The XFL is a Nightmare and It's Coming to Seattle

The XFL, an alternative version of football, was born in 2001. It also died in 2001.

America wasn’t ready for “extreme” football. The pre-season XFL advertising blimp that deflated and crashed in Oakland, CA was some on-the-nose foreshadowing. After its single season, the XFL quietly faded from memory, but its founder, Vince McMahon, of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) acclaim, was lying in wait.

Now, a short 17 years later, America is getting exactly what we never asked for, and maybe exactly what we deserve: the Second Coming of the XFL.

McMahon announced today that he and Andrew Luck’s (you know, that guy from football) dad, Oliver Luck, will be rebooting the league. There will be eight teams: Dallas, Los Angeles, Tampa Bay, Houston, New York, St. Louis, Washington D.C., and Seattle.

So, just what are we in for? When I first heard about the XFL, I assumed it was some cool, modern revamping of football like what Twenty20 did for cricket. Nope.

Bob Costas, an NBC sportscaster, described the XFL as a combination of “mediocre high school football and a tawdry strip club.”

The XFL was co-sponsored by NBC and the WWF (the precursor to the WWE). NBC was all bitter that they lost NFL broadcasting rights to CBS. So, naturally, they teamed up with the wrestling world to bring a new, spicier football to American television sets. Wrestling and football? What could go wrong?

The game, played by mostly amateur players (aside from this one guy), was designed to be faster and more violent.

For instance, there wasn’t a coin toss. There was, instead, an “opening scramble.” Players would race toward the middle and fight to get to a football first. Whoever got it would get to choose who had possession first. One guy ripped up his shoulder so badly in his first game during the scramble that he was out for the whole season.

The cheerleaders wore scantily clad and sexually suggestive outfits. The XFL filmed inside looks into the cheerleaders’ locker room. Players were encouraged to date them, according to the Wall Street Journal. There were hot tubs in the end zones filled with actual strippers.

by Nathalie Graham, The Stranger | Read more:
Image: Fatcamera/Getty

Lunch With M.

One afternoon last month, a woman in her early thirties, with shoulder-length blond hair and large brown eyes, arrived at Jean Georges, on the ground floor of the Trump International Hotel, in midtown Manhattan. The restaurant, which is owned by the chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and is one of the highest rated in the world, has an understated décor, with bare white walls and floor-to-ceiling windows. The woman took a seat at one of the tables in the center of the room. She wore a light-blue dress with a high neckline, little makeup, and no jewelry. There was nothing remarkable about her appearance, and her demeanor was quiet and unassuming, as if designed to deflect attention—a trait indispensable for her profession as an inspector for the Michelin hotel-and-restaurant guide. (...)

Michelin has gone to extraordinary lengths to maintain the anonymity of its inspectors. Many of the company’s top executives have never met an inspector; inspectors themselves are advised not to disclose their line of work, even to their parents (who might be tempted to boast about it); and, in all the years that it has been putting out the guide, Michelin has refused to allow its inspectors to speak to journalists. The inspectors write reports that are distilled, in annual “stars meetings” at the guide’s various national offices, into the ranking of three stars, two stars, or one star—or no stars. (Establishments that Michelin deems unworthy of a visit are not included in the guide.) A three-star Michelin ranking—like that enjoyed by Jean Georges—is exceedingly rare. Only twenty-six three-star restaurants exist in France, and only eighty-one in the world. (...)

Maxime is a New Yorker. She said that speaking to me about her work felt “surreal.” “We spend all our time not letting people know who we are,” she said, but admitted that she had told her husband what she does for a living. “He’s an attorney; he knows all about confidentiality.” For most others, she keeps her occupation vague. “We try not to lie,” she said. “You say you’re ‘in publishing,’ something like that.”

The waiter, a young man in a dark suit, handed us menus. I asked Maxime how she chooses what to order.

“You’re looking for something that really tests a number of quality ingredients and then something that’s a little complex, because you want to see what the kitchen can do,” she said. “We would never order something like a salad. We rarely order soup.” She decided to try the foie-gras brûlée, “although I usually avoid it, because of the calories.”

Maxime eats out more than two hundred days of the year, lunch and dinner. She eats the maximum number of courses offered—at Jean Georges, we were having three courses, plus dessert; that way, she said, “you really get to see the most food”—and she is required to eat everything on her plate. It is a regimen that calls to mind the force-feeding of the ducks that supply Vongerichten with his velvety foie gras, but Maxime, blessed with a quick metabolism, had managed to avoid obesity, an occupational hazard.

She was tending toward the Arctic char for her main course but couldn’t decide about her second course. The waiter reappeared and asked if he could answer any questions.

“Can you tell me about the crab toast?” she asked.

“It’s Peekytoe crab, a chiffonade of tarragon as well as chives topped with white sesame seeds, toasted in the oven, finished with a miso mustard, and a pear salad on the side,” he said.

“It’s new?” she said.

“About a week on the menu.”

She asked the waiter to give her a minute and then leaned in to me. Inspectors love it when they ask a question and can tell that a waiter has made up an answer, she explained, adding, “That never happens here.”

The original Guide Michelin was developed by André Michelin, an engineer, and his younger brother, Édouard. Born into a wealthy manufacturing family in Clermont-Ferrand, the brothers, in 1895, presented a new design for a pneumatic tire for cars. Automobiles were still a rarity on roads in France. The brothers had the idea that a guidebook to hotels in the French countryside would encourage people to climb into a car (equipped with Michelin tires) and hit the open road. The first edition, published in 1900, was a five-hundred-and-seventy-five-page alphabetical listing of towns throughout France and the distances between them, with recommendations for hotels and places to refuel, and instructions on how to change a flat. In a preface to the first edition, André wrote, “This work comes out with the century; it will last as long.” In 1933, the Michelin brothers introduced the first countrywide restaurant listings and unveiled the star system for ranking food, with one star denoting “a very good restaurant in its class”; two stars “excellent cooking, worth a detour”; and three stars “exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey.”

Over the years, other publications attempted to challenge Michelin but without success. To offset the expense of sending inspectors to restaurants across the country, rival guides were obliged to accept free meals, or to offer favors, like free advertising in the guides’ pages. Michelin’s inspectors faced no such quid pro quo. A century after André and Édouard created their first tire patent, Michelin has grown into one of the most successful multinational corporations in the world, a company more than three times the size of Goodyear. Michelin’s profits help to defray the costs of food inspectors’ salaries, travel budgets, and restaurant bills (which can run into real money at the upper end of the gastronomic scale: six years ago, at Bernard Loiseau’s La Côte d’Or, a three-star restaurant in Burgundy, the chicken stuffed with carrots, leeks, and truffles was two hundred and sixty-seven dollars). This independence, coupled with the jealously guarded anonymity of its inspectors, is what gives Michelin its aura of incorruptibility. The French chef Paul Bocuse, who helped create nouvelle cuisine in the nineteen-sixties, and whose restaurant near Lyons has held a three-star Michelin ranking for a record forty-five years, has said, “Michelin is the only guide that counts.” Indeed, in France publication of the guide each year sparks the kind of media excitement attendant on the Academy Awards. The days and weeks leading up to publication day are given over to endless debate, speculation, and rumor on TV and in newspapers over who might lose, and who might gain, a star. The results, revealed in early March, provide either a very public triumph or a very public humiliation for the chefs concerned, and a corresponding rise or drop in revenues for their restaurants.

Not everyone, however, is convinced that anonymous experts with bottomless expense accounts are the key to a dependable restaurant guide. “We’re coming at it from a completely different perspective,” says Nina Zagat, who dreamed up the idea of a customer-driven food survey with her husband, Tim, in their Upper West Side apartment thirty-one years ago. Today, Zagat covers more than ninety cities worldwide, is available as an iPhone app, and remains the top-selling restaurant guide in New York. “We’ve never believed that there were experts that should tell you what to do.”

“I’d love to know what their training is,” Tim Zagat added, speaking about Michelin’s inspectors. “Usually, the experts—for example, the major critics for the major papers—you know what their background is. But this business of making a virtue out of not knowing? I question it. How are you supposed to judge their expertise if you don’t have any idea who they are?”

by John Colapinto, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Floc’h

Jules Pascin, Siesta
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[ed. Fell it, section it, load it, haul it, cut it into plugs, split it, stack it, burn it. It'll warm you more than twice.]

Migrating From Tumblr to Wordpress

Okay, folks. So. Tumblr’s jumped the shark in a big way, and I’m not even just talking about indiscriminately blocking all “adult” content on a platform that IS, in fact, primarily 18+. (...)

I know lots of people are talking about migrating, but none of us are sure to where yet. Pillowfort seems to be an option, some people are talking about Twitter. But for now, it’s a mess, and even if we knew where we were going, it’s often a huge process, and a lot of us have stuff on tumblr that ONLY exists there.

One possible quick solution to save your blogs, both NSFW and personal, is to import it to WordPress. I found this solution through from frantic googling on how to save an entire blog, text posts an all. There are several apps for downloading all the pictures from a tumblr, (Plently for Windows, but only a few paid ones for mac, of which Tumbelog Picture Downloader is working for me so far) but this is the only solution I’ve seen so far that allows you to save EVERYTHING. I downloaded my NSFW blog in like 10 min. My regular blog, which is significantly larger, is in the process of importing, but I don’t anticipate any problems. I will, of course, update you if I have any.

This tutorial I found worked really easily. http://quickguide (.) tumblr (.) com/post/39780378703/backing-up-your-tumblr-blog-to-wordpress

I put parenthesis around the .’s like we’re back in FF-Hell, just in case tumblr’s new thing about outgoing links kicks in. You know what to do.

To break it down, just in case:

Sign up for a WordPress.com account at wordpress (.) com/start

You’ll have to create an account, with your email, a username, and a password. They should send you a confirmation email immediately, check it, activate it, and you’re good to go.

On the site, it will ask you for a site name. That page asks you a bunch of other information too, but you only have to fill out the site name.

Then you have to give your site a URL. If you’re lucky, your tumblr URL is still available, if not you’ll have to come up with another one, sorry.

It will tell you if that option is still available for free.

Then it will ask you to pick a plan. Free is really good enough, I swear.

Now you’re set up! You can import your tumblr!

The only differences from the linked tutorial are that the Import button is now on the first level menu, not in tools.

Hit Import, then you have to follow the link for “other importers” at the bottom, to find the option for Tumblr.

Then you’ll have to sign in with tumblr, using your normal tumblr credentials. You’ll be redirected there automatically.

You’ll have to allow Wordpress permissions on your blog.

Then your blogs, including all your sideblogs, will show up in wordpress.

Hit import, wait a WHILE depending on the size of your blog, and you’re done!

ALSO!!

I made my NSFW blog private for now, since I don’t know WP’s policy on NSFW.

This means that to access it, someone has to have an account and request access. But hey, part of our problem on this hellsite has been people going places they aren’t wanted, so I don’t personally see this as a bad thing. They can send a request from the landing site on your blog, you get an email, click a link in the email, and PRESTO, they have access.

To make it private, go to Settings > Reading > Site Visibility. Go back and check, it took me changing the setting twice for it to actually stick.

tl;dr, you can import your entire blog to wordpress in just a few steps. 

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[ed. Interesting to see a corporation destroys a cultural touchstone in realtime. I feel so bad for people (hundreds of thousands, millions?) who've invested years in creating and maintaining blogs on Tumblr who will now see all their work vanish on December 17 just because they've posted an occasional nude, or art work containing nudity (or god forbid, female nipples). That's why I'm so reticent about embracing cloud storage and having all your eggs in one basket (like Picasa). It's a good wake up call. I'll have to start exploring Wordpress too (as an alternative to Google's Blogger). We'll see how it goes.]

What Has Everyone Got Against Dave Matthews?

When the sun sets on the Columbia River, behind the boxy stage of the Gorge Amphitheatre, the scene’s as placid and vivid as a nineteenth century landscape painting. This is nature as those Romantic artists would’ve rendered it, brutal, sublime. The rock cliffs are lined like a layer cake in browns and tans, topped with the Central Washington sky in a watercolorist’s pink and blue. But now that the August sky has almost fully turned dark, the star of the show finally strolls mid-stage before 20,000 people fanned like congregants and goes directly into the first song.

The first sound the band makes is…a hiccup.

And nearly all 20,000 break into woos and screams of appreciation, because that “Hhuunc!” from lead singer Dave Matthews is the first lyric of “Pig,” an old standby from the 28-year-old band. It gets a lot more intelligible after the first nonsense noises; a jam about enjoying the here and now. A plea to “don’t burn the day away” in case “a great wave should wash us all away.” You know, carpe diem and all that.

The audience has interpreted that edict as an embrace of all things comfortable, clad in plaid flannels or hoodies or plaid flannels layered over hoodies. One trio wears matching lime-green shirts printed with the Tommy Boy callout “Holy Schnikes!” and nonmatching baggy cargo shorts. Some raise $25 big plastic goblets of strawberry frosé. The air smells like weed. Of course it smells like weed.

Of the thousands here, about half have stepped out of RVs and those big square tents you buy at Target parked on thousands of campsites spread on the festival grounds that fan out from the amphitheater.

Here, 150 miles east of Seattle, a 51-year-old man rocking the ultimate dad bod holds court, as he’s done for decades on summer stints that have become like annual tent revivals. What most of the crowd doesn’t consider is how deep Dave Matthews’s local ties run—that he lives in Seattle, enrolls his kids in Seattle schools. That Dave Matthews is Seattle’s biggest rock star.

No, really. It just depends a little on how you define “biggest.” And “rock,” and “star.” And, now that you mention it, “Seattle’s.”

Though the band formed in a Virginia college town back in 1991, Dave Matthews has been a Seattle resident since Bush II’s first term. His eponymous band has sold more than 33 million records, right behind Bob Dylan and Queen on lists of the best-selling recording artists of all time.

In 2014, Billboard marked them the seventh most successful touring band since 1990, noting their then-$777 million gross haul—it’s probably around a billion by now—outpaced Paul McCartney and Metallica. The Recording Industry Association of America ranks the Dave Matthews Band in their top 50, with gold and platinum stats similar to U2’s.

The only Seattle band—and we’ll get to DMB’s Emerald City bona fides in a second—that comes close to that longevity or success is one that formed a year earlier than Matthews’s crew: Pearl Jam. And while no one’s going to deny that Eddie Vedder and Co. are a quintessential Seattle outfit, before this year’s Home Shows at Safeco Field they hadn’t played the city in five years.

Both are wildly successful music acts, the top 1 percent of 1 percent of dudes who sing songs for a living. But if you believe the stats on the internet—big grain of salt here—Eddie Vedder has a net worth of $100 million, but Dave Matthews is sitting on three times that.

For two decades Matthews has parked his jam band circus at the Gorge and he’s funded progressive causes. His photos hang next to platinum records from Death Cab for Cutie, Sir Mix-a-Lot, and Nirvana at Robert Lang Studio in Shoreline—the Northwest’s most hallowed recording spot.

When KEXP fundraised for their new Seattle Center studio in the mid 2010s, three big bands showed up with cash: “Macklemore and Ryan Lewis came through, Pearl Jam came through,” says longtime DJ and program director John Richards. “And Dave Matthews.” This in spite of the fact that while KEXP’s airwaves might blast “Thrift Shop” or “Jeremy,” the station doesn’t even play DMB.

There’s a Dave Matthews shaped hole in the public idea of the Seattle sound, and neither Matthews nor the Emerald City seems interested in changing that. Why do two wildly successful entities—a music man and a music city—have so little to do with each other?

When I tell Seattle music critic Charles R. Cross that I’m writing about the Dave Matthews Band, he immediately quips, “Why? Did you lose a bet with your editor?”

Sometime in the past two decades, the group’s ubiquity seeped into the national consciousness so thoroughly that the band and the man melded into one familiar entity, “Dave.” And to most, “Dave” became unbearably irritating.

The punchlines were mockery wrapped up in derision of cargo shorts and ultimate Frisbee. Basic, before “basic” was an insult. For a whole generation of late-stage Gen Xers, the DMB posters that papered their dorm rooms have become as embarrassing as that ’90s men’s haircut with floppy side bangs. Try it. Mention Dave Matthews Band anywhere in Seattle and look for the knowing cringe.

DMB made it so easy. There was the Day Dave Matthews Band Pooped on Chicago: On August 8, 2004, one of the band’s busses—that Dave wasn’t on at the time—emptied its sewage tank through the grated roadway of the Windy City’s Kinzie Street Bridge. Right on an open-air boat of sightseers on an architecture tour. The bus driver was hit with fines, but the metaphor of Poopgate was, well, easy pickings. (...)

He married and moved to Seattle where his wife studied holistic medicine, buying a house on an unremarkable block of Wallingford in 2001. Today the tiny blue Craftsman, even with its finished basement and artfully overgrown front garden, would barely qualify as a Seattle starter home. Dave still owns the property, valued at less than a million dollars in a city where that barely buys a dog house. Seattleites do double takes when Dave pops up at QFC or an Eastlake punk show, but he seems to crave the anonymity he found here. He declined to be interviewed for this story, but in 2012 he told critic Gene Stout, “For the most part, I feel comfortably middle class in Seattle.”

by Alison Williams, Seattle Met |  Read more:

Image: Taylor Hill/Getty via Longreads

Scientists Develop 10-Minute Universal Cancer Test

Scientists have developed a universal cancer test that can detect traces of the disease in a patient’s bloodstream.

The cheap and simple test uses a colour-changing fluid to reveal the presence of malignant cells anywhere in the body and provides results in less than 10 minutes.

While the test is still in development, it draws on a radical new approach to cancer detection that could make routine screening for the disease a simple procedure for doctors.

“A major advantage of this technique is that it is very cheap and extremely simple to do, so it could be adopted in the clinic quite easily,” said Laura Carrascosa, a researcher at the University of Queensland.

The test has a sensitivity of about 90%, meaning it would detect about 90 in 100 cases of cancer. It would serve as an initial check for cancer, with doctors following up positive results with more focused investigations.

“Our technique could be a screening tool to inform clinicians that a patient may have a cancer, but they would require subsequent tests with other techniques to identify the cancer type and stage,” Carrascosa said.

The test was made possible by the Queensland team’s discovery that cancer DNA and normal DNA stick to metal surfaces in markedly different ways. This allowed them to develop a test that distinguishes between healthy cells and cancerous ones, even from the tiny traces of DNA that find their way into the bloodstream.

Healthy cells ensure they function properly by patterning their DNA with molecules called methyl groups. These work like volume controls, silencing genes that are not needed and turning up others that are. In cancer cells, this patterning is hijacked so that only genes that help the cancer grow are switched on. While the DNA inside normal cells has methyl groups dotted all over it, the DNA inside cancer cells is largely bare, with methyl groups found only in small clusters at specific locations.

Writing in the journal Nature Communications, the Queensland team described a series of tests that confirmed the telltale pattern of methyl groups in breast, prostate and colorectal cancer as well as lymphoma. They then showed that the patterns had a dramatic impact on the DNA’s chemistry, making normal and cancer DNA behave very differently in water. “This is a huge discovery that no one has grasped before,” said Carrascosa.

After a series of experiments, the scientists hit on the new test for cancer. The suspect DNA is added to water containing tiny gold nanoparticles. Though made of gold, the particles turn the water pink. If DNA from cancer cells is then added, it sticks to the nanoparticles in such a way that the water retains its original colour. But if DNA from healthy cells is added, the DNA binds to the particles differently, and turns the water blue. “The test is sensitive enough to detect very low levels of cancer DNA in the sample,” Carrascosa said.

by Ian Sample, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Steve Gschmeissner/Getty/Science Photo Library RM

Under China's New Rules, U.S. Recycling Suffers

Under China's New Rules, U.S. Recycling Suffers

Image: Shutterstock

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:

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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:

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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:

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