of public services. As economist J.W. Mason asks, “Suppose users of Central Park are higher-income on average; is progressive policy then to fence it off and charge admission?” Similar arguments could be made about fire stations, if you notice that they particularly benefit well-off homeowners.
- Donald Trump’s use of humiliation could have catastrophic consequences – a psychologist explains why — Simon McCarthy-Jones of Trinity College Dublin in the Conversation on the bullies we have to endure:
Some individuals who are shamed will explode with humiliated fury. This is more likely if the person has high levels of narcissism. Such people have grandiose views of themselves, a strong sense of entitlement, and seek to exploit others. They are strongly motivated to maintain their self-esteem and deflect shame by placing blame on others, whom they rage against. […] Trump’s use of humiliation has the potential […] to trigger an extreme and unpredictable reaction, including on the global stage. It also risks setting a social norm in which humiliating people is acceptable. All this undermines the concept of inherent human dignity and risks a conflict in which people are accorded no inherent value.
- Off the Mark — by Mark Parisi:
Sunday, 7 April 2019 - 3:03pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- .NORM Normal File Format — xkcd:
- Response to Doug Henwood’s Trolling in Jacobin — Randy Wray in New Economic Perspectives:
For far too long left-leaning Democrats have had a close symbiotic relationship with the rich. They’ve needed the “good” rich folk, like George Soros, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Bob Rubin, to fund their think tanks and political campaigns. The centrist Clinton wing, has repaid the generosity of Wall Street’s neoliberals with deregulation that allowed the CEOs to shovel money to themselves, vastly increasing inequality and their own power. And they in turn rewarded Hillary—who by her own account accepted whatever money they would throw in her direction. Today’s progressives won’t fall into that trap. “How ya gonna pay for it?” Through a budget authorization. Uncle Sam can afford it without the help of the rich. And, by the way, they’re going to tax you anyway, because you’ve got too much—too much income, too much wealth, too much power. What will we do with the tax revenue? Burn it. Uncle Sam doesn’t need your money.
- AOC, Sanders, and Warren Are the Real Centrists Because They Speak for Most Americans — Mehdi Hasan at the Intercept:
Take Ocasio-Cortez’s signature issue: the Green New Deal. Former George W. Bush speechwriter — and torture advocate — Marc Thiessen claims that the Green New Deal will “make the Democrats unelectable in 2020.” The Economist agrees: “The bold plan could make the party unelectable in conservative-leaning states.” The Green New Deal “will not pass the Senate, and you can take that back to whoever sent you here and tell them,” a testy Diane Feinstein, the senior and supposedly “moderate” Democratic senator from California, told a bunch of kids in a viral video. But here is the reality: The Green New Deal is extremely popular and has massive bipartisan support. A recent survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University found that a whopping 81 percent of voters said they either “strongly support” (40 percent) or “somewhat support” (41 percent) the Green New Deal, including 64 percent of Republicans (and even 57 percent of conservative Republicans).
- Matt Wuerker:
- The Reserve Bank Governor is completely wrong about the budget and it matters — Steven Hail:
The Australian Commonwealth Government has no purely financial constraint on its spending and it is ridiculous to suppose it can somehow “save” its own money. It can create money by spending and it can destroy money by taxing. It cannot save its own currency. That is a nonsensical concept. It cannot even borrow its own currency, in the conventional sense of the word “borrowing”. Government issuance of debt securities simply gives those of us who hold Australian dollars the option to swap them for safe, interest-bearing transferable savings accounts at the Reserve Bank. That is all that government bonds are. The Government doesn’t even need to issue them at all to cover its deficits. It chooses to issue them and they play a useful role in our financial system. Their issuance does nothing to pay for government spending today and does nothing to limit the ability of the Government to spend in the future.
- Anti-social economics — Peter Radford at the Real-World Economics Review Blog:
Just how anti-social is economics? I don’t think the question is difficult to answer: economics in its modern mainstream form is, at its heart, designed to undermine democratic government. It is, therefore, profoundly anti-social.
