Florida’s 1.5 Million Missing Voters

Everyone remembers that the 2000 presidential election was decided by 537 votes in Florida. Far fewer remember another important number from the state that year — 620,000, the Floridians who were barred from voting because state records showed, correctly or not, they had been convicted of a felony.

It didn’t matter whether their crime was murder or driving with a suspended license, nor whether they had fully served their sentence. In Florida, the voting ban is entrenched in the Constitution, and it’s for life.

Today, Florida disenfranchises almost 1.5 million of its citizens, more than 11 states’ populations and roughly a quarter of the more than six million Americans who are unable to vote because of a criminal record.

Felon disenfranchisement is a destructive, pointless policy that hurts not only individuals barred from the ballot box, but American democracy at large. Its post-Civil War versions are explicitly racist, and its modern-day rationales are thin to nonexistent. It can make all the difference in places like Florida, which didn’t stop being competitive in 2000; the state remains a major presidential battleground, and victories for both parties in state and local elections are often narrow.

That could all change if a proposed constitutional amendment gets enough signatures to be placed on the ballot in November and wins enough support. The initiative would automatically restore voting rights to the vast majority of Floridians who have completed their sentence for a felony conviction, including any term of parole or probation.

This is a long overdue and urgently needed reform. The only way around Florida’s lifetime ban — as in the other three states with such a ban, Kentucky, Iowa and Virginia — is a direct, personal appeal to the governor. In the last few years, Terry McAuliffe, as Virginia’s governor, restored voting rights to more than 168,000 people, and the governors in Kentucky and Iowa granted roughly 9 in 10 of the restoration requests they received in the first half of the decade.

In contrast, Gov. Rick Scott of Florida grants only 8 percent of the requests that come before the state’s clemency board, which he leads — for a total of only a few hundred people each year, even though there is a backlog of more than 10,000 petitions awaiting review.

Mr. Scott’s predecessor, Charlie Crist, took a far better approach, using his executive power to streamline the restoration process for certain classes of offenders, like those convicted of nonviolent felonies. Once people “have paid their debt, society should honor its part of the bargain and allow citizens to re-enter society,” he wrote in 2007. “To not do so is more than reckless or irresponsible, it is unjust.”

It’s hard to argue with that logic, but Mr. Scott found a way. Soon after taking office in 2011, he not only reversed Mr. Crist’s policies, but imposed a waiting period of at least five years after people had completed their sentences before they could plead with him to restore their voting rights. The message wasn’t meant to be welcoming, and Floridians have responded accordingly — the number of restoration requests has cratered during Mr. Scott’s tenure.

Anyone lucky enough to get a hearing before the governor has a few minutes to make his or her case for being a reformed citizen. These people, who have served their time and should not have to answer to anyone, must then endure condescending moral lectures from Mr. Scott and his cabinet members, who don’t have to provide any explanation for their decisions. In one case involving a man who had been convicted of manslaughter after drunken driving, Mr. Scott, whose microphone remained on, turned and whispered to a board member, “That’s how my uncle died.”

With condolences to Mr. Scott, this is absurd. The right to vote is the most meaningful mark of citizenship in a democracy. It should be withheld only in extreme circumstances, and its restoration shouldn’t depend on the whims of a governor. What’s worse, many of these laws, especially in the South, are inextricable from their racist origins. Florida’s was enacted in 1868 — two years after the state thumbed its nose at the 14th Amendment — with the intent to prevent newly freed black people from voting. Those effects linger today, as one in five black adults in Florida remain disenfranchised because of a criminal record.

The new initiative, which excludes people convicted of murder or sexual offenses, will be placed on the ballot if it receives 766,200 signatures and will take effect if it earns at least 60 percent of the vote. Its advocates have submitted more than one million signatures to date, although many still need to be verified before the Feb. 1 deadline.

by Editorial Board, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Yarek Waszul

Hachiro Kanno, " TN 565"
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Andrew Wyeth, “Coming Storm” (1938)
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“This is Serious": Facebook Begins Its Downward Spiral

Years ago, long before Mark Zuckerberg became Mark Zuckerberg, the young founder reached out to a friend of mine who had also started a company, albeit a considerably smaller one, in the social-media space, and suggested they get together. As Facebook has grown into a global colossus that connects about a third of the globe, Zuckerberg has subsequently assumed a reputation as an aloof megalomaniac deeply out of touch with the people who use his product. But back then, when he only had 100 million users on his platform, he wasn’t perceived that way. When he reached out to my friend, Zuckerberg was solicitous. He made overtures that suggested a possible acquisition—and once rebuffed, returned with the notion that perhaps Facebook could at least partner with my friend’s company. The chief of the little start-up was excited by the seemingly harmless, even humble, proposition from the growing hegemon. Zuckerberg suggested that the two guys take a walk.

Taking a walk, it should be noted, was Zuckerberg’s thing. He regularly took potential recruits and acquisition targets on long walks in the nearby woods to try to convince them to join his company. After the walk with my friend, Zuckerberg appeared to take the relationship to the next level. He initiated a series of conference calls with his underlings in Facebook’s product group. My friend’s small start-up shared their product road map with Facebook’s business-development team. It all seemed very collegial, and really exciting. And then, after some weeks passed, the C.E.O. of the little start-up saw the news break that Facebook had just launched a new product that competed with his own.

Stories about Facebook’s ruthlessness are legend in Silicon Valley, New York, and Hollywood. The company has behaved as bullies often do when they are vying for global dominance—slurping the lifeblood out of its competitors (as it did most recently with Snap, after C.E.O. Evan Spiegel also rebuffed Zuckerberg’s acquisition attempt), blatantly copying key features (as it did with Snapchat’s Stories), taking ideas (remember those Winklevoss twins?), and poaching senior executives (Facebook is crawling with former Twitter, Google, and Apple personnel). Zuckerberg may look aloof, but there are stories of him giving rousing Braveheart-esque speeches to employees, sometimes in Latin. Twitter, Snap, and Foursquare have all been marooned, at various points, because of Facebook’s implacable desire to grow. Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus VR, and dozens of others are breathing life because they assented to Facebook’s acquisition desires. Meanwhile, Zuckerberg moved quickly to circumnavigate regulations before governments realized the problems that Facebook created—and certainly before they understood exactly how dangerous a social network can be to their citizens’ privacy, and to a democracy as a whole.

From a business standpoint, Facebook’s barbarism seemed to work out well for the company. The social network is worth over half-a-trillion dollars, and Zuckerberg himself is worth some $76 billion. Facebook has some of the smartest engineers and executives in the entire industry. But the fallout from that success has also become increasingly obvious, especially since the 2016 election, which prompted a year of public relations battles over the company’s most fundamental problems. And now, as we enter 2018, Zuckerberg is finally owning up to it: Facebook is in real trouble.

During the past six months alone, countless executives who once workedfor the company are publicly articulating the perils of social media on both their families and democracy. Chamath Palihapitiya, an early executive, said social networks “are destroying how society works”; Sean Parker, its founding president, said “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.” (Just this weekend, Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, said he won’t let his nephew on social media.) Over the past year, people I have spoken to internally at the company have voiced concerns for what Facebook is doing (or most recently, has done) to society. Many begin the conversation by rattling off a long list of great things that Facebook inarguably does for the world—bring people and communities together, help people organize around like-minded positive events—but, as if in slow motion, those same people recount the negatives. Unable to hide from the reality of what social media has wrought, Facebook has been left with no choice but to engage with people and the media to explore if it is possible to fix these problems. Zuckerberg determined that his 2018 annual challenge would be fixing his own Web site, noting that “the world feels anxious and divided,” and that Facebook might—just maybe—be contributing to that. “My personal challenge for 2018 is to focus on fixing these important issues,” he wrote. Now, the company has said it’s going to change the focus of the site to be less about news and more about human connections.

The question, of course, revolves around this underlying motivation. Is Zuckerberg saying this because he really does worry what the world might look like tomorrow if we continue headed in the direction we’re going? Is Facebook eliminating news from its site because it realizes that spotting “fake news” is too difficult to solve—even for Facebook? Or, as some people have posited to me, is Facebook rethinking the divide it has created in order to keep growing? After all, much of Zuckerberg’s remaining growth opportunity centers upon China, and the People’s Republic won’t let any product (digital or otherwise) enter its borders if there’s a chance it could disrupt the government’s control. Why would the Chinese Politburo open its doors to a force that could conspire in its own Trumpification or Brexit or similar populist unrest?

There’s another theory floating around as to why Facebook cares so much about the way it’s impacting the world, and it’s one that I happen to agree with. When Zuckerberg looks into his big-data crystal ball, he can see a troublesome trend occurring. A few years ago, for example, there wasn’t a single person I knew who didn’t have Facebook on their smartphone. These days, it’s the opposite. This is largely anecdotal, but almost everyone I know has deleted at least one social app from their devices. And Facebook is almost always the first to go. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other sneaky privacy-piercing applications are being removed by people who simply feel icky about what these platforms are doing to them, and to society.

Some people are terrified that these services are listening in to their private conversations. (The company’s anti-privacy tentacles go so far as to track the dust on your phone to see who you might be spending time with.) Others are sick of getting into an argument with a long-lost cousin, or that guy from high school who still works in the same coffee shop, over something that Trump said, or a “news” article that is full of more bias and false facts. And then there’s the main reason I think people are abandoning these platforms: Facebook knows us better than we know ourselves, with its algorithms that can predict if we’re going to cheat on our spouse, start looking for a new job, or buy a new water bottle on Amazon in a few weeks. It knows how to send us the exact right number of pop-ups to get our endorphins going, or not show us how many Likes we really have to set off our insecurities. As a society, we feel like we’re at war with a computer algorithm, and the only winning move is not to play.

There was a time when Facebook made us feel good about using the service—I used to love it. It was fun to connect with old friends, share pictures of your vacation with everyone, or show off a video of your nephew being extra-specially cute. But, over time, Facebook has had to make Wall Street happy, and the only way to feed that beast is to accumulate more, more, more: more clicks, more time spent on the site, more Likes, more people, more connections, more hyper-personalized ads. All of which adds up to more money. But as one recent mea culpa by an early Internet guru aptly noted, “What if we were never meant to be a global species?”

by Nick Bilton, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Image: Pau Barrena/Bloomberg/Getty Images.

Who’s Afraid of the “Petextrian”?

They are suddenly everywhere, like mushrooms after the rain: Walking at night with the right-of-way but with their heads down; occupying the intersection for just a couple seconds too long while answering a stray text message; wandering midblock into a suburban thoroughfare where the crosswalks are a mile apart and the cars zoom by at 40 mph. They are the recurring nightmare of every driver going a little too fast when it’s a little too dark out; their specter haunts local-news websites when there’s a fatal crash in the neighborhood and self-proclaimed “car guys” rush to the comments section to exonerate their own. They are, in short, the newest menace on American streets: the distracted pedestrian.

In the last year, local lawmakers across the nation have become convinced that smartphone-addled pedestrians are a pressing public-safety concern. Honolulu, a city where the weather is so perfect that everyone should naturally want to walk everywhere at all times, passed the nation’s first “distracted walking” law in July, which approves fines for pedestrians who look at a phone or other digital device while using a crosswalk. Next came San Mateo County, a suburban area south of San Francisco; similar laws are under consideration in Cleveland, Stamford, Ct., and the entire state of New Jersey. In early November, two Chicago aldermen proposed an ordinance to ban “distracted walking,” punishable by fines of up to $500. The aldermen, like most proponents of distracted-walking crackdowns, claimed that they were responding to an alarming spike in local traffic fatalities. (...)

It’s difficult, however, to see how distracted pedestrians bear any real responsibility for this trend. Most Americans drive, and the primary effect of what transportation planners call “windshield bias” is to always blame somebody else. (Even in New York, the mayor is an avid driver whose car-centric perspective has led him to take positions that would actively harm most of his constituents.) Everything we know from countries that have successfully reduced road deaths indicates that the most effective approach is to systematically redesign streets to prioritize safety over speed. The growing moral panic over being wired while walking takes none of this into account. Instead, Americans are increasingly being told that the solution is an arbitrary, punitive approach that has little evidence to back it up.

“Distracted pedestrian” laws aren’t really about the evidence, though. They are about maintaining the privileges of car culture as that culture is about to confront an enormous shift in the balance of civic and technological power—one that threatens to permanently upend the relationship between drivers and pedestrians. (...)

***

The phantom menace of the “distracted pedestrian” is just an updated version of the same tactic. In bringing it to pass, local and state lawmakers are once again getting an assist from one of the world’s most storied car companies. The 2017 Ford Fusion included a new feature called Pre-Collision Assist, which uses a combination of radar and cameras to scan the roadway and identify objects blocking it. Fair enough—except that Ford is advertising Pre-Collision Assist as a way to defend the driver against “petextrians.” The company website states, “By identifying the problem that petextrians pose to drivers and creating a new technology to combat and prevent this issue, we have reaffirmed our commitment to making the roads safer for everyone.” A company engineer helpfully added, “We were startled to see how oblivious people could be of a 4,000-pound car coming toward them.” In a battle between one person wearing clothing and shoe-leather and another wearing a speeding, combustible two-ton metal machine, Ford wants us to believe that the former is the real threat.

If there were anything close to a “petextrian” epidemic, it would be a textbook example of a self-inflicted harm. (A collision between a driver and a careless pedestrian has never ended with the driver being killed.) More to the point, the evidence that rising traffic deaths are the direct result of distracted walking has never been anything but anecdotal. In July, the National Transportation Safety Board released a comprehensive study showing that motor-vehicle speed is the factor most heavily correlated with death or severe injury on the road. Tara Goddard, who teaches transportation engineering at Texas A&M, told me in an email, “I’ve seen studies looking at pedestrian distraction, both observation (in the real world) and using virtual reality. But neither of those observed or included, respectively, distracted drivers. Part of that is methodological, since it is much easier to observe pedestrian behavior than the behavior of someone in a car, and police reporting is currently very much dependent on the survivor getting to tell the story.” While acknowledging that pedestrians sometimes do things they shouldn’t, Goddard wrote, “When automotive companies are literally adding online shopping to the in-car tech, I don’t think this focus on pedestrians, which has no empirical basis that I’ve seen, is constructive.”

So what’s the motive force behind this new round of ped-shaming tactics? It’s an offstage, but rapidly looming, disruption of American car culture: the advent of the driverless car. (...)

Much about this future remains a mystery, but we do already know that compared to human drivers, autonomous vehicles will be very conservative and risk-averse. Computers, after all, are designed to follow rules. For almost a decade, Google has been testing driverless cars in California. During one test in 2009, the New York Times writes that the car “couldn’t get through a four-way stop because its sensors kept waiting for other (human) drivers to stop completely and let it go. The human drivers kept inching forward, looking for the advantage—paralyzing Google’s robot.” Google cars have been rear-ended while stopping to yield the right-of-way to a pedestrian, and in 2015 one was pulled over in Silicon Valley for driving too slowly. Crashes between autonomous vehicles and human-driven cars have occurred, but in almost all cases, the human driver was found to be at fault.

In recent years, major car companies have joined Silicon Valley giants in developing and testing autonomous vehicles, but adapting the engineering marvel to our existing, hyper-individualist car culture remains a tricky task. In a November article in Wired, Aarian Marshall joked, “If the Silicon Valley motto is ‘move fast and break things,’ Detroit’s seems to be ‘move below the speed limit and ensure you don’t kill anyone.’” His experience in a GM driverless car in San Francisco was mixed: On one hand, Marshall says, “the whole thing felt very safe” and the car was exceedingly polite towards pedestrians, cyclists, and other vehicles. On the other, cars “stop at the hint of danger, sometimes slamming on the brakes and throwing passengers forward in their seats.”

What this means is that AVs will rupture the unspoken contract between automakers and drivers. Currently, automakers simply make the machines; they’re conveniently able to profit off their creations and then wash their hands of responsibility if a vehicle’s actual operator does something stupid or dangerous. Meanwhile, pedestrians on car-choked city streets are kept timid and obedient by the very real threat of a driver striking and killing them at any time, with the law poised to take the side of the driver. (Even when drivers who kill pedestrians are found to be legally in the wrong, punishments are often minimal.) In other words: Take an aggressive, entitled jerk driving a souped-up BMW and replace him with a law-abiding computer. What happens next?

A recent paper by urban-planning professor Adam Millard-Ball uses game theory to outline three possible answers to this question. The first hypothetical outcome is “human drivers,” i.e., drivers choose to continue manually operating their cars because it affords them greater speed and flexibility. (It’s unclear whether insurers would even be willing to cover human drivers once a much safer alternative appears, but that’s another issue.) Millard-Ball’s second scenario is “regulatory response”; here, “laws are changed to reduce pedestrian priority . . . enforcement action against jaywalkers and similar violators is stepped up, and legislation specifies that an autonomous vehicle manufacturer is not liable for any collision where a pedestrian was unlawfully present in the roadway.” The third scenario speaks for itself: “pedestrian supremacy.”

The specter of a road system once more ruled by pedestrians seems all but unimaginable to anyone living outside a handful of city cores where pedestrians already dominate. Speculating on this future has mostly been done from the driver’s perspective; a typical article included phrases like “jaywalking paradise” and “gridlock hell.” The Drive, Time Magazine’s website devoted to cars and car culture, summarized Millard-Ball’s paperby worrying that “pedestrians could bully self-driving cars into gridlock.” Put another way: Pedestrians, long shunted to the margins of America’s transportation system and left to fend for themselves, would now be empowered to walk when and where they please, reclaiming their equal right to move about the city.

by Jordan Fraade, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Robert A. Di Ieso, Jr.

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Bojack Horseman: Rose Colored Glasses

Try a Little Nuance Instead

When Donald Trump was elected president, I tried to console myself with the idea that at least we were living in interesting times. Things might be discombobulating and, for some, downright terrifying, but they would hardly be boring, right?

The last year has proved me wrong. We've never lived in less interesting times. In order for something to be interesting it has to be at least marginally graspable. Even if you can't see the big picture, you have to be able to back up and see past your nose. And trying to grasp the full scope of the political climate right now is a bit like trying to view a Hieronymus Bosch triptych that's been hung inside a small, dark closet. We have no idea what we're really looking at. All we know is that it's overwhelming and often grotesque.

That's part of the reason I mostly kept my opinions to myself in 2017. My taste for counterintuitive rumination and occasional devil's advocacy felt inappropriate to the occasion. I could have spent the year clucking about unhelpful hyperbole and tiresome performative wokeness, about the perils of labeling every political opponent a fascist, and all the ways in which the "nasty woman" trope was becoming, well, a little trop. But given the magnitude of the political earthquake and the justifiability of people's outrage, it seemed better to step back and let more visceral responses set the tone.

Still, as we come up on the anniversary of Trump's inauguration, the awe-inspiring Women's March and the beginning of the mass nervous breakdown among liberals, I can't help but think we've also reached the end of a certain grace period, one in which we pretended that wokeness was an acceptable substitute for an actual personality, not to mention for actual activism.

During this period, virtue signaling has become blue states' own sort of opioid addiction. Post something about toxic masculinity, white privilege or, of course, President Trump (whose name is shorthand for both) and the likes and affirmations will mete out just enough dopamine to keep you going until the next fix.

Better yet, if you want to promote your movie, your book, your economic theory or your crowdfunded business venture, wrap it in the cloak of Trump-resistance and you are suddenly part of a mighty and magically unassailable franchise. Approval will be freely bestowed and favors exchanged. Important people are likely to endorse you and important media to cover you. In fact, this might be the only way to get important media coverage because "life in the age of Trump" is pretty much the only story in the news cycle.

But if you start to feel less than sincere every time you join a #MeToo chorus, you do what humans have done for thousands of years: Get together and admit privately to feeling conflicted.

Such gatherings are now referred to as "back channeling." And they don't just happen after a few too many drinks at media industry cocktail parties. They happen when college professors feel they have to whisper their support to colleagues embroiled in campus identity politics scandals. They take the form of direct messages on social media that start with "I didn't want to say this in the comment thread, but ..." They're what we professional opinionators sometimes do after holding forth with righteous certainty: turn to our closest confidants and confess to a level of cognitive dissonance and confusion we fear would alienate our followers and possibly kill our careers if we tried to put it into words.

All this messiness makes back-channel conversations the most interesting ones going on right now. It's time they came out of the shadows.

Bit by bit, it's starting to happen. The #MeToo movement is infused with obtuse rhetoric like "zero tolerance," but it has also led to a handful of more nuanced analyses about the slippery nature of sexual consent and the dangers of failing (or refusing) to distinguish male clumsiness from dangerous aggression. Sure, some of the woke-iscenti dismissed these articles out of hand. I even saw someone refer to "nuance" as though it were a form of conservative trolling or rape apology. But I also noted rumblings of relief.

by Meghan Daum, LA Times |  Read more:

Image: Jose Luis Magana / AP
[ed. See also: We're Not Done Here.]

Horacio Salinas Blanch
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Sparton 566 “Bluebird" Radio
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Police Union Privileges

Earlier I wrote about how police unions around the country give to every officer dozens of “get out of jail” cards to give to friends, family, politicians, lawyers, judges and other connected people. The cards let police on the street know that the subject is to be given “professional courtesy” and they can be used to get out of speeding tickets and other infractions. Today, drawing on the Police Union Contracting Project, I discuss how union contracts and Law Officer “Bill of Rights” give police legal privileges that regular people don’t get.

In 50 cities and 13 states, for example, union contracts “restrict interrogations by limiting how long an officer can be interrogated, who can interrogate them, the types of questions that can be asked, and when an interrogation can take place.” In Virginia police officers have a right to at least a five-day delay before being interrogated. In Louisiana police officers have up to 30 days during which no questioning is allowed and they cannot be questioned for sustained periods of time or without breaks. In some cities, police officers can only be interrogated during work hours. Regular people do not get these privileges.

The key to a good interrogation is that the suspect doesn’t know what the interrogator knows so the suspect can be caught in a lie which unravels their story. Thus, the Florida Police Bill of Rights is stunning in what it allows police officers:

The law enforcement officer or correctional officer under investigation must be informed of the nature of the investigation before any interrogation begins, and he or she must be informed of the names of all complainants. All identifiable witnesses shall be interviewed, whenever possible, prior to the beginning of the investigative interview of the accused officer. The complaint, all witness statements, including all other existing subject officer statements, and all other existing evidence, including, but not limited to, incident reports, GPS locator information, and audio or video recordings relating to the incident under investigation, must be provided to each officer who is the subject of the complaint before the beginning of any investigative interview of that officer.

By knowing what the interrogators know, the suspect can craft a story that fits the known facts–and the time privilege gives them the opportunity to do so.

Moreover, how do you think complainants feel knowing that the police officer they are complaining about “must be informed of the names of all complainants.” I respect and admire police officers but frankly I think this rule is dangerous. Would you come forward?

How effective would criminal interrogations be if the following rules held for ordinary citizens?

The law enforcement officer or correctional officer under interrogation may not be subjected to offensive language or be threatened with transfer, dismissal, or disciplinary action. A promise or reward may not be made as an inducement to answer any questions.

What does it say about our justice system that the police don’t want their own tactics used against them?

In the United States if you are arrested–even for a misdemeanor or minor crime, even if the charges are dropped, even if you are found not guilty–you will likely be burdened with an arrest record that can increase the difficulty of getting a job, an occupational license, or housing. But even in the unlikely event that a police officer is officially reprimanded many states and cities require that such information is automatically erased after a year or two. The automatic erasure of complaints makes it difficult to identify problem officers or a pattern of abuse.

Louisiana’s Police Officer Bill of Rights is one of the most extreme. It states that police have the right to expunge any violation of criminal battery and assault and any violation of criminal laws involving an “obvious domestic abuse.”

A law enforcement officer, upon written request, shall have any record of a formal complaint made against the officer for any violation of a municipal or parish ordinance or state criminal statute listed in Paragraph (2) of this Subsection involving domestic violence expunged from his personnel file, if the complaint was made anonymously to the police department and the charges are not substantiated within twelve months of the lodging of the complaint. (2)(a) Any violation of a municipal or parish ordinance or state statute defining criminal battery and assault. (b) Any violation of other municipal or parish ordinances or state statutes including criminal trespass, criminal damage to property, or disturbing the peace if the incident occurred at either the home of the victim or the officer or the violation was the result of an obvious domestic dispute.

In an excellent post on get out of free jail cards, Julian Sanchez writes:

…beyond being an affront to the ideal of the rule of law in the abstract, it seems plausible that these “get out of jail free” cards help to reinforce the sort of us-against-them mentality that alienates so many communities from their police forces. Police departments that want to demonstrate they’re serious about the principle of equality under the law shouldn’t be debating how many of these cards an average cop gets to hand out; they should be scrapping them entirely.

Equality under the law also requires that privileges and immunities extend to all citizens equally.

by Alex Tabarokk, Marginal Revolution |  Read more:

Phantom Thread

A brilliant English couturier of the postwar age: fastidious and cantankerous, humourless and preposterous – and heterosexual, in that pre-Chatterley era when being a bachelor and fashion designer wasn’t automatically associated in the public mind with anything else. Daniel Day-Lewis gives us his cinema swansong in this new film from writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson. He is Reynolds Jeremiah Woodcock, celebrated dressmaker to the debutantes of Britain, but now under pressure from the New Look and influences from across the Channel. He treats us to a fine display of temper on the subject of that unforgivably meretricious word: chic.

Just when he is at his lowest, Woodcock falls in love with a shy, maladroit German waitress at the country hotel where he happens to be staying. This is Alma, played by Vicky Krieps. With his connoisseur’s eye, Woodcock sees in her a grace and beauty that no one else had noticed, certainly not Alma herself. Dazzled, she comes to live with him as his assistant and model in the central London fashion house over which Woodcock rules with his sister and confidante Cyril, played with enigmatic reserve by Lesley Manville. But, as Woodcock becomes ever more impossible and controlling, submissive Alma must find new, more dysfunctional ways to re-establish her emotional mastery over him.

Day-Lewis gives a performance of an almost ridiculously charismatic outrageousness, the sort only he could get away with. He is Hardy Amies and Norman Hartnell with a dash of Tony Armstrong-Jones – certainly Hartnell’s relationship with his sister and business partner Phyllis is evoked here. It’s a study in cult leadership to compare with Anderson’s The Master and a portrait of entrepreneurial loneliness to put alongside his appearance in Anderson’s There Will Be Blood.

Woodcock is a preening exquisite, theatrical, highly strung, with a borderline-bizarre speaking voice, sinuous and refined: an acquired style perhaps hinting at a humbler beginning than any he will admit to now. This Woodcock has the etiolated grace of a dancer, the misanthropy of an artist, and also the careless hauteur of the nobleman, and it’s the kind of character that Day-Lewis has played in other films, the one who nurses a politely unvoiced contempt for the lack of integrity he sees in everything and everyone around him, especially here the vulgar, moneyed women on whose patronage he is forced to rely.

He is the definition of a gentleman: someone who never gives offence accidentally. I couldn’t watch Day-Lewis without grinning all over my face at this creation. But he is not supposed to be funny or camp. Krieps matches this as best she can with an intelligent, subdued naturalism, just as she did playing Jenny Marx in Raoul Peck’s new film The Young Karl Marx. Yet there is no question of who is in the spotlight. (...)

There is such pure delicious pleasure in this film, in its strangeness, its vehemence, its flourishes of absurdity, carried off with superb elegance. And Woodcock’s sartorial creations have a surreal quality, decadent, like dishes at a Roman banquet. Can this really be Daniel Day-Lewis’s final performance? He’s said that it is and he is not someone for speaking casually. We have to assume that this is goodbye. Maybe this is how onlookers felt at Nijinsky’s last public performance in 1917, which reputedly made Arthur Rubinstein burst into tears. It’s a wonderful high note for Day-Lewis to end on: I feel a mixture of euphoria and desperate sadness.

by Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Phantom Thread

[ed. Looking forward to seeing this one.]

Hole

Ralph Goings
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Toyota's Mirai Hydrogen Car

Toyota wants to change the world with Mirai, its new hydrogen car

Image: Christoffer Rudquist

Politics 101

Don’t Fear Trump–Fear the Next Republican President (Benjamin Studebaker)

Budget talks progress, as Senate Dems drop Dreamer demand (Politico) [ed. Dems = Charlie Brown = Football]

American democracy is failing. The courts are finally starting to notice. (Think Progress)

[ed. Take-away line: And then there is in the single most frightening projection facing both large-D Democrats and small-d democrats in the United States. By 2040, according to Dean David Birdsell of the school of public and international affairs at Baruch College, “about 70% of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states.” That means that 70 percent of Americans “will have only 30 senators representing them, while the remaining 30% of Americans will have 70 senators representing them.”]

NSA Deletes "Honesty" and "Openness" from Core Values (The Intercept)

How the GOP Rigs Elections (Rolling Stone)

White House asks for Van Gogh loan – but Guggenheim offers gold toilet instead (The Guardian)

Democrats Paid a Huge Price for Letting Unions Die (New York)

Presidential Confusion (The Baffler)

[ed. Stay tuned for more.]

Lund Hagem
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Robert De Niro's Disaster Capitalism

A chorus of voices from the Caribbean island of Barbuda is accusing Robert De Niro of being part of a backroom effort to exploit a devastating hurricane to fundamentally change the island’s communal land ownership law in the interest of developers — changes opposed by many Barbudans, but which could aid the actor’s controversial plans to build a large luxury resort called Paradise Found Nobu.

Earlier this month, with almost no international news coverage and with the majority of Barbudans still displaced from the storm, an amendment to the law in question was quietly pushed through the Senate of Antigua and Barbuda — a body dominated by politicians from the wealthier and more populous island of Antigua. If the amendment stands, a tradition of communal land rights that dates back to the abolition of slavery in 1834 — and which has protected Barbuda as a rare beacon of sustainable development in the Caribbean — will be extinguished.

But as news of the change trickles out, Barbudans are fighting back, challenging the legality of the amendment to the Barbuda Land Act. And they say the island’s highest-profile investor, Robert De Niro, stands to benefit most.

“It’s just a scam to take away the land from the Barbudans so they can give it to people like Robert de Niro,” said Mackenzie Frank, a former senator from the island. “Anyone who has beach land is laughing all the way to the bank.”

De Niro, who has so far stayed silent as the controversy has grown, did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

Up until the recent changes, land in Barbuda was held in common: It could not be bought or sold, and though developers could lease land for 50 years, their projects needed to win the consent of a majority of Barbudans. It was a rare example of participatory economic planning and successful land redistribution to freed slaves and their descendants.

But the Land Act was resented by foreign investors and wealthy Antiguans, and the latest push to alter the law first reared its head just days after Hurricane Irma roared through Barbuda. The island had been hit by storms before, but never like this: Upwards of 90 percent of the buildings in Barbuda were damaged, and all residents were evacuated to Antigua.

When they heard about the proposed changes to the Land Act, many Barbudans (including those living in the diaspora) objected — but it was nearly impossible for them to organize effective opposition. As Tim George, a U.K. citizen whose mother is Barbudan, observed weeks after the storm, “An entire population is now housed in temporary shelter, reliant on the authorities for everything, and restricted in their access to their homes. By allowing an opportunistic Antiguan government the momentum to force this change past a traumatised community in its most vulnerable moment, the core freedom secured by those emancipated from slavery, successfully defended and passed down through generations, is under serious threat.”

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist and ocean conservationist who worked in Barbuda for years, describes the attempted changes a “land grab” and “a wild episode of disaster capitalism.”

To many outsiders, the role De Niro played in this period seemed benign, if not downright heroic. In the weeks after Irma hit, he appeared at the United Nations and on cable news, pledging to personally help with Barbuda’s reconstruction and urging governments and international agencies to pony up aid and stand with the “vulnerable.” In interviews, De Niro did mention that he had a hotel project in development on the island, but only to explain his particular compassion for the people there.

The facts paint a more complex picture. Though best known for acting and producing (as well as founding the Tribeca Film Festival), De Niro has also emerged as a highly successful real estate mogul, accumulating a rapidly expanding empire of elite properties. As co-owner of Nobu Hospitality, De Niro helped turn a celebrated Japanese eatery in Beverly Hills into a chain of dozens of restaurants around the world, as well as a growing roster of luxury condos and hotels.

For the most part, Nobu’s expansion has focused on cities, but in recent years, De Niro has had his sights set on an ambitious project on Barbuda, which has a population of approximately 1,800. In 2014, the actor partnered with the Australian billionaire bad boy James Packer (best known for his messy break-up with singer Mariah Carey) to develop an exclusive hotel there. They bought out the lease on a derelict resort that, in its heyday, had been Princess Diana’s favorite family beach destination. Attracted to the island’s unspoiled white beaches, shallow turquoise waters, and slow pace, De Niro and Packer unveiled plans to significantly expand the property and rebrand it as “Paradise Found Nobu.” Packer has also not responded to a request for comment.

But there were limits to how big and how lavish the resort could be. That’s because Barbuda’s unique and democratic collective land ownership structure keeps the pace of development in check. As explained in this New York Times documentary, the island runs “like a co-op,” with decisions about land use driven by an elected council, and approvals for major developments going to a general vote. Many of its inhabitants raise livestock or fish for lobster to support themselves. “Life in Barbuda, it is slow, it is quiet, it is restful, it’s peaceful,” 25-year-old Kendra Beazer, the youngest member of the Barbuda Council, told The Intercept.

In contrast, the other half of the twin-island nation, Antigua, has flung itself open to mega resorts and heavy cruise ship traffic (as well as financial services). Seeing further opportunity in Barbuda’s pristine beaches and abundant fisheries, the Antiguan-dominated government – which has strong ties to real estate and banking — has long fought to end the tradition of communal land rights on Barbuda. Casting this pressure as an attack on hard-won victories after the abolition of slavery, Barbudans convinced legislators in 2007 to cement in law the practices they had followed for hundreds of years. The Barbuda Land Act underlined that “all land in Barbuda shall be owned in common by the people of Barbuda,” and “no land in Barbuda shall be sold.”

All of this has kept the vast majority of the island in the hands of families directly descended from slaves — a remarkable achievement. It has also kept tourism and most other development at a sustainable level, which is the reason Barbuda remained a “paradise” to be “found” by men like De Niro and Packer in the first place.

But for investors with big dreams, the Barbuda Land Act was also highly inconvenient. It placed limits on the length of their leases, the footprint of their properties, and the infrastructure that could service them. It also required a great deal of democratic engagement with the island’s residents, as opposed to the usual top-down deals.

De Niro and Packer have not navigated this landscape well, choosing instead to try winning exceptions to the Land Act from the Antigua-based government of Prime Minister Gaston Browne, a former banker who consistently casts Barbuda as a “welfare island.” De Niro has found a fierce ally in Browne. Months before the Barbudan approval process could even begin, the prime minister signed a memorandum of agreement with the actor, promising a 198-year lease of 555 acres for just $6.2 million, plus an array of tax benefits. He went further, dubbing De Niro an official “economic envoy” of Antigua and Barbuda.

This approach has not gone over well with many Barbudans, who see it as railroading their democratic rules. It’s a conflict that has landed De Niro and Packer in a protracted legal mess, with hundreds of Barbudans signing a petition against their plans for Paradise Found. Members of the political party Barbuda People’s Movement sued the project, arguing that the referendum approving it illegally allowed non-Barbudans to vote and failed to anonymize the ballots.

Browne responded to these challenges by going to war for De Niro. “Those who may intend to become economic terrorists in this country,” he said in March 2015, referring to project opponents, “they would have to face the full extent of the law for any infractions whatsoever.” Months later, his government went so far as to pass the Paradise Found Act, specially designed to approve De Niro’s project and bypass the Barbuda Land Act with its collective approval requirements. Just for Paradise Found, the act explicitly nullifies the community approval sections of the Barbuda Land Act. It also grants the project permission to build its own television service, renewable energy, and desalinization plants, “for the sole purpose of the Project,” as well as infrastructure for “large and super yachts” and a helipad.

by Naomi Klein and Alleen Brown, The Intercept |  Read more:
Image: Chris Young/The Canadian Press/AP

Plein air in a can
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[ed. Might make a great gift.]

What's the Deal With Tide Pods?

Across the world, millennials are pausing to ask, in the manner of J. Alfred Prufrock: “Do I dare to eat a Tide Pod?”

As any adult with a half-functioning brain will tell you, the answer is no. I guess I should put this at the top: Do not, under any circumstances, eat Tide Pods, the dissolving packets of detergent that make laundry slightly easier.

Why, then, are Tide Pods suddenly dominating the memescape? Why are teenagers on YouTube eating, or pretending to eat, or, uh, vaping Tide Pods? Why is it that on any social network worth that title — from Tumblr to YouTube to Facebook to even, yes, Twitter — people are joking (are they joking?) about eating Tide Pods?

This gets a little messy. By and large, the jokes about eating Tide Pods are just that: jokes. There are very few people “eating” Tide Pods; the people who are “eating” them are really just biting into them and spitting out the detergent. But, of course, when local-news anchors hear the phrase “eating Tide Pods,” it becomes fodder for nice parental-anxiety-inducing segments, and to young people that panic is incredibly funny (and search-term-friendly!), so then more people start “eating” laundry pods (or even just posting videos with those terms in the title). So idiocy begets idiocy in the worst possible “chicken and the egg” parable one could imagine. (...)

The jokes about eating Tide Pods have also spawned a “Tide Pod Challenge” in which (a fairly small number of) people actually bite into these things on video, a rare instance of thousands of jokes spawning an online “challenge” (previously: cinnamon, ice bucket, mannequin) rather than the other way around. One answer to the question “Why is eating Tide Pods a joke?” is “because it drives engagement on YouTube.” Ah, youth! Never underestimate the power of social-platform metrics to drive adolescent meme consumption!

Truly, never underestimate the appeal of obscurity and adult incomprehensibility — Tide Pods are a global inside joke for fans of light trolling. And there is something generationally specific about Tide Pods, beyond the YouTube incentives and the generically youthful oddness. The uncharitable reading would be that the Tide Pod is an invention for age demographics so coddled that they can’t be bothered to measure out laundry detergent themselves. That makes the product a potent marker for a certain cultural stereotype — younger, pampered, more destabilized than they’ve ever been in their life.

More generously, though, we might imagine that the idea of eating Tide Pods has a certain resonance to a medicated, surveilled generation, coming of age among ceaseless internet-based moral panics (Jenkem, i-dosing, the knockout game) and amid a constant volume of hectoring advice from parents and teachers and therapists and advertisers — all while the world collapses around it. It makes sense that the rise of the culturewide idea of eating poisonous Tide Pods coincides with the end of an exhausting 2017, and the start of a 2018 that saw its first statewide ballistic-missile panic less than two weeks in. Why take your doctor-prescribed meds when you can take Procter & Gamble’s, administering to yourself the ultimate cure, death on your own terms? (...)

Tide Pods are, maybe, a step beyond the Harambe concept — not simply a meme that corporations can’t control, but a meme that itself controls a corporation. Instead of participating in the meme — thereby ruining it — Procter & Gamble is obligated to spend a great deal of money actively trying to shut the meme down. There is something thrilling, funny, and a bit perverse in forcing a company’s “I talk just like you, fellow teens” social-media account to request that you engage with their products less.

The life cycle of a meme is always a struggle over ownership. It’s silly to try to own an idea, or a joke, and to try to control how people tweak it and iterate on it. Tide Pods are the first step in a new age where — instead of resisting corporate meddling in the meme world — the established norms of social media are manipulated to force a company to participate in the culture in ways that run counter to its own interests.

by Brian Feldman, Select/All |  Read more:
Image: Samokhin Roman/Getty Images/iStockphoto
[ed. When a meme gets this type attention/analysis you know it's probably dead (in meme time). See also: I Made Edible Tide Pods — and Honestly, You Should Just Eat a Real One]