The Thin Blue Line Between Violent, Pro-Trump Militias and Police (The Intercept)
Image: John Rudoff/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
Monday, August 31, 2020
Thin Blue Line: Militias and the Police
The Thin Blue Line Between Violent, Pro-Trump Militias and Police (The Intercept)
Hawaii Politics: One Legislator's Personal Journey
Transcript:
CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And as we said, with the Republican Convention in the spotlight this week, we now turn to a former member of the party who simply had had enough. Beth Fukumoto served in the Hawaii House of Representatives for three terms. But the party forced her resignation after she publicly denounced President Trump’s policies and his rhetoric. She is now openly acknowledging what she calls her political failings and is now a Democrat. Here she is talking with our Michel Martin about the racism she endured and what led to her resignation.
MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks, Christiane. Beth Fukumoto, thank you so much for talking with us.
FMR. STATE REP. BETH FUKUMOTO (D-HI): Of course. Thank you.
MARTIN: You served three terms in the Hawaii House of Representatives. You rose to minority leader. You were one of the youngest people ever in a leadership position like that. So, you were clearly on the rise there before all the events took place that we’re now going to talk about. But I was just wondering if you wouldn’t mind taking us back to why you were attracted to the Republican Party to begin with.
FUKUMOTO: Sure. well, I think, for context, I was — it was 2008 when I was graduating from my master’s program, and went back to Hawaii because of the recession, and found a job working in the legislature. And I found a job working with the Republicans in the legislature. And I think what I saw — my state had been Democratically controlled since 1954. And so most of the policies that were in place were all Democratic policies, or at least they have had the ability to implement their policies since 1954. And I felt like, as somebody who was watching my community really suffer from the recession, and just economically, nobody was being able to build wealth, people were having trouble having a place to live, it — our cost of living was just skyrocketing. And I didn’t feel like the legislation was taking that seriously enough. And as somebody that was newly out of graduate school, and didn’t have much of a political background, the natural conclusion for me was that it must be that those principles didn’t work. So perhaps we should try Republican principles, and specifically things like being more careful with money, being cautious with government spending, not overtaxing people. All of that really appealed to me at the time, from the world view that I had.
MARTIN: Well, in fact, you were one of the standard-bearers, as I recall.
FUKUMOTO: Yes.
MARTIN: I mean, that was this initiative that was announced by the then chairman of the Republican National Committee, a multimillion-dollar initiative to kind of recruit, train and support diverse candidates across the country, particularly at the state and local level, as I recall. And weren’t you one of the people who were selected to kind of roll that out?
FUKUMOTO: Yes, I think one of the first events that I did — it was, I think, the first event I did at the RNC was this announcement that we were going to be putting money into state level races, specifically to get women and other candidates, specifically people of color to have backing, so that they could run for office, so they can achieve — we could achieve a better balance and more diversity amongst even our candidates.
MARTIN: So, what happened for you. When did you start to feel disaffected? When did you start to feel, well, maybe this isn’t what I thought it was?
FUKUMOTO: There were multiple things going on, right? You definitely — I knew that a lot of — at least some portion of the party was only doing this because they wanted to be able to win. And I thought that, as long as that coincided with what I actually wanted, which was more diversity on our tickets, then it was fine. We could work together. We could move forward. I think what — that was something I thought was going to be OK with me and, over time, realized that it wasn’t going to be. Part of it was that I was in this position where I should have been able to set policy. I should have been able to set the vision. And I was to a certain extent in Hawaii. But what I noticed fairly quickly, especially as Donald Trump and — I guess as Donald Trump started to pick up speed, what I realized very quickly is, I was only valued in the party, and my diverse face, if you will, was only valuable as long as that’s all it was. And if I had different opinions, if I wanted to voice something else, then quickly people didn’t want me on the stage anymore.
MARTIN: Well, give an example of that. How did that become clear to you?
FUKUMOTO: So, I think the example would be when I started talking about Donald — specifically, Donald Trump in December of 2015 was the first interview that I did, saying that I thought that the comments that he made about Japanese-American internment were appalling and didn’t have any place in the Republican Party. That, to me, should have been a perfectly good message, given that we were trying to make this new party. That’s what we said we were trying to do. So, when I realized that — first of all, when Donald Trump started talking about the Muslim registry, I started to get very concerned, started to talk to other Republicans who were much less concerned, and many of them said, this is not something that’s ever going to happen, he’s just using it as rhetoric, and brushed it off. And then when I tried to talk to RNC and say, this is impacting the message we’re putting out, it’s the exact opposite of all the things you told me to say, let me talk about it, they basically said, we don’t want to talk about this, because it’s not in the news cycle. And so, for me, I started speaking out then, and then quickly, within a few months, there was a complaint against me. A few months later, I said the same things again at the state convention, and was booed for 15 minutes. But I just really thought we needed to talk about this, because it was so different than what we said we were doing, that we needed to at least acknowledge what had gone wrong.
MARTIN: You were actually removed from your leadership position.
FUKUMOTO: That’s right.
The Social Fabric of the U.S. Is Fraying Severely, if Not Unravelling
The year 2020 has been one of the most tumultuous in modern American history. To find events remotely as destabilizing and transformative, one has to go back to the 2008 financial crisis and the 9/11 and anthrax attacks of 2001, though those systemic shocks, profound as they were, were isolated (one a national security crisis, the other a financial crisis) and thus more limited in scope than the multicrisis instability now shaping U.S. politics and culture.
Since the end of World War II, the only close competitor to the current moment is the multipronged unrest of the 1960s and early 1970s: serial assassinations of political leaders, mass civil rights and anti-war protests, sustained riots, fury over a heinous war in Indochina, and the resignation of a corruption-plagued president.
But those events unfolded and built upon one another over the course of a decade. By crucial contrast, the current confluence of crises, each of historic significance in their own right — a global pandemic, an economic and social shutdown, mass unemployment, an enduring protest movement provoking increasing levels of violence and volatility, and a presidential election centrally focused on one of the most divisive political figures the U.S. has known who happens to be the incumbent president — are happening simultaneously, having exploded one on top of the other in a matter of a few months.
Lurking beneath the headlines justifiably devoted to these major stories of 2020 are very troubling data that reflect intensifying pathologies in the U.S. population — not moral or allegorical sicknesses but mental, emotional, psychological and scientifically proven sickness. Many people fortunate enough to have survived this pandemic with their physical health intact know anecdotally — from observing others and themselves — that these political and social crises have spawned emotional difficulties and psychological challenges.
But the data are nonetheless stunning, in terms of both the depth of the social and mental health crises they demonstrate and the pervasiveness of them. Perhaps the most illustrative study was one released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this month, based on an extensive mental health survey of Americans in late June.
One question posed by researchers was whether someone has “seriously considered suicide in the past 30 days”— not fleetingly considered it as a momentary fantasy nor thought about it ever in their lifetime, but seriously considered suicide at least once in the past 30 days. The results are staggering.
For Americans between 18-24 years old, 25.5 percent — just over 1 out of every 4 young Americans — said they had. For the much larger group of Americans ages 25-44, the percentage was somewhat lower but still extremely alarming: 16 percent. A total of 18.6 percent of Hispanic Americans and 15 percent of African Americans said they had seriously considered suicide in the past month. The two groups with the largest percentage who said yes: Americans with less than a high school degree and unpaid caregivers, both of whom have 30 percent — or almost 1 out of every 3 — who answered in the affirmative. A full 10 percent of the U.S. population generally had seriously contemplated suicide in the month of June.
In a remotely healthy society, one that provides basic emotional needs to its population, suicide and serious suicidal ideation are rare events. It is anathema to the most basic human instinct: the will to live. A society in which such a vast swath of the population is seriously considering it as an option is one which is anything but healthy, one which is plainly failing to provide its citizens the basic necessities for a fulfilling life.
Since the end of World War II, the only close competitor to the current moment is the multipronged unrest of the 1960s and early 1970s: serial assassinations of political leaders, mass civil rights and anti-war protests, sustained riots, fury over a heinous war in Indochina, and the resignation of a corruption-plagued president.
But those events unfolded and built upon one another over the course of a decade. By crucial contrast, the current confluence of crises, each of historic significance in their own right — a global pandemic, an economic and social shutdown, mass unemployment, an enduring protest movement provoking increasing levels of violence and volatility, and a presidential election centrally focused on one of the most divisive political figures the U.S. has known who happens to be the incumbent president — are happening simultaneously, having exploded one on top of the other in a matter of a few months.
Lurking beneath the headlines justifiably devoted to these major stories of 2020 are very troubling data that reflect intensifying pathologies in the U.S. population — not moral or allegorical sicknesses but mental, emotional, psychological and scientifically proven sickness. Many people fortunate enough to have survived this pandemic with their physical health intact know anecdotally — from observing others and themselves — that these political and social crises have spawned emotional difficulties and psychological challenges.
But the data are nonetheless stunning, in terms of both the depth of the social and mental health crises they demonstrate and the pervasiveness of them. Perhaps the most illustrative study was one released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier this month, based on an extensive mental health survey of Americans in late June.
One question posed by researchers was whether someone has “seriously considered suicide in the past 30 days”— not fleetingly considered it as a momentary fantasy nor thought about it ever in their lifetime, but seriously considered suicide at least once in the past 30 days. The results are staggering.
For Americans between 18-24 years old, 25.5 percent — just over 1 out of every 4 young Americans — said they had. For the much larger group of Americans ages 25-44, the percentage was somewhat lower but still extremely alarming: 16 percent. A total of 18.6 percent of Hispanic Americans and 15 percent of African Americans said they had seriously considered suicide in the past month. The two groups with the largest percentage who said yes: Americans with less than a high school degree and unpaid caregivers, both of whom have 30 percent — or almost 1 out of every 3 — who answered in the affirmative. A full 10 percent of the U.S. population generally had seriously contemplated suicide in the month of June.In a remotely healthy society, one that provides basic emotional needs to its population, suicide and serious suicidal ideation are rare events. It is anathema to the most basic human instinct: the will to live. A society in which such a vast swath of the population is seriously considering it as an option is one which is anything but healthy, one which is plainly failing to provide its citizens the basic necessities for a fulfilling life.
The alarming CDC data extends far beyond serious suicidal desires. It also found that “40.9% of respondents reported at least one adverse mental or behavioral health condition, including symptoms of anxiety disorder or depressive disorder (30.9%), symptoms of a trauma- and stressor-related disorder (TSRD) related to the pandemic (26.3%), and having started or increased substance use to cope with stress or emotions related to COVID-19 (13.3%).” For the youngest part of the adult population, ages 18-24, significantly more than half (62.9 percent) reported suffering from depressive or anxiety disorders.
That mental health would suffer materially in the middle of a pandemic — one that requires isolation from community and work, quarantines, economic shutdowns, and fear of illness and death — is not surprising. In April, as the realities of isolation and quarantine were becoming more apparent in the U.S., we devoted a SYSTEM UPDATE episode to a discussion with the mental health experts Andrew Solomon and Johann Hari, both of whom described how “the traumas of this pandemic — the unraveling of our way of life for however long that lasts, the compulsory viewing of all other humans as threats, and especially sustained isolation and social distancing” — will exacerbate virtually every social pathology, including ones of mental health.
But what makes these trends all the more disturbing is that they long predated the arrival of the coronavirus crisis, to say nothing of the economic catastrophe left in its wake and the social unrest from this year’s protest movement. Indeed, since at least the financial crisis of 2008, when first the Bush administration and then the Obama administration acted to protect the interests of the tycoons who caused it while allowing everyone else to wallow in debt and foreclosures, the indicia of collective mental health in the U.S. have been blinking red.
That mental health would suffer materially in the middle of a pandemic — one that requires isolation from community and work, quarantines, economic shutdowns, and fear of illness and death — is not surprising. In April, as the realities of isolation and quarantine were becoming more apparent in the U.S., we devoted a SYSTEM UPDATE episode to a discussion with the mental health experts Andrew Solomon and Johann Hari, both of whom described how “the traumas of this pandemic — the unraveling of our way of life for however long that lasts, the compulsory viewing of all other humans as threats, and especially sustained isolation and social distancing” — will exacerbate virtually every social pathology, including ones of mental health.
But what makes these trends all the more disturbing is that they long predated the arrival of the coronavirus crisis, to say nothing of the economic catastrophe left in its wake and the social unrest from this year’s protest movement. Indeed, since at least the financial crisis of 2008, when first the Bush administration and then the Obama administration acted to protect the interests of the tycoons who caused it while allowing everyone else to wallow in debt and foreclosures, the indicia of collective mental health in the U.S. have been blinking red.
by Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: CDC
[ed. Certainly blinking red for me.]
[ed. Certainly blinking red for me.]
Sunday, August 30, 2020
Steven Mnuchin Tried to Save the Economy. Not Even His Family Is Happy.
One spring day, not long after President Trump signed the largest economic stimulus package in American history in March, a group of his top aides and cabinet officers gathered in the Oval Office.
The $2.2 trillion government rescue — which delivered cash to individuals, small businesses and giant companies — was a crucial victory for Mr. Trump, who was facing withering attacks for his failures to respond to the fast-spreading coronavirus.
It also was a much-needed win for the program’s chief architect, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. He didn’t have a lot of fans. The president ran hot and cold on him. Conservatives distrusted him as a Republican in Name Only. Liberals demonized him as a plutocrat. Even members of Mr. Mnuchin’s immediate family distanced themselves; his liberal father said he was appalled by his son’s politics.
When the pandemic hit, the task of saving the economy was an opportunity for Mr. Mnuchin to transform himself from an unremarkable Treasury secretary into a national hero.
Mr. Mnuchin, a former banker and film financier, sought advice from his former Goldman Sachs colleagues, a cable-TV host, a Hollywood superagent, a disgraced Wall Street tycoon and Newt Gingrich. Unburdened by his own ideology and with a detail-disoriented boss, Mr. Mnuchin worked with Democrats to devise and pass the landmark stimulus bill.
Afterward, Mr. Trump hailed Mr. Mnuchin as a “great” Treasury secretary and “fantastic guy.”
The acclaim didn’t last. Republicans argued that Mr. Mnuchin had been outfoxed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the embodiment of free-spending liberals and, in Mr. Trump’s words, “a sick woman” with “mental problems.”
The conservative critique began to resonate with the president.
Thanks to the stimulus package, the economy had stabilized, but it was still on life support. Millions continued to lose their jobs. More help was needed. Was Mr. Mnuchin’s initial bipartisan success a fluke, or would he be able to save the American economy again?
The omens were bad. That spring day in the Oval Office, the president was venting about the stimulus package.
“I never should have signed it,” Mr. Trump bellowed, according to someone who was there. He pointed at his Treasury secretary. “You’re to blame.” (...)
Mr. Mnuchin is the rare cabinet secretary who does not seem to have strong political beliefs. “I don’t know if Steve is a Republican or Democrat,” said Larry Kudlow, the White House economic adviser. “I do know he’s smart and a hard worker.”
Mr. Trump has told people that he suspects that, deep down, Mr. Mnuchin is a Democrat. (Mr. Mnuchin has said he has always been a registered Republican. Still, he donated to Kamala Harris’s Senate campaign in 2016.) (...)
“When people ask why have I succeeded in this job, one, I understand why the president is the president. I was there — I saw why he won,” Mr. Mnuchin said in a mid-August interview in a Treasury Department conference room overlooking the White House.
He insisted that he didn’t take the criticism personally. After all, Mr. Mnuchin said, he is simply acting on behalf of Mr. Trump. “Anything that’s significant or material I check with the president.”
by James B. Stewart and Alan Rappeport, NY Times | Read more:
The $2.2 trillion government rescue — which delivered cash to individuals, small businesses and giant companies — was a crucial victory for Mr. Trump, who was facing withering attacks for his failures to respond to the fast-spreading coronavirus.
It also was a much-needed win for the program’s chief architect, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. He didn’t have a lot of fans. The president ran hot and cold on him. Conservatives distrusted him as a Republican in Name Only. Liberals demonized him as a plutocrat. Even members of Mr. Mnuchin’s immediate family distanced themselves; his liberal father said he was appalled by his son’s politics.
When the pandemic hit, the task of saving the economy was an opportunity for Mr. Mnuchin to transform himself from an unremarkable Treasury secretary into a national hero.Mr. Mnuchin, a former banker and film financier, sought advice from his former Goldman Sachs colleagues, a cable-TV host, a Hollywood superagent, a disgraced Wall Street tycoon and Newt Gingrich. Unburdened by his own ideology and with a detail-disoriented boss, Mr. Mnuchin worked with Democrats to devise and pass the landmark stimulus bill.
Afterward, Mr. Trump hailed Mr. Mnuchin as a “great” Treasury secretary and “fantastic guy.”
The acclaim didn’t last. Republicans argued that Mr. Mnuchin had been outfoxed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the embodiment of free-spending liberals and, in Mr. Trump’s words, “a sick woman” with “mental problems.”
The conservative critique began to resonate with the president.
Thanks to the stimulus package, the economy had stabilized, but it was still on life support. Millions continued to lose their jobs. More help was needed. Was Mr. Mnuchin’s initial bipartisan success a fluke, or would he be able to save the American economy again?
The omens were bad. That spring day in the Oval Office, the president was venting about the stimulus package.
“I never should have signed it,” Mr. Trump bellowed, according to someone who was there. He pointed at his Treasury secretary. “You’re to blame.” (...)
Mr. Mnuchin is the rare cabinet secretary who does not seem to have strong political beliefs. “I don’t know if Steve is a Republican or Democrat,” said Larry Kudlow, the White House economic adviser. “I do know he’s smart and a hard worker.”
Mr. Trump has told people that he suspects that, deep down, Mr. Mnuchin is a Democrat. (Mr. Mnuchin has said he has always been a registered Republican. Still, he donated to Kamala Harris’s Senate campaign in 2016.) (...)
“When people ask why have I succeeded in this job, one, I understand why the president is the president. I was there — I saw why he won,” Mr. Mnuchin said in a mid-August interview in a Treasury Department conference room overlooking the White House.
He insisted that he didn’t take the criticism personally. After all, Mr. Mnuchin said, he is simply acting on behalf of Mr. Trump. “Anything that’s significant or material I check with the president.”
by James B. Stewart and Alan Rappeport, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Erik Tanner for The New York Times
[ed. Tales from the Swamp.]
[ed. Tales from the Swamp.]
Saturday, August 29, 2020
Eagle Creek with Gibson & Son Road Building
[ed. My golfing partner made this video and supervises the crews. Pretty awesome, especially if you have little kids that enjoy heavy equipment (like my grandson).]
The Racial Anxiety Lurking Behind Reaction Videos
For decades, the drum break in Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight” has been making listeners reach for their adjectives. The barrage of tom-tom hits, which comes almost four minutes into Collins’s 1981 single, has elicited rock-critic clichés from “bone-crunching” to “iconic.” Complex magazine called it “notoriously brilliant”; the website The Quietus unholstered its hyphens, describing a“Phil-falling-down-the-stairs-with-his-kit explosion.” In 2009, Ozzy Osbourne declared the drum fill “the best ever.”
Then there is the judgment of Tim and Fred Williams, 22-year-old twins from Gary, Ind. The Williamses are YouTube stars who post so-called reaction videos, documenting their responses to hearing well-known songs for the first time. The clip that appeared on July 27, “FIRST TIME HEARING Phil Collins — In the Air Tonight REACTION,” shows them seated at a computer, absorbing the song’s ominous sound. When the big drum eruption finally arrives, their eyes widen, and they rock backward in surprise. “That was cold!” Fred cries. “Yeah,” Tim says. “That was cold.”
“Cold” is indeed the mot juste. “In the Air Tonight” has a chilly glamour. It is the definitive 1980s noir anthem, evoking the spiritual froideur [ed. coolness or reserve between people] we associate with such period artifacts as white linen suits, pink neon light and lines of cocaine on a DeLorean’s hood. It climbed the Billboard charts in 1981, but its place in pop culture was cemented by its later use onscreen — in a racy nocturnal scene in the 1983 film “Risky Business” and in a sequence in the pilot episode of “Miami Vice.” It has hung around ever since, passing through cycles of ironic and earnest appreciation on its way to a place in pop’s golden jukebox.
But the Williams brothers’ reaction has pushed it back to center stage: After the video went viral on Aug. 7, “In the Air Tonight” rose to No.2 on the iTunes charts. It is a familiar modern-day music business story, where a couple of guys in a bedroom can accomplish a job once designated to battalions of marketers. It is also a reminder that the reaction video — staring at a screen to watch people stare at a screen — is a weird, definitively American art form that stretches back at least to the 1990s heyday of “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” But the viral popularity of this display of intergenerational sympathy — Black 20-somethings professing love for a white boomer’s pop-rock chestnut — may also tell us something else about the ambient tensions and neuroses that are, you might say, in the air, adrift in the ether of 2020. (...)
Clearly, the Williams brothers understand this dynamic. They begin each video with the tagline “Back with another banger,” announcing a foregone conclusion: The song will be received with wild enthusiasm. Even if we take them at their word that they’ve never heard these songs, even if we accept their raves as genuine, we may still note that exaggerating their guilelessness and throwing a little extra sauce on their wowed responses is good business, part and parcel of the reaction-video gig. A popular YouTube channel can be a lucrative thing; the Williamses sell merchandise and know how to build a brand. Flattering the tastes of your target audience — catering to its insecurities — is Marketing 101.
Then there is the judgment of Tim and Fred Williams, 22-year-old twins from Gary, Ind. The Williamses are YouTube stars who post so-called reaction videos, documenting their responses to hearing well-known songs for the first time. The clip that appeared on July 27, “FIRST TIME HEARING Phil Collins — In the Air Tonight REACTION,” shows them seated at a computer, absorbing the song’s ominous sound. When the big drum eruption finally arrives, their eyes widen, and they rock backward in surprise. “That was cold!” Fred cries. “Yeah,” Tim says. “That was cold.”
“Cold” is indeed the mot juste. “In the Air Tonight” has a chilly glamour. It is the definitive 1980s noir anthem, evoking the spiritual froideur [ed. coolness or reserve between people] we associate with such period artifacts as white linen suits, pink neon light and lines of cocaine on a DeLorean’s hood. It climbed the Billboard charts in 1981, but its place in pop culture was cemented by its later use onscreen — in a racy nocturnal scene in the 1983 film “Risky Business” and in a sequence in the pilot episode of “Miami Vice.” It has hung around ever since, passing through cycles of ironic and earnest appreciation on its way to a place in pop’s golden jukebox.
But the Williams brothers’ reaction has pushed it back to center stage: After the video went viral on Aug. 7, “In the Air Tonight” rose to No.2 on the iTunes charts. It is a familiar modern-day music business story, where a couple of guys in a bedroom can accomplish a job once designated to battalions of marketers. It is also a reminder that the reaction video — staring at a screen to watch people stare at a screen — is a weird, definitively American art form that stretches back at least to the 1990s heyday of “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” But the viral popularity of this display of intergenerational sympathy — Black 20-somethings professing love for a white boomer’s pop-rock chestnut — may also tell us something else about the ambient tensions and neuroses that are, you might say, in the air, adrift in the ether of 2020. (...)
Clearly, the Williams brothers understand this dynamic. They begin each video with the tagline “Back with another banger,” announcing a foregone conclusion: The song will be received with wild enthusiasm. Even if we take them at their word that they’ve never heard these songs, even if we accept their raves as genuine, we may still note that exaggerating their guilelessness and throwing a little extra sauce on their wowed responses is good business, part and parcel of the reaction-video gig. A popular YouTube channel can be a lucrative thing; the Williamses sell merchandise and know how to build a brand. Flattering the tastes of your target audience — catering to its insecurities — is Marketing 101.
by Jody Rosen, NY Times | Read more:
Image: YouTube
[ed. Reaction videos? Must be some subset or evolution of unboxing videos. See also: The Addictive Joy of Watching Someone Listen to Phil Collins (New Yorker)]
[ed. Reaction videos? Must be some subset or evolution of unboxing videos. See also: The Addictive Joy of Watching Someone Listen to Phil Collins (New Yorker)]
Friday, August 28, 2020
Rotisserie Chicken
Emma Feigenbaum remembers when she first dropped a rotisserie chicken into her basket in the supermarket. She was about twelve, on vacation with her family on Long Island. At home, she enjoyed home-cooked meals almost every night, and prepared foods were not something that her family typically bought. Then she turned a corner and arrived at the warm, glowing display of rust-colored birds.
“It was revelatory,” Feigenbaum recalls. “I remember thinking to myself, It’s a whole roast chicken, I don’t have to roast a chicken.”
Her practical purchase was further justified upon a taste test; Feigenbaum was blown away by its flavor, the sticky skin and crispy wing tips. Even if the breast meat was a little dry (it’s always a little dry), nowadays she finds the slightly chewy breast meat of a supermarket rotisserie chicken appealingly nostalgic. Since then, rotisserie chicken has stuck around as occasional stand-in for home-cooked dinners, and it’s had an immense presence in her work—Feigenbaum is a food stylist and chef, and she has previously served as a food editor for Martha Stewart Living. She says that when styling any recipe that involves shredded chicken meat, it’s a no-brainer. “It looks the same as if I’m spending $16 for a Bell & Evans [raw chicken],” she says. “It’s not a better or worse product than what you roast at home, just a more convenient one.”
Roasting a whole chicken at home is a rite of passage for nearly everybody who has turned on an oven, and for avid home cooks, perfecting one can border on a spiritual quest. There are numerous gurus of the craft, as well as buzzworthy home hacks, from spatchcocking to brining to using a hair dryer to ensure a crisp skin and juicy meat. Roasted chicken is the entrée that many food critics regard as a “litmus test” for a restaurant’s worth—and it is essentially beloved all around the globe. Yet going out of one’s way to roast a chicken at home seems futile when there is a hot, glistening, extremely delicious roasted bird a few aisles away, priced as low as a bag of chips. And an entire generation has been raised with them around.
In the United States, rotisserie chickens are available for an ever-deeper—even artificial—bargain compared to the price of a whole, uncooked chicken at the same store. While a home-roasted chicken represents an idealized American dinner, the rise of the ubiquitous takeout rotisserie chicken is an extreme microcosm of the commodification and exploitation of that vision.
At Costco, the wholesale supermarket chain founded in 1983 with 785 locations in the United States, rotisserie chickens have been widely reported to be a “loss leader” at $4.99 each; they’re sold for less than they cost, but they are there to lure you into the store, so you can buy other goods (at a profit to the company) while you’re shopping. (Representatives at Costco declined to comment for this article.) At many other supermarkets selling cut-rate rotisserie birds, the same strategy has been in place for decades. A spokesperson for Kroger, a supermarket chain with nearly 3,000 stateside locations, says that their rotisserie chicken program began in the 1980s: “Hot rotisserie chickens are a prepared food mainstay for many households,” she added.
Even restaurant chefs have a soft spot for the supermarket entrée. King Phojanakong, chef-owner of Kuma Inn on New York City’s Lower East Side, remembers that rotisserie chicken was an imperative whenever his family shopped at Costco growing up. Now, he goes with his kids.
“I cook a pot of rice, there’s salad, and that’s dinner,” he says. “The next day, we make a fried rice, and everybody loves it.” (...)
In 2020, the United States is expected to eat an estimated 1 billion rotisserie chickens, according to the National Chicken Council. And yet many of them won’t turn a profit for their retailers—at least not directly. The fact that they double as marketing for so many businesses may help explain why they’re so ubiquitous today. But the economy of roasting many birds at once on mechanically rotating spits—and the sensory appeal of that process—is not to be underestimated.
“It was revelatory,” Feigenbaum recalls. “I remember thinking to myself, It’s a whole roast chicken, I don’t have to roast a chicken.”
Her practical purchase was further justified upon a taste test; Feigenbaum was blown away by its flavor, the sticky skin and crispy wing tips. Even if the breast meat was a little dry (it’s always a little dry), nowadays she finds the slightly chewy breast meat of a supermarket rotisserie chicken appealingly nostalgic. Since then, rotisserie chicken has stuck around as occasional stand-in for home-cooked dinners, and it’s had an immense presence in her work—Feigenbaum is a food stylist and chef, and she has previously served as a food editor for Martha Stewart Living. She says that when styling any recipe that involves shredded chicken meat, it’s a no-brainer. “It looks the same as if I’m spending $16 for a Bell & Evans [raw chicken],” she says. “It’s not a better or worse product than what you roast at home, just a more convenient one.”
Roasting a whole chicken at home is a rite of passage for nearly everybody who has turned on an oven, and for avid home cooks, perfecting one can border on a spiritual quest. There are numerous gurus of the craft, as well as buzzworthy home hacks, from spatchcocking to brining to using a hair dryer to ensure a crisp skin and juicy meat. Roasted chicken is the entrée that many food critics regard as a “litmus test” for a restaurant’s worth—and it is essentially beloved all around the globe. Yet going out of one’s way to roast a chicken at home seems futile when there is a hot, glistening, extremely delicious roasted bird a few aisles away, priced as low as a bag of chips. And an entire generation has been raised with them around.In the United States, rotisserie chickens are available for an ever-deeper—even artificial—bargain compared to the price of a whole, uncooked chicken at the same store. While a home-roasted chicken represents an idealized American dinner, the rise of the ubiquitous takeout rotisserie chicken is an extreme microcosm of the commodification and exploitation of that vision.
At Costco, the wholesale supermarket chain founded in 1983 with 785 locations in the United States, rotisserie chickens have been widely reported to be a “loss leader” at $4.99 each; they’re sold for less than they cost, but they are there to lure you into the store, so you can buy other goods (at a profit to the company) while you’re shopping. (Representatives at Costco declined to comment for this article.) At many other supermarkets selling cut-rate rotisserie birds, the same strategy has been in place for decades. A spokesperson for Kroger, a supermarket chain with nearly 3,000 stateside locations, says that their rotisserie chicken program began in the 1980s: “Hot rotisserie chickens are a prepared food mainstay for many households,” she added.
Even restaurant chefs have a soft spot for the supermarket entrée. King Phojanakong, chef-owner of Kuma Inn on New York City’s Lower East Side, remembers that rotisserie chicken was an imperative whenever his family shopped at Costco growing up. Now, he goes with his kids.
“I cook a pot of rice, there’s salad, and that’s dinner,” he says. “The next day, we make a fried rice, and everybody loves it.” (...)
In 2020, the United States is expected to eat an estimated 1 billion rotisserie chickens, according to the National Chicken Council. And yet many of them won’t turn a profit for their retailers—at least not directly. The fact that they double as marketing for so many businesses may help explain why they’re so ubiquitous today. But the economy of roasting many birds at once on mechanically rotating spits—and the sensory appeal of that process—is not to be underestimated.
by Cathy Erway, Taste | Read more:
Image: Photofusion/Universal Images Group via Getty Images via
The Brain Implants That Could Change Humanity
Jack Gallant never set out to create a mind-reading machine. His focus was more prosaic. A computational neuroscientist at the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Gallant worked for years to improve our understanding of how brains encode information — what regions become active, for example, when a person sees a plane or an apple or a dog — and how that activity represents the object being viewed.
By the late 2000s, scientists could determine what kind of thing a person might be looking at from the way the brain lit up — a human face, say, or a cat. But Dr. Gallant and his colleagues went further. They figured out how to use machine learning to decipher not just the class of thing, but which exact image a subject was viewing. (Which photo of a cat, out of three options, for instance.)
One day, Dr. Gallant and his postdocs got to talking. In the same way that you can turn a speaker into a microphone by hooking it up backward, they wondered if they could reverse engineer the algorithm they’d developed so they could visualize, solely from brain activity, what a person was seeing.
The first phase of the project was to train the AI. For hours, Dr. Gallant and his colleagues showed volunteers in fMRI machines movie clips. By matching patterns of brain activation prompted by the moving images, the AI built a model of how the volunteers’ visual cortex, which parses information from the eyes, worked. Then came the next phase: translation. As they showed the volunteers movie clips, they asked the model what, given everything it now knew about their brains, it thought they might be looking at.
The experiment focused just on a subsection of the visual cortex. It didn’t capture what was happening elsewhere in the brain — how a person might feel about what she was seeing, for example, or what she might be fantasizing about as she watched. The endeavor was, in Dr. Gallant’s words, a primitive proof-of-concept.
And yet the results, published in 2011, are remarkable.
The reconstructed images move with a dreamlike fluidity. In their imperfection, they evoke expressionist art. (And a few reconstructed images seem downright wrong.) But where they succeed, they represent an astonishing achievement: A machine translating patterns of brain activity into a moving image understandable by other people — a machine that can read the brain.
Dr. Gallant was thrilled. Imagine the possibilities when better brain-reading technology became available? Imagine the people suffering from locked-in syndrome, Lou Gehrig’s disease, the people incapacitated by strokes, who could benefit from a machine that could help them interact with the world?
He was also scared because the experiment showed, in a concrete way, that humanity was at the dawn of a new era, one in which our thoughts could theoretically be snatched from our heads. What was going to happen, Dr. Gallant wondered, when you could read thoughts the thinker might not even be consciously aware of, when you could see people’s memories?
“That’s a real sobering thought that now you have to take seriously,” he told me recently. (...)
by Moises Velasquez-Manoff, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Derrick Schultz
By the late 2000s, scientists could determine what kind of thing a person might be looking at from the way the brain lit up — a human face, say, or a cat. But Dr. Gallant and his colleagues went further. They figured out how to use machine learning to decipher not just the class of thing, but which exact image a subject was viewing. (Which photo of a cat, out of three options, for instance.)
One day, Dr. Gallant and his postdocs got to talking. In the same way that you can turn a speaker into a microphone by hooking it up backward, they wondered if they could reverse engineer the algorithm they’d developed so they could visualize, solely from brain activity, what a person was seeing.
The first phase of the project was to train the AI. For hours, Dr. Gallant and his colleagues showed volunteers in fMRI machines movie clips. By matching patterns of brain activation prompted by the moving images, the AI built a model of how the volunteers’ visual cortex, which parses information from the eyes, worked. Then came the next phase: translation. As they showed the volunteers movie clips, they asked the model what, given everything it now knew about their brains, it thought they might be looking at.The experiment focused just on a subsection of the visual cortex. It didn’t capture what was happening elsewhere in the brain — how a person might feel about what she was seeing, for example, or what she might be fantasizing about as she watched. The endeavor was, in Dr. Gallant’s words, a primitive proof-of-concept.
And yet the results, published in 2011, are remarkable.
The reconstructed images move with a dreamlike fluidity. In their imperfection, they evoke expressionist art. (And a few reconstructed images seem downright wrong.) But where they succeed, they represent an astonishing achievement: A machine translating patterns of brain activity into a moving image understandable by other people — a machine that can read the brain.
Dr. Gallant was thrilled. Imagine the possibilities when better brain-reading technology became available? Imagine the people suffering from locked-in syndrome, Lou Gehrig’s disease, the people incapacitated by strokes, who could benefit from a machine that could help them interact with the world?
He was also scared because the experiment showed, in a concrete way, that humanity was at the dawn of a new era, one in which our thoughts could theoretically be snatched from our heads. What was going to happen, Dr. Gallant wondered, when you could read thoughts the thinker might not even be consciously aware of, when you could see people’s memories?
“That’s a real sobering thought that now you have to take seriously,” he told me recently. (...)
Dear Brain
Not many people will volunteer to be the first to undergo a novel kind of brain surgery, even if it holds the promise of restoring mobility to those who’ve been paralyzed. So when Robert Kirsch, the chairman of biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University put out such a call nearly 10 years ago, and one person both met the criteria and was willing, he knew he had a pioneer on his hands.
The man’s name was Bill Kochevar. He’d been paralyzed from the neck down in a biking accident years earlier. His motto, as he later explained it, was “somebody has to do the research.”
At that point, scientists had already invented gizmos that helped paralyzed patients leverage what mobility remained — lips, an eyelid — to control computers or move robotic arms. But Dr. Kirsch was after something different. He wanted to help Mr. Kochevar move his own limbs.
The first step was implanting two arrays of sensors over the part of the brain that would normally control Mr. Kochevar’s right arm. Electrodes that could receive signals from those arrays via a computer were implanted into his arm muscles. The implants, and the computer connected to them, would function as a kind of electronic spinal cord, bypassing his injury.
Once his arm muscles had been strengthened — achieved with a regimen of mild electrical stimulation while he slept — Mr. Kochevar, who at that point had been paralyzed for over a decade, was able to feed himself and drink water. He could even scratch his nose.
There are about two dozen people around the world who have lost the use of limbs from accidents or neurological disease, who’ve had sensors implanted on their brains. Many, Mr. Kochevar included, participated in a United States government-funded program called BrainGate. The sensor arrays used in this research, smaller than a button, allow patients to move robotic arms or cursors on a screen just by thinking. But as far as Dr. Kirsch knows, Mr. Kochevar, who died in 2017 for reasons unrelated to the research, was the first paralyzed person to regain use of his limbs by way of this technology.
This fall, Dr. Kirsch and his colleagues will begin version 2.0 of the experiment. This time, they’ll implant six smaller arrays — more sensors will improve the quality of the signal. And instead of implanting electrodes directly in the volunteers’ muscles, they’ll insert them upstream, circling the nerves that move the muscles. In theory, Dr. Kirsch says, that will enable movement of the entire arm and hand. (...)
Zap That Urge
Not all the applications of brain-reading require something as complex as understanding speech, however. In some cases, scientists simply want to blunt urges.
When Casey Halpern, a neurosurgeon at Stanford, was in college, he had a friend who drank too much. Another was overweight but couldn’t stop eating. “Impulse control is such a pervasive problem,” he told me.
As a budding scientist, he learned about methods of deep brain stimulation used to treat Parkinson’s disease. A mild electric current applied to a part of the brain involved in movement could lessen tremors caused by the disease. Could he apply that technology to the problem of inadequate self control? (...)
Dr. Halpern’s approach takes as fact something that he says many people have a hard time accepting: that the lack of impulse control that may underlie addictive behavior isn’t a choice, but results from a malfunction of the brain. “We have to accept that it’s a disease,” he says. “We often just judge people and assume it’s their own fault. That’s not what the current research is suggesting we should do.”
I must confess that of the numerous proposed applications of brain-machine interfacing I came across, Dr. Halpern’s was my favorite to extrapolate on. How many lives have been derailed by the inability to resist the temptation of that next pill or that next beer? What if Dr. Halpern’s solution was generalizable?
Not many people will volunteer to be the first to undergo a novel kind of brain surgery, even if it holds the promise of restoring mobility to those who’ve been paralyzed. So when Robert Kirsch, the chairman of biomedical engineering at Case Western Reserve University put out such a call nearly 10 years ago, and one person both met the criteria and was willing, he knew he had a pioneer on his hands.
The man’s name was Bill Kochevar. He’d been paralyzed from the neck down in a biking accident years earlier. His motto, as he later explained it, was “somebody has to do the research.”
At that point, scientists had already invented gizmos that helped paralyzed patients leverage what mobility remained — lips, an eyelid — to control computers or move robotic arms. But Dr. Kirsch was after something different. He wanted to help Mr. Kochevar move his own limbs.
The first step was implanting two arrays of sensors over the part of the brain that would normally control Mr. Kochevar’s right arm. Electrodes that could receive signals from those arrays via a computer were implanted into his arm muscles. The implants, and the computer connected to them, would function as a kind of electronic spinal cord, bypassing his injury.
Once his arm muscles had been strengthened — achieved with a regimen of mild electrical stimulation while he slept — Mr. Kochevar, who at that point had been paralyzed for over a decade, was able to feed himself and drink water. He could even scratch his nose.
There are about two dozen people around the world who have lost the use of limbs from accidents or neurological disease, who’ve had sensors implanted on their brains. Many, Mr. Kochevar included, participated in a United States government-funded program called BrainGate. The sensor arrays used in this research, smaller than a button, allow patients to move robotic arms or cursors on a screen just by thinking. But as far as Dr. Kirsch knows, Mr. Kochevar, who died in 2017 for reasons unrelated to the research, was the first paralyzed person to regain use of his limbs by way of this technology.
This fall, Dr. Kirsch and his colleagues will begin version 2.0 of the experiment. This time, they’ll implant six smaller arrays — more sensors will improve the quality of the signal. And instead of implanting electrodes directly in the volunteers’ muscles, they’ll insert them upstream, circling the nerves that move the muscles. In theory, Dr. Kirsch says, that will enable movement of the entire arm and hand. (...)
Zap That Urge
Not all the applications of brain-reading require something as complex as understanding speech, however. In some cases, scientists simply want to blunt urges.
When Casey Halpern, a neurosurgeon at Stanford, was in college, he had a friend who drank too much. Another was overweight but couldn’t stop eating. “Impulse control is such a pervasive problem,” he told me.
As a budding scientist, he learned about methods of deep brain stimulation used to treat Parkinson’s disease. A mild electric current applied to a part of the brain involved in movement could lessen tremors caused by the disease. Could he apply that technology to the problem of inadequate self control? (...)
Dr. Halpern’s approach takes as fact something that he says many people have a hard time accepting: that the lack of impulse control that may underlie addictive behavior isn’t a choice, but results from a malfunction of the brain. “We have to accept that it’s a disease,” he says. “We often just judge people and assume it’s their own fault. That’s not what the current research is suggesting we should do.”
I must confess that of the numerous proposed applications of brain-machine interfacing I came across, Dr. Halpern’s was my favorite to extrapolate on. How many lives have been derailed by the inability to resist the temptation of that next pill or that next beer? What if Dr. Halpern’s solution was generalizable?
by Moises Velasquez-Manoff, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Derrick Schultz
Small-Time Scams are Dissolving America From the Inside
Few were surprised when the "We Build the Wall" crowdfunding effort, where rank and file conservatives shelled out to build a tiny section of the big, beautiful border wall, turned out to be a gigantic scam, according to a recent federal indictment. It was only slightly more surprising that Steve Bannon, President Trump's former chief strategist, was a central part of the grift. He was arrested by federal marshals last week, and faces charges of money laundering conspiracy and wire fraud conspiracy. Hilariously, it seems one of the alleged conspirators, Brian Kolfage, spent some of the ill-gotten proceeds on a boat called the "Warfighter."
But this scheme is one small wave in an ocean of fraud. Half of conservative politics now — particularly the infestation of conspiratorial insanity that is rapidly devouring the Republican Party — runs on this kind of small-bore grifting. Look behind the latest bug-eyed theories about Democrats being space lizard cannibals or coronavirus vaccines being a secret plot to brainwash citizens, and odds are you will find some kook hawking snake oil remedies to eagerly receptive rubes. It follows that a stringent crackdown on petty scams and quack medicine would go some distance towards cleansing American politics of madness. (...)
In this they are following a long tradition of other right-wing grifters. Alex Jones of InfoWars has long sold supplements with ridiculous lies about how they will make you stronger, healthier, and smarter (or cure COVID-19). BuzzFeed News sent some of them to a testing lab and found they were just vitamins and other ordinary supplements sold at a preposterous markup. As Alex Pareene and Rick Perlstein have written, this kind of thing has been a foundational part of conservative politics for decades.
By the same token, basically all of Trump's business empire — the fraudulent Trump University, the grift Trump Foundation, and various other Trump-branded trash — has been a similar type of scam after he squandered his father's inheritance (on which he dodged taxes in a likely illegal fashion) on real estate and casino failures. Of course as president he is constantly violating the Constitution by nickel-and-diming the government to use his own facilities.
It thus makes perfect sense that the very top of conservative politics, the Trump re-election campaign, has apparently been infested with fraud and self-dealing. Trump's previous campaign manager, Brad Parscale, recently departed the effort under suspicion that he had directed millions of dollars into his and his friends' pockets. As Josh Marshall writes at Talking Points Memo, "Criminality and fraud come like breathing to the president and seemingly everyone around him. Like recognizes like. Thieves and cons sense a fellow traveler." No wonder the campaign has crossed the billion dollar mark in its spending faster than any in history.
[ed. Tip of the iceberg. See also: Spotting $62 Million in Alleged P.P.P. Fraud Was the Easy Part (NYT).]
But this scheme is one small wave in an ocean of fraud. Half of conservative politics now — particularly the infestation of conspiratorial insanity that is rapidly devouring the Republican Party — runs on this kind of small-bore grifting. Look behind the latest bug-eyed theories about Democrats being space lizard cannibals or coronavirus vaccines being a secret plot to brainwash citizens, and odds are you will find some kook hawking snake oil remedies to eagerly receptive rubes. It follows that a stringent crackdown on petty scams and quack medicine would go some distance towards cleansing American politics of madness. (...)
In this they are following a long tradition of other right-wing grifters. Alex Jones of InfoWars has long sold supplements with ridiculous lies about how they will make you stronger, healthier, and smarter (or cure COVID-19). BuzzFeed News sent some of them to a testing lab and found they were just vitamins and other ordinary supplements sold at a preposterous markup. As Alex Pareene and Rick Perlstein have written, this kind of thing has been a foundational part of conservative politics for decades.By the same token, basically all of Trump's business empire — the fraudulent Trump University, the grift Trump Foundation, and various other Trump-branded trash — has been a similar type of scam after he squandered his father's inheritance (on which he dodged taxes in a likely illegal fashion) on real estate and casino failures. Of course as president he is constantly violating the Constitution by nickel-and-diming the government to use his own facilities.
It thus makes perfect sense that the very top of conservative politics, the Trump re-election campaign, has apparently been infested with fraud and self-dealing. Trump's previous campaign manager, Brad Parscale, recently departed the effort under suspicion that he had directed millions of dollars into his and his friends' pockets. As Josh Marshall writes at Talking Points Memo, "Criminality and fraud come like breathing to the president and seemingly everyone around him. Like recognizes like. Thieves and cons sense a fellow traveler." No wonder the campaign has crossed the billion dollar mark in its spending faster than any in history.
by Ryan Cooper, The Week | Read more:
Image: Illustrated | Getty Images, Alamy, iStock[ed. Tip of the iceberg. See also: Spotting $62 Million in Alleged P.P.P. Fraud Was the Easy Part (NYT).]
Thursday, August 27, 2020
Otter Jumps Onto Boat Escaping Orca With Seconds To Spare
This is the dramatic moment a genius otter being chased by a killer whale hops onto a boat for safety with just seconds to spare. In the incredible footage, captured in Halibut Cove, Alaska, on Sunday July 26, the otter is first seen roughly 200yds away from John Dornellas’ boat, swimming frantically as the orca follows. As it reaches John’s boat the otter swims around the outside, looking for a safe haven to climb onto as the orca closes in. Eventually, the otter jumps up onto the transom of John’s vessel moments before the whale arrives at the surface just feet away. John, 37, revealed a game of cat-and-mouse followed, with the otter hopping back into the water in an attempt to get away, only for the orca to chase it back up again three or four times.
Sometimes The Chicken Kills You, Though
In 2008, David Sedaris wrote a short piece for the New Yorker about undecided voters that has recently resurfaced. Sedaris was not sympathetic to those among the electorate who find it difficult to make up their minds:
First, this is 2008, so presumably John McCain is the plate of shit and Barack Obama is airline chicken (tepid, not likely to change your life, but, you know, fine). Sedaris thinks the choice between these two is so obvious that it should not require even a moment’s thought, which is why he can’t imagine anyone being undecided. But surely the bigger mystery is why there are so many Republicans, i.e. enthusiastic shit-gobblers (in this analogy). Surely it should be puzzling that there are so many people who are going for the plate of shit with tiny bits of broken glass. Perhaps this should lead us to wonder: is there something wrong with the chicken that I am not noticing? And given that this seems to happen every election since at least 2000, is the problem not particular to 2008?
In fact—and I say this not just to be fatuous but because it’s leading somewhere important—eating chickens is a leading cause of death worldwide. Sometimes the chicken has salmonella! If you simply say “well, everything else on this menu is a big ol’ plate of shit,” but it turns out that the answer to “how is the chicken cooked?” is “it isn’t,” then that would have been an important question to ask before agreeing to put it in your mouth.
I point this out because it captures what’s so wrong about the way Sedaris thinks about elections, i.e. mindlessly. His analogy is actually very useful, because the point it makes is: do not think about what you are eating, think only about what you are not eating. Do not ask even basic questions about whether the Democratic candidate is any good. Just look at the Republican, realize how terrible they are, and take whatever the alternative is. In other words, “vote blue no matter who.”
We need to reject the view of politics embedded in Sedaris’ analogy. The reason I bring up salmonella is to point out that it’s not inherently a given that someone with a (D) after their name is the best choice. We have to examine the candidates carefully. Yes, the Republican Party in this country is so monstrous that there are almost no conceivable circumstances in which voting Republican is the better choice. But to refuse to examine your own candidate, to ask even the most basic questions about “how are they cooked” and what they stand for, means that over time you’re probably going to end up being served worse and worse chicken, because the airline staff (DNC) realize they can get away with serving you something that’s extremely close to a plate of shit and you’ll still eat it.
My colleague Briahna Joy Gray explains this more eloquently and less disgustingly in her “Defense of Litmus Tests.” Briahna points out that when we make it clear at the outset that we have few standards for our party’s candidate, and we will vote for them regardless of how much they depart from or even betray our values, we are preemptively surrendering the leverage that we need to use to get better candidates. One of the most absurd moments in the Democratic primary was when progressives were asked if they would support the Democratic candidate even if it was Michael Bloomberg, a racist, sexist, Republican billionaire who might arguably have actually been worse than Trump. But this is what you get if you make it clear that you’re willing to be pushed around, to sit silently and eat your poisoned chicken.
Notice how passive the voter is in Sedaris’ analogy. They are strapped into their seat, and their only ability is to make a binary choice between two meals. Presumably, since this is supposed to represent an election, it is not possible to “not eat at all”—they’re going to get something, and if they remain undecided, the airline staff will force-feed them the plate of shit with tiny bits of broken glass. (Not even Spirit does that yet.) We do not participate in making the meal, we just have to accept what we are given.
But we can’t accept that candidates are just going to be handed to us and that our role is to pick the least fecal one. There is no reason we cannot have good meals, but voters have to see themselves as active participants in the political process who get to make demands of their parties, who do not just have to accept a menu of options that has been pre-decided for them.
A relevant anecdote: the last time I was on an international flight, the flight attendant told me that the meal options were chicken or fish. I am a vegetarian, so both were equally inedible as far as I was concerned. “You should have ordered the vegetarian meal,” she said. I told her I had ordered the vegetarian meal, which was true. She said that they had no record of this, and there was nothing available but chicken or fish. “Then I can’t eat either,” I said. “Because I am a vegetarian.” She looked very annoyed. Five minutes later she returned with a vegetarian pasta dish. It wasn’t half bad. The lesson: people in power want you to believe that there is no alternative to the options they give you, but oftentimes there are more available, and you only find out by making demands and sticking with them.
The difficulty here is that once Election Day rolls around, we do face a binary choice. This election is particularly painful for many on the left, because the Democratic candidate is so utterly unrepresentative of our aspirations. My personal feeling is that when it comes down to it, we do need to hold our noses and vote for him, since Trump’s reelection would be so catastrophic. But we have to do so in full awareness of what it is we’re eating. We can’t, like Sedaris implies, just refuse to ask questions about or examine our own candidate. We’re stuck with him, but we cannot delude ourselves into thinking a Biden presidency will be good. It will be not as bad as what is going on now, which is possibly the lowest bar any person has ever had to clear.
I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?I find that this short passage usefully demonstrates what I would call “some common bad tendencies in liberal thought” and so it’s worth analyzing closely.
To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”
To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
First, this is 2008, so presumably John McCain is the plate of shit and Barack Obama is airline chicken (tepid, not likely to change your life, but, you know, fine). Sedaris thinks the choice between these two is so obvious that it should not require even a moment’s thought, which is why he can’t imagine anyone being undecided. But surely the bigger mystery is why there are so many Republicans, i.e. enthusiastic shit-gobblers (in this analogy). Surely it should be puzzling that there are so many people who are going for the plate of shit with tiny bits of broken glass. Perhaps this should lead us to wonder: is there something wrong with the chicken that I am not noticing? And given that this seems to happen every election since at least 2000, is the problem not particular to 2008?
In fact—and I say this not just to be fatuous but because it’s leading somewhere important—eating chickens is a leading cause of death worldwide. Sometimes the chicken has salmonella! If you simply say “well, everything else on this menu is a big ol’ plate of shit,” but it turns out that the answer to “how is the chicken cooked?” is “it isn’t,” then that would have been an important question to ask before agreeing to put it in your mouth.I point this out because it captures what’s so wrong about the way Sedaris thinks about elections, i.e. mindlessly. His analogy is actually very useful, because the point it makes is: do not think about what you are eating, think only about what you are not eating. Do not ask even basic questions about whether the Democratic candidate is any good. Just look at the Republican, realize how terrible they are, and take whatever the alternative is. In other words, “vote blue no matter who.”
We need to reject the view of politics embedded in Sedaris’ analogy. The reason I bring up salmonella is to point out that it’s not inherently a given that someone with a (D) after their name is the best choice. We have to examine the candidates carefully. Yes, the Republican Party in this country is so monstrous that there are almost no conceivable circumstances in which voting Republican is the better choice. But to refuse to examine your own candidate, to ask even the most basic questions about “how are they cooked” and what they stand for, means that over time you’re probably going to end up being served worse and worse chicken, because the airline staff (DNC) realize they can get away with serving you something that’s extremely close to a plate of shit and you’ll still eat it.
My colleague Briahna Joy Gray explains this more eloquently and less disgustingly in her “Defense of Litmus Tests.” Briahna points out that when we make it clear at the outset that we have few standards for our party’s candidate, and we will vote for them regardless of how much they depart from or even betray our values, we are preemptively surrendering the leverage that we need to use to get better candidates. One of the most absurd moments in the Democratic primary was when progressives were asked if they would support the Democratic candidate even if it was Michael Bloomberg, a racist, sexist, Republican billionaire who might arguably have actually been worse than Trump. But this is what you get if you make it clear that you’re willing to be pushed around, to sit silently and eat your poisoned chicken.
Notice how passive the voter is in Sedaris’ analogy. They are strapped into their seat, and their only ability is to make a binary choice between two meals. Presumably, since this is supposed to represent an election, it is not possible to “not eat at all”—they’re going to get something, and if they remain undecided, the airline staff will force-feed them the plate of shit with tiny bits of broken glass. (Not even Spirit does that yet.) We do not participate in making the meal, we just have to accept what we are given.
But we can’t accept that candidates are just going to be handed to us and that our role is to pick the least fecal one. There is no reason we cannot have good meals, but voters have to see themselves as active participants in the political process who get to make demands of their parties, who do not just have to accept a menu of options that has been pre-decided for them.
A relevant anecdote: the last time I was on an international flight, the flight attendant told me that the meal options were chicken or fish. I am a vegetarian, so both were equally inedible as far as I was concerned. “You should have ordered the vegetarian meal,” she said. I told her I had ordered the vegetarian meal, which was true. She said that they had no record of this, and there was nothing available but chicken or fish. “Then I can’t eat either,” I said. “Because I am a vegetarian.” She looked very annoyed. Five minutes later she returned with a vegetarian pasta dish. It wasn’t half bad. The lesson: people in power want you to believe that there is no alternative to the options they give you, but oftentimes there are more available, and you only find out by making demands and sticking with them.
The difficulty here is that once Election Day rolls around, we do face a binary choice. This election is particularly painful for many on the left, because the Democratic candidate is so utterly unrepresentative of our aspirations. My personal feeling is that when it comes down to it, we do need to hold our noses and vote for him, since Trump’s reelection would be so catastrophic. But we have to do so in full awareness of what it is we’re eating. We can’t, like Sedaris implies, just refuse to ask questions about or examine our own candidate. We’re stuck with him, but we cannot delude ourselves into thinking a Biden presidency will be good. It will be not as bad as what is going on now, which is possibly the lowest bar any person has ever had to clear.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: An Ineffectual Biden Presidency Is Better For The Left Than An Actively Authoritarian Trump Presidency (Current Affairs).]
Convicted of Sex Crimes, but With No Victims
Jace Hambrick worked as an apprentice laborer during the week, renovating homes around Vancouver, Wash., and at a neighborhood gas station on weekends. Much of the rest of his life was online. He was hard-core, amassing a collection of more than 200 games. People told him it wasn’t smart to be so cut off from reality, but his internet life felt rich. As a dungeon master in Dungeons & Dragons, he controlled other players’ destinies. As a video warrior, he was known online by his nom de guerre and was constantly messaging fellow gamers, particularly his best friend, Simon. Though the two had never met in person, over the last few years they paired up as teammates playing Rainbow Six Siege and Rocket League and grew close.
At 20, Hambrick was still living at home with his mother to save money for college, where he hoped to study game design. He was a voracious reader who could knock off a 1,000-page fantasy novel in two days. People liked him; he made them laugh. When he and his mother lived in places that had board-game clubs, he was a regular. And his kindness could be surprising. He would spend a morning handing out sandwiches to the hungry.
The problem, he knew, was that he was a nerd. Sometimes he was too open with people. As a boy, he took medication for A.D.H.D. His mother, Kathleen, describes him affectionately as her “introverted, sensitive, immature, coddled, nerdy son.” They are very close. She would prod him to get out more, but he wasn’t someone who could meet women at a bar. Online, it was different. Starting when he was 18, a few times a month, he clicked through the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist, looking for sex. There were so many listings, but when he tried messaging, it was rare to get a response. If people did respond, they often went dark after a few emails.
Users had to certify that they were 18 or older, but at the time Craigslist didn’t verify users’ age. People described their appearance in personal ads, then sent photos that didn’t match. Some seemed to enjoy role playing. He once replied to a post describing an attractive 21-year-old, but when he arrived at the address she gave him, an old man answered the door. He got out of there fast. Every once in a while, it worked out: In the past few years, he had sex with five or six women he met this way.
One Friday after work in February 2017, Hambrick came across a Casual Encounters “w4m” (woman searching for man) post that seemed meant for him.
“Jus gamer gurl sittin’ home on sunny day,” it read. “we can chat as long as im not lvling!”
Hambrick emailed back. “Sounds like fun. What game you playin?”
“i am HOOKED on ALIEN ISOLATION,” Gamer Gurl replied.
“forget sex,” Hambrick wrote. “Let me come watch I haven’t gottn that one yet,” adding that he was 20. Fifteen minutes later, Gamer Gurl replied that she was 13.
Hambrick was confused. “why did you post an ad in craigslist if your 13? You mean 23?”
She asked for his cellphone number and they switched to texting, exchanging photos. Gamer Gurl was beautiful, he thought, if he wasn’t being pranked: Big eyes, cute white cap, soft smile, gazing up at the camera serenely with a really nice set of headphones. (...)
Was this an elaborate game? Again she claimed to be 13. The photo seemed to tell a different story, and the gaming chair she was seated in looked too expensive for a kid. She used slang a 13-year-old probably wouldn’t know, like “FTP” — “[expletive] the police” — that originated in ’80s hip-hop. The vulgarities and snide tone seemed too adult. Her texts were full of “lol”s. Was she an immature teenager? Or a sly adult?
Her driving directions seemed too specific for 13.
Hambrick texted that he would be driving a red Prius — his mother’s — and Gamer Gurl replied she would be wearing a gray sweatshirt and ripped jeans.
It was a 20-minute drive to the house in suburban Vancouver. After stopping for condoms, he arrived at 7 p.m., three and a half hours after their first emails. She came to the door just as she’d said, in torn jeans and gray sweatshirt, as beautiful as her photo. She didn’t look 13 at all, more like she was in her 20s.
“You made it,” she called out and waved for him to follow, court documents would later show. When he got inside, she disappeared down a hallway. Suddenly two police officers wearing bulletproof vests appeared from a back room, ordered him to lie on the floor and handcuffed him.
“What’s going on?” Hambrick asked.
“We’re gonna advise you you’re under arrest.”
“OK, why?” he said.
“We’ll explain it all in just a moment,” one of the officers answered.
“Is it possible I could talk to my mom?” he later asked.
“That’s not possible right now.”
Since 2015, nearly 300 men in cities and towns across Washington State have been arrested in online-predator stings, most of them run by the State Patrol and code-named Operation Net Nanny. The men range in age from 17 to 77, though about a quarter are 25 or younger. As many as two dozen have been rounded up in a single sting and charged with attempted rape of a child, as Jace Hambrick was, even though no actual children were involved. The emails and texts offering sex are written by undercover officers. The “girls” in the photos are not 13. They are police officers, typically the youngest women on the force.
For law enforcement, stings are an efficient way to make high-profile felony arrests and secure convictions. In June 2016, John Garden, a State Patrol detective, emailed a fellow trooper about joining him on a sting in Spokane. “See if you can come play” and “chat some guys in,” he wrote, according to a court filing. The conviction rate in cases that go to trial is about 95 percent, though most don’t get that far. There is such shame associated with a sex crime, let alone a child sex crime, that a majority of the defendants plead guilty rather than face a jury. At least five of the men have committed suicide, including a 66-year-old caught in the same operation as Hambrick who then fled to California. As the police there moved to make the arrest, the man shot himself in the head.
An analysis of court records in Washington State stings, as well as interviews with police and prosecutors, reveals that most of the men arrested have no felony record. A strong predictor of predatory behavior is an obsession with child pornography, but at the time of their arrest, according to the State Patrol, 89 percent have none in their possession and 92 percent have no history of violent crime. They are nonetheless sentenced, on average, to more than six years in prison with no chance of parole, according to my analysis of the 271 arrests I was able to confirm. (State police calculate the average is just over five years.) Once released, the men are listed on the state’s sex-offender registry for at least 10 years — and often for life. Almost all were caught up in Operation Net Nanny, although the sting in which Hambrick was arrested was a joint venture between the State Patrol and the Vancouver police.
The men caught in these cases can wind up serving more time than men who are convicted of sexually assaulting and raping actual children. While there are no statistics comparing sentencing among different states in such predator stings, Washington’s criminal code has some particularly draconian provisions that result in unusually lengthy sentences. The legal standard for making an arrest in police stings is not high. Washington law allows undercover officers to use “deception, trickery or artifice.” They can fake sympathy or friendship. The police need only demonstrate that their target took a “substantial step” toward meeting the undercover officer. (...)
In a December 2015 email to his superiors, a state police captain, Roger Wilbur, wrote why they should do more stings: “Plea bargains start at 10 years in prison. Compared to other criminal cases that can take a year or longer, may result in a few years in prison, costs hundreds of man-hours and still only result in a single arrest, this is a significant return on investment. Mathematically, it only costs $2,500 per arrest during this operation! Considering the high level of potential offense, there is a meager investment that pays huge dividends.”
Yet most men caught in these raids pose a low risk to the public, according to Dr. Richard Packard, a past president of the Washington State chapter of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, and Dr. Michael O’Connell, a member of the state’s sex-offender policy board, who have examined about three dozen men arrested in cyberstings around the state. They say that relatively few — maybe 15 percent of men they saw — pose a moderate to high risk. Many have addiction problems, suffer from depression or anxiety, are autistic or are, as O’Connell described them to me, simply “pathetic, lonely people.” He went on: “Some are in marriages where things aren’t going great. They’re socially inept, but this is the way of having sex and having a relationship. They’re just stupid and making not very well thought out decisions. They weren’t looking for kids, but there was this one ad that caught their attention.” And a sizable percentage of those arrested are themselves in their late teens and early 20s and may, according to current scientific research, exercise poor judgment because the regions of the brain that control risk taking are not yet fully developed.
by Michael Winerip, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jess T. Dugan for The New York Times
At 20, Hambrick was still living at home with his mother to save money for college, where he hoped to study game design. He was a voracious reader who could knock off a 1,000-page fantasy novel in two days. People liked him; he made them laugh. When he and his mother lived in places that had board-game clubs, he was a regular. And his kindness could be surprising. He would spend a morning handing out sandwiches to the hungry.The problem, he knew, was that he was a nerd. Sometimes he was too open with people. As a boy, he took medication for A.D.H.D. His mother, Kathleen, describes him affectionately as her “introverted, sensitive, immature, coddled, nerdy son.” They are very close. She would prod him to get out more, but he wasn’t someone who could meet women at a bar. Online, it was different. Starting when he was 18, a few times a month, he clicked through the Casual Encounters section of Craigslist, looking for sex. There were so many listings, but when he tried messaging, it was rare to get a response. If people did respond, they often went dark after a few emails.
Users had to certify that they were 18 or older, but at the time Craigslist didn’t verify users’ age. People described their appearance in personal ads, then sent photos that didn’t match. Some seemed to enjoy role playing. He once replied to a post describing an attractive 21-year-old, but when he arrived at the address she gave him, an old man answered the door. He got out of there fast. Every once in a while, it worked out: In the past few years, he had sex with five or six women he met this way.
One Friday after work in February 2017, Hambrick came across a Casual Encounters “w4m” (woman searching for man) post that seemed meant for him.
“Jus gamer gurl sittin’ home on sunny day,” it read. “we can chat as long as im not lvling!”
Hambrick emailed back. “Sounds like fun. What game you playin?”
“i am HOOKED on ALIEN ISOLATION,” Gamer Gurl replied.
“forget sex,” Hambrick wrote. “Let me come watch I haven’t gottn that one yet,” adding that he was 20. Fifteen minutes later, Gamer Gurl replied that she was 13.
Hambrick was confused. “why did you post an ad in craigslist if your 13? You mean 23?”
She asked for his cellphone number and they switched to texting, exchanging photos. Gamer Gurl was beautiful, he thought, if he wasn’t being pranked: Big eyes, cute white cap, soft smile, gazing up at the camera serenely with a really nice set of headphones. (...)
Was this an elaborate game? Again she claimed to be 13. The photo seemed to tell a different story, and the gaming chair she was seated in looked too expensive for a kid. She used slang a 13-year-old probably wouldn’t know, like “FTP” — “[expletive] the police” — that originated in ’80s hip-hop. The vulgarities and snide tone seemed too adult. Her texts were full of “lol”s. Was she an immature teenager? Or a sly adult?
Her driving directions seemed too specific for 13.
Hambrick texted that he would be driving a red Prius — his mother’s — and Gamer Gurl replied she would be wearing a gray sweatshirt and ripped jeans.
It was a 20-minute drive to the house in suburban Vancouver. After stopping for condoms, he arrived at 7 p.m., three and a half hours after their first emails. She came to the door just as she’d said, in torn jeans and gray sweatshirt, as beautiful as her photo. She didn’t look 13 at all, more like she was in her 20s.
“You made it,” she called out and waved for him to follow, court documents would later show. When he got inside, she disappeared down a hallway. Suddenly two police officers wearing bulletproof vests appeared from a back room, ordered him to lie on the floor and handcuffed him.
“What’s going on?” Hambrick asked.
“We’re gonna advise you you’re under arrest.”
“OK, why?” he said.
“We’ll explain it all in just a moment,” one of the officers answered.
“Is it possible I could talk to my mom?” he later asked.
“That’s not possible right now.”
Since 2015, nearly 300 men in cities and towns across Washington State have been arrested in online-predator stings, most of them run by the State Patrol and code-named Operation Net Nanny. The men range in age from 17 to 77, though about a quarter are 25 or younger. As many as two dozen have been rounded up in a single sting and charged with attempted rape of a child, as Jace Hambrick was, even though no actual children were involved. The emails and texts offering sex are written by undercover officers. The “girls” in the photos are not 13. They are police officers, typically the youngest women on the force.
For law enforcement, stings are an efficient way to make high-profile felony arrests and secure convictions. In June 2016, John Garden, a State Patrol detective, emailed a fellow trooper about joining him on a sting in Spokane. “See if you can come play” and “chat some guys in,” he wrote, according to a court filing. The conviction rate in cases that go to trial is about 95 percent, though most don’t get that far. There is such shame associated with a sex crime, let alone a child sex crime, that a majority of the defendants plead guilty rather than face a jury. At least five of the men have committed suicide, including a 66-year-old caught in the same operation as Hambrick who then fled to California. As the police there moved to make the arrest, the man shot himself in the head.
An analysis of court records in Washington State stings, as well as interviews with police and prosecutors, reveals that most of the men arrested have no felony record. A strong predictor of predatory behavior is an obsession with child pornography, but at the time of their arrest, according to the State Patrol, 89 percent have none in their possession and 92 percent have no history of violent crime. They are nonetheless sentenced, on average, to more than six years in prison with no chance of parole, according to my analysis of the 271 arrests I was able to confirm. (State police calculate the average is just over five years.) Once released, the men are listed on the state’s sex-offender registry for at least 10 years — and often for life. Almost all were caught up in Operation Net Nanny, although the sting in which Hambrick was arrested was a joint venture between the State Patrol and the Vancouver police.
The men caught in these cases can wind up serving more time than men who are convicted of sexually assaulting and raping actual children. While there are no statistics comparing sentencing among different states in such predator stings, Washington’s criminal code has some particularly draconian provisions that result in unusually lengthy sentences. The legal standard for making an arrest in police stings is not high. Washington law allows undercover officers to use “deception, trickery or artifice.” They can fake sympathy or friendship. The police need only demonstrate that their target took a “substantial step” toward meeting the undercover officer. (...)
In a December 2015 email to his superiors, a state police captain, Roger Wilbur, wrote why they should do more stings: “Plea bargains start at 10 years in prison. Compared to other criminal cases that can take a year or longer, may result in a few years in prison, costs hundreds of man-hours and still only result in a single arrest, this is a significant return on investment. Mathematically, it only costs $2,500 per arrest during this operation! Considering the high level of potential offense, there is a meager investment that pays huge dividends.”
Yet most men caught in these raids pose a low risk to the public, according to Dr. Richard Packard, a past president of the Washington State chapter of the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, and Dr. Michael O’Connell, a member of the state’s sex-offender policy board, who have examined about three dozen men arrested in cyberstings around the state. They say that relatively few — maybe 15 percent of men they saw — pose a moderate to high risk. Many have addiction problems, suffer from depression or anxiety, are autistic or are, as O’Connell described them to me, simply “pathetic, lonely people.” He went on: “Some are in marriages where things aren’t going great. They’re socially inept, but this is the way of having sex and having a relationship. They’re just stupid and making not very well thought out decisions. They weren’t looking for kids, but there was this one ad that caught their attention.” And a sizable percentage of those arrested are themselves in their late teens and early 20s and may, according to current scientific research, exercise poor judgment because the regions of the brain that control risk taking are not yet fully developed.
Image: Jess T. Dugan for The New York Times
NBA Season Up In The Air
"Just so you know, I'm the king of this place."
NBA season up in air as Lakers and Clippers reportedly vote to quit playoffs (The Guardian)
Image: New Yorker
[ed. What a shit show going down in Wisconsin. But what to expect when armed militias are allowed to roam freely, openly carrying weapons in a tinder box situation.]
Wednesday, August 26, 2020
A Lady’s Duty to Submit—Then And Now
In 1956, my Grandma Claire gave birth to the first of her five children and soon after divorced the father, an Australian who turned out to be a drunk and besotted loser. Her father was so embarrassed by the divorce that he banned her from the family home. Claire refused to submit and shortly after being disowned, she moved west. Her second child was born to her (and my grandfather) in 1959, at Grace Hospital in Vancouver.
This time, she was not married at all. And the nuns in attendance were so disgusted to see an unwed mother that they refused to give her a pillow during labour. She never legally married my grandfather, an Irish-Catholic-altar-boy-turned-atheist, and once again put the shame behind her. She lived her life uncowed by the stigma and shame that divorced women faced in that time.
As far as I know, she was never bitter. Instead, the misogynistic bigotry of the Catholic Church was a source of amusement, and she regularly mocked the church. I’ve seen photos of her waiting at the arrivals department of Vancouver Airport to greet my grandfather while dressed as a stern Catholic nun. She could find humour in just about anything. Once, when I was a teen, she nearly choked laughing at a Marilyn Manson lyric I shared with her about “surviving abortion.” She didn’t suffer fools. She built a life for herself rooted in left-wing politics, trade unionism, and—though I never heard her call herself a “feminist” per se—second-wave feminism.
I was born 52 years after Grandma Claire, and I benefited greatly from the changes women of her generation fought for and achieved. Growing up, there were no nuns to scold me about my sexuality, and the idea of being disowned for divorce was unthinkable. When I was a young teen, Claire bought me a book on female puberty and sexual education that was suffused with the Pacific Northwest Riot Grrrl feminism of the time. I recall experiencing a mix of embarrassment and gratitude. I wasn’t quite sure why she got it for me, but of course see it now as a gift rooted in love and born out of her own experience.
Unfortunately, I didn’t save it. But five years ago, I got another one of Claire’s books. She had this one in her possession for over 60 years: 10 Lessons in Sex Technique, a 1948 publication edited by Toronto physicians L. Pellman and R.W. Hatch. I inherited the worn and crumpled copy after she died.
Why would she keep this book for over six decades? Perhaps it’s for the same reason she dressed up as a nun: The thing represents every piece of misogynistic bullshit that she stood against. My guess is that it appealed to her dark sense of humour; whenever I read its yellowed pages, I hear her laugh clink around in my head.
On sex before marriage, Pellman and Hatch were just as scornful as nuns: “Promiscuity of any sort is never advisable. Besides the dangers to the self-respect and emotional balance of the girl who surrenders her virginity, or the boy who visits prostitutes, there is the terrible danger of infection with one of the venereal diseases.” Those who marry after pregnancy, a “scandal” as they called it, might find the resultant marriage is “only a dreary and distasteful duty.”
Page after page, the book does not disappoint. “As a wise man once said, marriage should not begin with a rape. In other words, the husband must win his bride, captivate her emotions, rouse her to the pitch where the urge to submission will overcome all her fears and inhibitions, and then carry out the act with the minimum of pain and shock.” A few of the volume’s 10 lessons cover the basics of sexual education, including sections on anatomy, and how pregnancy occurs. Other lessons conjure images of poodle skirts and drive-in movie theatres. But perhaps most memorable of all is the bonus “eleventh lesson.” It’s about female inferiority and sexual submission, male dominance, and a man’s (apparently) barely-controllable sexual drive. The words are prescriptive, not descriptive. They enforce the worst stereotypes about men and women:
In 2020, it’s easy to laugh off Pellman and Hatch’s words as anachronistic. And until recently, that’s what I was inclined to do. But by an odd twist, this “eleventh lesson” from the 1940s has snuck back into the mainstream, albeit through the back door of progressive politics. I’ve seen it happen, experienced some of the consequences personally, and witnessed the negative impact on numerous families I’ve encountered in my professional role as a nurse. (...)
As second-wave feminism receded and today’s third wave crests, we are quick to congratulate ourselves for the work we’ve done to dismantle gender and “smash” sex stereotypes. We talk about women’s sexual liberation. We (rightly) celebrate laws against marital rape, and the movement to bring sexual predators to account, fraught though it may be. Things are better. But there are blind spots, and not just where you might normally expect to find them.
In Western countries, the same regressive sex stereotypes peddled by Pellman and Hatch have regained liberal respectability thanks to our newfound obsession with gender—in particular, with the idea of a soul-like “gender identity” that overrides sex. Girls and women who eschew stereotypically feminine appearances or hobbies are encouraged to come out as non-binary or trans. The only “real” females, now, as in 1948, paint their nails and play with dolls. And naturally, men—“progressive” men, especially—have discovered they can leverage this trend to lord their sexuality over women.
When author J.K. Rowling recently tweeted in support of a woman who shares my view that sexual biology is real and important, legions of self-identified females told the famous author to suck their “lady dicks.” It seemed a more vulgar, but also more concise, restatement of Pellman and Hatch’s advice that women “undertake active cooperation” to male desires, sexual or otherwise, with “no unnecessary difficulty put in the way.” Numerous outlets reported on Rowling’s alleged “transphobia,” while ignoring the misogyny perpetrated against her. It is fine to tell a woman to shut up and submit, apparently, so long as you get your pronouns right.
by Amy Eileen Hamm, Quillette | Read more:
Image: 10 Lessons, Pellman and Hatch
This time, she was not married at all. And the nuns in attendance were so disgusted to see an unwed mother that they refused to give her a pillow during labour. She never legally married my grandfather, an Irish-Catholic-altar-boy-turned-atheist, and once again put the shame behind her. She lived her life uncowed by the stigma and shame that divorced women faced in that time.
As far as I know, she was never bitter. Instead, the misogynistic bigotry of the Catholic Church was a source of amusement, and she regularly mocked the church. I’ve seen photos of her waiting at the arrivals department of Vancouver Airport to greet my grandfather while dressed as a stern Catholic nun. She could find humour in just about anything. Once, when I was a teen, she nearly choked laughing at a Marilyn Manson lyric I shared with her about “surviving abortion.” She didn’t suffer fools. She built a life for herself rooted in left-wing politics, trade unionism, and—though I never heard her call herself a “feminist” per se—second-wave feminism.
I was born 52 years after Grandma Claire, and I benefited greatly from the changes women of her generation fought for and achieved. Growing up, there were no nuns to scold me about my sexuality, and the idea of being disowned for divorce was unthinkable. When I was a young teen, Claire bought me a book on female puberty and sexual education that was suffused with the Pacific Northwest Riot Grrrl feminism of the time. I recall experiencing a mix of embarrassment and gratitude. I wasn’t quite sure why she got it for me, but of course see it now as a gift rooted in love and born out of her own experience.
Unfortunately, I didn’t save it. But five years ago, I got another one of Claire’s books. She had this one in her possession for over 60 years: 10 Lessons in Sex Technique, a 1948 publication edited by Toronto physicians L. Pellman and R.W. Hatch. I inherited the worn and crumpled copy after she died.Why would she keep this book for over six decades? Perhaps it’s for the same reason she dressed up as a nun: The thing represents every piece of misogynistic bullshit that she stood against. My guess is that it appealed to her dark sense of humour; whenever I read its yellowed pages, I hear her laugh clink around in my head.
On sex before marriage, Pellman and Hatch were just as scornful as nuns: “Promiscuity of any sort is never advisable. Besides the dangers to the self-respect and emotional balance of the girl who surrenders her virginity, or the boy who visits prostitutes, there is the terrible danger of infection with one of the venereal diseases.” Those who marry after pregnancy, a “scandal” as they called it, might find the resultant marriage is “only a dreary and distasteful duty.”
Page after page, the book does not disappoint. “As a wise man once said, marriage should not begin with a rape. In other words, the husband must win his bride, captivate her emotions, rouse her to the pitch where the urge to submission will overcome all her fears and inhibitions, and then carry out the act with the minimum of pain and shock.” A few of the volume’s 10 lessons cover the basics of sexual education, including sections on anatomy, and how pregnancy occurs. Other lessons conjure images of poodle skirts and drive-in movie theatres. But perhaps most memorable of all is the bonus “eleventh lesson.” It’s about female inferiority and sexual submission, male dominance, and a man’s (apparently) barely-controllable sexual drive. The words are prescriptive, not descriptive. They enforce the worst stereotypes about men and women:
The young wife must be warned again that the sexual act is a mutual relationship; both partners should take a full part, the wife throwing aside her previous modesty and inhibitions, and meeting her husband’s aggressive advances with a willing and active submission.“Men have been designed by nature to be the wooer and aggressor; women to be the receptive, surrendering partner,” the authors further explained. A husband should, therefore, “realize that his bride has been taught all her life to resist the sexual embraces of men, to maintain her chastity at all costs,” while the wife “should undertake active cooperation and response to his advances.”
In 2020, it’s easy to laugh off Pellman and Hatch’s words as anachronistic. And until recently, that’s what I was inclined to do. But by an odd twist, this “eleventh lesson” from the 1940s has snuck back into the mainstream, albeit through the back door of progressive politics. I’ve seen it happen, experienced some of the consequences personally, and witnessed the negative impact on numerous families I’ve encountered in my professional role as a nurse. (...)
As second-wave feminism receded and today’s third wave crests, we are quick to congratulate ourselves for the work we’ve done to dismantle gender and “smash” sex stereotypes. We talk about women’s sexual liberation. We (rightly) celebrate laws against marital rape, and the movement to bring sexual predators to account, fraught though it may be. Things are better. But there are blind spots, and not just where you might normally expect to find them.
In Western countries, the same regressive sex stereotypes peddled by Pellman and Hatch have regained liberal respectability thanks to our newfound obsession with gender—in particular, with the idea of a soul-like “gender identity” that overrides sex. Girls and women who eschew stereotypically feminine appearances or hobbies are encouraged to come out as non-binary or trans. The only “real” females, now, as in 1948, paint their nails and play with dolls. And naturally, men—“progressive” men, especially—have discovered they can leverage this trend to lord their sexuality over women.
When author J.K. Rowling recently tweeted in support of a woman who shares my view that sexual biology is real and important, legions of self-identified females told the famous author to suck their “lady dicks.” It seemed a more vulgar, but also more concise, restatement of Pellman and Hatch’s advice that women “undertake active cooperation” to male desires, sexual or otherwise, with “no unnecessary difficulty put in the way.” Numerous outlets reported on Rowling’s alleged “transphobia,” while ignoring the misogyny perpetrated against her. It is fine to tell a woman to shut up and submit, apparently, so long as you get your pronouns right.
by Amy Eileen Hamm, Quillette | Read more:
Image: 10 Lessons, Pellman and Hatch
Remember the Pandemic?
Never has the simple tense of a verb revealed so much about a political party—or seemed so plainly out of touch with reality.
“It was awful,” Larry Kudlow, President Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser, said tonight during his brief remarks to the Republican National Convention. He was referring, of course, to the coronavirus pandemic—the one that came and went earlier this year, the one that’s over, the one that America, under Trump’s leadership, decisively defeated and consigned to history. “Health and economic impacts were tragic,” Kudlow said of that pandemic. “Hardship and heartbreak were everywhere.”
If the pandemic were truly in the past, however, Kudlow would have been delivering that message to a packed, roaring crowd at the Spectrum Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. Instead, Kudlow was speaking from a wood-paneled room at his home in Redding, Connecticut—a rural community with a population of fewer than 10,000 in one of the few states that has brought the coronavirus outbreak under control. He introduced himself as someone familiar to viewers who have seen him frequently “on TV and radio,” but so too was the tableau: a talking head surrounded by bookshelves and the comfort of a home that is not safe to leave.
But this entire week, the contradiction at the heart of the GOP’s assertions about the virus is even more obvious: It’s apparent in just about every image viewers see of the convention. Kudlow appeared from his home, and so did Trump, who made his appearances from the White House in what was simultaneously a bow to the reality of the pandemic as well as a blatant use of a government building for political campaigning. The RNC tried to re-create the backdrop of a convention at the Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C., with speakers appearing at a podium in front of a bank of American flags. But their remarks were almost all taped, and the lack of an applauding audience was glaring for a few of them.
Kudlow’s rosy speech was just one small example of how Republicans have tried to downplay, if not outright erase, the public consciousness of the pandemic during the convention. Until first lady Melania Trump devoted the opening of her speech to the pandemic—even referring to it in the present tense, notably—the virus received only glancing mentions during most of the speeches, and those speakers who did allude to it spoke, as Kudlow did, of recovery more than they did of an ongoing crisis. Masks were nowhere to be found—not on any of the speakers, nor on Trump or any of the varied people he appeared with, in close contact, at the White House. (...)
In some ways, the convention has felt like an event frozen in time—perhaps February 2020—as speakers laud a booming national economy that no longer exists. At other points, like during Kudlow’s remarks, an alternative picture seemed to emerge—one in which time has sped up, and the virus is no longer a threat.
“It was awful,” Larry Kudlow, President Donald Trump’s chief economic adviser, said tonight during his brief remarks to the Republican National Convention. He was referring, of course, to the coronavirus pandemic—the one that came and went earlier this year, the one that’s over, the one that America, under Trump’s leadership, decisively defeated and consigned to history. “Health and economic impacts were tragic,” Kudlow said of that pandemic. “Hardship and heartbreak were everywhere.”
If the pandemic were truly in the past, however, Kudlow would have been delivering that message to a packed, roaring crowd at the Spectrum Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. Instead, Kudlow was speaking from a wood-paneled room at his home in Redding, Connecticut—a rural community with a population of fewer than 10,000 in one of the few states that has brought the coronavirus outbreak under control. He introduced himself as someone familiar to viewers who have seen him frequently “on TV and radio,” but so too was the tableau: a talking head surrounded by bookshelves and the comfort of a home that is not safe to leave.But this entire week, the contradiction at the heart of the GOP’s assertions about the virus is even more obvious: It’s apparent in just about every image viewers see of the convention. Kudlow appeared from his home, and so did Trump, who made his appearances from the White House in what was simultaneously a bow to the reality of the pandemic as well as a blatant use of a government building for political campaigning. The RNC tried to re-create the backdrop of a convention at the Mellon Auditorium in Washington, D.C., with speakers appearing at a podium in front of a bank of American flags. But their remarks were almost all taped, and the lack of an applauding audience was glaring for a few of them.
Kudlow’s rosy speech was just one small example of how Republicans have tried to downplay, if not outright erase, the public consciousness of the pandemic during the convention. Until first lady Melania Trump devoted the opening of her speech to the pandemic—even referring to it in the present tense, notably—the virus received only glancing mentions during most of the speeches, and those speakers who did allude to it spoke, as Kudlow did, of recovery more than they did of an ongoing crisis. Masks were nowhere to be found—not on any of the speakers, nor on Trump or any of the varied people he appeared with, in close contact, at the White House. (...)
In some ways, the convention has felt like an event frozen in time—perhaps February 2020—as speakers laud a booming national economy that no longer exists. At other points, like during Kudlow’s remarks, an alternative picture seemed to emerge—one in which time has sped up, and the virus is no longer a threat.
by Eric Weiner, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Getty/The Atlantic
Suburbia, Reconsidered
It’s a weird time for the American suburbs.
As the Trump administration attempts to secure votes in the lead-up to the 2020 election, the president has leaned in to a not-so-subtle tactic: promising to protect suburban America from the supposedly harmful influence of low-income housing, by abolishing an Obama-era rule designed to combat racial segregation.
But Trump’s suburban rhetoric — and his apparent conviction that suburbia is the exclusive domain of affluent white housewives enjoying the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” — no longer holds water. Suburban America is more diverse than ever, and poverty is rising in the suburbs at a faster pace than in urban or rural areas.
“I honestly don’t think that guy has ever been to a real suburb — aside from like, golf courses.” says Jason Diamond, the author of The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs, a new examination of the suburbs and their influence on American culture. As he writes in the introduction to his book, out Aug. 25 from Coffee House Press, “we try to pigeonhole suburbia, act like it’s a great big boring monolith of conformity and tract housing, but there’s so much more to it than that, and we need to understand it better.”
As in his previous book, 2016’s Searching for John Hughes, Diamond mined his 1980s childhood in the suburbs of Chicago for material. But he also traveled to suburbs throughout the U.S. to try and understand how they went from being perceived as utopian enclaves to bland wastelands. Along the way, he discovered that hackneyed ideas about the homogeneity of suburbia don’t hold up.
“I started noticing how much some of these places are different from the other ones — like some suburbs are suburbs, but they’re more country,” he says. “I was like, that’s interesting, because we’re taught that suburbs are one thing, and all the houses look alike. That’s not necessarily true.”
The book is also an examination of how the suburbs have influenced popular culture and vice versa, through the work of artists like Steven Spielberg (raised in the Phoenix suburb of Arcadia, Arizona), TV shows like “Twin Peaks” and “Fresh Off the Boat,” and authors like John Cheever, Shirley Jackson and William Gibson.
None of this is to say the suburbs aren’t worthy of critique; as Diamond writes in the introduction, “the suburbs were a smart, practical idea that was put into practice in all the wrong ways.” He finds plenty to scrutinize in the racist policies that established patterns of segregation and inequity that persist to this day, and in the strain of suburban NIMBYism that defends it. In addition, the car-centric geography of many suburbs takes a terrible environmental toll. But, Diamond argues, it’s worth fighting those forces and making suburbia more welcoming for all. “Whether we like it or not, the future is in suburbia,” he writes. “We just need to reclaim it.”
We spoke with Diamond about the the cultural power of the American suburb, why stereotypes about it persist, and how life among the cul-de-sacs could change. The following conversation has been condensed and edited. (...)
The concept of place in your book is really interesting — you write about the way the suburbs are designed, and how that can foster creativity. What’s the connection between the suburbs as a place and art?
I am always curious about how people hit a certain point and are still creative and curious about things. I started realizing that it wasn’t so much the specific suburb they were from; it was mostly the suburban way of life that influenced them. I would talk to a lot of people and everyone had the same experience: “Yeah, I was really bored, and would just draw all day.” That is a thing that unites all the people I know from the suburbs; boredom was a great connector.
I didn’t want to write a book about the architecture of the suburbs; that’s not something I know a lot about. From the get-go, the art coming out of the suburbs was going to be the focus. We can pooh-pooh the suburbs, but we’ll call Blue Velvet one of the great cinematic masterpieces of the last 40 years, or “The Simpsons” will get voted the greatest show of all time. There’s a reason. It’s because this stuff connects to us. (...)
You also say that one way to fix the suburbs and make them more livable would be to “decrease the ease” that people who live there have gotten used to. How do you sell that to suburbanites when part of the appeal is the ease of living?
I don’t think you’re going to sell it. As we’ve learned with trying to get people to wear masks, I don’t think we’re going to sell anything. I think you change the culture. You’re going to see people moving from the cities back to the suburbs — which was happening before Covid — and [those] people are like, “I want what I had in the city, I want more of that.” It’s not going to be widespread, but it’s going to impact the culture of certain suburbs. And that’s a good thing.
As the Trump administration attempts to secure votes in the lead-up to the 2020 election, the president has leaned in to a not-so-subtle tactic: promising to protect suburban America from the supposedly harmful influence of low-income housing, by abolishing an Obama-era rule designed to combat racial segregation.
But Trump’s suburban rhetoric — and his apparent conviction that suburbia is the exclusive domain of affluent white housewives enjoying the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” — no longer holds water. Suburban America is more diverse than ever, and poverty is rising in the suburbs at a faster pace than in urban or rural areas.
“I honestly don’t think that guy has ever been to a real suburb — aside from like, golf courses.” says Jason Diamond, the author of The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs, a new examination of the suburbs and their influence on American culture. As he writes in the introduction to his book, out Aug. 25 from Coffee House Press, “we try to pigeonhole suburbia, act like it’s a great big boring monolith of conformity and tract housing, but there’s so much more to it than that, and we need to understand it better.” As in his previous book, 2016’s Searching for John Hughes, Diamond mined his 1980s childhood in the suburbs of Chicago for material. But he also traveled to suburbs throughout the U.S. to try and understand how they went from being perceived as utopian enclaves to bland wastelands. Along the way, he discovered that hackneyed ideas about the homogeneity of suburbia don’t hold up.
“I started noticing how much some of these places are different from the other ones — like some suburbs are suburbs, but they’re more country,” he says. “I was like, that’s interesting, because we’re taught that suburbs are one thing, and all the houses look alike. That’s not necessarily true.”
The book is also an examination of how the suburbs have influenced popular culture and vice versa, through the work of artists like Steven Spielberg (raised in the Phoenix suburb of Arcadia, Arizona), TV shows like “Twin Peaks” and “Fresh Off the Boat,” and authors like John Cheever, Shirley Jackson and William Gibson.
None of this is to say the suburbs aren’t worthy of critique; as Diamond writes in the introduction, “the suburbs were a smart, practical idea that was put into practice in all the wrong ways.” He finds plenty to scrutinize in the racist policies that established patterns of segregation and inequity that persist to this day, and in the strain of suburban NIMBYism that defends it. In addition, the car-centric geography of many suburbs takes a terrible environmental toll. But, Diamond argues, it’s worth fighting those forces and making suburbia more welcoming for all. “Whether we like it or not, the future is in suburbia,” he writes. “We just need to reclaim it.”
We spoke with Diamond about the the cultural power of the American suburb, why stereotypes about it persist, and how life among the cul-de-sacs could change. The following conversation has been condensed and edited. (...)
The concept of place in your book is really interesting — you write about the way the suburbs are designed, and how that can foster creativity. What’s the connection between the suburbs as a place and art?
I am always curious about how people hit a certain point and are still creative and curious about things. I started realizing that it wasn’t so much the specific suburb they were from; it was mostly the suburban way of life that influenced them. I would talk to a lot of people and everyone had the same experience: “Yeah, I was really bored, and would just draw all day.” That is a thing that unites all the people I know from the suburbs; boredom was a great connector.
I didn’t want to write a book about the architecture of the suburbs; that’s not something I know a lot about. From the get-go, the art coming out of the suburbs was going to be the focus. We can pooh-pooh the suburbs, but we’ll call Blue Velvet one of the great cinematic masterpieces of the last 40 years, or “The Simpsons” will get voted the greatest show of all time. There’s a reason. It’s because this stuff connects to us. (...)
You also say that one way to fix the suburbs and make them more livable would be to “decrease the ease” that people who live there have gotten used to. How do you sell that to suburbanites when part of the appeal is the ease of living?
I don’t think you’re going to sell it. As we’ve learned with trying to get people to wear masks, I don’t think we’re going to sell anything. I think you change the culture. You’re going to see people moving from the cities back to the suburbs — which was happening before Covid — and [those] people are like, “I want what I had in the city, I want more of that.” It’s not going to be widespread, but it’s going to impact the culture of certain suburbs. And that’s a good thing.
Tuesday, August 25, 2020
Clothing As Platform
Long before the Covid-19 pandemic halted fashion shows and shuttered malls, the harsh realities of the fashion industry’s race-to-the-bottom production practices were becoming all too clear: unsustainable for the environment and lethally dangerous for textile producers and garment workers. Yet despite news stories of dangerous working conditions and tragedies such as the Rana Plaza factory collapse, tons of garments continued to enter the market, resulting in record amounts of textile waste. In fact, according to the EPA, Americans buried 10.5 million tons of clothing in landfills each year. And it’s not just the mass-market H&Ms and Zaras of the retail world who are implicated; the luxury segment of the market is flooded with unwanted products too: Burberry was discovered to have burned £90 million worth of unsold stock over a five-year period rather than see it devalue its brand image in discount stores.
In tandem, responsible retail alternatives have also boomed, and America’s bloated clothes retail sector has led to a burgeoning resale market. Fueled by online opportunities for peer-to-peer commerce, companies such as Thredup (which bills itself as the largest online consignment and thrift store), Depop, and Vestiaire Collective have multiplied — so much so that according to a 2020 report, the resale market is estimated to grow 21 times faster than that of regular apparel, with the secondhand market reaching a projected value of $51 billion within five years. Add to this the luxury-rental options (Rent the Runway) as well as monthly rental subscriptions (such as Le Tote for bags and Armoire for designer fashion) and it becomes clear that clothes have begun to circulate beyond the traditional control of luxury-fashion conglomerates.
Unsurprisingly, traditional fashion brands perceive these new distribution models as a threat, jeopardizing revenue and their well-honed prestige, cachet, and financial value. In an attempt regain monopoly over the sale of their goods, some have made efforts to discredit non-affiliated resale. (...)
In addition, some luxury brands have started adding surveillance to their arsenal, turning to blockchains to undermine the emergence of secondary markets in a way that pays lip service to sustainability and labor ethics concerns. LVMH launched Aura in 2019, a blockchain-enabled platform for authenticating products from the Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Marc Jacobs, and Fenty brands, among others. Meanwhile, fashion label Stella McCartney began a transparency and data-monitoring partnership with Google for tracking garment provenance, discouraging fakes and promising to ensure the ethical integrity of supply chains. Elsewhere, a host of fashion blockchain startups, including Loomia, Vechain, and Faizod, have emerged, offering tracking technologies to assuage customer concerns over poor labor conditions and manufacturing-related pollution by providing transparency on precisely where products are made and by which subcontractors.
However, as promising as these technologies may be for holding a mirror to the industry’s production methods, their impact on consumers won’t simply be to reassure them. When it comes to garments, surveillance isn’t simply a matter of placing the supply chain under new scrutiny. Companies such as Arianee, Dentsu and Evrythng also aim to track clothes on consumers’ bodies and in their closets. At the forefront of this trend is Eon, which with backing from Microsoft and buy-in from mainstream fashion brands such as H&M and Target, has begun rolling out the embedding of small, unobtrusive RFID tags — currently used for everything from tracking inventory to runners on a marathon course — in garments designed to transmit data without human intervention.
Eon’s primary stated goal sits squarely within the realm of sustainability: It wants to help implement a global digital-identity protocol so the information from everybody who touches or owns the product is uploaded in a standardized way, potentially encouraging better labor practices through transparency and increased rental and resale opportunities. Tracking sensors (along with apps developed to make use of them) could feasibly be used to extend the life of a garment, ensuring its provenance and making it a better long-term investment, encouraging resale, and allowing for proper recycling.
But its technology would also connect products and their wearers to the internet of things. According to the future depicted by Eon and its partners, garments would become datafied brand assets administering access to surveillance-enabled services, benefits, and experiences. The people who put on these clothes would become “users” rather than wearers. In some respects, this would simply extend some of the functionality of niche wearables to garments in general. Think: swimsuits able to detect UV light and prevent overexposure to the sun, yoga pants that prompt the wearer to hold the right pose, socks that monitor for disease risks, and fitness trackers embedded into sports shirts. At the same time, it would extend the symbolic functions of clothing to one’s online networks, offering consumers the potential cultural capital and social currency of having one’s outfit and location broadcast automatically to their social circle and beyond. Digital identity tags would also allow consumers to purchase physical and augmented-reality products simultaneously: i.e. the owner of a pair of Nike Cryptokicks could wear them on the street and as an avatar in a video game.
These benefits, such as they are, pale in comparison to what companies stand to gain from implementing ubiquitous fashion surveillance. As described by consultant Chris Grantham, this “new dynamic channel for marketing … and even new customer acquisition” would afford “seamless and personalized marketing strategies,” “continued conversation with the consumer post-sale,” “new business models such as subscription, rental and second-market offerings,” and even “tailored shopping/outfit planning services effectively incentivizing customers to share their data.” Simply put, clothes would become a digital platform for engaging consumers in branded, monetized experiences and tapping them as recurring revenue streams.
It’s unclear what consumers would get from so much “engagement,” other than a constant seep of ads. According to one potential scenario outlined by Eon partners, a running shoe could send a stream of usage data to the manufacturer so that it could notify the consumer when the shoe “nears the end of its life.” In another, sensors would determine when a garment needs repairing and trigger an online auction among competing menders. Finally, according to another, sensors syncing with smart mirrors would offer style advice and personalized advertising. All these open the door to myriad behavioral nudges, frictionless repeat orders, push notifications, and exhortations to update, repurchase, or repair on the manufacturer’s timetable — like a Check Engine light for a garment.
Given these ambitions, mainstream “smart” fashion (as with most things “smart”) appears as little more than an alibi for collecting personal behavioral data — not to mention a form of greenwashed techno-solutionism that ignores the realities of today’s surveillance economy. After all, sensor-laden garments would become part of the economic system described by Shoshana Zuboff as “surveillance capitalism,” or what digital theorist Mark Andrejevic has called the “digital enclosure,” an entanglement of “free” services from the likes of Facebook and Google and household products with networking capabilities, for which access “requires willing submission to increasingly detailed forms of data collection and online monitoring.”
As Zuboff illustrates, even well-intentioned privacy guidelines and “stylized disclosure agreements” don’t entirely protect users— opaque, exploitative terms of service still allow for data sharing and, for example, the monetization of patients’ private information from mobile health apps. Within this greater picture, the assetization of garments puts fashion brands on the same economic path as big tech, employing a monopolistic business rationale Nick Srnicek calls “platform capitalism,” or “ecosystems of goods and services that close off competitors: apps that only work with Android, services that require Facebook logins.” It would be inescapable unless you make your own clothes or remove embedded tags — potentially at a penalty. Using the economic playbook developed by Google, Facebook, Spotify, and Netflix, fashion brands would be poised to leverage users for financial gain, either selling them as audiences to other brands or collecting subscription revenue from them directly. In either case, a conventional material good (clothing) becomes reimagined as a service for which use is contingent upon regular payment, with either data or cash.
by Rachel Huber, Real Life | Read more:
Image: Farah Al Qasimi
In tandem, responsible retail alternatives have also boomed, and America’s bloated clothes retail sector has led to a burgeoning resale market. Fueled by online opportunities for peer-to-peer commerce, companies such as Thredup (which bills itself as the largest online consignment and thrift store), Depop, and Vestiaire Collective have multiplied — so much so that according to a 2020 report, the resale market is estimated to grow 21 times faster than that of regular apparel, with the secondhand market reaching a projected value of $51 billion within five years. Add to this the luxury-rental options (Rent the Runway) as well as monthly rental subscriptions (such as Le Tote for bags and Armoire for designer fashion) and it becomes clear that clothes have begun to circulate beyond the traditional control of luxury-fashion conglomerates.
Unsurprisingly, traditional fashion brands perceive these new distribution models as a threat, jeopardizing revenue and their well-honed prestige, cachet, and financial value. In an attempt regain monopoly over the sale of their goods, some have made efforts to discredit non-affiliated resale. (...)In addition, some luxury brands have started adding surveillance to their arsenal, turning to blockchains to undermine the emergence of secondary markets in a way that pays lip service to sustainability and labor ethics concerns. LVMH launched Aura in 2019, a blockchain-enabled platform for authenticating products from the Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior, Marc Jacobs, and Fenty brands, among others. Meanwhile, fashion label Stella McCartney began a transparency and data-monitoring partnership with Google for tracking garment provenance, discouraging fakes and promising to ensure the ethical integrity of supply chains. Elsewhere, a host of fashion blockchain startups, including Loomia, Vechain, and Faizod, have emerged, offering tracking technologies to assuage customer concerns over poor labor conditions and manufacturing-related pollution by providing transparency on precisely where products are made and by which subcontractors.
However, as promising as these technologies may be for holding a mirror to the industry’s production methods, their impact on consumers won’t simply be to reassure them. When it comes to garments, surveillance isn’t simply a matter of placing the supply chain under new scrutiny. Companies such as Arianee, Dentsu and Evrythng also aim to track clothes on consumers’ bodies and in their closets. At the forefront of this trend is Eon, which with backing from Microsoft and buy-in from mainstream fashion brands such as H&M and Target, has begun rolling out the embedding of small, unobtrusive RFID tags — currently used for everything from tracking inventory to runners on a marathon course — in garments designed to transmit data without human intervention.
Eon’s primary stated goal sits squarely within the realm of sustainability: It wants to help implement a global digital-identity protocol so the information from everybody who touches or owns the product is uploaded in a standardized way, potentially encouraging better labor practices through transparency and increased rental and resale opportunities. Tracking sensors (along with apps developed to make use of them) could feasibly be used to extend the life of a garment, ensuring its provenance and making it a better long-term investment, encouraging resale, and allowing for proper recycling.
But its technology would also connect products and their wearers to the internet of things. According to the future depicted by Eon and its partners, garments would become datafied brand assets administering access to surveillance-enabled services, benefits, and experiences. The people who put on these clothes would become “users” rather than wearers. In some respects, this would simply extend some of the functionality of niche wearables to garments in general. Think: swimsuits able to detect UV light and prevent overexposure to the sun, yoga pants that prompt the wearer to hold the right pose, socks that monitor for disease risks, and fitness trackers embedded into sports shirts. At the same time, it would extend the symbolic functions of clothing to one’s online networks, offering consumers the potential cultural capital and social currency of having one’s outfit and location broadcast automatically to their social circle and beyond. Digital identity tags would also allow consumers to purchase physical and augmented-reality products simultaneously: i.e. the owner of a pair of Nike Cryptokicks could wear them on the street and as an avatar in a video game.
These benefits, such as they are, pale in comparison to what companies stand to gain from implementing ubiquitous fashion surveillance. As described by consultant Chris Grantham, this “new dynamic channel for marketing … and even new customer acquisition” would afford “seamless and personalized marketing strategies,” “continued conversation with the consumer post-sale,” “new business models such as subscription, rental and second-market offerings,” and even “tailored shopping/outfit planning services effectively incentivizing customers to share their data.” Simply put, clothes would become a digital platform for engaging consumers in branded, monetized experiences and tapping them as recurring revenue streams.
It’s unclear what consumers would get from so much “engagement,” other than a constant seep of ads. According to one potential scenario outlined by Eon partners, a running shoe could send a stream of usage data to the manufacturer so that it could notify the consumer when the shoe “nears the end of its life.” In another, sensors would determine when a garment needs repairing and trigger an online auction among competing menders. Finally, according to another, sensors syncing with smart mirrors would offer style advice and personalized advertising. All these open the door to myriad behavioral nudges, frictionless repeat orders, push notifications, and exhortations to update, repurchase, or repair on the manufacturer’s timetable — like a Check Engine light for a garment.
Given these ambitions, mainstream “smart” fashion (as with most things “smart”) appears as little more than an alibi for collecting personal behavioral data — not to mention a form of greenwashed techno-solutionism that ignores the realities of today’s surveillance economy. After all, sensor-laden garments would become part of the economic system described by Shoshana Zuboff as “surveillance capitalism,” or what digital theorist Mark Andrejevic has called the “digital enclosure,” an entanglement of “free” services from the likes of Facebook and Google and household products with networking capabilities, for which access “requires willing submission to increasingly detailed forms of data collection and online monitoring.”
As Zuboff illustrates, even well-intentioned privacy guidelines and “stylized disclosure agreements” don’t entirely protect users— opaque, exploitative terms of service still allow for data sharing and, for example, the monetization of patients’ private information from mobile health apps. Within this greater picture, the assetization of garments puts fashion brands on the same economic path as big tech, employing a monopolistic business rationale Nick Srnicek calls “platform capitalism,” or “ecosystems of goods and services that close off competitors: apps that only work with Android, services that require Facebook logins.” It would be inescapable unless you make your own clothes or remove embedded tags — potentially at a penalty. Using the economic playbook developed by Google, Facebook, Spotify, and Netflix, fashion brands would be poised to leverage users for financial gain, either selling them as audiences to other brands or collecting subscription revenue from them directly. In either case, a conventional material good (clothing) becomes reimagined as a service for which use is contingent upon regular payment, with either data or cash.
by Rachel Huber, Real Life | Read more:
Image: Farah Al Qasimi
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