Is This the End of the American Century?

The idea that Trump is a wrecker of the American-led world order rests on three claims. First, he is manifestly unfit for high office. That such a man can be elected president of the United States reveals a deep degeneration of American political culture and permanently damages the country’s credibility. Second, his capricious and crude pursuit of ‘America first’ has weakened America’s alliances and instigated a departure from globalisation based on free trade. Finally, he has triggered this crisis at a moment when China poses an unprecedented challenge to Western-led globalisation. Each of these claims is hard to deny, but do they in fact add up to a historically significant shift in the foundations of America’s global power?

No question, Trump has done massive damage to the dignity of the American presidency. Even allowing for the personal and political failings of some previous incumbents, he marks a new low. What ought to be of no less concern is that he has received so little open criticism from the supposedly respectable ranks of the Republican leadership. Similarly, American big business leaders, though sceptical of Trump, have profited from his administration’s tax cuts and eagerly assisted in dismantling the apparatus of environmental and financial regulation. He has been applauded by the section of the US media that caters to the right. And a solid minority of the electorate continues to give him its wholehearted support. What is worrying, therefore, isn’t simply Trump himself, but the forces in America that enable him.

Of course, Trump isn’t the first Republican president to evoke a mixture of outrage, horror and derision both at home and abroad. Both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were accused, in their time, of endangering the legitimacy of the American world order. The cultural conservatism and overt nationalism of the American right is fiercely at odds with bien pensant global opinion. This culture clash has historical roots in America’s domestic struggles over civil rights, the women’s and gay liberation struggles, and in the worldwide protest movement against America’s brutal war in Vietnam. Since the days of Nixon and the ‘Southern strategy’, the Republicans have been progressively digging in, consolidating their grip on the white electorate in the South and Midwest. By the 1980s the Republican Party was an uneasy coalition between a free-market, pro-business elite and a xenophobic working and lower-middle-class base. This was always a fragile arrangement, held together by rampant nationalism and a suspicion of big government. It was able to govern in large part owing to the willingness of Democratic Party centrists to help with the heavy lifting. The Nafta free-trade agreement between the US, Mexico and Canada was initiated by George H.W. Bush, but carried over the line in 1993 by Bill Clinton, against the opposition of the American labour movement. It was Clinton’s administration that righted the fiscal ship after the deficit excesses of the Reagan era, only for the budget to be blown back into deficit by the wars and tax cuts of the George W. Bush administration.

Meanwhile, the broad church of the Republican Party began to radicalise. In the 1990s, with Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove setting the tone, the battle lines hardened. With the Iraq War going horribly, and the Democrats taking control of Congress in 2006, the right became ever more dominant within the Republican Party. In 2008, in the midst of the financial crisis, the Republicans in Congress abandoned the Bush administration. The financial crisis-fighting of Hank Paulson as Bush’s Treasury secretary and Ben Bernanke at the Fed relied on the Democrats for congressional support. Elite leadership of the Republican Party collapsed. John McCain chose the shockingly unqualified Sarah Palin as a running mate in the 2008 election because she was hugely popular with the Republican base, who revelled in the outrage she triggered among liberals. Barack Obama’s victory in that election only exacerbated the lurch to the right. The Republicans in Congress put up a wall of opposition and indulged the populist right in openly questioning his legitimacy as president. The defeat of the centrist Mitt Romney in 2012 caused a further, decisive slide to the right, opening the door for Trump. In 2016 no major corporation was willing to sponsor the convention that nominated Trump as the Republican presidential candidate: their brand advisers were too worried that Confederate flags would be waving in the convention hall. His is the voice of the right-wing base, energised by funding from a small group of highly ideological oligarchs, no longer constrained by the globalist business elite.

A cynic might say that Trump simply says out loud what many on the right have long thought in private. He is clearly a racist, but the mass incarceration of black men since the 1970s has been a bipartisan policy. His inflammatory remarks about immigration are appalling, but it isn’t as though liberal centrists would advocate a policy of open borders. The question – and it is a real question – is whether his disinhibited rhetoric announces a disastrous slide from the hypocrisies and compromises of the previous status quo into something even darker. The concern is that he will trigger an illiberal chain reaction both at home and abroad. (...)

America retains some huge advantages. But it would be dangerous, the argument goes, simply to count on those. Sometimes American preponderance has to be defended by a ‘war of manoeuvre’. The emerging American strategy is to use threats of trade policy sanctions and aggressive counter-espionage in the tech arena, combined with a ramping up of America’s military effort, to force Beijing to accept not just America’s global preponderance but also its terms for navigation of the South China Sea. In pursuing this course the Trump presidency has a clear precedent: the push against the Soviet Union in the early 1980s by the Reagan administration, which deployed economic and political pressure to break what was perceived to be a menacing phase of Soviet expansion in the 1970s. Despite all the risks involved, for American conservatives that episode stands as the benchmark of successful grand strategy.

The reason the attempt to apply this lesson to present-day China is so shocking is that US business is entangled with China to an immeasurably greater degree than it ever was with the Soviet Union. If you are seeking a component of the American world order that is really being tested at the present moment, look no further than Apple’s supply chain in East Asia. Unlike South Korea’s Samsung, the Californian tech giant made a one-way bet on manufacturing integration with China. Almost all its iPhones are assembled there. Apple is an extreme case. But it is not alone. GM currently sells more cars in China than it does in the US. America’s farmers converted their fields wholesale to grow soy beans for export to China, only to find themselves cut out of their biggest market by Brazilian competitors. And it isn’t just American firms that are caught up in the escalation of tension. Important European, South Korean, Taiwanese and Japanese businesses have staked huge wagers on China.

Given these investments, one might have expected more pushback against Trump’s China strategy from US business. So far there has been little. The radical decoupling of the Chinese and American economies may be so horrible a prospect that business leaders simply prefer not to discuss it in public. They may be lying low hoping the row blows over. Or it may be that American business itself buys the increasingly pessimistic diagnosis of the US intelligence and defence community, who argue China’s persistent protectionism and economic nationalism may mean that it presents more of a threat than an opportunity. Even top ‘China hands’ like Steve Schwarzman and Hank Paulson have warned of a chill in the air.

The hardening of attitudes towards China is not confined to America. It was the Anglo-American intelligence consortium known as ‘Five Eyes’ that raised the alarm about Huawei’s capability to build back doors into the West’s most sensitive telecommunications networks. Canada and Australia are deeply concerned about Chinese penetration. The new pessimism about Sinocentric globalisation isn’t confined to security policy hawks, but shared by many mainstream economists and political scientists in US academia, the think-tank world, and journalists and commentators on Chinese affairs. The liberal version of the American world order is deeply influenced by strands of modernisation theory, the up to date version of which is encapsulated in the doctrine of the middle-income trap. Very few large countries have managed to grow beyond China’s current level of income. Those that have done so have kitted themselves out with the full set of liberal institutions and the rule of law. On this reading, China is in a precarious position. Xi’s authoritarian turn is a decisive step in the wrong direction. Further frequently cited signs of Chinese weakness include ethnic tensions and the ageing of the population as a long-term effect of the one-child policy. There is a belief, held well beyond the administration, that the tide may be turning against Beijing and that now is the moment for the West to harden the front.

This would indeed constitute a break with the narrative of globalisation since the 1990s. But it would hardly be a break in the American-led world order. To imagine the American world order as fully global is after all a relatively recent development. After 1945, the postwar order that is generally seen as the non plus ultra of American hegemony was built on the hardened divisions of the Cold War. Where China is concerned, the issue is not so much America’s intention to lead as whether others are willing to follow. Building the Cold War order in Europe and East Asia was comparatively easy. Stalin’s Soviet Union used a lot of stick and very little carrot. The same is not true of modern-day China. Its economy is the thumping heart of a gigantic East Asian industrial complex. In the event of an escalation with China, particularly in East Asia, we may find ourselves facing not so much an end of the American-led order, as an inversion of its terms. Where the US previously offered soft-power inducements to offset the threat of communist military power, backed up by hard power as a last resort, in the next phase the US may become the provider of military security against the blandishments offered by China’s growth machine.

But this is premature. As of today, two years into the Trump presidency, it is a gross exaggeration to talk of an end to the American world order. The two pillars of its global power – military and financial – are still firmly in place. What has ended is any claim on the part of American democracy to provide a political model. This is certainly a historic break. Trump closes the chapter begun by Woodrow Wilson in the First World War, with his claim that American democracy articulated the deepest feelings of liberal humanity. A hundred years later, Trump has for ever personified the sleaziness, cynicism and sheer stupidity that dominates much of American political life. What we are facing is a radical disjunction between the continuity of basic structures of power and their political legitimation.

by Adam Tooze, LRB |  Read more:

Image: Rob Dobi/Politico

Thanks, Turbotax

Congress is about to ban the government from offering free online tax filing

Just in time for Tax Day, the for-profit tax preparation industry is about to realize one of its long-sought goals. Congressional Democrats and Republicans are moving to permanently bar the IRS from creating a free electronic tax filing system.

Last week, the House Ways and Means Committee, led by Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.), passed the Taxpayer First Act, a wide-ranging bill making several administrative changes to the IRS that is sponsored by Reps. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and Mike Kelly (R-Pa).

In one of its provisions, the bill makes it illegal for the IRS to create its own online system of tax filing. Companies like Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, and H&R Block have lobbied for years to block the IRS from creating such a system. If the tax agency created its own program, which would be similar to programs other developed countries have, it would threaten the industry’s profits.

“This could be a disaster. It could be the final nail in the coffin of the idea of the IRS ever being able to create its own program,” said Mandi Matlock, a tax attorney who does work for the National Consumer Law Center.

Experts have long argued that the IRS has failed to make filing taxes as easy and cheap as it could be. In addition to a free system of online tax preparation and filing, the agency could provide people with pre-filled tax forms containing the salary data the agency already has, as ProPublica first reported on in 2013.

The Free File Alliance, a private industry group, says 70% of American taxpayers are eligible to file for free. Those taxpayers, who must make less than $66,000, have access to free tax software provided by the companies. But just 3% of eligible US taxpayers actually use the free program each year. Critics of the program say that companies use it as a cross-marketing tool to upsell paid products, that they have deliberately underpromoted the free option, and that it leaves consumer data open to privacy breaches.

The congressional move would codify the status quo. Under an existing memorandum of understanding with the industry group, the IRS pledges not create its own online filing system and, in exchange, the companies offer their free filing services to those below the income threshold.

One member of the Free File Alliance explicitly told shareholders that the IRS “developing software or other systems to facilitate tax return preparation…may present a continued competitive threat to our business for the foreseeable future.”

The IRS’ deal with the Free File Alliance is regularly renegotiated and there have been repeated, bipartisan efforts in Congress to put the deal into law.

Those efforts have been fueled by hefty lobbying spending and campaign contributions by the industry. Intuit and H&R Block last year poured a combined $6.6 million into lobbying related to the IRS filing deal and other issues. Neal, who became Ways and Means chair this year after Democrats took control of the House, received $16,000 in contributions from Intuit and H&R Block in the last two election cycles.

by Justin Elliot, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Ken Teagardin

The Death of Smartphones

The Death of Smartphones (Safehaven)
Image: "Focals" via CNBC
[ed. See also: I Didn’t Write This Column. I Spoke It. (NY Times)]

Have We Reached Peak Lyft?

Last Friday, Lyft became America’s latest decacorn with an initial public offering that valued it at $24.3 billion; analysts expect Uber’s IPO, scheduled for later this year, to fetch $120 billion. These eye-popping valuations are bolstered not by profits—Lyft lost nearly a billion dollars in 2018—but by narrative. The story goes like this: Uber and Lyft are upending how we live by reversing a century-long trend of ever-increasing automobile dependence, with its attendant deadening sprawl, omnipresent danger, and environmental harm. Their revolution will transform the $1.5 trillion business of selling cars into a $10 trillion “mobility as service” business, according to a report by Morgan Stanley (now the lead underwriter for the Uber IPO).

As if to pump up the stock in the run-up to Lyft’s market debut (not that I’m making accusations), Bloomberg Businessweek devoted its March 4 issue to Peak Car. “We still drive 1.3 billion automobiles,” the headline said. “But not for long. The mobility revolution is almost here.” This was followed by a Peak Car Bloomberg Opinion Piece and a half-hour Peak Car interview on Bloomberg television. One week to the day before Lyft went public, tech reporter Kara Swisher published an op-ed in the Times that declared: “Owning a car will soon be as quaint as a horse.” She had given up her car. Soon, she said, you would, too.

The claims for Peak Car have passed from inference to incantation. Millennials are getting their drivers’ licenses at diminishing rates because they prefer walkable cities to suburban sprawl. Traffic congestion is bad and getting worse. Driving is a mind-numbing chore. Buying a two-ton hunk of metal that sits idle most of the time has become an anachronism in an optimized world of Airbnb, TaskRabbit, and Seamless. Automobile travel by smartphone app is just how digital natives do things! As Swisher puts it, “everything that can be digitized must be digitized.” Big data, AI, autonomous vehicles—all add up to smarter, greener, hipper urban living. What killjoy would claim otherwise?

Peak Car is a new name for an old idea. In 1925, auto executive Charles Nash, who not only had a major car company of his own but was in on the ground floor of General Motors, declared to a national gathering of automobile dealers that car sales had already peaked. Everyone who could afford a car already had one. But carmakers found a solution: the car loan. Dealers demanded ever smaller down payments and extended ever longer loans. The bursting of that credit bubble was one of the causes of the Great Depression. But in the years that followed the great crash, gasoline sales fell only marginally and, after a steep drop of 29 percent between 1929 and 1932, sales began to recover even as the Depression ground on.

In 1958, when car sales again fell off a cliff, commentators declared that Americans had “fallen out of love” with Detroit’s chromed boats. Traffic congestion was bad and getting worse. The Big Three responded with the compact car and the imports arrived, perfectly sized for one-car families who wanted to become two-car families. These new models also appealed to Baby Boomers, the first of whom, not coincidentally, reached driving age in 1962. By the late 1960s, we had arrived at Peak Car once again. This time traffic fatalities were skyrocketing, smog was blanketing cities, and traffic congestion was bad and getting worse. The future belonged to mass transit. Instead, we got safer and cleaner cars. Automobility metastasized and mass transit withered.

Peak Car offers a compelling story of vast riches and better living. Yet the evidence is thin. The rate at which young people get their licenses has indeed been falling, but the trend began in 1983, when the internet was still a science experiment. Today, the three best-selling vehicles in the US by far are pickup trucks. Most of those trucks are used as personal vehicles, as their pristine empty beds make clear. Whatever madness causes Americans to drive empty-bedded trucks around is not something Uber or Lyft can cure. And for those of us in the suburbs, minivans and three-row SUVs are more than transportation. They are waiting rooms, warm cabins on a cold day, and a place to leave the squash racket so we don’t forget it every week. It may be possible to find a Lyft big enough to carry the soccer team, but piling in with muddy cleats and leaving behind lost balls will earn you the dreaded one-star rating. Do it regularly and you’ll get you banned from the app. (...)

Still, Lyft investors are betting on the Peak Car theory, as an analysis by NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran shows. “Reviewing Lyft’s (very long) prospectus, I was struck by the repetition of the mantra that it saw its future as a ‘US transportation’ company,” Damodaran wrote on his blog. “Lyft’s use of the word ‘transportation’ is intended to draw attention to the size of that market, which is $1.2 trillion.” But that $1.2 trillion “includes what people spend on acquiring cars.” In fact, Lyft is in the transportation services business, which right now amounts to $120 billion—one tenth the size of the transportation business as a whole. By inflating the addressable market, Lyft inflates its valuation.

by Daniel Albert, N+1 |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

DJ - 2019 Masters Interview

[ed. Despite questions ranging from the banal to inane, Dustin Johnson stays cool and distills the essence of golf in one minute (at: 4:15 - 5:22).]

The N.F.L.’s Great Cherry Tree Caper

Last Saturday morning, all across the city, Nashville residents woke up to news that seemed almost Orwellian — or if not Orwellian, then at least Onionian: City officials had decided to cut down 21 mature cherry trees in full bloom.

On less than 72 hours’ notice.

Because the National Football League asked them to.

The cherry trees in question line downtown’s First Avenue North, which runs along the Cumberland River and fronts Riverfront Park, site of the city’s grandest celebrations. Later this month that park will be where the N.F.L. holds its annual draft, an event that seems to require a giant stage the likes of which Nashville — and possibly all of Tennessee, maybe even the whole country — has never seen. Nashville, otherwise known as Music City, is pretty well set with stages, but apparently none of them is sufficiently grand to suit the N.F.L. Better to chop down a bunch of living trees and build an even grander stage, and all for a three-day event that may be moved indoors anyway. Perhaps you’ve heard of April showers?

The ironies here abound. Just last October, Nashville’s mayor, David Briley, announced a major initiative to plant 500,000 trees by 2050 — an effort to replace the roughly 9,000 trees the city is losing each year to its explosive growth. But the trees in question here hadn’t been lost at all. They are mature Yoshino cherry trees, the same trees that bloom so extravagantly along the mall in Washington during the National Cherry Blossom Festival. And Nashville’s own Cherry Blossom Festival, which National Geographic ranks as one of the best in the country, is set for April 13, less than two weeks after news broke that 21 of the 68 trees on First Avenue North would be destroyed. (...)

Nashvillians erupted with fury. Conservation groups like the Nashville Tree Foundation and the Nashville Tree Conservation Corps mobilized their followers, who sent up a great alarm that quickly rippled across Facebook and Twitter and from there to local, and then national, news outlets.

A Change.org petition posted at 9 o’clock on Saturday morning racked up thousands of signatures — more than 61,000 by Sunday afternoon — and city officials were scrambling to respond, at first announcing that the 21 trees would be dug up and relocated in the city, and then reconfiguring the plan itself so that only 10 trees would be moved, leaving all the trees on First Avenue itself in place. “In our own brand promise, we talk about protecting the authenticity of the city,” Butch Spryidon, the chief executive of the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp., said in a public apology on Sunday. “I think it’s a balance. I think it’s a good reminder of that balance. Lesson learned. Hard lesson learned.”

Well, no. A lesson truly learned would have meant moving that stage. Mature trees can with great effort be transplanted successfully under ideal circumstances, but these are not ideal circumstances. Their roots lie under a public walkway paved with bricks, a location that makes it difficult to remove enough of the root structure for successful relocation. And transplanting a tree once it has already begun to bud out in spring, just before the stress of summer heat, makes the challenges to its survival even greater. Moving these trees, in other words, is just a more expensive way to kill them. (...)

When the N.F.L. draft was held in Dallas last year, it inspired some $74 million in visitor spending, according to the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp., so it’s easy to see why city officials gave the cherry trees so little thought. These people are not villains. They aren’t sitting in a bunker plotting to steal Nashville’s trees. They aren’t thinking about trees at all. They’re thinking about landing a deal to bring a bunch of spending money to downtown Nashville, a city with a cash-flow problem so troubling that last year it reneged on a promised cost-of-living increase for city employees. (Mayor Briley’s proposed budget for the 2019-2020 fiscal year restores those raises.)

But sometimes good intentions can be as harmful as villainy. There is no “authenticity to the city” left in downtown Nashville anymore. Lower Broad is a neon wasteland of rooftop bars and pedal taverns and motorized scooters and horse-drawn carriages in the shape of Cinderella’s pumpkin and a terrible new rolling atrocity called the Music City Party Tub. Such tourist attractions are to the real Nashville what Las Vegas is to the pristine sands of the Mojave Desert before white people found it.

Nashvillians are not alone in finding their own city unrecognizable, in getting lost on once-familiar routes because longtime landmarks are gone and monstrous new buildings have risen, seemingly overnight, where they once stood. All across the country, in growing cities like Austin and Burlington and Charlotte and Denver, people are looking around and wondering if they still belong in the place where they actually live. We all have the same secret fear: What if this town we love so much is just the next Atlanta?

by Margaret Renkl, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Mark Humphrey/AP

As Baby Powder Concerns Mounted, J&J Focused Marketing on Minority, Overweight Women

In 2006, an arm of the World Health Organization began classifying cosmetic talc such as Baby Powder as “possibly carcinogenic” when women used it as a genital antiperspirant and deodorant, as many had been doing for years. Talc supplier Luzenac America Inc started including that information on its shipments to J&J and other customers.

J&J, meanwhile, looked for ways to sell more Baby Powder to two key groups of longtime users: African-American and overweight women. The “right place” to focus, according to a 2006 internal J&J marketing presentation, was “under developed geographical areas with hot weather, and higher AA population,” the “AA” referring to African-Americans.

“Powder is still considered a relevant product among AA consumers,” the presentation said. “This could be an opportunity.”

In the following years, J&J turned those proposals into action, internal company documents show. It distributed Baby Powder samples through churches and beauty salons in African-American and Hispanic neighborhoods, ran digital and print promotions with weight-loss and wellness company Weight Watchers and launched a $300,000 radio advertising campaign in a half-dozen markets aiming to reach “curvy Southern women 18-49 skewing African American.”

These are only some of the more recent examples of J&J’s decades-long efforts to offset declining Baby Powder sales amid rising concern about the health effects of talc, based on a Reuters review of years of J&J print, radio and digital advertising campaigns and thousands of pages of internal marketing documents and email correspondence.

Adults have been the main users of Johnson’s Baby Powder since at least the 1970s, after pediatricians started warning of the danger to infants of inhaling talc. As adults became ever more crucial to the brand – accounting for 91 percent of Baby Powder use by the mid-2000s – J&J honed its powder pitches to court a variety of targeted markets, from teen-focused ads touting the product’s “fresh and natural” qualities, to promotions aimed at older minority and overweight women.

Today, women who fall into those categories make up a large number of the 13,000 plaintiffs alleging that J&J’s Baby Powder and Shower to Shower, a powder brand the company sold off in 2012, caused their ovarian cancer or mesothelioma.

Many of the ovarian cancer lawsuits have blamed the disease on perineal use of J&J cosmetic talcs – a claim supported by some studies showing an association between such use and increased cancer risk. The most recent cases have alleged that J&J’s talc products contained asbestos, long a known carcinogen.

In an investigation published Dec. 14 here, Reuters revealed that J&J knew for decades that small amounts of asbestos had occasionally been found in its raw talc and in Baby Powder and Shower to Shower, based on test results from the early 1970s to the early 2000s – information it did not disclose to regulators or the public.

by Chris Kirkham, Lisa Girion, Reuters | Read more:
Image: Mark Makela

Gil Scott-Heron

[ed. Sounds like Santana but it's Ed Brady at 7:48. Kim Jordan on piano.] See also:

Pieces of a Man
Home is Where the Hatred Is
I Think I'll Call it Morning
I'm New Here

Facebook Got Caught Phishing For Friends

Once again, Facebook is in the news for bad security practices, dark design patterns, and secretly reappropriating sensitive data meant for “authentication” to its own ends. Incredibly, this time, the company managed to accomplish all three in one fell swoop.

What happened?

Last weekend, news broke that Facebook has been demanding some new users enter their email passwords in order to sign up for an account on the site. First publicized by cybersecurity specialist e-sushi on Twitter, the unnervingly phishing-like process worked like this: any user who tried to create a new account on Facebook with an email from one of a few providers (including Yandex and GMX) was directed to a page that asked them to “Confirm [Their] Email”--by entering their email password.

Soon after the news was reported more widely by The Daily Beast and Business Insider, Facebook discontinued its verify-with-password program. EFF was made aware of the sign-up flow before the stories were published. Armed with a burner Yandex email and a fresh browsing session, we were able to experiment with the password-grabbing tool briefly before it was shut down. (...)

The Plot Thickens

In a statement, Facebook said it gave people “the option” to enter their password in order to verify their account. But why did the company build this tool at all? Asking for passwords you don’t need is a classic security anti-pattern: a commonly reinvented, bad solution to a common problem. Facebook is a huge company with plenty of security engineers on its payroll. Surely someone must have identified this as a terrible idea. And users around the web are familiar with the need to verify accounts with a click in a confirmation email; there was no reason to reinvent the wheel.

So why was Facebook’s design so intent on getting users to input their passwords?

It makes more sense in the context of what happened next.

When we clicked “Connect to yandex.com,” an overlay with a status bar appeared. “Authenticating,” it said. But wait—“Importing contacts?” When did that happen? What? How? Why??

Somewhere in a cavernous, evaporative cooled datacenter, one of millions of blinking Facebook servers took our credentials, used them to authenticate to our private email account, and tried to pull information about all of our contacts.

After clicking Continue, we were dumped into the Facebook home page, email successfully “confirmed,” and our privacy thoroughly violated. (...)

Why is this bad?

Where to begin.

Before we get into the manipulative data import feature, let’s talk about Facebook asking for email credentials in the first place. For all intents and purposes, this is a phishing attack. A company you don’t have a prior relationship with asks you to “confirm your email,” and tries to get you to enter your password into a website that is not your email client. This is the oldest trick in the book.

Phishing attacks commonly target email accounts because they are extremely rich data mines. For better or worse, email accounts often act as de facto digital passports. They connect users to social media, bank accounts, and services like gas, electric, and cable. They can be used to reset passwords for hundreds of services around the Internet. If your email is compromised, everything else about your digital identity is put at risk.

We cannot emphasize this enough: you should not give your email password to websites that are not your email provider or client. In this case, it looks like Facebook “only” wanted users’ contact lists, but that’s a paper-thin justification for the kind of access it demanded.

Tech companies, non-profits, researchers, community educators, and IT departments around the world have devoted millions of cumulative hours — writing countless explainers, giving presentations until their voices have gone hoarse, fundamentally redesigning how trust on the web works with cryptographic certificates and OAuth — all to prevent users from doing exactly this.

And Facebook, in its first interaction with a cohort of newcomers to its service, throws this all out the window. This interaction, and Facebook’s implicit assertion that nothing is out of the ordinary, is conditioning its users to be phished. For a company that is many people’s primary portal to the Internet, that’s downright irresponsible.

Uninformed non-consent

But the mis-education of new users is just the first layer of this onion of awfulness. By collecting sensitive information it didn’t need, Facebook put users at risk of future data breaches. Even if the company never intended to store users’ passwords, it’s hard to feel secure given its track record of, well, accidentally storing passwords. (The company said in a statement that “These passwords were not stored by Facebook.”)

Perhaps worst was Facebook’s approach to user consent. The “Confirm Your Email” page gave no context for why Facebook needed an email password and hid information about how to sidestep the process.

Everything about the page led users to believe they had no choice but to enter their email password. And once they did, nothing about the page indicated how Facebook would use it. According to the researcher who discovered it, an older version of the page had a “See how it works” link that led to… nothing. It wasn’t even a link, just a string of text that evoked the idea of one. Before users had the chance to consent to any kind of data collection, Facebook was scraping their email accounts for all of their social connections. This is worse than a typical dark pattern, which might take advantage of people’s tendency not to read fine print. It delivered unwanted behavior that even the most savvy users should not have predicted.

by Bennett Cyphers and Jason Kelley, EFF |  Read more:
Image: EFF

Zulkarnain Ismail
via:

Google and Other Tech Giants Are Quietly Buying Up the Most Important Part of the Internet

Google makes billions from its cloud platform. Now it’s using those billions to buy up the internet itself — or at least the submarine cables that make up the internet backbone.

In February, the company announced its intention to move forward with the development of the Curie cable, a new undersea line stretching from California to Chile. It will be the first private intercontinental cable ever built by a major non-telecom company.

And if you step back and just look at intracontinental cables, Google has fully financed a number of those already; it was one of the first companies to build a fully private submarine line.

Google isn’t alone. Historically, cables have been owned by groups of private companies — mostly telecom providers — but 2016 saw the start of a massive submarine cable boom, and this time, the buyers are content providers. Corporations like Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon all seem to share Google’s aspirations for bottom-of-the-ocean dominance.

I’ve been watching this trend develop, being in the broadband space myself, and the recent movements are certainly concerning. Big tech’s ownership of the internet backbone will have far-reaching, yet familiar, implications. It’s the same old consumer tradeoff; more convenience for less control — and less privacy.

We’re reaching the next stage of internet maturity; one where only large, incumbent players can truly win in media.

Consumers will soon need to decide exactly how much faith they want to place in these companies to build out the internet of tomorrow. We need to decide carefully, too; these are the same companies that are gaining access to a seemingly ever-increasing share of our private lives.

Walling off the garden

If you want to measure the internet in miles, fiber-optic submarine cables are the place to start. These unassuming cables crisscross the ocean floor worldwide, carrying 95-99 percent of international data over bundles of fiber-optic cable strands the diameter of a garden hose. All told, there are more than 700,000 miles of submarine cables in use today.

While past cable builders leveraged cable ownership to sell bandwidth, content providers are building purposefully private cables.

The internet is commonly described as a cloud. In reality, it’s a series of wet, fragile tubes, and Google is about to own an alarming number of them. The numbers speak for themselves; Google will own 10,433 miles of submarine cables internationally when the Curie cable is completed later this year.

The total shoots up to 63,605 miles when you include cables it owns in consortium with Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. Including these part-owned cables, the company has enough submarine infrastructure to wrap around the earth’s equator two-and-a-half times (with thousands of cable miles to spare).

by Tyler Cooper, Venture Beat |  Read more:

Image: Ander Gillenea/Getty Images

Making a Living From Your Billionaire Neighbor’s Trash

Three blocks from Mark Zuckerberg’s $10 million Tudor home in San Francisco, Jake Orta lives in a small, single-window studio apartment filled with trash.

There’s a child’s pink bicycle helmet that Mr. Orta dug out from the garbage bin across the street from Mr. Zuckerberg’s house. And a vacuum cleaner, a hair dryer, a coffee machine — all in working condition — and a pile of clothes that he carried home in a Whole Foods paper bag retrieved from Mr. Zuckerberg’s bin.

A military veteran who fell into homelessness and now lives in government subsidized housing, Mr. Orta is a full-time trash picker, part of an underground economy in San Francisco of people who work the sidewalks in front of multimillion-dollar homes, rummaging for things they can sell.

Trash picking is a profession more often associated with shantytowns and favelas than a city at the doorstep of Silicon Valley. The Global Alliance of Waste Pickers, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization, counts more than 400 trash picking organizations across the globe, almost all of them in Latin America, Africa and southern Asia.

But trash scavengers exist in many United States cities and, like the rampant homelessness in San Francisco, are a signpost of the extremes of American capitalism. A snapshot from 2019: One of the world’s richest men and a trash picker, living a few minutes’ walk from each other.

Mr. Orta, 56, sees himself as more of a treasure hunter.

“It just amazes me what people throw away,” he said one night, as he found a pair of gently used designer jeans, a new black cotton jacket, gray Nike running sneakers and a bicycle pump. “You never know what you will find.”

Mr. Orta says his goal is to earn around $30 to $40 a day from his discoveries, a survival income of around $300 a week.

Trash picking is illegal in California — once a bin is rolled out onto the sidewalk the contents are considered the possession of the trash collection company, according to Robert Reed, a spokesman for Recology, the company contracted to collect San Francisco’s garbage. But the law is rarely enforced. (...)

For years San Francisco has been a global beacon of recycling, attracting a stream of government ministers, journalists and students from across the globe to study the sorting facilities of Recology.

But the city is also full of young, affluent people preoccupied with demanding jobs and long commutes for whom the garbage can is a tempting way to get rid of that extra pair of jeans or old electronics cluttering their closet.

“We have a lot of trash of convenience,” said Mr. Reed, the spokesman for Recology. “You’ve got more and more tech people here and this city is moving faster and faster. These people have short attention spans. Some discard items that ought to be repurposed through a thrift shop.”

Trash pickers fall into several broad categories. For decades, elderly women and men have collected cardboard, paper, cans or bottles, lugging impossibly large bags around the city and bringing them to recycling centers for cash.

The city is most concerned about the battered pickup trucks, known as mosquito fleets, that buzz around San Francisco collecting recyclables on an industrial scale, depriving Recology, and ultimately the city, of income, said Bill Barnes, a spokesman for the city administrator’s office.

“That’s a significant challenge for residents because it results in higher garbage rates,” Mr. Barnes said.

Trash pickers like Mr. Orta are in yet another category, targeting items in the black landfill garbage bins whose contents would otherwise go to what’s known as the pit — a hole in the ground on the outskirts of the city that resembles a giant swimming pool, where nonrecyclable trash is crushed and compacted by a huge bulldozer and then carried by a fleet of trucks to a dump an hour and a half away. The city exports about 50 large truckloads a day.

by Thomas Fuller, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Jim Wilson/The New York Times
[ed. Never imagined there'd be something like a Global Alliance of Waste Pickers.]

They Had It Coming

Sweet Christ, vindication!

How long has it been? Years? No, decades. If hope is the thing with feathers, I was a plucked bird. Long ago, I surrendered myself to the fact that the horrible, horrible private-school parents of Los Angeles would get away with their nastiness forever. But even before the molting, never in my wildest imaginings had I dared to dream that the arc of the moral universe could describe a 90-degree angle and smite down mine enemies with such a hammer fist of fire and fury that even I have had a moment of thinking, Could this be a bit too much?

Let’s back up.

Thirty years ago, having tapped out of a Ph.D. program, I moved to Los Angeles (long story) and got hired at the top boys’ school in the city, which would soon become co-educational. For the first four years, I taught English. Best job I’ve ever had. For the next three, I was a college counselor. Worst job I’ve ever had.

When I was a teacher, my job was a source of self-respect; I had joined a great tradition. I was a young woman from a certain kind of good but not moneyed family who could exchange her only salable talents—an abiding love of books and a fondness for teenagers—for a job. Poor, obscure, plain, and little, I would drive though the exotic air of early-morning Los Angeles to the school, which was on a street with a beautiful name, Coldwater Canyon, in a part of the city originally designated the Central Motion Picture District. It sat on a plot of land that in the 1920s composed part of the Hollywood Hills Country Club, an institution that has a Narnia-like aspect, in that not even the California historian Kevin Starr knew whether it ever really existed, or whether it was merely a fiction promoted by real-estate developers trying to entice new homeowners to the Edenic San Fernando Valley. Across from a round tower connecting the upper and lower campuses was Saint Saviour’s, a chapel that the founders of the school built in 1914 as an exact replica of the one built in 1567 for the Rugby School in England, with pews facing the center aisle in the Tudor style. This combination of the possibly imaginary country club and the assumption behind the building of the chapel—get the set right, and you can make the whole production work—seemed to me like something from an Evelyn Waugh novel. But it also meant that—unlike Exeter or Choate—this school was a place where I could belong. There were no traditions, no expectation of familiarity with the Book of Common Prayer. All you needed to have was a piercing love of your subject and a willingness to enter into an apprenticeship with great teachers. I had those things. (...)

And so when a job opened in the college-counseling office, I should not have taken it. My god was art, not the SAT. In my excitement at this apparent promotion, I did not pause to consider that my beliefs about the new work at hand made me, at best, a heretic. I honestly believed—still believe—that hundreds of very good colleges in the country have reasonable admissions requirements; that if you’ve put in your best effort, a B is a good grade; and that expecting adolescents to do five hours of homework on top of meeting time-consuming athletic demands is, in all but exceptional cases, child abuse. Most of all, I believed that if you had money for college and a good high-school education under your belt, you were on third base headed for home plate with the ball soaring high over the bleachers.

I did not know—even after four years at the institution—that the school’s impressive matriculation list was not the simple by-product of excellent teaching, but was in fact the end result of parental campaigns undertaken with the same level of whimsy with which the Japanese Navy bombed Pearl Harbor.

Every parent assumed that whatever alchemy of good genes and good credit had gotten his child a spot at the prep school was the same one that would land him a spot at a hyper-selective college. It was true that a quarter of the class went to the Ivy League, and another quarter to places such as Stanford, MIT, and Amherst. But that still left half the class, and I was the one who had to tell their parents that they were going to have to be flexible. Before each meeting, I prepared a list of good colleges that the kid had a strong chance of getting into, but these parents didn’t want colleges their kids had a strong chance of getting into; they wanted colleges their kids didn’t have a chance in hell of getting into. A successful first meeting often consisted of walking them back from the crack pipe of Harvard to the Adderall crash of Middlebury and then scheduling a follow-up meeting to douse them with the bong water of Denison.

The new job meant that I had signed myself up to be locked in a small office, appointment after appointment, with hugely powerful parents and their mortified children as I delivered news so grimly received that I began to think of myself less as an administrator than as an oncologist. Along the way they said such crass things, such rude things, such greedy things, and such borderline-racist things that I began to hate them. They, in turn, began to hate me. A college counselor at an elite prep school is supposed to be a combination of cheerleader, concierge, and talent agent, radically on the side of each case and applying steady pressure on the dream college to make it happen. At the very least, the counselor is not supposed to be an adversary.

I just about got an ulcer sitting in that office listening to rich people complaining bitterly about an “unfair” or a “rigged” system. Sometimes they would say things so outlandish that I would just stare at them, trying to beam into their mind the question, Can you hear yourself? That so many of them were (literal) limousine liberals lent the meetings an element of radical chic. They were down for the revolution, but there was no way their kid was going to settle for Lehigh.

Some of the parents—especially, in those days, the fathers—were such powerful professionals, and I (as you recall) was so poor, obscure, plain, and little that it was as if they were cracking open a cream puff with a panzer. This was before crying in the office was a thing, so I had to just sit there and take it. Then the admissions letters arrived from the colleges. If the kid got in, it was because he was a genius; if he didn’t, it was because I screwed up. When a venture capitalist and his ageless wife storm into your boss’s office to get you fired because you failed to get their daughter (conscientious, but no atom splitter) into the prestigious school they wanted, you can really start to question whether it’s worth the 36K.

by Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Gretchen Ertl/Reuters

40 Best Chicken Thighs Recipes for Frying, Baking and More

40 Best Chicken Thighs Recipes for Frying, Baking and More (Bon Appétit)

Here's one:

DescriptioBon Appétit

Chicken Scarpariello with Sausage and Peppers:

1½ pounds fingerling potatoes, halved lengthwise
6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, divided
Kosher salt, freshly ground pepper
3 links sweet Italian sausage
6 skin-on, bone-in chicken thighs
2 large onions, chopped
½ large red bell pepper, chopped
6 garlic cloves, finely grated
1 cup dry white wine
1 cup low-sodium chicken broth
½ cup chopped hot, sweet pickled Peppadew peppers in brine
¼ cup white wine vinegar
3 sprigs rosemary
Chopped parsley (for serving)

***

Arrange racks in upper and lower thirds of oven; preheat to 450°. Toss potatoes with 3 Tbsp. oil on a rimmed baking sheet; season with salt and pepper. Arrange cut side down and roast on lower rack until tender and cut sides are browned, 20–30 minutes; set aside.

Meanwhile, heat remaining 3 Tbsp. oil in a large skillet over medium-high. Cook sausages, turning occasionally, until browned on all sides, 6–8 minutes (they will not be fully cooked). Transfer to a plate.

Season chicken on both sides with salt and pepper. Cook in same skillet, turning occasionally, until golden brown on both sides, 8–10 minutes (they will also be undercooked). Transfer to plate with sausage.

Cook onions, bell pepper, and garlic in same skillet over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally and scraping bottom of pan, until tender and beginning to brown, 10–12 minutes. Add wine and cook, stirring occasionally, until reduced and you can no longer smell the alcohol, about 8 minutes. Add broth, peppers, vinegar, and rosemary and bring to a boil; cook until slightly reduced, about 5 minutes. Nestle chicken into onion mixture, then transfer skillet to upper rack of oven and roast chicken 10 minutes. Add sausages to skillet, pushing them into onion mixture, and continue to roast until chicken is cooked through and an instant-read thermometer inserted into thickest part of thigh registers 165°, 5–10 minutes.

Top with parsley and serve with roasted potatoes alongside.

[ed. See also: Is Your Wellness Practice Just a Diet in Disguise? (Bon Appétit).]

I Get Comments

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Duck Soup. The thinking is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of machine learning most of the philosophy will go over a typical reader's head. There’s also the utilitarian outlook, which is deftly woven throughout – personal philosophy drawn heavily from the Golden Age of Science Fiction, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these posts, to realize that they’re not just funny or informative - they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Duck Soup truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn’t appreciate, for instance, the humour in such existential catchphrases as “This is not a coincidence because nothing is ever a coincidence” which itself is a cryptic reference to Lovecraft’s horror classic “The Rats In The Walls”. I’m smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Duck Soup's genius unfolds itself on their smartphone screens. What fools… how I pity them. 😂 And yes by the way, I DO have a Duck Soup tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It’s for the ladies’ eyes only- And even they have to demonstrate that they’re within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand.

via:

h/t SSC, Image: via:
[ed.  : )]

Burrito Blanket

via:

The Universal Design Ideal

The Universal Design Ideal (Aeon)

[ed. Product packaging has to be the worst. See also: Wrap Rage (Wikipedia).]

Philanthropy is Broken

Globalisation and trade liberalisation were supposed to make us all better-off through the mechanism of trickledown economics,’ said the Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph E Stiglitz. ‘What we seemed to be seeing instead was trickle-up economics, accompanied by a destruction of democratic politics.’

While this period has been arguably one of the most innovative in human history, wealth inequality has widened. In a much-disputed Oxfam report last year, it was argued that a trend of ‘widening inequality’ was continuing, as 82 per cent of money generated in 2017 went to the richest 1 per cent of the global population. The nine richest men on the planet have more wealth than the poorest 4 billion people, and wealth is more concentrated at a company level, too. (...)

People are not happy with the status quo, and the super-rich are to blame. For Anand Giridharadas, author of the controversial Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, philanthropists must shoulder a large chunk of this blame. He believes elites such as Zuckerberg who speak the grand language of changing the world for the better are, in effect, making things worse by reinforcing the unjust systems that allowed them to acquire their wealth in the first instance.

The Facebook founder is one of many in this ‘new gilded age’ who are guilty of what Giridharadas, a former McKinsey consultant and New York Times columnist, calls philanthropic ‘fake change’. It’s also expressed by the likes of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire who announced a $2 billion fund to support homelessness and education while presiding over a company where workers reportedly live in fear of ‘losing their jobs just because they needed the loo’.

‘The modest good that philanthropy does do is in certain cases part of abetting the active commission of harm that is actually causing these problems in the first place,’ the author tells Spear’s over a coffee in central London. ‘The people who won from this age of extraordinary innovation, built, maintained and operated, wittingly and unwittingly, systems that actually deprive most people of progress.’

The paradox, as he sees it, is that ‘we encourage people to become really successful and have money to give away by being slash-and-burn capitalists on the way up’.

Giridharadas characterises this as: ‘Pay people as little as you can, evade and lobby against regulation as much as you can, be as monopolistic as you can, asphyxiate competition as much as you can – and pay as little taxes as you can.’ As a result, he argues that philanthropy is an ‘after the fact way of being kind to people’, when in fact ‘the most important ways to be kind to people are what you do in your day job’. It’s a symptom of the faults in contemporary capitalism. For all of Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropic pledges, Giridharadas would rather he not ‘urinate on our democracies’ with his company. (...)

At January’s World Economic Forum in Davos, similar arguments were relayed in front of an elite audience. ‘Stop talking about philanthropy, start talking about taxes,’ declared Rutger Bregman, the author of Utopia for Realists. Bregman added: ‘Taxes, taxes, taxes. All the rest is bullshit.’ Quite some opponent, however: institutional philanthropy is global and formidable. According to a report from UBS last year, its global reach encompasses more than 260,000 foundations in 39 countries.

Assets exceed $1.5 trillion, and expenditures exceed $150 billion a year. The wealth transfer, says Giridharadas, must shift away from philanthropy to a new species – from ‘giving back to giving up’. He’s talking about giving away not only money, but power too. Governments will need to be ‘crowded in’ to a discussion of regulation if the economic system is to be reformed in a rigorous way that offers a meaningful resolution to grievances expressed from the have-nots.

by Arun Kakar, Spear's |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Top 3 lessons on how not to waste your career on things that don’t change the world (YouTube).]

Leave No Trace

The grassed back half of the school where we played when I was a child was called the Back Paddock, and sometimes we found things there. The Back Paddock bordered a quiet suburban street on one side, and on the other was the high barbed wire of one of the state’s largest juvenile-detention facilities. Teenagers broke into the Back Paddock at night. It must have been perfect in the privacy of the dark. In the mornings before class began we would find beer cans and broken bottles of rum, KitKat wrappers, syringes, and wet condoms filled with semen. These, and the strange things that sometimes happened, like the teenage boy who once bicycled naked past the window of my grade-two classroom, were frequently attributed to the juvenile-detention center next door. There was, in the end, no real way of knowing where the bicyclists and beer cans and condoms came from. Besides, it was never those things that rattled me. What rattled me was the clothing.

When I was six, I found a pair of pink underpants by a tree stump. The next year, I found a pair of adult men’s track pants. I was eight when the clothing began migrating from the Back Paddock proper to the concrete playground outside my classroom doors. One winter morning I arrived early to school and found an entire outfit outside the grade-four classrooms. There was a blouse, a jumper, jeans, a bra, socks, and underwear. I remember that the underwear was dirty and had been left crotch-up on top of the pile. The pile frightened me for reasons I couldn’t articulate, and I backed away from it to the wet-weather shed, where I waited for the other children to arrive.

I asked our teacher later that day about the woman those clothes must have belonged to, and whether she was naked now. I was worried because it had been so cold the night before. Why were the woman’s clothes there, I asked, and not on her body? And where was that body now?

There is a scene in Picnic at Hanging Rock in which Mademoiselle de Poitiers, the French tutor at Appleyard College for Young Ladies, is overcome with horror. In Peter Weir’s 1975 film version, she looks around and shakes her head, but in Joan Lindsay’s original 1967 novel, the tutor’s thoughts are explicit. She stands by the edge of a creek, looking up at the rock overhead, and wonders “how anything so beautiful could be the instrument of evil.”

That nonspecific evil is at the center of both the novel and the film. Both follow a group of schoolgirls in rural Victoria who travel two hours outside of Melbourne to Hanging Rock, a volcanic outcrop that rises abruptly out of the plains. Four of the girls ascend the Rock shortly after lunchtime. Our last glimpse of them occurs as they disappear one by one, barefoot and corsetless, between two boulders at the top. One of girls is terrified and wants to turn back. She begs the others to stop. But they don’t listen, or else they cannot hear her. The girl stumbles, screaming, down the slope of the rock, passing their middle-aged mathematics instructor, Miss McGraw, as she descends. None of the three schoolgirls nor Miss McGraw ever return. They leave no trace. The mystery of what happened to the girls at Hanging Rock, never solved, reverberates in the town for years to come. It seems as though the landscape itself swallowed them up. (...)

“I used to go there when I was a kid,” recalled Helen Morse, who played Mademoiselle de Poitiers in the film. “We’d go for picnics and climb all over the rock, but it was only going back to make Picnic at Hanging Rock that I actually became aware of those faces in the rock.” The film lingers on these faces—ancient, volcanic, otherworldly—and, visiting the site, I saw for myself how the pockmarks and holes in the rock can, in the right light, seem to be literally looking down at you. “We were asserting that the landscape took these girls,” Hal McElroy, the film’s coproducer, explained. “So the landscape had to be alive. And anyone who’s spent any time in the Australian bush knows it is. It’s a kind of living, throbbing, and in fact a very noisy place.”

In Lindsay’s novel, the landscape is full of that throb and noise, that gloom. The bush is full of cicadas that “shrill” and leaves that “hang lifeless.” The slabs of the Rock “repudiate” the landscape around it. The boulders “force” their way toward the sky. In some instances Bush is capitalized, as if it were a proper noun, just as possessed of power and agency as a person.

As the schoolgirls ascend the rock, they are described as “unconscious of the strains and tensions of the molten mass that hold it anchored to the groaning earth.” But the animals know. The snakes and insects are attuned to the “creakings and shudderings” of the landscape, and they flee. The girls climb higher, as if bewitched, or seduced. The frightening thing about the seduction is what Lindsay suggests with all her anthropomorphisms—not merely that the landscape might possess its own agency, but that it might also have very bad intentions.

Picnic at Hanging Rock takes place in 1900, a year before six separate British colonies were federated into the Commonwealth of Australia. Federation was an era of Australian life when newly minted citizens set about casting their recent history into oblivion, trying to forget 112 years of institutional violence and bureaucratic bungling, indigenous displacement and massacre, and a vast prison experiment unmatched until the Soviet gulags. Australians in 1900, observed historian Robert Hughes, “embarked on this quest for oblivion with go-getting energy.” (...)

The scholar Elspeth Tilley has observed that all lost-child stories employ what she calls “the white-vanishing trope”: they begin with a white character—more often than not a girl—occupying a safe, familiar place, then crossing some kind of threshold. She enters an area of the unknown, where both spatial and temporal conditions are disrupted. Then she disappears. Whether or not she is found matters very little. The psychological effect on the community is always the real point, because the lost child is a kind of human sacrifice the culture gives up once in a while in order to vouchsafe its go-getting pursuit of oblivion. Because, Tilley argues, the white-vanishing trope is another way to keep Australians from fully confronting their history. “In endlessly retelling narratives of its members vanishing,” she writes, “white Australia… builds an ongoing myth of itself occupying a victim position.”

Pierce argues, in The Country of Lost Children, that these stories work to dramatize fears about the legitimacy of white occupation—the niggling feeling that not only were Europeans trespassing on the land of others’, but that their presence on the continent was uniquely unwelcome. By the nineteenth century, he says, Australians had begun to fear they might never feel legitimately “at home” in the country. “Children lost in places they might not belong focused anxieties,” Pierce writes, “not only over the legitimacy of land tenure, but of European Australians’ spiritual and psychological lodgement.” (...)

The stories began, in Australia, with the wilderness swallowing up its lost white girls, but over time the girls began to fall victim to men. If the landscape was thought to act on the country’s women by seducing or absorbing them, it acted on men in quite another way. Men often seemed to emerge out of the landscape, like some kind of malevolent byproduct of the country’s cult of “mateship.” They were cast in the mold of John Jarratt’s rifle-wielding Mick in the film Wolf Creek, the infernal flip side of Paul Hogan’s friendly, larrikin Mick in Crocodile Dundee. But it was rarely felt that the harsh, unforgiving landscape of the country manifested the savagery of the men who had occupied, settled, and killed upon it. Rather, the evil of the land that Mademoiselle de Poitiers can see at Hanging Rock was the thing that worked through the men. (...)

To this day, electioneering politicians go out into the bush every three years to try and connect with the electorate. They praise the egalitarian, hardworking spirit of the bush, and thank the farmers who live there for extracting sugar and wheat and gold from the soil. They describe their policies as being “fair dinkum” and, wearing Akubra hats and standing in the middle of farms, surrounded by eucalyptus and drought-stricken plains, affirm their belief in Australia as “the land of the fair go.” While they’re at it, they praise the spirit of mateship, which is everywhere in the bush. The men turn and give each other those big Australian handshakes, roaring, “Good to see you, mate” in a way that never feels not aggressive.

The politicians know this is where the country conceives of its heart, even if most of us don’t live there. The work of the bush was done by men and their mates—mates built the farms, drove the sheep, felled the trees. Such work built character, made Australians eccentric, but pleasantly so—different, but not so different as to look anything less than British with a suntan. But there was no room for women in the mythology of the bush. Women weren’t mates.

by Madeleine Watts, The Believer | Read more:
Image: Lost by Frederick McCubbin

[ed. See also: The Sunburnt Country (The Believer).]

Charles M. Schulz, Peanuts
via:
[ed. I'm down with the flu so posts may be a bit sporadic. Update: Still down. Feels like being stabbed in the brain and thrown in the freezer.]