Americans Shocked to Find Their Rights Literally Vanish at U.S. Airports

If you’re traveling outside the United States this summer you might want to rethink taking your electronics along. Government agents have been detaining American citizens without arrest, searching, and in some cases downloading the entire contents of phones, tablets, laptops, and other devices. And this all happens without a warrant or access to an attorney.

“The border has become a rights-free zone for Americans who have to travel,” Senator Ron Wyden said in a statement to TAC. “The founders never could have imagined that the government would be able to sift through your entire digital life, from pictures to emails and even where you’ve been, just because you decide to take a vacation or travel for work.”

Border searches of electronic devices have exploded at an exponential rate in recent years: in 2018, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) searched over 33,295 smartphones, laptops, and other electronic devices; up nine percent from fiscal year 2017 and over six times the number searched in 2012. And that’s just the statistics from CBP; Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not maintain records of the number of electronic device searches it conducts.

“The government is accessing all your private data,” Sophia Cope, senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told TAC. These “deeply intrusive” searches of electronic devices “reveal a lot about you: your emails, contacts, bank history, internet searches, medical history, social media usage, and political beliefs.”

The “border is not a Constitution-free zone,” said Cope. But right now, it’s essentially functioning as one, as laws that protect Americans privacy are being run over roughshod by agents at the border.

In a unanimous decision in 2014, the Supreme Court ruled that when a person has been arrested, law enforcement need a warrant to search their electronic devices.

But government agents at the border assert that they can search anyone’s device, at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all. CBP has largely been operating under its own rules; they say they do not need a warrant, or even probable cause, to conduct this digital invasion because of the “border search exception” to the Fourth Amendment’s requirement for probable cause or a warrant.

A lawsuit brought by EFF and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) argues that these searches are in violation of the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.

For travelers whose professions require they maintain the privacy of sensitive information, like journalists, attorneys, clergy, and doctors, the effect of these searches can be quite chilling. We have laws that preserve the privacy of patients and attorneys’ clients—even journalists are protected by shield laws in most states—but there’s no such protection when CBP seizes electronic devices.

by Barbara Boland, The American Conservative |  Read more:

Image: Michael Ball/Wikimedia Commons

Blindsided: Alaska’s University System Pleads for a Lifeline

More than a month after Alaska lawmakers settled on a plan to cut $5 million in support for the state’s universities, Gov. Mike J. Dunleavy shocked the state last month by using a veto to cut much deeper, taking away $130 million more from the system that gave him his master’s degree.

Mr. Dunleavy, a Republican in his first year as governor, has seized on a hawkish approach to budgeting, in order to fulfill a campaign promise to increase the amount of oil-revenue dividends the state pays each Alaska resident, to about $3,000 a year.

The governor’s slashing of state funding left university leaders blindsided and in turmoil. The university’s supporters have embarked on a desperate scramble to persuade lawmakers to override the governor’s line-item veto, which would reduce the operating funds the university system gets from the state by 41 percent.

With a special legislative session convening on Monday, they have just five days to do so before the cuts become official.

“I think people are actually frightened,” said Maria Williams, a professor who chairs the University of Alaska’s Faculty Alliance. “I’m frightened because I feel that what is happening is a drastic reshaping of the state of Alaska.”

The showdown in the Legislature this week comes at a time of economic trouble in the state. While much of the United States has benefited from robust economic growth in recent years, Alaska’s fortunes have been largely tied to those of the state’s declining oil and gas industry. Falling oil revenues have brought on a persistent recession that has forced the state to confront lingering questions about how to best revive its economy.

Faced with looming deficits, political leaders avoided imposing a state sales tax or personal income tax, and chose to reduce payouts from the oil dividend fund instead. But the reductions were unpopular with some voters, and Mr. Dunleavy won election last year promising not only to restore the full dividend payments for the future but to fight for catch-up payments to make up for past reductions.

Leaders of the University of Alaska system, which serves more than 26,000 students from Juneau to Fairbanks, expect the governor’s budget cut to result in the shuttering of some satellite campuses, the elimination of hundreds of staff and faculty positions and an unprecedented reduction in the number of students the system is able to serve.

Mr. Dunleavy, a former teacher who got a master’s in education from the University of Alaska system, said his cuts to the state budget, including those for the university system, were necessary to lay a better foundation for private-sector job growth. But Jim Johnsen, the president of the university, said a strong university system was necessary to develop innovators and training for a work force that is increasingly dependent on postsecondary education.

“There is really no strong state without a strong university,” Mr. Johnsen said. “It just doesn’t exist.”

Paying the dividend

During his campaign last year, Mr. Dunleavy vowed to balance the state’s budget while avoiding new taxes, and to provide Alaskans with bigger payouts from the Alaska Permanent Fund, which holds oil revenue for later distribution. Lawmakers gave each Alaskan a $1,600 dividend last year; an old formula for the payouts that the governor hopes to revive would yield payments of about $3,000 a person this year, according to Bryce Edgmon, the speaker of the State House.

To raise the dividend while lowering the state’s deficit, Mr. Dunleavy proposed a large budget cut for the university system earlier this year. But after the university system worked closely with lawmakers through the budget-writing process, the Alaska Legislature settled on a reduction of just $5 million in the $327 million of operating-budget support the state provides.

Mr. Johnsen, fearing that the governor might not stomach the Legislature’s plan, met with Mr. Dunleavy in late May and quietly provided him with a written plan that he regarded as a drastic alternative: A $49 million reduction spread over several years, with significant cuts to personnel and “a reduced capacity to serve our students and our state.” Mr. Johnsen said he thought that such a reduction would be a challenge that would force some difficult choices, but one that the university could handle.

“It was an interesting discussion,” Mr. Johnsen said in an interview about his talk with the governor. “He nodded his head. He stood up. He shook my hand. He said, ‘We’ll talk.’”

The governor used a line-item veto to cut the operating support the state gives the university by 41 percent. University leaders said the cut would sharply reduce the number of students the school could serve.

The next time they spoke was the morning of Mr. Dunleavy’s veto announcement, he said. Legislative leaders had also been left in the dark. (...)

Along with the cuts to the university, Mr. Dunleavy also used his veto to push deep spending reductions elsewhere in the state budget. He eliminated funding for the Alaska State Council on the Arts, for public television and radio, and for a benefits program for older people.

He also cut $334,700 from the state’s appellate court system, writing in a veto document that the amount reflected the cost of government-funded abortion services. Mr. Dunleavy disliked a state Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that struck down state regulations that would have curtailed abortion coverage under Medicaid.

Despite all the cuts, the governor did not manage to completely close the state’s budget gap, which has grown in recent years as oil prices and revenues have declined and the state’s economy has been in recession. With a gap of hundreds of millions of dollars still remaining, Mr. Dunleavy suggested in announcing the veto that more cuts could be coming.

“Next year, it’s our goal to complete this process,” Mr. Dunleavy said.

An uncertain vote

Overriding the governor’s veto would require a three-quarters majority of the state’s 60 representatives and senators. More than half of them are Republicans. [ed. Who are so dysfunctional they can't even decide where to meet.]

Republican Party officials have celebrated Mr. Dunleavy’s actions in recent days, among them the state chairman, Glenn Clary, who said last week that the governor understood that the state must live within its means.

“Alaska’s economic future is in good hands with our governor and his staff,” Mr. Clary said.

by Mike Baker, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Joshua Corbett for The New York Times

[ed. I lived in Alaska for nearly 40 years and am just sick at what the state has become: short-sighted, greedy, entitled, and mean. Rather than institute a state income tax, sales tax, or any other kind of tax, the governor and majority Republican legislature continue to cut state services and programs, just to pass out (MORE) free money to every resident. It's the worst kind of political pandering. See also: A partial list of Dunleavy’s line-item budget vetoes (ADN); and, because this seems to be the direction they're heading: the Kansas Experiment (Wikipedia). God even seems to be sending them a message.]

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Fall; or, Dodge in Hell

Neal Stephenson’s New Novel — Part Tech, Part Fantasy — Dazzles

Straw poll: Who thinks we’re living in the Matrix?

On the one hand, are we really to believe a single human is responsible for the body of work — entertaining, brilliant, immense — that Neal Stephenson has produced over the past quarter-century? Turning out thousand-page novels every couple of years? It seems much more likely that a computer is behind all of this.

On the other hand, have you read Neal Stephenson? His mind is capable of going places no one else has ever imagined, let alone rendered in photorealist prose. And he doesn’t just go to those places; he takes us with him. The very fact of Stephenson’s existence might be the best argument we have against the simulation hypothesis.

His latest, “Fall; or, Dodge in Hell,” is another piece of evidence in the anti-Matrix case: a staggering feat of imagination, intelligence and stamina. For long stretches, at least. Between those long stretches, there are sections that, while never uninteresting, are somewhat less successful. To expect any different, especially in a work of this length, would be to hold it to an impossible standard. Somewhere in this 900-page book is a 600-page book. One that has the same story, but weighs less. Without those 300 pages, though, it wouldn’t be Neal Stephenson. It’s not possible to separate the essential from the decorative. Nor would we want that, even if it were were. Not only do his fans not mind the extra — it’s what we came for.

In this particular case, the extra stuff is also kind of the point. The mind-melting density of detail in Stephenson’s work can sometimes overwhelm or bog down the narrative, but in “Fall” it is very much in service of the book’s subject: reality, and how it might one day be simulated. How those simulations could be iterated and upgraded over time, through technological progress and at great financial cost, to an arbitrary degree of verisimilitude. How the resources of our “Meatspace” civilization would increasingly become inputs and raw material for the creation and improvement of a digital civilization (“Bitworld”), gradually sucking all of humanity into the Matrix in the process. Exploring the implications and possibilities of this, on a grand and granular scale, plays to Stephenson’s strengths. This is a case of author and substance and story and style all lining up; a series of lenses perfectly arranged to focus the power and precision of Stephenson’s laser-beam intellect.

The world-famous billionaire Richard “Dodge” Forthrast made his fortune developing T’Rain, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), much like World of Warcraft. In his later years, Dodge has settled down somewhat, attending to his gaming empire, while also managing to enjoy time with his family. (Pause here to note: Although “Fall” features several characters who have appeared in the Stephenson universe, including the Forthrast family, it is not a sequel to 2011’s “Reamde” and can be read as a stand-alone work.)

One morning, while undergoing a simple medical procedure, Dodge suffers an unusual complication that causes him to stop breathing. By the time doctors are able to get him on a ventilator, he is brain-dead.

Dodge’s last will and testament, written years earlier and semi-forgotten, sets off a chain of events (legal, familial, financial) that eventually lead to Dodge’s brain (or more specifically, its “connectome,” the totality of its data and structures and connections between every cell therein) being scanned and turned into digital information, which is then uploaded into the cloud until such time as technology improves to the point where Dodge’s consciousness is able to be restored — whatever that means.

Years go by. Technology, as it tends to do, improves. Dodge is eventually brought back to life, or a kind of virtual afterlife, in the “Bitworld” where he exists as ones and zeros. Initially inchoate, Dodge’s mind evolves, along with the digital environment he creates around him, a kind of information-age Genesis story that Stephenson describes evocatively.

From there, Stephenson begins to leap forward in time, in fits and starts, the story eventually spanning several decades. Along the way, he manages many sharp bits of social satire. An elaborate DDoS attack exploits the filter bubbles through which reality is mediated for large portions of the population. A portrait emerges of an America divided: the United States enclosing within it another nation, Ameristan, the borders of which are “not a line on a map,” impossible to demarcate and having “no official reality” but nevertheless all too real in effect. A country in which those with means can afford to hire personal “editors” whose “sole job was to filter incoming and outgoing information,” while those who can’t afford the privilege are more likely to have unfiltered exposure to “flumes … of porn, propaganda and death threats, 99.9 percent of which were algorithmically generated.”

For a good long while in the middle, the novel alternates between realms, digital and analog. Early choices, or sometimes relatively arbitrary initial conditions, end up shaping future events and technologies. In this case, the cosmology, topography and even the theology of an entire universe — Bitworld — affect Meatspace, and the two realms are linked in a feedback loop of cause and effect, resources and outcomes (dollars, computing power).

Without spoiling too much, the last quarter of the book, itself the length of a fairly decent-sized novel, reads like high fantasy — expertly written fanfic of some long-running swords-and-wizards epic. Or an exhaustive transcript of every turn, saving throw and dice roll of the most elaborate Dungeons and Dragons campaign of all time. Has Neal Stephenson flipped genres, mid-book? What is this fantasy doing in my science fiction? Although the action lags a bit in this final section, narratively it is the inevitable (if surprising) endpoint of the story that began all those years ago when Dodge died. No matter how far afield it might seem, it’s all of a piece, derived rigorously from Stephenson’s initial premises. This is hard sci-fi, but it goes so far in its speculative extrapolation toward that end of the spectrum that it hits the end, goes through and comes back around the other side. The result is a story that touches on society, technology, spirituality and even eschatology, a far-reaching attempt at a grand myth that is breathtaking in scope and ambition.

by Charles Yu, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Matthieu Bourel

There Should Be a Public Option for Everything

The struggle between capitalism and socialism is back. “America will never be a socialist country,” President Trump tells us, even as Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez champion democratic socialism. At the same time, a consensus is growing — from Ray Dalio, the billionaire hedge fund manager, to Joseph Stiglitz, the economist and Nobel winner — that capitalism needs major reforms if it is going to survive. Perhaps surprisingly, given the trend toward the privatization of public services over the last generation, American history offers a way forward: the public option.

Most Americans probably associate the idea of a public option with health care. When the Affordable Care Act was debated in 2010, proponents of a public option wanted anyone to be able to buy into a government health insurance option like Medicare that would compete with private health insurance plans. But the public option isn’t a recent policy innovation, it isn’t limited to health care and, historically speaking, it hasn’t even been particularly controversial as an approach to public policy.

Americans love public options and have relied on them for hundreds of years. We just don’t usually think of them with that label. A public swimming pool is a public option; many people have private swimming pools. A public library is a public option; many universities have private libraries. Public parks, public schools, public defenders in courtrooms — the list goes on. They are all public options, government provisions of goods and services that coexist with the private marketplace.

Throughout our history, Americans have turned to public options as a way to promote equal opportunity and reconcile markets with democracy. For example, public libraries allow anyone to read, check out books or surf the internet. This expands educational opportunities and guarantees access to information to everyone, but it doesn’t prevent people from buying books at the bookstore if they choose.

Public options also benefit competitive markets and make capitalism work better. Public options in the form of public schools guarantee that we have an educated work force, and services like public transit and the post office support economic activity. The public option also competes in the marketplace with private options, expanding choices for consumers and acting as a check on monopoly power in concentrated sectors.

And whether it’s a pickup game of basketball or a shared picnic table at a state park, public options bring together people from different walks of life. They also help make our democracy more vibrant by giving us a shared set of experiences and goals to talk over in the public sphere.

by Ganesh Sitaraman and Anne L. Alstott, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Tim Lahan

Climate Change Update

Report: If Earth Continues To Warm At Current Rate Moon Will Be Mostly Underwater By 2400 (The Onion)

Image: uncredited

Thoughts on the Impromptu Kim-Trump Summit

1. South Korean President Moon Jae-in told journalists a week before the DMZ meeting between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump that it was likely to occur, and U.S. news reports also indicate that Trump’s tweeted invitation to the North Korean leader while in Osaka was not spontaneous.

2. Following Trump’s wild threats after his election to rain down “fire and fury” on the DPRK (and thus the entirety of the Korean Peninsula), South Korea and North Korea quickly joined together in an effort to cope with an obviously unstable, dangerous new world leader who could annihilate the whole Korean nation. In February 2017 a South Korean delegation delivered a letter from the North Korean leader to Trump proposing talks. South Korea has since played a de facto mediating role between the U.S. and Pyongyang, Moon repeatedly meeting with Kim and the two apparently coordinating relations with Trump.

3. Trump’s visit to Seoul after the Osaka G-20 summit had been announced in advance. Moon may himself have suggested that during the trip Trump meet Kim at the DMZ to indicate support for the ongoing process of normalized relations between north and south. (The U.S. press downplays or doesn’t grasp the significance of the two states’ declaration of the end to the state of war between them, and the launching of initiatives for rail links and expanded trade ties. Some pundits complain that South Korea is attempting to circumvent U.S. sanctions on the north. Pyongyang notes that since Seoul must obey the U.S., its own negotiations with the U.S. must be one-on-one, not mediated by the south.) Moon looked very pleased posing for photos with Kim and Trump at the DMZ.

4. Every student of Korean history knows that Korea’s fate has been largely determined by the relations between larger, more powerful neighboring nations: China, Japan and Russia. Since it occupied the southern part of the Korean Peninsula in 1945, the U.S. has also shaped that fate. China has been Korea’s historical protector, patron, and teacher; its ties with Korea are “as close as lips and teeth.” Japan has been Seoul’s antagonist, from the Wako pirate raids of the medieval period and the horrific Hideyoshi invasion in the 1590s to colonization in the twentieth century; Tokyo for its part has viewed Korea as “a dagger aimed at the heart of Japan.” Russia has been an opportunistic imperialist, hosting the Korean king in its Seoul legation in the 1890s during a period of instability, seeking trade advantages, installing Kim Il-song in the north in 1945.

All have an interest in maintaining stability on the peninsula. China dreads the prospect of a refugee crisis caused by war, and the reunification of Korea on U.S. imperialist terms. Russia is less concerned but keen on restoring full trade ties with both Koreas, and Putin is cultivating a reputation as a thoughtful statesman striving to facilitate peace (the Astana and Minsk processes, for example). So I would not be surprised if Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin, or both, urged Trump to reach out again to Kim. They are no doubt saying: “Look this is our part of the world; North Korea is much closer to us than you and its nukes threaten us more than you. But you scare us more than the DPRK. We too want disarmament, we just want no more wild threats but rather calm protracted negotiations.”

5. The U.S. media’s general dismissal of the DMZ photo opportunity—as a mere political stunt producing no substance other than to unnecessarily elevate Chairman Kim’s stature in the world—is driven by anti-Trump sentiment rather than a critical examination of its meaning. An MSNBC talking head just stated that if the U.S. accepts a freeze on the DPRK nuclear program, that would change the balance of power in the region and pose an immanent threat to the United States. This remains the norm in televised analysis. Increasingly Trump is depicted as a threat to national security due to his “coddling of dictators” or unwillingness to confront them, Hillary Clinton-style (in Syria). He’s accused of being unpredictable, mercurial, spontaneous, rude to his subordinates and dismissive of their advice. But worst of all from some critics’ standpoint is his failure to maintain the status quo requiring ongoing confrontation.

One doesn’t hear common sense: that this was a rational friendly gesture towards a country that Trump has rationally decided not to attack.

6. The absence of John Bolton, assigned to diplomatic tasks in Mongolia, suggests that Trump wanted to message Kim that, yes, he had heard the DPRK Foreign Ministry’s criticisms of that war-monger and wanted to signify a departure from Bolton’s belligerent line. That the U.S. press would leak the information that Trump might accept a nuclear freeze by the DPRK in return for some sanctions relief, and that Bolton would immediately respond with an angry tweet dissociating himself from that position, suggests that Bolton is on his way out, which can only be good.

7. Is it not obvious that the South Korean state, with twice the North’s population and many times its GDP, and a huge well-equipped military, does not require the presence of 25,000 U.S. troops and the visitation of nuclear-armed aircraft carriers to defend it from the north, which hosts no foreign troops? Shouldn’t the world support the demilitarization of the Korean Peninsula, and its peaceful gradual reunification? U.S. pundits want us to believe that U.S. troops everywhere in the world maintain “security” and “stability” and “defend our national interests.” (The latter should be understood to mean corporate interests, and geopolitical interests centering on capitalist profit.) But the Korean people would just as soon be left alone to work out their historical reconciliation, or assisted by interested parties (like the U.S. and China) in achieving that end. Trumps visit to the DMZ was welcomed by north and south Koreans, causing all to breathe easier.

by Gary Leupp, Counterpunch |  Read more:

[ed. See also: North Korea Nuclear Freeze? Finally, a Realistic Proposal.]

Graffiti
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Are You Really the ‘Real’ You?

Alex was a bouncer when he changed his mind about who he was. Or maybe he wasn’t a bouncer. Maybe he was only pretending.

In the year 2000, “reality TV” still sounded to most people like an oxymoron, a bizarre new genre that was half entertainment and half psychological warfare, where neither audience nor participants were quite sure which of them were the combatants.

The show Alex appeared on, Faking It, had a simple set-up: each week a participant with an archetypical identity would be tasked with learning a skill that jarred with that identity. The participant had four weeks to perfect that skill before being sent to a real event where they would have to pass undetected by experts asked to spot the imposter.

Elbow-patched Alex arrived on the programme as the toffee-nosed eldest son of an upper-class British family. He was 20 years old and as Oxbridge as it’s possible to imagine. If you took Bertrand Russell, bound him in leather and made him smoke a cigar made entirely of armchairs you’d still be several punt rides short. We meet him for the first time at his family’s country home, where he shows us around the grounds and introduces us to Roger, who is a horse.

Alex’s task on Faking It was to pass as a bouncer at one of London’s busiest nightclubs in the middle of Euro 2000. He is 5ft 6in and slight, with a body that kept a respectful distance from any image of athleticism. His clipped private-school consonants and eager-to-please eyes are obvious artefacts of a life spent very far from rowdy pubs. Alex is not deterred; he packs his clothes, says goodbye to his boyfriend Clinton, bids adieu to Roger, and sets out to fake it.

To help him act the part, he is provided with three advisers – kickboxing champion Tony, former police officer and security expert Charlie and voice coach William – and sent to live for a month with Tony on the 15th floor of a council block. Alex has never been to London before and as his taxi drives towards Tony’s flat, he stares out the window with his eyes and mouth open. “My God, look at this place. Laundrette – oh my God, there’s a – I don’t think I’ve ever seen a laundrette… There’s a mattress! There is a mattress, on the pavement… I’m going to get beaten, the absolute shit out of me, in this tie. And this jacket. Oh. My. God.”

How do you change your mind about who you really are? Presumably you start with a view about what your “true” self is and then go on to repudiate that view. But even that first step turns out to be remarkably difficult, because you have to work out what a “true” self could be. When Alex arrived on Faking It he thought he knew what his sense of “me-ness” looked like. It was marching him towards a future life in a big country house, going to horse trials, hunting and shooting. But as you’ve probably guessed, that isn’t how it worked out. Something about Faking It changed Alex’s mind about what his “true” self was really like.

How is that possible? What rational cogs are turning for people when they change their minds about who they are? Are beliefs about ourselves even the kind of thing we can be rational about, when we’re the ones who make those beliefs true? I had to ask Alex directly.

I found him in Australia, where he now lives. It’s been nearly 20 years since the programme first broadcast. His vowels have been hammered flat by years in Australia and he is not as affably eager to please. In some way I think I’d expected to know him, having seen him on TV, but when he says he’s changed he isn’t lying.

“Did going on the show really change your understanding of who you were?” I ask.

“Yes. Completely,” says Alex. ‘“After the show – or, after that experience, I don’t really look at it as a show any more – four or five weeks after I got back home to Oxford I left the UK and came to Australia. I literally dropped everything. I arrived in Australia with a backpack and not much else.”

Before that moment, Alex’s life had followed a predictable pattern. “And then the show was this sort of great chasm that broke that in my mind, and I went, ‘Hang on! I don’t have to do all those things any more. I don’t have to be someone’s son, or brother, or grandson, I can actually be… me.’ I wasn’t going on any mission of self-finding, because I didn’t realise I was lost.”

What is going on in this kind of mind-change? Is our sense of who we are a belief just like any other? More pressingly, how do we do it? Is it the kind of thing we can be persuaded into? What does it mean to have a belief about your true self? What even is a true self?

by Eleanor Gordon-Smith, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Michelle Thompson

The Wild Ride at Babe.Net

In the spring of 2018, I visited the offices of the millennial/Gen-Z-oriented website babe.net, a sunny loft space in Williamsburg, just around the corner from Vice. Babe.net — now shuttered — was then at the frothy peak of its existence. I made sure to wear my coolest pants.

The site’s managing editor, Eleni Mitzali, a 24-year-old blonde with a sharp bob and half-a-dozen tiny earrings who told me she only listened to podcasts about business strategy and murder, offered me a doughnut while I waited for the day to start. I sat on a small couch, in front of a DIY wall-hanging of Rihanna photos, while Rihanna songs played on a nearby Sonos. Above an archway hung a tweet that a staffer had printed out and enlarged: Overheard in LA (at my dinner table): What the fuck is babe dot net? — Bridget Phetasy (@BridgetPhetasy) January 15, 2018.

Great question. Babe.net had been humming along, catering to an audience of about 4 million monthly viewers, before it burst through the wall of collective cultural consciousness on a Saturday night that January with both middle fingers up: “I went on a date with Aziz Ansari. It turned into the worst night of my life,” read the instantly viral headline. Babe more typically was full of articles with perfectly demented headlines like: “What Your Favorite Sex Position Says About What Kind of Hoe You Are”; “We Asked Girls How They Prepare for Dick Appointments, and WOW You Guys Are Some Evil Geniuses”; “We Found ’Em: The Last Remaining Beauty Bloggers With Their Original Faces”; “I’m Pretty Sure Kendall Jenner Is Gay, and I Have Evidence for Days.” (And the follow-up, “Taylor Swift Is Gay and I Have Evidence for Days.”) The site once launched a nearly brilliant March Madness–style bracket ranking “ugly hot guys” on a scale of Adam Driver to Ed Sheeran. Its natural stance was nihilist: A babe.net writer asked Jonathan Cheban, a.k.a. “the FoodGod,” what Kim Kardashian’s butthole tasted like and received a belligerent email response that started “Listen to me you little lowlife” and escalated from there. The writer published the screenshots.

Babe launched in 2016 as a vertical of Tab Media, the brainchild of a 29-year-old British journalist named Jack Rivlin. He’d started the site in 2009 while still a 19-year-old student at Cambridge. The Tab, like Babe, relied on content from a network of unpaid student journalists to write a mix of first-person and reported pieces about being young, along with coverage of cultural topics that mattered to 18-to-24-year-olds. In 2017, Rivlin reportedly walked into a meeting with Rupert Murdoch, hung-over, with glitter left on his face from the previous weekend’s music festival — then, according to the Guardian, he walked out with millions of dollars in funding. (Murdoch was one of a handful of investors, including the Knight Foundation, but he didn’t have operational involvement in Tab Media.)

The company scaled up and churned out more copy: Tab Media was already operating on 80 campuses across the U.K. and the U.S., but it expanded its network of contributors and grew babe.net’s editorial team. Babe became its own millennial-pink website, with an independent staff and its own URL, in May 2017. It would have been “babe.com” — so named because that’s what the founding editors liked to call their friends — but the URL already belonged to a camgirl site.

Every internet era gets the insurgent women’s site it deserves. Jezebel broke new ground with an article about a tampon stuck up a writer’s vagina; xoJane, a microgeneration later, outdid that with a cat hairball found in the same cavity. The Betches defended their right, as feminists (or not, who cares), to Brazilian-wax their vaginas, via sorority-girl screeds. Like the Betches, babe.net certainly wasn’t built to be feminist in any kind of traditional sense (after all, Murdoch was a funder and anarchic page-view-getting was the ethos). And yet babe.net was created during an era when to be a woman saying just about anything online was now, theoretically, classified as feminist. When I asked them about it, the site’s writers described theirs as “not the brand of feminism where we have to unconditionally support every woman no matter what she does. Because women can be problematic too.”

The site was frequently and defiantly unsanitized and “real.” Editor Amanda Ross, who was in charge of all the writers, told me she gave new writers links to the old Gawker archives to read in order to nail the tone. (Rarely had the new writers, with an average age of approximately 23, heard of Gawker — much less did they know about its fall.) “It’s like, you know, women have to care about politics, and you have to care about your appearance, but just the right amount,” Ross explained. She had been appointed the editor of babe.net in the fall of 2017, after working with Tab Media for two months. “And you have to care about sexual health but sometimes I just like, Don’t want to use a condom, I wanna use Plan B instead, you know what I mean?”

Babe took a shit on the shibboleths of media, not to mention feminist thought. For a moment, readers were eager to engage in scat-play. But what was always unclear was how much the site’s writers — often with little or no journalistic experience or training — understood the traditions they were turning inside out or ignoring. Nor was it clear whether staff recognized the parallels between the gray-area #MeToo themes of its Ansari piece and the complicated sexual power dynamics of their own office, the ones that would partly lead to the collapse of the site.

Last spring, at the time of my visit, the staff was getting used to the increased attention (and criticism) that had come along with the traffic from the Ansari story. There were some growing pains, maybe even an identity crisis. The site, Ross told me, was pivoting to more serious investigative journalism, though it would still have the content the people craved, like “What percent hoe are you?”

“I turn 25 tomorrow,” she said, groaning. “I’m aging out of the demographic.” Ross sat in the middle of a long table, fielding pitches from her staff and typing on her computer, twirling one of the coils of her blonde mermaid waves. It felt like a TMZ on TV reboot.

“So I think I want to do a story where I ask men to be my slave on Tinder, like as reparations,” said Ari Bines. Bines was a few months into her job at Babe and had quickly become one of site’s top traffic-getters. During college, she’d started her own blog about being big and black; at Babe, she’d added “… and likes to fuck” to her personal brand.

“Yes! Assigned,” yelled Ross. A young woman with a cool-girl Soviet-era mullet pitched a man-in-the-street video asking men if they knew where the clitoris was. Another staff writer wanted to use the corporate card to buy a haunted doll from eBay — for a story, of course.

Katie Way, the reporter who had written the Ansari piece, said she was working on catching pedophiles on Reddit and launching a series of articles by a young woman she’d reported on, Skoop Hernandez, who was imprisoned for killing her mom’s abusive boyfriend. Babe.net had officially tapped Hernandez to be its prison correspondent.

Sitting in the Babe bullpen with the dozen or so staffers working there at the time felt like a version of All the President’s Men, but with Ariana Grande on the radio and schemes to take down fuckboys instead of corrupt politicians. As advertised by the site’s official slogan, for “girls who don’t give a fuck,” Babe women appeared really not to give a fuck. It was thrilling, invigorating — if terrifying — to watch. These kids would never want to work at, like, the Atlantic, would they?

“I would love to work at the Atlantic,” Way said.

At the end of the day, as they often did, the staff transitioned into Thirsty Tuesday happy hour at their regular haunt, an Irish pub called the Craic. It was a chance for them all to hang out and “put drinks on a card that isn’t ours, basically,” explained Ross.

She sat in the center like a sorority-house den mother (she had, in fact, been in a sorority) and held court as the evening slipped into night, and beers turned to shots, and trips to the bathrooms were taken in pairs. Everyone had tiny tattoos and seemed to genuinely like hanging out with each other. The social-media editor, Syra Aburto, taught me the secret to texting quickly when you have long acrylics on. Another staffer sat down next to me, sweetly sipping a tequila sour with a maraschino cherry. “Oh, don’t be fooled,” Ross called out to me, pointing to maraschino-cherry girl. “She’s cute but savage. She’s a Virgo!” Eventually, someone suggested Union Pool, another made a joke (or not) about needing cocaine, and I decided to leave.

I would find out later that most of that day had been carefully calibrated to impress me. “You know how a teacher decorates the classroom on parents’ visiting day?” Bines said recently, laughing. “It was like that.” The Rihanna poster, the framed enlargements of highly trafficked articles on the wall, even the “What the Fuck is babe.net” sign on the archway had all been hung just for my arrival. The U.S. tab.com staffers, who shared the office with babe.net, had been told to go work at another location for the day. Pitches for the features meeting had been prearranged, and my one-on-one meetings with the writers had been so heavily coached Mitzali and Ross could have been producers on The Bachelor. According to Way, things had been tense and chaotic around the time of my visit, as they’d been since the Aziz piece was published. Nobody really wanted to go to happy hour, another staffer told me. The idea of a reporter and photographer coming to the office set off waves of anxiety. But one thing about the day that was true to the actual dynamics of the workplace: The staff all socialized and drank together all the time. And it often got complicated.

by Allison P. Davis, The Cut | Read more:
Image: Amy Lombard

[ed. Reminds me of Cat Marnell's memoir, 'How to Murder Your Life.']

Why TikTok is Facing Greater Scrutiny

The most downloaded app on the App Store for the last year makes almost no money, is barely understood by anyone over 25, and has already faced investigations, fines and bans on three continents.

TikTok’s success has taken regulators, parents and its competitors by surprise. But with the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) in the UK now investigating the company over its handling of young users’ private data, can reality catch up with the viral smash?

At its core, TikTok is a video-sharing app. Users film themselves in 15-second clips, typically set to music, and upload them to be viewed by followers and strangers alike. If it seems like it came out of nowhere, that’s because in part, it did: the app as it is today is a merger of the original TikTok, which was launched internationally in September 2017, and the earlier viral sensation Musical.ly.

The latter had already become one of the most popular social media platforms for UK and US teenagers by the time it was purchased by TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, in November 2017, and its influence still pervades the platform to this day. More importantly, the merger meant TikTok ended up on the smartphones of more than 60 million users overnight.

ByteDance had experience of that sort of scale, however. The Chinese startup was already famous in its homeland for viral news app Toutiao, which hit 120 million daily users in 2017, as well as Douyin, the China-only version of TikTok that has been kept separate to comply with Beijing’s strict censorship regime.

That pre-existing scale also gave TikTok another weapon: a huge war chest. Before ByteDance was even earning revenue from the app, the company was the single largest advertiser on Snapchat, spending nearly $1bn (£800m) on app install ads on the messaging platform, according to the Wall Street Journal. That spending was recreated on Facebook, Instagram, poster campaigns and TV adverts.

As a result, according to analytics firm SensorTower, TikTok has been the No 1 app on the worldwide App Store for five consecutive quarters, with an estimated 500 million users worldwide. Even if TikTok’s spending dies off, it now has the momentum to survive, according to Emma Worth of the marketing firm Ralph Creative.

“The app itself offers something no other app does and that’s why it has become so successful: paid acquisitions just help more people know about it,” she said. “Young people are fed up with the narcissistic influencer movement on other channels, seeing ‘the perfect life’, ‘the perfect body’, the ‘perfect relationship’ and that’s why they’ve moved to TikTok.”

But with increased scale has come increased scrutiny. In February, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in the US fined the company $5.7m) £4.2m for collecting the personal data of children under 13 without parental consent. In April, TikTok was banned in India, where it claims to have more than 120 million monthly active users, over concerns that the app was being used to share sexually explicit material. The ban was lifted a week later.

The ICO is investigating because of the same data protection concerns as the FTC, but with additional focus on the controls available on the app’s direct messages. The UK watchdog fears that adults are able to send private messages to children they do not know.

It is the ability to live stream that worries the NSPCC and others.

by Alex Hern, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Danish Siddiqui/Reuters

Bansky, Extinction Rebellion, Marble Arch, London 2019
via:

The Chance for Peace

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. […] Is there no other way the world may live?

—Dwight David Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Apr. 16, 1953.

via: (Harper's)

[ed. See also: "When asked if the United States should have a military parade to show off its might, this was then-President Eisenhower’s response: ‘Absolutely not. We are the pre-eminent power on Earth. For us to try and imitate what the Soviets are doing in Red Square would make us look weak.’" (PolitiFact).]

The Impossible Dream

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.
—The Declaration of Independence

These words, from Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, are so familiar that it is easy to assume their meaning is obvious. The puzzle lies in the assertion that we have a right to pursue happiness. John Locke, in his Two Treatises of 1690, said we are all created equal and have inalienable rights, including those to life and liberty. But for Locke the third crucial right was the right to property. In Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, also published in 1690, he wrote about the pursuit of happiness, but it follows from his account there that there can be no right to pursue happiness because we will pursue happiness come what may. The pursuit of happiness is a law of human nature (of what we now call psychology), just as gravity is a law of physics. A right to pursue happiness is no more necessary than a right for water to run downhill.

Jefferson meant, I think, that we have a right to certain preconditions that will allow us to pursue happiness: freedom of speech, so we can speak our minds and learn from others; a career open to talents, so our efforts may be rewarded; freedom of worship, so we may find our way to heaven; and a free market, so we can pursue prosperity. Read this way, Jefferson’s right to the pursuit of happiness is an elaboration of the right to liberty. Liberty means not only freedom from coercion, or freedom under the law—or even the right to participate in politics—it is also a right to live in a free community in which individuals themselves decide how they want to achieve happiness. The “public happiness” to which Jefferson aspired can therefore be attained, since public happiness requires liberty in this expanded sense, as Hannah Arendt would later note.

Jefferson was well aware that being free to pursue happiness does not mean that everyone will be happy. And yet, as Adam Sternbergh explains, we trick ourselves into thinking we know what is needed to be happy: a promotion, a new car, a vacation, a good-looking partner. We believe this even though we know there are plenty of people with good jobs, new cars, vacations, and attractive partners, and many of them are miserable. But they, too, imagine their misery can be fixed by a bottle of Pétrus or a yacht or public adulation. In practice, our strategies for finding happiness are usually self-defeating. There’s plenty of empirical evidence to suggest that much of what we do to gain happiness doesn’t pay off. It seems that aiming at happiness is always a misconceived project; happiness comes, as John Stuart Mill insisted, as the unintended outcome of aiming at something else. “The right to the pursuit of happiness,” wrote Aldous Huxley, “is nothing else than the right to disillusionment phrased in another way.”

This problem is particularly acute in our modern consumer economy, in which political institutions, the economic system, and popular culture are all now primarily dedicated to the pursuit of happiness. This has had the perverse effect of creating a world of frustration and disappointment in which so many discover that happiness is beyond their grasp. The economy fails to deliver for the majority but urges everyone to spend beyond their means. We engage in “retail therapy,” spending for the momentary gratification of acquisition. We encounter advertisements that wrap themselves around us like a blizzard of snow, each promising that if we spend, and go on spending, we will be rewarded with endless delights. This spending helps drive climate change, which threatens to make the planet uninhabitable. Moreover, our sense of who we are seems to be increasingly detached from reality; we live out fantasy versions of ourselves, playing our own private form of air guitar. To constantly pursue something you can never catch is a form of madness. We have built this madness into the very structure of our lives. Every society in the world aims at economic growth, and every society encourages the endless accumulation of wealth. When it comes to wealth, we have great difficulty in saying enough is enough, because it is hard to know when we can safely say we have enough to face down every possible catastrophe.

How then have we come to build a whole culture around an impossible, futile, self-defeating enterprise?

The word happy in English originally simply meant lucky. Are you lucky? It’s always too soon to tell, till death closes your account. For the Greeks and Romans, happiness was linked to success: the happy man (barbarians, slaves, and women hardly counted) was someone good at living up to the ideals of manhood. Virtue, happiness, and success were inextricably intertwined, so that in the end they amounted to the same thing, the ultimate objective. An impartial observer could best judge if someone was virtuous, happy, or successful, because the standards were objective, not subjective. And just as one should withhold judgment on someone’s luck until they are safely dead, so the Greeks held that you could really tell if someone had been happy only when they were securely buried.

This all changed during the seventeenth century, when a few thinkers, Thomas Hobbes foremost, redefined happiness as a subjective experience, an emotional state. “The felicity of this life,” Hobbes wrote in 1651, does not consist, as the Epicureans claimed, “in the repose of a mind satisfied”:

For there is no such finis ultimus (utmost aim) nor summum bonum (greatest good) as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers. Nor can a man any more live whose desires are at an end than he whose senses and imaginations are at a stand. Felicity is a continual progress of the desire from one object to another, the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter.

To be happy, in Hobbes’ view, was to succeed in acquiring pleasurable experiences. And each individual was the sole judge of what is pleasurable. In order to acquire the means to future pleasure, we seek what Hobbes called power—money, status, influence, and friendship are all forms of power. There is no limit to our quest for pleasure and power, just as there is no limit to the merchant’s quest for money; Hobbes took Niccolò Machiavelli’s account of politics and generalized it as an account of human life. Machiavelli said human beings have insatiable appetites, and Hobbes constructed his psychology, moral philosophy, and political theory around this perception. We all, he claimed, endlessly compete with one another over limited resources. This statement seems obvious to us, so we are surprised to discover that the word competition was a new one in Hobbes’ time, as was the idea of a society in which competition is pervasive. In the pre-Hobbesian world, ambition, the desire to get ahead and do better than others, was universally condemned as a vice; in the post-Hobbesian world, it became admirable, a spur to improvement and progress.

The appetite for pleasure, as understood by Hobbes, has two disturbing features. First, it never ends until death. There is no stable condition that counts as being happy; there are only fleeting experiences that must be renewed constantly. We are (though Hobbes doesn’t use the phrase) in an endless pursuit of happiness, and in order to attain happiness, we are in pursuit of the power and wealth that we believe will make it possible. Second, we take an imaginary pleasure now in our future pleasures. And since happiness is subjective, imaginary pleasures are just as authentic as real ones. Thus fantasy and reality become interchangeable.

by David Wootton, Lapham's Quarterly |  Read more:

Image: John Trumbull

Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Regulating Big Tech Makes Them Stronger, So They Need Competition Instead

It is hard to find anyone cheering for a world dominated by a few giants. It is even harder to find anyone who thinks that Big Tech stands any chance of being toppled. Both the right and the left clamour for a break-up of the biggest web platforms, notably in America—from the trustbusting manifesto pledge by Elizabeth Warren, a democratic senator, to the followers of Alex Jones, a right-wing commentator, who was recently banned from several social-media sites.

Monopoly break-ups are the disused weapons of antitrust. Like stone pyramids, they seem a relic of history, a lost art from a fallen civilisation. Yet they are exceptionally hard to do politically. So if break-ups belong to the past, how can society tame Big Tech? The question has fresh salience as America’s Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission divvy up which agency will handle possible antitrust investigations of companies like Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon.

In the absence of a political faith in break-ups, modern trustbusters are operating on the assumption that Big Tech will dominate in perpetuity—and placing upon the incumbents the state-like duties to police bad user activities, from fomenting terrorist violence to infringing copyright. Yet this raises a new problem: complying with these rules would be so expensive that only a handful of (mostly American) companies could afford it. This snuffs out any hope of a big incumbent being displaced by a nascent competitor.

As a creator who derives the bulk of his living from giant media companies, it has been hard for me to watch those companies—and other creators who should really know better—act as cheerleaders for a situation in which the Big Tech firms are being handed a prize beyond measure: control over what is, in effect, a planetary, species-wide electronic nervous system. (...)

Creating state-like duties for the big tech platforms imposes short-term pain on their shareholders in exchange for long-term gain. Shaving a few hundred million dollars off a company's quarterly earnings to pay for compliance is a bargain in exchange for a world in which they need not fear a rival growing large enough to compete with them. Google can stop looking over its shoulder for the next company that will do to it what it did to Yahoo, and Facebook can stop watching for someone ready to cast it in the role of MySpace, in the next social media upheaval.

These duties can only be performed by the biggest companies, which all-but forecloses on the possibility of breaking up Big Tech. Once it has been knighted to serve as an arm of the state, Big Tech cannot be cut down to size if it is to perform those duties.

Over the past 12 months there has been a radical shift in the balance of power on the internet. In the name of taming the platforms, regulators have inadvertently issued them a “Perpetual Internet Domination Licence”, albeit one that requires that they take advice from an aristocracy of elite regulators. With only the biggest tech companies able to perform the regulatory roles they have been assigned because of complexity and cost, they officially become too big to fail, and can only be nudged a little in one direction or another by regulators drawn from their own ranks.

by Cory Doctorow, The Economist |  Read more:

Image: Getty Images

Everything is Written in Stone

Another topic is on health insurance. Harris jumped in early saying that she favored abolishing private health care insurance, or rather programs that would insure all Americans under an expanded Medicare system but would ban all but supplement health care insurance. She’s been wrestling with explaining that ever since – even back and forth a few times during and after last week’s debate.

Short point from me. The whole system of private insurance is something this country is cursed with. We’d be far better if we had the system in Germany or France or Switzerland. But advocates saying that Medicare for All is overwhelmingly popular and would save lots of money are living in a dream world. Polls show pretty clearly that people support Medicare for All because most assume it is a voluntary buy-in system. When they hear that everyone now on private insurance would be moved into expanded Medicare support drops rapidly. It still has a lot of support but it’s not majority support.

You can say no one likes their insurance company. And that’s definitely true in a way, and rhetorically. But the reality is that lots of people are wary of giving up what they have and think that what they’d get in exchange would be worse. You can’t disprove people’s risk aversion with a logic argument.

Another big problem with Medicare for All. Medicare is much more efficient than the private insurance system. We should expand it. But much of our health care system – hospitals, doctors – are supported by the private system reimburseing at significantly higher rates than Medicare. If you moved immediately to everyone being in Medicare at the same reimbursement rates you have today lots of hospitals would simply go under. These aren’t impossible problems. A lot of the problem with the current system is that hospitals, even when nominally non-profit, have become massive profit centers and have collusive relationships with the insurers. So from one perspective if they take it on the chin that’s great. But even if you think it’s a good idea in principle, the level of dislocation and disruption is immense.

The argument I’m making here isn’t against single payer. It is to understand the scale of the challenge on the front end. It’s pressing some realism about the massive challenges of transitioning from one to the other if your plan is not some version of buy-in to Medicare. It’s also not to be fooled by polls that don’t approach the question the way it will be approached in political terms. But circling back to Harris, she seems to have a tendency to make seemingly off-handed commitments with very big implications for a potential general election. Not a huge thing maybe, small data set. But it’s recurred a few times now.

You can run an audacious campaign. Or you can run a cautious campaign. The worst mixture is to think you’re running one and find out in the fall of 2020 that you’re running the other without a clear plan on how to do it.

by Josh Marshall, TPM |  Read more:
[ed. See also: How to Straighten Out the Medicare Maze (NY Times).]

Harry Nilsson

Coconut

Brother bought a coconut, he bought it for a dime
His sister had another one she paid it for the lime

She put the lime in the coconut, she drank 'em bot' up
She put the lime in the coconut, she drank 'em bot' up
She put the lime in the coconut, she drank 'em bot' up
She put the lime in the coconut, she call the doctor, woke 'I'm up

And said "doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take?"
I said "doctor, to relieve this belly ache"
I said "doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take?"
I said "doctor, to relieve this belly ache"

Now lemme get this straight
You put the lime in the coconut, you drank 'em bot' up
Put the lime in the coconut, you drank 'em bot' up
Put the lime in the coconut, you drank 'em bot'up
Put the lime in the coconut, you call your doctor, woke 'I'm up

Said "doctor, ain't there nothing' I can take?"
I said, "doctor, to relieve this belly ache"
I said "doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take?'
I said, "doctor, to relieve this belly ache"

You put the lime in the coconut, you drink 'em bot' together
Put the lime in the coconut and you'll feel better
Put the lime in the coconut, drink 'em bot' up
Put the lime in the coconut and call me in the morning"

Woo-oo-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh
Woo-oo-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh
Woo-oo-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh-ooh

Brother bought a coconut, he bought it for a dime
His sister had another one she paid it for a lime
She put the lime in the coconut, she drank 'em bot' up
She put the lime in the coconut, she called the doctor, woke 'I'm up

And said, "doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take?'
I said, "doctor, to relieve this belly ache"
I said "doctor, ain't there nothin' I can take?"

I said, "doctor, now lemme get this straight

You put the lime in the coconut, you drink 'em bot'up
Put the lime in the coconut, you drink 'em bot' up
Put the lime in the coconut, you drink 'em bot' up
Put the lime in the coconut, you're such a silly woman

Put a lime in the coconut and drink 'em bot' together
Put the lime in the coconut, then you'll feel better
Put the lime in the coconut, drink 'em both down
Put the lime in your coconut, and call me in the morning

Woo, ain't there nothin' you can take?
I say, woo, to relieve your belly ache
You say, well woo, ain't there nothin' I can take?
I say woo, woo, to relieve your belly ache
You say ya, ain't there nothin' I can take?

I say wow, to relieve this belly ache
I said "doctor, ain't there nothing I can take?"
I said, "doctor, ain't there nothing I can take?"
I said, "doctor, ain't there nothing I can take?"
I said, "doctor you're such a silly woman"

Put the lime in the coconut and drink 'em both together
Put the lime in the coconut, and you'll feel better
Put the lime in the coconut, drink 'em bot' up
Put the lime in the coconut and call me in the morning

Yes, you call me in the morning, you call me in the morning
I'll tell you what to do if you call me in the morning
I'll tell you what to do if you call me in the morning
I'll tell you what to do if you call me in the morning
I'll tell you what to do and if you call me in the morning
I'll tell you what to do

[ed. Genius.]

Death of a Political Junkie

"Political Junkie" doesn't rate an entry in William Safire’s New Dictionary of Politics, the final and much-expanded revision of a book Safire first published in 1968. Perhaps that’s just because its meaning was already too obvious to be worth unpacking by 1993, when Richard Nixon’s onetime speechwriter, by then a Pulitzer-winning New York Times columnist and part-time language maven, updated his labor of love for the last time. I wish that Safire had at least tried to shed some light on who coined the term in the first place or when it passed into popular usage, two things nobody seems to know. But I can certainly recall using it early and often, hearing it tossed around as both pejorative and brag, and applying it to myself and my similarly minded pals back when Rachel Maddow was still a zygote.

The Beltway-bred likes of me must have had to call ourselves something in the 1970s, after all. We were making the leap from high school to college when what I still call our Watergate summers exfoliated from third-rate burglary to John Dean’s cancer on the presidency to Nixon giving one last stiff V-fingered salute before boarding Marine One after he’d resigned. Ever since, we’ve held one truth to be self-evident. If you’ll forgive me for paraphrasing Safire’s fellow lexicographer Samuel Johnson, we know that anyone tired of Watergate is tired of life.

No doubt, we’d have caught the bug no matter what. But to us, Watergate was unquestionably what America’s most exuberant political junkie, Chris Matthews, later called it: “Carnival in Rio.” Talk about letting the cat out of the bag, even if he only did so long after the fact. (...)

Once Watergate ebbed, we newly minted political junkies went right back to being oddball members of a subculture that was viewed with suspicion, not to say bemusement, by most of our compatriots. Back in the days when Donald Trump was a flashy would-be casino mogul with only one bankruptcy to brag about and no reality show on NBC to lend him gravitas, longtime Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. could write a book called Why Americans Hate Politics with no worry that anyone would gainsay his title’s premise. (It came out in 1991.) On top of that, as far as I could tell, Americans always had. Almost anywhere outside Washington itself, to my considerable surprise in my tenderer years, people like me were instant Martians.

Discovering that my immediate family and friends’ predilection for smack disguised as political news wasn’t universally shared—and was, indeed, despised—was a major shock the first time my State Department parents took the kids to visit our Oregon relatives after we’d been raised mostly abroad. In our various unwittingly exotic homes, which by then included McLean, Virginia, we’d imbibed constant chatter about politics. Our stalwart aunts and uncles were downright scandalized when they heard my sister and I—mere children!—making cynical jokes about, say, Hubert Humphrey when the evening news was on.

In their placid America, which we dazedly gathered was the agreed-upon one, politics—like religion—was taboo as a subject for opinionated discussion. Attending nightly to Walter Cronkite or The Huntley-Brinkley Report while waiting for Gunsmoke or I Dream of Jeannie was a civic duty to them, not a half-hour feast combining the best elements of Western shootouts with the allure of softcore sitcom porn. They weren’t that crazy about hearing us debate the merits of Gunsmoke or I Dream of Jeannie, either, because what on earth was the point?

What I think struck our Oregon relatives as most alienating of all—and in this, they were stand-ins for Mr. and Mrs. White America writ large—was the dawning recognition that our passion wasn’t rooted solely in a belief that political disputes are consequential to the nation’s well-being. Horrifically, it soon sank in that gabbing endlessly about what was up and who was down on Capitol Hill or in the latest Presidential sweepstakes was these goddamn Martians’ idea of fun, sort of like rotisserie football with the nuclear codes thrown in to add spice.

What makes the comparison apt is that your true, hardcore political junkie is more closely akin to a sports nut than anything else. Most of us thrive on being partisan—we want our team to not only reach but win the Super Bowl every year, even an odd-numbered one when only a few governorships are in play—and yet we’re also the kind of buffs who can say “Great game” and mean it even when our guy has just been out-quarterbacked by the opposition’s version of Tom Brady.

We dote on stats, team lore, and league history, discussing ancient contests and long-gone gridiron superstars as avidly as this year’s NFL season—er, election cycle. To this day, nothing makes Chris Matthews happier than a chance to time-warp over to Arlington Cemetery and dig up Jack Kennedy, his all-time favorite QB. You can practically see the Hardball host’s eyes glaze over with bliss and his chuckle grow beatific as the Camelot syringe nosedives toward his forearm for the thousandth or millionth time. (...)

Only in New York City is political junkiedom not only unabashed but somehow organic to the milieu, at least if you know the right parts of town. But it’s also intellectualized and more ideological than partisan, which usually wrecks everything. True ideologues are never in it simply for love of the game, and often disdain those who are. I imagine that many of my New York friends—from mere liberals to ardent leftists—would be confounded by how easily and happily I can bond with conservative P.J.’s elsewhere in the country once it’s established that we delight in the same lore.

Then again, I should probably have found a way to put the foregoing and not only my Oregon memories in the past tense. That’s because, in the Trump era, the creature I’m describing—and, for that matter, the creature I was—has become virtually extinct. And right, I know that sounds counterintuitive. Nationwide, aren’t we all obsessed with Trump’s latest outrage pretty much 24/7, no matter how much we’d give to go cold turkey? (...)

A spectatorial addiction to politics that’s bereft of any sort of pleasure principle somewhere in the mix—e.g., the way that, albeit from a safe distance, we can exult in the untrammeled LBJ-ness of LBJ or even, more recently, the finesse of Obama’s “long game”—is a recipe for misery. Nowadays, the only people who get any pleasure out of Trump’s presidency are the MAGA zealots at his rallies, and as we all know, their idea of fun is on the scary side.

For us recovering P.J.s, keeping up with Trump’s latest atrocity has become an ordeal, not our favorite recreational drug. And yet, as Pete Buttigieg recently put it, “It is the nature of grotesque things that you can’t look away.” That’s virtually the opposite of the zesty interest we used to take in the spectacle for its own sake, even in eras when the game’s potential consequences were no joke.

One refuge from 24/7 Trumpism is escaping into blather about the 2020 Democratic field: who’s electable, who’s running the brainiest campaign or showing the most intriguing flashes of welcome wit and nimbleness, and who’s ahead in the horse race at this meaninglessly early stage of things. Briefly, we get to imagine that we’re back in P.J. business at the old stand again, because this kind of “the rain in Spain falls mainly on Mansplain” musical interlude is the sort of fake-insider prattle that turned us into Beltway nuts to begin with.

But it’s a very temporary treat, because the only reason we can indulge ourselves this way is that the race for the nomination truly is at a meaninglessly early stage. Once the choice of which of these contenders will be the Democrats’ anointed challenger to go up against our nightmare president goes from hypothetical to white-knuckle imminent to, come convention time, irreversible, soul-crushing anxiety about the need to defeat Trump is guaranteed to end our paradoxical vacation—or recidivist retreat into hobbyism, anyhow.

To whatever extent this is a lament, I realize it’s one unlikely to rate much sympathy from people who didn’t need Trump’s advent—or any earlier administration’s depredations, for that matter—to remind them that politics is a deadly serious business, not a source of entertainment. That Trump himself is, among other roles, our Entertainer-in-Chief is exactly what makes the thought of being entertained so toxic.

Nor, sadly enough, do I expect to ever be entertained again, even after Trump leaves office. Except for Joe Biden, for whom getting back to business at the old stand is both his major selling point and his mission in life, does anyone really believe the country will return to “normal” once our forty-fifth POTUS departs the scene? I doubt that any of the other 2020 Democratic candidates think so, and I bet that Mitch McConnell isn’t planning on it either. More likely, we’re in for something like a generation of strange, wracked, unnerving times, which won’t have much resemblance to how we used to think the U.S.A. was supposed to work. (...)

Maybe I’m no better than a kid who discovers that his favorite electric toy-train set was crammed with tiny, live, terrified passengers when it went off the rails. But I don’t think so, and not only because getting off on politics as spectacle hardly precludes an absorption in politics as deadly serious business. (If anything, it’s more like the spoonful of sugar that always made the medicine go down.) More tellingly, not that many of us realized it until it was no longer the case in Trump’s U.S.A., the pleasures of being a political junkie always depended on an innate belief that America’s democratic system was too resilient to be at more than temporary risk from any demagogue, crook, or would-be despot.

Rather more naively, we also took it for granted that democracy itself was something we could rely on both parties, no matter how opportunistic or scheming, to preserve and protect. Even the scandal so many of us were weaned on didn’t shake that confidence, since the last and most pious of the Watergate clichés was everybody’s affirmation that, ultimately, “the system worked.” (...)

In other words, the reason people like me can’t be happy political junkies anymore is that our superficially frivolous addiction always depended more than we knew on a secret ingredient: idealism. When I try to imagine what a desperate struggle American politics must look like to youngsters shaped primarily by resisting the Trump era—that is, people whose own idealism takes the form of outraged disbelief, not unwitting complacency—I sometimes think of my favorite quote from Talleyrand, that ultimate political survivor: “Only those who lived before the Revolution know how sweet life can be.”

by Tom Carson, The Baffler |  Read more:
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[ed. "Superficially frivolous addiction", "unwitting complacency". Destroying democracy is fun! (but really, it's the system's fault).]

Macsime Simon
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