Tumblr Tumbles

Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.

Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).

Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.

So what is changing?

Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.

Why are we doing this?

It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.

Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.

So what’s next?

Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.

Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.

Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.

Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.

Jeff D’Onofrio
CEO

[ed. Tumblr is/was one of the best sites on the Internet for blogging and self-expression (including sexual expression) - the closest thing to "the old Internet" that we now/used to have. But you could see the writing on the wall when Yahoo and then Verizon acquired it. See also: The Death of Tumblr and Why Tumblr’s adult content ban is about so much more than porn. Expect to see a lot more commentary in the next few days.]

Sake vs. Mirin

Japanese Pantry Essentials: Sake vs. Mirin

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All night noodles in Sendai
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Tesla, Software and Disruption

“We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going to just walk in.” - Ed Colligan, CEO of Palm, 2006, on rumours of an Apple phone

“They laughed at Columbus and they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” - Carl Sagan

When Nokia people looked at the first iPhone, they saw a not-great phone with some cool features that they were going to build too, being produced at a small fraction of the volumes they were selling. They shrugged. “No 3G, and just look at the camera!”

When many car company people look at a Tesla, they see a not-great car with some cool features that they’re going to build too, being produced at a small fraction of the volumes they’re selling. “Look at the fit and finish, and the panel gaps, and the tent!”

The Nokia people were terribly, terribly wrong. Are the car people wrong? We hear that a Tesla is ‘the new iPhone’ - what would that mean?

This is partly a question about Tesla, but it’s more interesting as a way to think about what happens when ‘software eats the world’ in general, and when tech moves into new industries. How do we think about whether something is disruptive? If it is, who exactly gets disrupted? And does that disruption mean that one company wins in the new world? Which one?

The idea of ‘disruption’ is that a new concept changes the basis of competition in an industry. At the beginning, either the new thing itself or the companies bringing it (or both) tend to be bad at the things the incumbents value, and get laughed at, but they learn those things. Conversely, the incumbents either dismiss the new thing as pointless or presume they’ll easily be able to add it (or both), but they’re wrong. Apple brought software and learnt phones, whereas Nokia had great phones but could not learn software.

However, not every new technology or idea is disruptive. Some things do not change the basis of competition enough, and for some things the incumbents are able to learn and absorb the new concept instead (these are not quite the same thing). Clay Christensen calls this ‘sustaining innovation’ as opposed to ‘disruptive’ innovation.

By extension, any new technology is probably disruptive to someone, at some part of the value chain. The iPhone disrupted the handset business, but has not disrupted the cellular network operators at all, though many people were convinced that it would. For all that’s changed, the same companies still have the same business model and the same customers that they did in 2006. Online flight booking doesn’t disrupt airlines much, but it was hugely disruptive to travel agents. Online booking (for the sake of argument) was sustaining innovation for airlines and disruptive innovation for travel agents.

Meanwhile, the people who are first to bring the disruption to market may not be the people who end up benefiting from it, and indeed the people who win from the disruption may actually be doing something different - they may be in a different part of the value chain. Apple pioneered PCs but lost the PC market, and the big winners were not even other PC companies. Rather, most of the profits went to Microsoft and Intel, which both operated at different layers of the stack. PCs themselves became a low-margin commodity with fierce competition, but PC CPUs and operating systems (and productivity software) turned out to have very strong winner-takes-all effects. Being first is not the same as having a sustainable competitive advantage, no matter how disruptive you are, and the advantage might be somewhere else.

This gives us four things to think about when looking at Tesla: 

• First, it does have to learn the ‘old’ things - it has to learn how to make cars at scale with the efficiency and quality that the existing car industry takes for granted, preferably not in a tent, and preferably without running out of cash on the way. But, solving ‘production hell’ is just a condition of entry - it’s not victory. If it can only do this, it’s just another car company, and that’s not what has anyone excited. It’s what the cars are that matters. 
• Second, Tesla also has to be doing things that the incumbent car OEMs will struggle to learn. This is not quite the same as doing things that the OEMs’ suppliers will struggle to learn. 
• Third, those disruptive things need to be fundamentally important - they need to be enough to change the basis of competition, and to change what it is to be a car and a car company, so that it matters if they can’t be copied.
• Fourth, in addition to all of these there needs to be some fundamental competitive advance, not just over the existing car industry but also over other new entrants. Apple did things Nokia could not do, but it also does things that Google cannot do. 

Now, let’s talk about what’s happening in cars. 

by Benedict Evans |  Read more:

Even When I Lie

So what does that make you? Good guys? Don’t kid yourselves. You’re no better’n me. You just know how to hide…and how to lie. Me? I don’t have that problem. I always tell the truth. Even when I lie.

Tony Montana’s speech to restaurant patrons from Scarface (1983)

Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt (1951)

Justice and honesty will be the first topics of our speech, especially as we are asking for alliance; because we know that there can never be any solid friendship between individuals, or union between communities that is worth the name, unless the parties be persuaded of each other’s honesty.

History of the Peloponnesian War, Book 3, by Thucydides

When I was young, a Sunday School teacher presented our class with a hypothetical.

Imagine for a moment, he said, that a criminal came into the church today and seized your parents. He took them up to the front of the church and pointed a gun at both of their heads. Unless you denied your faith, he would kill them both. What should you do?

A heavy question for a 12-year old, it always disturbed me. ‘Always’, I say, because it was asked of me more than once. It came up shockingly often, although I suspect given differing sensibilities that you might consider once shocking enough. Perhaps it was the favorite brainteaser of a teacher bored of 30 years of giving the same pictorial lessons of Zacchaeus climbing the tree. I think it was a reflection of some evangelical churches’ occasionally morbid obsession with the end times described in Revelations. There was a time when ‘What will you do when you are persecuted for your faith’ occupied much of my mind. ‘What if Jesus returns before a girl ever kisses you?’ occupied most of the rest. There was really no doubt in any of our minds that it was going to happen during our lifetimes. Probably much sooner.

The intended moral of the story was that there is no valid justification for sin. To lie by denying Christ was the greatest of these sins. You will be disappointed to learn that the typical lesson does not discuss the two last people who were asked if they knew Him; the one who lied became Pope, and the one who told the truth hanged himself and, if Luke’s vivid account is to be believed, exploded. Instead, the usual lesson proceeds from Job to a reading from the Sermon on the Mount. You know this sermon, even if you don’t know that you know it. Blessed are the meek, etc. You may not know that this is where it ends up:

If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.

Matthew 5:30

More heavy stuff. In a spectacle to be repeated in a thousand thousand Dodge Caravans and Chevy Suburbans on the way to Old Country Buffet after church, the children turn their Sunday School lesson around on their parents. What would you do, mom and dad, if I were brought to the front of the church? I bet that if you could look in on those parents in those minivans, you’d see just about all of them look their children straight in the eyes and tell them the same thing: I would lie a million times before I let someone hurt you.

For the most part, our moral systems end up with a similar basic set of rules. Don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t cheat, don’t lie. The problems arise in weighing conflicts between rules within our value system, or between multiple value systems. Common sense allows us to easily resolve some of these conflicts. Don’t lie, but if the alternative would result in the murder of your children, lie until your lips turn numb. More often, the units we must weigh are irreducible and incompatible. How many lies offset an act of generosity? The answers to these questions are non-falsifiable, even if various ethical systems purport to have adopted more objective means to answer them. That means that we will disagree. It also means that, as much as we might like to say ‘the ends don’t justify the means’, we are often left with no choice but to judge the rightness of actions by calculating their expected consequences, and by weighing unweighable goods and bads.

This ground was well-trod among ethicists hundreds of years ago. You need a 4,000-word, dime store survey version of it from me today like you need a hole in the head. But if we would be students of the widening gyre of politics and the black hole of financial markets, there is one ethical topic we must grapple with directly and urgently. It is the thing which Thucydides considered a prerequisite for union within a community. It is what Hannah Arendt considered the first casualty of a state veering toward totalitarianism.

Honesty.

Like any other ethical idea, honesty may inevitably come into conflict with other principles. It is these conflicts and how they are resolved or justified, whether rightly or wrongly, that empower the widening gyre. In simpler terms: our differing reasons for becoming liars are what are causing us to fall apart. Understanding those reasons will play a large role in how we chart a path back to sanity. The way I see it, there are three reasons a person becomes a liar: he believes that he must, he believes that he may, or he believes it serves a Greater Truth.

by Rusty Guinn, Epsilon Theory |  Read more:

Image: Scarface 

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[ed. See also: Ice fishing.]

Don’t Pretend You Can’t See Us

Fighting on the Champs Elysées last weekend between French security forces and the so-called ‘gilets jaunes’ led to more than 100 arrests. According to the police, roughly eight thousand demonstrators took part. Barricades were built – and set alight – by what looked from a distance to be groups of rampaging lollipop people in dayglo yellow tops. But the gilets jaunes are not championing pedestrian safety: their revolt has been prompted by a sharp rise in the price of diesel and unleaded petrol at the pump, which they blame on President Macron’s fossil fuel tax. This is a drivers’ movement, at least at first sight, and despite the turmoil on the Champs Elysées, it is deeply provincial. Macron responded on Tuesday not with a U-turn, but with a concession enabling parliament to freeze the carbon tax – which is set to keep rising year on year – when the oil price goes up. A freeze is a very different proposition from a reduction and the gilets jaunes don’t like it. They were out in force again on Wednesday and another big demonstration looks likely in Paris tomorrow.

The movement took off in mid-November, when thousands of people in hi-vis jackets turned out across the country at major junctions and minor roundabouts. The aim was to slow up traffic, or halt it, and share their anger with other motorists idling in neutral (racking up their CO2 emissions). The gilets jaunes also set up human chicanes – between 20 and 200 protesters – outside petrol stations and supermarkets where they could buttonhole consumers who’d dodged the roundabouts by taking by-roads to their nearest Auchan, Intermarché or Leclerc. Drivers in France are obliged to have hi-vis tops in their vehicles at all times: people who support the gilets jaunes – or claim to – have taken to placing theirs in a hi-vis position, wedged between the dashboard and the windscreen in a show of solidarity (or hope of a laisser-passer). In the rural south-west, where I live, most vehicles – commercial vans, family cars – are still sporting the tabard as they whizz by.

The gilets jaunes claim that they are being hammered into the ground by fuel tax, of which the carbon levy is only one component. Taxes on fuel have scarcely gone through the roof: the average increase since 2007 is roughly two centimes per annum, which environmentalists argue is not enough. (Duty on diesel is now rising faster, and it will soon be taxed at the same rate as unleaded.) Timing, however, has been a problem: The new carbon tax figures were set in 2017, when the price of crude averaged $50 per barrel. Last month it peaked in the region of $80 – which, combined with the tax hike, meant that diesel was 23 per cent more expensive (14 per cent for unleaded) than in October 2017. The tax is set to go up again in January and the government has no plan, at the time of writing, to put this on hold.

Carbon tax in France is part of a long term strategy to phase out fossil fuels (one ambition is to be levying CO2 emissions at €100 per tonne by 2030; another to end sales of diesel and unleaded cars by 2040). But the overall tax on fuel – roughly 65 per cent of the cost to consumers – is non-progressive, a central objection for the gilets jaunes. Those who can’t claim it back oppose the addition of VAT on a consumer item whose price consists largely of tax. They mistrust many of the tax-lite regimes for business, aviation in particular. And they’re stuck with their cars. Inhabitants of big conurbations and bijou cities are abandoning the car as public transport offers affordable alternatives. But that still leaves about 13 million people who live in the countryside. The conspicuous rich in rural areas drive ‘me-first’ utility vehicles whose manufacturing footprint is daunting, even though emissions are low: they can afford to pay. But millions with modest incomes above the poverty level – variously defined in France as households with less than 50 or 60 per cent of average national income – are disproportionately hit by the tax. So are their neighbours, the rural poor: roughly 1.7 million people, according to a government report in 2009: that figure has surely risen in the last ten years.

There are no gilet jaune leaders, only eccentric figureheads and pop-up advocates. (...)

Many local business people in south-west France support the gilets jaunes: bakers, plumbers, roofers, electricians, small farmers, and most of the shopkeepers left standing now that the supermarkets have put weaker contenders out of a job. All depend on their cars and those of their customers to stay afloat. But the small business contingent isn’t enough to justify the description ‘Poujadist’. This is a leaderless, spontaneous surge of impatience against an ‘elite’ which is thought to spurn poorer citizens or milk them dry. All the same, when more incisive commentary describes the movement as a jacquerie – and likens the hi-vis vest to the ‘jacques’ (a short, padded jacket) worn by the peasants of the 14th-century Grand Jacquerie – we’re told the comparison is condescending. I find the term ‘Poujadist’ far more derogatory, and I’m guessing that the vests are worn to make a simple point: ‘don’t pretend you can’t see us.’ The press have now taken to referring politely to a ‘fronde’. (...)

The protests have produced many minor road injuries and at least two fatal accidents: one involving a man on a motorbike who collided with a van reversing out of a blockade, another a sixty-something woman activist, run down by an edgy mother in a 4×4 taking her child to the doctor. While the gilets jaunes are the proximate cause in both, panic and road rage bear the burden of blame. The same can’t be said of racist episodes: ‘Go back to your own country,’ a gilet jaune said to a black mother and her children at a roadblock in Charente. Or homophobia: a gay couple harassed at a roadblock north of Lyon. Or the near-lynching of journalists in Toulouse last Saturday: TV journalism is seen by many protesters as an instrument of soft power wielded on behalf of Macron. Other gilets jaunes have taken their distance from racism, anti-gay sentiment and violent journophobia – a growing trend in France. To judge from the graffiti in Paris after last weekend, the left have a presence in the movement, but as long as the gilets jaunes are unaffiliated, with no trade union figurehead or party-political leader to deplore the odd aberration, the rest of us are left to make up our own minds about who they really are.

There are hundreds of activists in my nearest towns. Often their message is smuggled in under a joke. Two gilets jaunes in their fifties at a go-slow in the Gironde opened the doors of my car and proposed that the three of us elope to a tropical island. Perhaps they were thinking of Réunion, a French Indian Ocean outpost 9000 km from Paris, paralysed by intransigent gilets jaunes, where the overseas minister had a ferocious reception on a recent visit. The refrain from protesters in the Gironde, like those of Réunion, is that they have ‘nothing’. Poverty for local gilets jaunes is not just about the flat labour market or the price of fuel. It’s about a sense of being left behind, as the state withdraws from poorer parts of ‘la France profonde’: schools under pressure, ‘medical deserts’ spreading, Republican institutions shrinking (town halls opening maybe three days a week or less), food prices rising, and the thriving world of non-profit associations – sports clubs, youth groups, cultural groups – suddenly short of money: since Macron abolished the wealth tax, the rich are no longer making tax-deductible gifts to these low-key, crucial NGOs.

by Jeremy Harding, LRB |  Read more:

Image: via

An Overly Analytical Guide to Camgirling

Included: Picking a site, security, equipment, lighting/angles, business strategy, psychological tricks, types of camgirls and members, how to make sales, dealing with the emotional burden, taxes, networking, personal branding, marketing, and a few other things.

My credentials: I was a camgirl for five years. My highest earning month was $50,000, and my highest rank (on MFC) was #7, meaning I earned the 7th most money that month. I was, at one point, one of the most (if not the most) widely known working camgirls thanks to some viral content. My average income per hour was $200. Getting there was not easy and took a ton of mistakes and work, so I hope this helps you.

Disclaimer: What I’m offering are guidelines for starting, which are useful to follow if you have no idea what’s going on. Nothing I say is a hard and fast rule, and you can probably find at least one successful performer out there who violates every single thing I recommend. If something works for you, do it. (...)

Trying to Decide

If you’re uncertain if you want to cam, know that there’s a lot of flexibility in how you do it. You can set whatever limits you want – the highest earning camgirl on MFC at one point, earning over 1,000,000 in a year, was a non-nude model! The more attractive you are, the easier camming will be for you. If you look like a potato you can still make money, it’s just gonna take more work.

Camming ‘pros’ involve: an easier source of money that’s independent of scheduling, bosses, and rules. The ceiling on cam income is very high – top-range models make around $200/hr, and the super-high end ones can make $1000+/hr. The average income is roughly $40/hr, based on around 200 girls I surveyed a few years ago.

Camming cons involve: potentially higher stress, identity risks, burnout, and self-esteem hits.

You can cam part-time, but you’ll make less per hour. This guide is written primarily for people who want to do this full-time (defined as 20+ live cam hours a week), all-out, going for the max amount of money per hour you can possibly earn. (...)

Which Cam Category to Choose?

There are two primary forms of camsites – token sites, and private sites.

Token sites operate sort of like busking, where you stand there, do things, and a watching crowd throws money at you. These websites often have private options (where only one guy can see you, and he pays per minute), but those usually aren’t the primary form of income, especially for higher-earning girls, who typically earn more through live tips than they do through the website-provided private options. Token sites generally have much higher total earning potential, but often require more intensive work and are more stressful. Token-site workers are also often more personality-based, tend towards more girlfriend-experience and performance aspects.

Token sites: myfreecams, chaturbate

Private sites operate sort of like a brothel, where you present yourself, get chosen by somebody, and then they take you into a private room for a while at a fixed rate. These sites tend to be a bit lower-pressure than token sites, because the biggest sell you make is getting someone to take you private, after which your income is a little more guaranteed. Private sites are typically lower-earning, and tend to be more wham-blam-thank-you-ma’am, with lower emphasis placed on personality, which is great if you want to zone out. This can be less emotionally taxing, too.

Private sites: streammate, livejasmin

My experience has been entirely with token sites, and so the majority of my advice is targeted towards those, and will be less applicable if you’re using a private site. (...)

Setting You Up

Experiment with the way you present yourself! In general, though, I’ve found that no matter how much high-end super-lace lingerie and red lipsticks I’ve put on, the thing that gets the best reaction is a good ol’ thin, tight t-shirt with no bra. Anything that emphasizes your sexy curves to the max is ideal – and typically, anything that looks effortless. The ‘girl next door’ look is probably the most popular, where you just ‘rolled out of bed’ looking like this, with some soft, super-short shorts and bared midriff or something. Definitely no lipstick. Don’t wear lipstick unless it’s super neutral. Keep your makeup subtle, although remember you’re performing through a camera which might allow you to pack on a bit more.

Not to say other looks can’t work, but if you’re just starting out and don’t really know what to do, start out with the tried and true accidental-tittied classic.

If you’re going to be a top girl, you aren’t going to get by selling yourself on being porny and hot. Emotional connection is a huuuge part of high pay, and by dressing in traditional slut clothes you’re signaling that you’re only here to make them feel less lonely in the penis, not in the heart. (...)

Who Are These Men and What Do They Want?

There’s different types, obviously, but the most common tipper is single/divorced/unhappily married man in his 40s-50s, who is too depressed/anxious/unattractive to be able to get any affection from women in real life.

I have a lot of empathy for these people, and in a lot of ways I felt like I was genuinely doing good, especially when I got to talk to them one-on-one. Remember, in this job, underneath all the sex and money, you’re still dealing with real people with real needs, and remember to treat them with kindness. Some of them are actually really wonderful and I’m thankful to have them.

That being said, there are some aspects of psychology that increase their spending. Men want a few things, and probably one of the biggest is winning a competition.

You see, you’re not just trying to get a guy to pay you – you’re trying to get a guy to pay you in front of a bunch of other guys. This is a super key. A man wants to feel attention from an attractive women on him, and this is made even more satisfying when it’s to the exclusion of those around him. He is showing off his power by buying your happiness.

So, when tipped, make sure you say his name (or username). A lot of girls use subtly masculine-competition language when referring to high tippers, such as “hero,” “champion,” or “winner”. I often would ask questions like “who is going to save my night?” or “who is going to be the one to make me feel x”?

The ‘control show’ I mentioned above plays into this. Give men a way to fight against each other, with tokens. A common tactic is to have guys buy into “teams”, and whichever team tips the most, wins (with the prize being a video or literally anything – you’d be surprised at how many competition prizes are just the guy’s name being listed on the girl’s profile). Have guys fight to put on or off your clothes, or force you/rescue you from doing something gross.

The most profitable thing I ever did was have a ‘war’ with another camgirl, and it became my tipping members vs. hers. Competition is bread and butter. Competition is love. Competition is life. Competition is your key to a life full of luxury handbags and butlers.

by Aella, Knowing Less |  Read more:

Image: via

Responding to "The Left Case Against Open Borders" (Current Affairs)

Image: Government agents apprehend a landscaper during an immigration sting at Corso’s Flower and Garden Center, Tuesday, June 5, 2018, in Castalia, Ohio. Associated Press/John Minchillo

One Take

Even when “Kidding” executive producer Michel Gondry isn’t directing an episode of Jim Carrey’s new Showtime show, the auteur’s presence can be felt. Case in point: Last Sunday’s episode, which featured a long, complicated scene shot in one take.

In the scene, guest star Riki Lindhome plays Shaina, a woman who’s inspired to turn her life around after watching an episode of “Mr. Pickles’ Puppet Time,” the kids’ show hosted by Carrey’s character. In one take, viewers see Lindhome’s world evolve as she renovates her apartment, starts exercising, invites friends over and celebrates her new life.

Behind the scenes, the “Kidding” crew physically transformed the set multiple times in real time. In this exclusive clip, the network gives a side-by-side comparison to how the scene looked on camera, vs. the hairy moments behind the camera as Lindhome and the show’s crew managed to pull it off.

by Michael Schneider, IndieWire | Read more:
Video: Kidding

Twitter’s Trans-Activist Decree

On November 15, I woke up to find my Twitter account locked, on account of what the company described as “hateful conduct.” In order to regain access, I was made to delete two tweets from October. Fair enough, you might think. Concern about the tone of discourse on social media has been widespread for years. Certainly, many have argued that Twitter officials should be doing more to discourage the vitriol and violent threats that have become commonplace on their platform.

In this case, however, the notion that my commentary could be construed as “hateful” baffled me. One tweet read, simply, “Men aren’t women,” and the other asked “How are transwomen not men? What is the difference between a man and a transwoman?” That last question is one I’ve asked countless times, including in public speeches, and I have yet to get a persuasive answer. I ask these questions not to spread hate—because I do not hate trans-identified individuals—but rather to make sense of arguments made by activists within that community. Instead of answering such questions, however, these same activists insist that the act of simply asking them is evidence of hatred.

The statement that “Men aren’t women” would have been seen as banal—indeed, tautological—just a few years ago. Today, it’s considered heresy—akin to terrorist speech that seeks to “deny the humanity” of trans-identified people who very much wish they could change sex, but cannot. These heretics are smeared as “TERF”—a pejorative term that stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist—and blacklisted. On many Twitter threads, the term is more or less synonymous with “Nazi.”Earlier this year, Tyler Coates, an editor at the apparently respectable Esquire magazine, tweeted out “FUCK TERFs!” and promptly got retweeted more than a thousand times.

In many progressive corners of academic and online life, it now is taken as cant that anyone who rejects transgender ideology—which is based on the theory that a mystical “gender identity” exists within us, akin to a soul—may be targeted with the most juvenile and vicious attacks. “Punch TERFs and Nazis” has become a common Twitter tagline, as is the demand that “TERFs” be “sent to the gulag.” (This latter suggestion was earnestly defended in a thread authored by students who run the official Twitter account of the LGBTQ+ Society at a British university. The authors went on to say that the gulag model would, in fact, comprise “a compassionate, non-violent course of action” to deal with “TERFs” and “anti-trans bigots” who must be “re-educat[ed].”) (...)

The reason why engagement with the most militant trans activists is fruitless, and yields only a slew of empty mantras and false stereotypes, is that one cannot argue with religious faith. At the core of transgender ideology is the idea that the old mind/body problem that has bedeviled philosophers for centuries has been definitively solved by gender-studies specialists—and that a female mind can exist within a male body and vice versa. Moreover, we are informed that these mystical phenomena are invisible in all respects, except to the extent that they are experienced from within—which means the only reliable indicator of supposed bona fide transgenderism is the self-declaration of trans-identified individuals (many of whom seem to have made these stunning discoveries as part of a sudden social trend). (...)

Like other women who have been sounding the alarm about these trends, I regularly get accused of spreading moral panic, and of attempting to vilify trans-identified people as inveterate predators. But my issue isn’t with “transgender people,” per se, but, rather, with men. There is a reason certain spaces are sex-segregated—such as change rooms, bathrooms, women’s shelters, and prisons: because these are spaces where women are vulnerable, and where male predators might target women and girls. These are spaces where women and girls may be naked, and where they do not want to be exposed to a man’s penis, regardless of his insistence that his penis is actually “female.”

by Meghan Murphy, Quillette |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. TERFs. It's so hard to keep up these days.]

History is Now

What always irritated me the most about Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis was not the way it reinforced the idea that “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism. Rather, it was the way it suggested that there was some fundamental difference between Us and Every Single Person Who Lived Before Us. We are the Present and they are History. Even as Fukuyama strongly rejected criticisms of his book, which he felt misunderstood his point, he was quite clear that there was some fundamental difference between events as we experience them and events as they used to be:

What I suggested had come to an end was not events, even large and grave events, but History: that is, history understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process, when taking into account the experience of all peoples in all times.

This annoyed me so much in part because it’s so easy to believe. The figures of history do seem quite unlike ourselves. It’s hard to believe that Socrates or Cleopatra or Marx ate, slept, and shat just the same way we do. I mean, it can be difficult enough to empathize with people who are alive today. It’s even harder—for me, at least—to fully appreciate that previous “presents” were just as present as our own.

When I look at our time, I try to look at it the way we look at ancient civilizations. Let’s assume that human beings will be around for another several thousand years at least. What do we look like to them? Clearly the idea that we were somehow uniquely different from those a hundred years before us will seem ludicrous to them, no matter what happens or doesn’t happen over the next several millennia. There are a few things I always wonder: Which things that we cared a lot about will seem completely trivial? And which things will it seem extraordinary not to have cared about? If I had to predict, I’d say that they’d be amazed we spent so much time talking about Paul Manafort and Michael Avenatti even as we tortured billions of animals to death and stood by watching the planet boil. Animal welfare, climate change, nuclear weapons, borders–our failures to do anything on these fronts will seem like a deep moral deficiency.

Understanding yourself as a person in history confers a great sense of responsibility. It’s interesting to daydream about questions like “If you had been alive in 1922, and had the freedom to act, what would you do to prevent the rise of Hitler?” What would you have done had you been alive in Time & Place X, Y, or Z? Now, the question doesn’t really make much sense, since “who you are” comes from the fact that you’re here, now, and have lived the life you’ve lived instead of some other life. But the exercise is still useful even if we can’t suspend the laws of the universe, because in some ways we have been plopped down in history and do face that exact question. Given that you are here, in a particular moment and place, an unchangeable past behind you and an unknowable future before you, what will you do? Any life is a historical blip (as Craig Ferguson says, your lifespan is two numbers separated by a hyphen, and this is the hyphen), and as individuals we almost certainly can’t change the course of history alone. But the decisions people make do matter.

One of history’s main lessons is “don’t be the person who grudgingly accepts the inevitability of atrocious things.” The liberals who cautioned Martin Luther King to “go slow” were cowards, and the civil rights protesters changed the country by refusing to tolerate the intolerable. The people who gathered and attacked the first black family who moved to Cicero, Illinois… these were not the people you want to be. Same with the ordinary Germans who were afraid to speak up each contributed to a human catastrophe, and today we admire those like Sophie Scholl and the Man Who Wouldn’t Heil. (He has an equivalent today: Jordan Blue, the bullied gay student who refused to participate when his fellow students all decided to do the Nazi salute.) The “good men who do nothing” are not very good at all, because being good in part depends on what you do in response to your circumstances.

I am not saying that “everyone must be an activist.” Many people do not have the time or health. But I do think knowledge confers duty: As we try to look at our lives from the perspective of future people, aliens, or ourselves on our deathbeds, what decisions do we think we should make? I am not religious, but I often wonder how I would “justify myself” if there were a day of judgment. What were you for? What good were you? Did you sit idly by? I believe strongly that life should be full of pleasure, and that there’s nothing helpful about living every day wracked with guilt over things you haven’t done. But I also know that history doesn’t just happen. It’s made by the sum total of the things people do, and I am a person, and you are a person, and we are the ones who decide what we do. 62,000 people lived rather than died because Carl Lutz was a good person who used his opportunities well. Because we are limited by our context, we each have constraints to our actions (I cannot go back and become Carl Lutz), but those constraints are also unknowable, and the only way to guarantee that a project fails is to resign yourself to its failure.

Try to look at our time as an outsider rather than a participant, and you’ll see how mad it all looks. These days, parts of the conservative press have switched from denying that climate change is happening to insisting that it won’t substantially impede GDP growth. The Wall Street Journal ran a column recently insisting that NINE DEGREES of average warming would be fine, because the economy could still expand. Did the article give any consideration to the billions of lives that would be disrupted, the refugees that would be generated, the people who would burn alive in new fires, or see their cities flooded? It didn’t. The right-wing press is pathological: growth at all costs, without ever wondering where it will stop or how you can have limitless expansion on a finite planet. Capitalism is a “paperclip maximizer“: It eats everything alive, and makes up whatever arguments are necessary to justify the ceaseless quest for maximizing productivity and revenue. It will do so even if it inflicts mass human suffering. What will this look like in the rear view mirror? How will we see columns that said the god of “GDP” must be served no matter the cost, that it is okay to kill every coral reef on earth if we can keep building new factories? I feel this will look like an age of lunacy, like we were members of a death-cult that made up rationalizations for its own destruction.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. "...your lifespan is two numbers separated by a hyphen, and this is the hyphen..."]

Anchorage, Alaska after the ‘64 quake
via:

A New Movement: Squatty Potty

For their 27th wedding anniversary, the Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston gave his wife, Robin, a gift that promises “to give you the best poop of your life, guaranteed”. The Squatty Potty is a wildly popular seven-inch-high plastic stool, designed by a devout Mormon and her son, which curves around the base of your loo. By propping your feet on it while you crap, you raise your knees above your hips. From this semi-squat position, the centuries-old seated toilet is transformed into something more primordial, like a hole in the ground. The family that makes the Squatty Potty says this posture unfurls your colon and gives your faecal matter a clear run from your gut to the bowl, reducing bloating, constipation and the straining that causes haemorrhoids. Musing about the gift on one of America’s daytime talk shows in 2016, Cranston said: “Elimination is love.”

More than 5m Squatty Potties have been sold since they first crept on to the market in 2011. Celebrities such as Sally Field and Jimmy Kimmel have raved about them, and the basketball sensation Stephen Curry put one in every bathroom of his house. “I had, like, a full elimination,” Howard Stern, the celebrity shock jock, said after he first used one, in 2013. “It was unbelievable. I felt empty. I was like, ‘Holy shit.’” The Squatty Potty has been the subject of jokes on Saturday Night Live, and of adulation by the queen of drag queens, RuPaul. This January, after Squatty Potty LLC hit $33m in annual revenues, the business channel CNBC, which helped bring the footstool to fame through its US version of Dragon’s Den, hailed the device as a “cult juggernaut”.

The Squatty Potty’s success is partly down to “This Unicorn Changed the Way I Poop”, an online ad that launched in October 2015 and has since been viewed more than 100m times. In the video, a fey cartoon unicorn, its rear hooves perched upon a Squatty Potty, Mr-Whippies rainbow-coloured soft-serve ice-cream out of its butt and into cake cones while an Elizabethan Prince Charming details the benefits of squatting to poop. (“I scream, you scream, and plop, plop baby!”) At the end of the video, the prince serves the ice-cream to a gaggle of kids. (“How does it taste, is that delicious? Is that the best thing you’ve ever had in your life?”)

At first, many people saw the footstool as little more than a joke Christmas present. But, like fresh bed linen and French bulldogs, the Squatty Potty exerts a powerful emotional force on its owners. “I have one and I have to tell you, it will ruin your life,” a Reddit user called chamburgers recently posted. “I can’t poop anywhere but at home with my Squatty Potty. When I have to poop at work I’m left unsatisfied. It’s like climbing into a wet sleeping bag.” Bobby Edwards, who invented the footstool with his mom, calls people like this “evangelists”. “They talk about it at dinner parties, they talk about whenever they can – about how the Squatty Potty has changed their life,” he told me. He sounded almost mystified.

The popularity of the Squatty Potty, and the existence of its many rivals and imitators, is one of the clearest signs of an anxiety that’s been growing in the west for the past decade: that we have been “pooping all wrong”. In recent years, some version of that phrase has headlined articles from outlets as diverse as Men’s Health, Jezebel, the Cleveland Clinic medical centre and even Bon Appétit. By giving up the natural squatting posture bequeathed to us by evolution and taking up our berths on the porcelain throne, the proposition goes, we have summoned a plague of bowel trouble. Untold millions suffer from haemorrhoids – in the US alone, some estimates run to 125 million – and millions more have related conditions such as colonic inflammation.

Where illness goes, big business follows. The markets for treating these ailments – with creams, surgery and haemorrhoid doughnut cushions – are worth many billions of dollars. Although diet is widely believed to be a contributing factor in these problems (eat your fibre!), lately attention has focused on the possible effects of toilet posture. The renowned Mayo clinic is now conducting a randomised controlled trial to see whether the Squatty Potty can ease chronic constipation, which afflicts some 50 million Americans, most of them women, many over 45 years old.

People often say pooping is taboo, but lately it seems more like a cultural fetish. There are poop emoji birthday parties for three-year-olds, people WhatsApping photos of their ordure to friends, TripAdvisor threads on how to avoid or avail yourself of squat toilets. Through the miracle of online media, you can now discover that, in the past year, both Brisbane, Australia and Colorado Springs, Colorado, suffered reigns of terror by mystery “pooping joggers” who ran around crapping on people’s lawns. There’s a whole YouTube subculture devoted to infiltrating restrooms with vintage toilets and surreptitiously flushing them over and over again (one of these channels has more than 16m views). The renowned novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard has devoted passage after passage to his bowel movements. You can even read opinion pieces about the pleasures of evacuating in the nude.

But it’s the banal Squatty Potty that’s doing the most to change not just how people discuss poop, but how they actually do it. “It’s piercing that final veil around bodily use and bodily functions,” Barbara Penner, professor of architectural humanities at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture, and one of the preeminent scholars of the modern bathroom, told me. Perhaps it’s because this small, unlovely stool embodies a grand ambition: to upend two centuries of western orthodoxy about going to the loo.

by Alex Blasdel, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Squatty Potty

The Pentagon’s Massive Accounting Fraud

On November 15, Ernst & Young and other private firms that were hired to audit the Pentagon announced that they could not complete the job. Congress had ordered an independent audit of the Department of Defense, the government’s largest discretionary cost center—the Pentagon receives 54 cents out of every dollar in federal appropriations—after the Pentagon failed for decades to audit itself. The firms concluded, however, that the DoD’s financial records were riddled with so many bookkeeping deficiencies, irregularities, and errors that a reliable audit was simply impossible.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan tried to put the best face on things, telling reporters, “We failed the audit, but we never expected to pass it.” Shanahan suggested that the DoD should get credit for attempting an audit, saying, “It was an audit on a $2.7 trillion organization, so the fact that we did the audit is substantial.” The truth, though, is that the DoD was dragged kicking and screaming to this audit by bipartisan frustration in Congress, and the result, had this been a major corporation, likely would have been a crashed stock.

As Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa, a frequent critic of the DoD’s financial practices, said on the Senate floor in September 2017, the Pentagon’s long-standing failure to conduct a proper audit reflects “twenty-six years of hard-core foot-dragging” on the part of the DoD, where “internal resistance to auditing the books runs deep.” In 1990, Congress passed the Chief Financial Officers Act, which required all departments and agencies of the federal government to develop auditable accounting systems and submit to annual audits. Since then, every department and agency has come into compliance—except the Pentagon.

Now, a Nation investigation has uncovered an explanation for the Pentagon’s foot-dragging: For decades, the DoD’s leaders and accountants have been perpetrating a gigantic, unconstitutional accounting fraud, deliberately cooking the books to mislead the Congress and drive the DoD’s budgets ever higher, regardless of military necessity. DoD has literally been making up numbers in its annual financial reports to Congress—representing trillions of dollars’ worth of seemingly nonexistent transactions—knowing that Congress would rely on those misleading reports when deciding how much money to give the DoD the following year, according to government records and interviews with current and former DoD officials, congressional sources, and independent experts.

“If the DOD were being honest, they would go to Congress and say, ‘All these proposed budgets we’ve been presenting to you are a bunch of garbage,’ ” said Jack Armstrong, who spent more than five years in the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General as a supervisory director of audits before retiring in 2011. (...)

Among the laundering tactics the Pentagon uses: So-called “one-year money”—funds that Congress intends to be spent in a single fiscal year—gets shifted into a pool of five-year money. This maneuver exploits the fact that federal law does not require the return of unspent “five-year money” during that five-year allocation period.

The phony numbers are referred to inside the Pentagon as “plugs,” as in plugging a hole, said current and former officials. “Nippering,” a reference to a sharp-nosed tool used to snip off bits of wire or metal, is Pentagon slang for shifting money from its congressionally authorized purpose to a different purpose. Such nippering can be repeated multiple times “until the funds become virtually untraceable,” says one Pentagon-budgeting veteran who insisted on anonymity in order to keep his job as a lobbyist at the Pentagon.

The plugs can be staggering in size. In fiscal year 2015, for example, Congress appropriated $122 billion for the US Army. Yet DoD financial records for the Army’s 2015 budget included a whopping $6.5 trillion (yes, trillion) in plugs. Most of these plugs “lack[ed] supporting documentation,” in the bland phrasing of the department’s internal watchdog, the Office of Inspector General. In other words, there were no ledger entries or receipts to back up how that $6.5 trillion supposedly was spent. Indeed, more than 16,000 records that might reveal either the source or the destination of some of that $6.5 trillion had been “removed,” the inspector general’s office reported.

In this way, the DoD propels US military spending higher year after year, even when the country is not fighting any major wars, says Franklin “Chuck” Spinney, a former Pentagon whistle-blower. Spinney’s revelations to Congress and the news media about wildly inflated Pentagon spending helped spark public outrage in the 1980s. “They’re making up the numbers and then just asking for more money each year,” Spinney told The Nation. The funds the Pentagon has been amassing over the years through its bogus bookkeeping maneuvers “could easily be as much as $100 billion,” Spinney estimated.

Indeed, Congress appropriated a record amount—$716 billion—for the DoD in the current fiscal year of 2019. That was up $24 billion from fiscal year 2018’s $692 billion, which itself was up $6 billion from fiscal year 2017’s $686 billion. Such largesse is what drives US military spending higher than the next ten highest-spending countries combined, added Spinney. Meanwhile, the closest thing to a full-scale war the United States is currently fighting is in Afghanistan, where approximately 15,000 US troops are deployed—only 2.8 percent as many as were in Vietnam at the height of that war.

by Dave Lindorff, The Nation |  Read more:

Image: Jason Reed/Reuters

Inger Sitter, Café Scene (1952)

via:

Bruce Springsteen: Beneath the Surface

The first time I meet Bruce Springsteen is backstage at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York, where he is in the homestretch of performing his one-man show, Springsteen on Broadway. It is a few weeks before I am supposed to sit with him for an interview, but his publicist has asked me to come by before this performance so he can, I deduce, check me out. I arrive at 7:00 and am directed to a small couch near the backstage bathroom. Finally, five minutes before curtain, I see, coming down the stairs that lead to his dressing room, a pair of black work boots and black-legged jeans. Springsteen ducks his head beneath a low arch and walks toward me, extending his hand and saying, “I’m Bruce.” We shake hands, and then there is silence. He looks at me and I look at him, not sure what to say. At five-foot-ten, he’s taller than you think he’ll be; somehow, he remains the runty-scrawny kid in the leather jacket, possibly dwarfed in our minds due to the years he spent leaning against Clarence Clemons.

That evening, Springsteen is weeks from notching his sixty-ninth birthday. And as we stand there, I find it impossible not to think that the journey he has undertaken in this decade of his life has been nothing short of miraculous. He entered his sixties struggling to survive a crippling depression, and now here he is approaching his seventies in triumph—mostly thanks to the success of this powerful, intimate show, which is not a concert but an epic dramatic monologue, punctuated with his songs. After a year of sold-out shows, he will close it out on December 15, the same night it will debut on Netflix as a film. He at last breaks the awkward silence by giving a small nod and saying to me—but more to himself, just as we all kind of say it to ourselves as we head out the door each day—“Well, I guess I better go to work.” And with that he ambles toward stage right. (...)

Springsteen’s first breakdown came upon him at age thirty- two, around the time he released Nebraska. It is 1982, and he and his buddy Matt Delia are driving from New Jersey to Los Angeles in a 1969 Ford XL. On a late- summer night, in remote Texas, they come across a small town where a fair is happening. A band plays. Men and women hold each other and dance lazily, happily, beneath the stars. Children run and laugh. From the distance of the car, Springsteen gazes at all the living and happiness. And then: Something in him cracks open. As he writes, in this moment his lifetime as “an observer . . . away from the normal messiness of living and loving, reveals its cost to me.” All these years later, he still doesn’t exactly know why he fell into an abyss that night. “All I do know is as we age, the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier . . . much heavier. With each passing year, the price of our refusal to do that sorting rises higher and higher. . . . Long ago, the defenses I built to withstand the stress of my childhood, to save what I had of myself, outlived their usefulness, and I’ve become an abuser of their once lifesaving powers. I relied on them wrongly to isolate myself, seal my alienation, cut me off from life, control others, and contain my emotions to a damaging degree. Now the bill collector is knocking, and his payment’ll be in tears.” (...)

As Springsteen confesses to me, “I have come close enough to [mental illness] where I know I am not completely well myself. I’ve had to deal with a lot of it over the years, and I’m on a variety of medications that keep me on an even keel; otherwise I can swing rather dramatically and . . . just . . . the wheels can come off a little bit. So we have to watch, in our family. I have to watch my kids, and I’ve been lucky there. It ran in my family going way before my dad.” (...)

Springsteen tells me he has found purpose through his children. He is the father of two sons and a daughter: Evan, twenty- eight, works for SiriusXM; Sam, twenty- four, is a firefighter in New Jersey; and Jessica, twenty-six, is an equestrian. He says he promised himself long ago that he would not lose his children the way his father lost him. Much of his struggle to become a good father had to do with the hurt and anger he had to work through. He was fighting what he calls “the worst of my destructive behavior.” His father sent him a message that a woman, a family, weakens a man. As he says, for years the idea of a home filled him “with distrust and a bucketload of grief.”

He credits Scialfa, his wife of twenty-seven years, with inspiring him to be a better man, with saving him. (“By her intelligence and love she showed me that our family was a sign of strength, that we were formidable and could take on and enjoy much of the world.”) It’s no wonder that he brings her out in the center of the show and duets with her on “Tougher Than the Rest” as well as “Brilliant Disguise.” You read his book and you see the wisdom and sensitivity she brought to their relationship. It’s Scialfa who, when the kids are small, goes to Bruce, the lifelong nocturnal creature, and says, “You’re going to miss it.” What? he asks. “The kids, the morning, it’s the best time, it’s when they need you the most.” Cut to: Bruce, remaking himself as the early- morning-breakfast dad. “Should the whole music thing go south, I will be able to hold a job between the hours of 5:00 and 11:00 a.m. at any diner in America. Feeding your children is an act of great intimacy, and I received my rewards: the sounds of forks clattering on breakfast plates, toast popping out of the toaster.”

And there it is: Bruce, no longer the son of scarcity but rather the father of abundance, reclaiming the kitchen for his family; transforming it from a fortress of darkness and silence into a land of brightness, filled with the sounds of life. Sitting here with me now, talking about his brood, he radiates joy. A father, proud of his children, grateful. I ask him, considering the current environment, what kinds of conversations he and his family are having around the kitchen table; what it means to be a man in society right now.

“My kids . . . we’re lucky. They’re solid citizens.”

But what would you say if you had to give advice to someone raising sons today?

“Be present. Be there. If I have any advice to give, that is it. I mean you have to be fully present in mind, spirit, and body. And you don’t have to do anything. [Laughs] I mean, you get a lotta credit just for showing up. Just by being present, you guide them. My children are transitioning into adulthood. But I’ve found my presence still carries a great deal of weight—on that rare occasion now when someone actually still asks me a question. [Laughs]” (...)

Do you feel you have, at last, found your true self?

“You never get there. Nobody does. You become more of yourself as time passes by. . . . In the arc of your life, there are so many places where you reach milestones that add to your authenticity and your presentation of who you really are. But I find myself still struggling just for obvious things that I should’ve had under my belt a long time ago. You know, when I get in those places where I’m not doing so well, I lose track of who I am. . . . The only thing in life that’s sure is: If you think you’ve got it, you don’t have it!”

I tell him I want to pause for a moment, because some people might say, “What are you talking about? You’re Bruce fucking Springsteen! How do you not know who you are?”

“Ugh.” Springsteen laughs and lets out a sigh. He drops his chin into his chest and then smiles and looks up. “Bruce fucking Springsteen is a creation. So it’s somewhat liquid—even though at this point you would imagine I have it pretty nailed down. But sometimes not necessarily. [Laughs] And personally—you’re in search of things like everybody else. Identity is a slippery thing no matter how long you’ve been at it. Parts of yourself can appear—like, whoa, who was that guy? Oh, he’s in the car with everybody else, but he doesn’t show his head too often, because he was so threatening to your stability. At the end of the day, identity is a construct we build to make ourselves feel at ease and at peace and reasonably stable in the world. But being is not a construct. Being is just being. In being, there’s a whole variety of wild and untamed things that remain in us. You bump into those in the night, and you can scare yourself.”

by Michael Hainey, Esquire |  Read more:

Image: Bruce Springsteen

Congress Has Refused to Restore Net Neutrality as Dec. 10 Deadline Nears

Net neutrality advocates are preparing one more "Day of Action" before the expiration of a key deadline for restoring the repealed rules.

In May, the US Senate narrowly voted to reverse the Federal Communications Commission's repeal of net neutrality rules. But the measure still needs majority support from the House of Representatives by a deadline of December 10, net neutrality advocates say.

Advocacy groups Fight for the Future and Demand Progress organized a Day of Action for Thursday this week.

"Congress has until the end of this session to reverse [FCC Chairman] Ajit Pai's net neutrality repeal—afterwards, it gets way harder to restore protections against blocking, throttling, and new fees," the groups said. "So we're bringing together tech companies, small businesses, and Internet users for an epic push on November 29th to pressure lawmakers into signing the Congressional Review Act resolution to restore net neutrality before it expires."

The effort, involving individuals and businesses that run websites, will consist of social media posts, banner ads, and website alerts. The goal is to direct people to this "deadline for net neutrality" page, where they can sign an open letter to Congress.

The effort is a long shot given President Trump's opposition to net neutrality and the fact that Republicans control the House until newly elected lawmakers are sworn in on January 3, 2019.

But advocates say public support is on their side. "Poll after poll shows that the overwhelming majority of people from across the political spectrum support strong protections against blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization of Internet content. In divided times, this is one of the few things we all agree on," their open letter to Congress says.

Without net neutrality rules, "monopolistic Internet providers like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T—some of the least popular companies in the United States—will become the dictators of our online experience: they'll control what we see, where we get our news, which businesses succeed, and which ones fail," the letter also says.

Open letter signers include Etsy, Tumblr, Postmates, Sonos, Foursquare, Namecheap, Private Internet Access, Startpage.com, Boing Boing, and many individuals.

218 signatures needed

In the House, 218 members (a majority) would have to sign a discharge petition to force a floor vote, but only 177 have signed it (176 of them are Democrats). The discharge petition must be filed by December 10.

Technically, the House could vote on reversing the repeal until its session ends on January 3. But the House's Republican leadership almost certainly would not bring the measure to a vote voluntarily. Advocates are thus centering their efforts around the December 10 discharge petition deadline.

While Republicans are almost universally opposed to the effort, there are also 18 Democrats in the House that haven't signed the petition. Motherboard reviewed campaign finance filings and found that "each of the [Democratic] representatives has taken thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from one or more major telecom companies, including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and the National Cable Television Association (NCTA), an ISP trade group." (Rep. Joseph Morelle (D-N.Y.), who was sworn in this month after a special election, intends to sign the petition, according to Motherboard.)

Lawmakers who haven't supported the petition are listed here. Advocates are urging Americans to call, write to, or tweet at those lawmakers.

by Jon Brodkin, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Getty

Delusion at the Gastropub

It takes a lot of high-capitalist pixie dust to turn the basics of subsistence into coveted luxuries. The brazen marketing of designer water at $5 per bottle, flown in from Fiji or the Alps—or better yet, filled from a local municipal tap—may have been the first red flag, signaling the modern public’s staggering ability to suspend its disbelief, or simply to miss the central tenets of manufactured demand.

But if one trait characterizes Americans with lots of disposable income, it’s their tireless compulsion to dispose of that income in brand new ways. The more pedestrian the product in question, the greater its seeming potential to evoke untold volumes of feeling and meaning. A few centuries into the future, inhabitants of a ravaged globe may look back on this time as the crucial moment at which delusional fervor around unremarkable, overpriced things reached its apex.

Oh, there are lovingly itemized ideological whys-and-wherefores behind the so-called food revolution, to be sure. A long train of exposés and manifestos has shown in chilling detail the myriad ways our foodstuffs have been too long tainted by chemical manipulations, resource-intensive factory farming, overprocessing, and general tastelessness. The solution, from the consumer’s vantage, is to repair all this systemic damage with the homely remedy of better informed, more locally minded shopping. To combat the epidemic of fast food (and the kindred American plague of mounting obesity), we’ve been schooled in the virtues of “slow food,” a.k.a. “locavore” cuisine, a.k.a. organic and regional produce, meats, and dairy products.

All of which is plenty worthy and salubrious, so far as our individual food intake goes. We’re all likelier to lead healthy, slim, fulfilling, and flavorful lives when we nourish ourselves on farmers’ market fare—and to feel better about ourselves as agents of ethical change.

But as no end of other right-thinking crusades have shown, there’s a fine line between right conduct and smarmy self-righteousness. As we weather one discursive foodie sermon after another and choke down the aristocratic excesses of today’s foodie media complex, we may long for a sweet taste of silence. After all, there’s scant evidence that the vogue for artisanal cuisine has produced anything close to a more just, affordable, and robust food economy. If anything, it has driven our already class-segmented food system into still greater polarities, with privileged access to rabbit larb and Japanese uni at the upper end of the spectrum, and a wasteland of overprocessed, cheap, and empty slop at the other. To better grasp just how things got to be this way, let’s venture into the dark belly of the modern-day cult known as foodie-ism.

Food, Glorious Food

The glorification of food seems understandable enough, at first glance. Everybody’s got to eat. And as with any other animal urge or act of survival—masticate, copulate, procreate, repeat—it’s not exactly challenging to move this activity to the center of one’s value system. What upper-middle-class college student doesn’t emerge from six months abroad in Barcelona swearing fealty to the crown of jamón ibérico? What leisurely plutocrat with too much time on his hands isn’t tempted to throw his energies into some hobby with immediate built-in payoffs, like becoming an overnight expert on the expensive aged cheeses of the world? What better pastime for a wealthy faux-hippie housewife than raising egg-laying hens (they’re adorable!) or learning to pickle the organic vegetables her child is growing at his pricey progressive preschool?

Why not, in short, transform the rather self-indulgent habit of spending more than $200 on a single meal into an intellectual and cultural badge of honor—a chance to loudly matter in public as you remark on the bright or redolent or flavorful undertones of whatever anxiously plated concoction you’ve just overpaid to savor? The bourgeoisie will always find creative new ways to paint even their most decadent indulgences as highly enlightened, discriminating, and honorable—if not downright heroic. And those who provide such indulgences (and who are, in turn, rewarded handsomely for them) are more than happy to collude in this fantasy.

Of course, the fantasy itself grows more baroque and involuted as the foodie cult nets an ever-greater number of well-heeled recruits. In spite of the self-congratulatory earthiness that foodie culture tends to favor (“I just really love food,” earnest foodies will confess, never bothering to notice that most of humankind shares their passion), its overwrought quasi-religiosity picks up right where the rise of designer bottled water left off—i.e., with the world-conquering condescension of the enormously cultivated consumer.

“Food is everything!” foodies often declare, in a fervent yelp apparently aimed at shaking the rest of the populace out of its imagined hunger strike. Even so, simply purchasing a meal at Chez Panisse or Momofuku or Trois Mec is not enough. One must dine at all of Eater’s “essential” restaurants, and speak in an authoritative, Top Chef–tutored tongue on the importance of balancing sourness and sweetness and umami in every single bite. The solemnly important task of delivering “thoughtful” and “inventive” food to every semi-hip town in America has been accomplished, and food culture mavens have officially overshot their mark: eating out now means being served sweetmeats on a slab of brick while listening to the neighboring table grouse about the inadequate “acidity” of their last plate in the self-serious tones of CIA operatives on a top-secret mission.

And every bit as vital as the digestion of precious food is the copious chronicling of the eating experience. If eating is a deeply private and emotional activity, laced with personal meaning and nostalgia, then the Yelp restaurant review corpus is a mass community diary, documenting with a hopelessly public, community-focused slant the turmoil of a food revolution. Here, each determined diarist struggles mightily to mimic the hauteur of the practiced establishment food critic. Take this review of a hot Italian restaurant in Silver Lake:

We ordered the chicken liver crostone, the octopus, and the chopped salad “amigliorata” to start. The chicken liver was ludicrous—airy and creamy in texture, and absolutely rich with flavor. It came with thick crusty hunks of grilled bread and a tart black plum mostarda, a thoughtful accompaniment to the decadent liver. The octopus was tender and toothsome, served over a bed of black barley, roasted carrots, and red onion—a nice, earthy dish with some balancing brightness.

Or how about this one, for a ramen joint nearby:

Everything in the Ozu pork ramen was on point, except for the broth. The pork was tender and flavorful, the ajitsuke egg was cooked to perfection, and I liked the tangy flavor added by the mizuna on top. The broth was on the lighter side—not to my liking (I like the fattier broths of Santouka Ramen)—but what made it fail for me was the lack of depth. Even lighter broths need that umami flavor to be good, and Ozu’s broth fell flat on its face on this dimension. . . . I will not come back to Ozu East Kitchen until they add a richer, fattier pork broth.

Both (entirely representative) reviews brandish the standard adjectives of food critics and food blogs and food everything—ludicrous, decadent, earthy, brightness, umami—all mixed and matched in an invocation of transcendent morsel-adoring delight that resembles nothing so much as the old Latin Mass. And as with the Mass, and other elite cultures of metaphysical self-congratulation, the obscurantism of the relevant content is itself a mark of chosenness.

This same sense of ethereal chosenness is what rhetorically elevates a mundane consumer choice to the level of a noble stand against . . . a ramen joint with a pork broth this expert deems inadequate? As these legions of pompous reviews unfold, the customer emerges not as an audience member, bystander, or faceless nobody holding a wallet, but someone central to the entire production, the star of the show, even. This incoherence of self goes straight to the heart of what makes foodie culture such a vibrant manifestation of high-capitalist bewilderment. Lured into a world of luxe commodities by their taste buds, their nostalgia, and a growing sense of their own insignificance (even with all of this money, I am no one!), high-end consumers do much more than simply misjudge a basic exchange of lucre for product. They come, very intimately, to identify with the embrace or rejection of said product (I like the fattier broths of Santouka Ramen!), beyond reason, as if the world turns on such appraisals, and awaits each of their Yelp verdicts with bated breath.

Here is also the point of transubstantiation: the moment when the foodie’s identity, so completely cobbled together from various deeply felt products (the broths of Santouka! the roasted chickens of Waxman’s!), intersects with the precious precepts of foodie-ism as political activism. Just as the food-chewing subject has been alchemized into an all-knowing, all-savoring telos for the preparation of ritzy grub, so is that subject mystically charged with the power to save the Earth—and its poor, overweight, undernourished people from themselves—with one effortless bite of a really good foie-gras-smeared, grass-fed burger. After all, a rich sense of entitlement has always paired nicely with empty self-righteousness. The stone soup, drizzled in an unctuous snake oil, is eventually mistaken for stone tablets, bearing the word of God.

by Heather Havrilesky, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: Jensine Eckwall

[ed. See also: Heather's new book of essays What If This Were Enough?]