Jean Degottex (1918-1988), Sans titre, 1959
via:
Thursday, November 19, 2020
Google Pay: Now a Full-Fledged Financial Service
Google today announced a major relaunch of Google Pay—which formerly was a relatively simple tap-to-pay app but will now be a complete financial service competing with the likes of Venmo, Mint, Apple Pay, and even some banks. The new Pay is available as an Early Access app in the Google Play store as of this afternoon, alongside the original and much less ambitious Google Pay—which is now tagged as "old version."
In addition to the simple tap-to-pay features offered in the previous app, users of the new Google Pay can directly link bank accounts and credit cards to the app. This allows for AI-driven insights into spending and saving, replacing much of the functionality of your own bank's online banking app with Google Pay, and more.
We can already hear readers screaming about the privacy implications of allowing Google directly into your banking, credit card, and payment histories—and we don't really blame you. Google clearly heard those cries coming as well and seems to be doing what it can to allay those concerns.
During the mandatory privacy preference section of the Google Pay setup process, the app assures you that personal info gathered in Pay will never be sold to a third party. It also pledges that your Pay transactions are not shared with any other Google services—so, for example, purchasing a pair of shoes with Google Pay shouldn't result in a sudden onslaught of Nike and Adidas ads while watching YouTube videos later.
If allowed, Google Pay can use your transaction history to more effectively select what cash-back and similar offers to present you with in the Explore and Discover areas of the app. The setting is optional, and it's opt-in—you have to actually grant Google permission before it will use your data to serve offers inside the app. In addition to the simple "yes you may" and "oh heck no" options, there's a more cautious "try it for three months"—if selected, Google will offer you targeted offers for now but prompt you to review your decision after you've had a few months to stew about it.
Finally, you have the option to "help friends find and pay you"—which, for our older readers, is largely similar to the old days of publicly listed or private telephone numbers. If you turn this setting on, entering your phone number will pop up your name and face, populated from your Google profile—and users who already have you as Google contacts (e.g., in their phone's address book) can find you directly in Pay that way as well. If you disable it, you can still accept payments—but your friends will need to be extra careful not to bobble your number when entering it since they won't get a confirmation that you're you.
We can already hear readers screaming about the privacy implications of allowing Google directly into your banking, credit card, and payment histories—and we don't really blame you. Google clearly heard those cries coming as well and seems to be doing what it can to allay those concerns.
During the mandatory privacy preference section of the Google Pay setup process, the app assures you that personal info gathered in Pay will never be sold to a third party. It also pledges that your Pay transactions are not shared with any other Google services—so, for example, purchasing a pair of shoes with Google Pay shouldn't result in a sudden onslaught of Nike and Adidas ads while watching YouTube videos later.
If allowed, Google Pay can use your transaction history to more effectively select what cash-back and similar offers to present you with in the Explore and Discover areas of the app. The setting is optional, and it's opt-in—you have to actually grant Google permission before it will use your data to serve offers inside the app. In addition to the simple "yes you may" and "oh heck no" options, there's a more cautious "try it for three months"—if selected, Google will offer you targeted offers for now but prompt you to review your decision after you've had a few months to stew about it.
Finally, you have the option to "help friends find and pay you"—which, for our older readers, is largely similar to the old days of publicly listed or private telephone numbers. If you turn this setting on, entering your phone number will pop up your name and face, populated from your Google profile—and users who already have you as Google contacts (e.g., in their phone's address book) can find you directly in Pay that way as well. If you disable it, you can still accept payments—but your friends will need to be extra careful not to bobble your number when entering it since they won't get a confirmation that you're you.
App overview
The new Google Pay offers three major feature groupings, organized into view icons at the bottom of the app:
The new Google Pay offers three major feature groupings, organized into view icons at the bottom of the app:
- Explore (...)
- Pay (...)
- Insights (...)
by Jim Salter, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: Google
[ed. See also: Google Pay's massive relaunch makes it an all-encompassing money app (Verge).]
'Integrity Still Matters'
Of all the Republicans to push back on Donald Trump’s baseless claims about voter fraud, Brad Raffensperger, the mild-mannered top election official in Georgia, did not seem like a likely candidate.
It was just a few months ago that civil rights groups called on Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to resign from his position after voters spent hours waiting to vote in the primary election. He also faced criticism for declining to mail an absentee ballot application to all voters for the general election – something he did in the primary. And he raised alarms by creating an election fraud taskforce and trumpeting potential voter fraud prosecutions with little context.
But after Trump lost Georgia to Joe Biden by around 13,000 votes, Raffensperger has emerged as one of the few Republican officials across the US who has aggressively disputed Trump’s baseless claims that fraud tainted the election result in the state. Trump, who endorsed Raffensperger in 2018, is now directing his ire at the secretary of state, and Georgia’s two Republican senators, both locked in separate runoff contests against Democrats, have called on Raffensperger to resign.
Raffensperger, who is quarantining after his wife tested positive for Covid-19, continued to push back on the attacks against his office on Wednesday, saying Trump’s loss in the state – long considered a Republican stronghold – was the candidate’s fault.
“I’m a conservative Republican. Yes, I wanted President Trump to win. But as secretary of state we have to do our job,” he said in an interview with the Guardian. “I’m gonna walk that fine, straight, line with integrity. I think that integrity still matters.”
He added there were 24,000 Republicans who voted by mail in Georgia’s primary, but did not turn out to vote in November. Those voters didn’t vote again in November, Raffensperger suggested, because Trump railed against voting by mail.
“Voters listened to the president, they didn’t show up,” he said. “That would have been a 10,000 person cushion that President Trump would have had if those folks would have come back out. They just stayed at home.”
“Democrats really strongly pushed it,” he added. “I hope that, as a Republican, our party becomes very active.”
Raffensperger says he has tried to use a fact-based approach to push back on false claims thrown at his state. When Republicans complained about the voting machines in Georgia, the state completed an audit on a random sampling of machines in six counties and found no tampering.
“We keep trying to knock down these rumors. But it’s like whack-a-mole. It’s a rumor mill not supported by fact,” he said.
He noted that the CDC said just before election day that voters with Covid-19 could vote in person, which might have scared off older voters from showing up at the polls.
“It’s really those little things that turned out to be big things. It’s not the machines, and it’s not the process.”
It was just a few months ago that civil rights groups called on Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, to resign from his position after voters spent hours waiting to vote in the primary election. He also faced criticism for declining to mail an absentee ballot application to all voters for the general election – something he did in the primary. And he raised alarms by creating an election fraud taskforce and trumpeting potential voter fraud prosecutions with little context.
Raffensperger, who is quarantining after his wife tested positive for Covid-19, continued to push back on the attacks against his office on Wednesday, saying Trump’s loss in the state – long considered a Republican stronghold – was the candidate’s fault.
“I’m a conservative Republican. Yes, I wanted President Trump to win. But as secretary of state we have to do our job,” he said in an interview with the Guardian. “I’m gonna walk that fine, straight, line with integrity. I think that integrity still matters.”
He added there were 24,000 Republicans who voted by mail in Georgia’s primary, but did not turn out to vote in November. Those voters didn’t vote again in November, Raffensperger suggested, because Trump railed against voting by mail.
“Voters listened to the president, they didn’t show up,” he said. “That would have been a 10,000 person cushion that President Trump would have had if those folks would have come back out. They just stayed at home.”
“Democrats really strongly pushed it,” he added. “I hope that, as a Republican, our party becomes very active.”
Raffensperger says he has tried to use a fact-based approach to push back on false claims thrown at his state. When Republicans complained about the voting machines in Georgia, the state completed an audit on a random sampling of machines in six counties and found no tampering.
“We keep trying to knock down these rumors. But it’s like whack-a-mole. It’s a rumor mill not supported by fact,” he said.
He noted that the CDC said just before election day that voters with Covid-19 could vote in person, which might have scared off older voters from showing up at the polls.
“It’s really those little things that turned out to be big things. It’s not the machines, and it’s not the process.”
by Sam Levine, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Brynn Anderson/AP
Wednesday, November 18, 2020
We Are Built to Forget
We remember and we forget. Lots of people know that marijuana makes us forget, and researchers in the sixties and seventies wanted to understand how. They discovered that the human brain has special receptors that perfectly fit psychoactive chemicals like THC, the active agent in cannabis. But why, they wondered, would we have neuroreceptors for a foreign substance? We don’t. Those receptors are for substances produced in our own brains. The researchers discovered that we produce cannabinoids, our own version of THC, that fit those receptors exactly. The scientists had stumbled onto the neurochemical function of forgetting, never before understood. We are designed, they realized, not only to remember but also to forget. The first of the neurotransmitters discovered was named anandamide, Sanskrit for bliss.
Twila comes and stands close to me. She peels the skin from a ripe peach with her small knife, then cradles the fruit in her palm and slices glistening sections into my bowl. Thick golden juice drips between her fingers onto the table. She pours milk over the peach and pushes the bowl gently toward me.
I said “parents.” Was my father there? I think so. But there is no way to know. What I remember is the peach.
People suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder are often unable to forget the causative trauma. What if we could simply erase that moment, expunge it as if it never happened? Researchers are working to develop drugs that will mimic the cannabinoids produced in the brain, pharmaceuticals that will find their way to those waiting receptors and lock in—click—a perfect fit. Release from memory. Oblivion. Bliss.
Scientists with hard hearts can create mice with unusually high and unusually low levels of cannabinoids. In one experiment, the mice were subjected to a loud sound followed by an electric shock to their feet. The mice with low levels of cannabinoids remembered what was coming. An echo in their tiny brains warned them of harm on its way. They froze at the loud sound, with apparent dread. But the mice with high levels of cannabinoids didn’t freeze. The shock that followed was news each time. Which is the blessing—the memory of pain and with it the dread, the ability to make adjustments to keep ourselves safe? Or the bliss of forgetting, never imagining the harm that is coming?
My parents divorced when I was ten.
My father, unsurprisingly, was absent before and after.
Unsurprisingly, I loved him.
I got pregnant when I was sixteen. It was 1965.
I was expelled from school.
My mother kicked me out.
My father and his new wife took me in.
My baby was given away.
Later, I argued with my father’s wife.
She kicked me out, a permanent exile from my silent father.
I was ten, I was sixteen, I was nineteen. Now I am sixty-five. All of this was a long time ago.
There. I have named everything you need to know. I have told these stories in other places, for other reasons, and am reluctant to say them again. I was on a basketball team. I am simply looking for that lost fragment.
I still can smell the peach. My grandmother’s voice, silent for thirty years. What was she saying to me? Did she say, Don’t be afraid? Did she say, Hush, everyone who loves you is sleeping? Did she say, Remember these hands cutting this ripe peach for you. This moment is important. (...)
We must forget in order to make room for remembering. We now have a metaphor for this process: delete. Here is oblivion. But here, too, is our hunger to know the full story. Our forgetting is the saboteur of that hope. I was on a basketball team with friends and classmates for three years. If we practiced or played games for one hundred twenty minutes five days of the week, for ten weeks of the season, where are those eighteen thousand minutes?
Maybe we are lucky if we produce a lot of cannabinoids. Wash the brain with forgetting. But what happens if we delete what lies near the center of our story? I remember, one day, running to the girls’ room to throw up again after lunch in the cafeteria. I remember moving past the school nurse, hunching over my five-month belly. Somehow later I was at her desk, and somehow I had in my hand a green expulsion card. I have it still, so I know this is memory, not fiction. I remember taking my mittens and jacket from my locker, walking down the long quiet hall, linoleum and echo, and past the big window in the office. The secretaries stared at me. I don’t remember any of their names. I remember the long walk home, and I remember terror. I remember a giving in, an understanding that this, finally, here, was the beginning of something too big and too sad. (...)
Goodwin and Baron studied motion in their “Lossless” series, manipulating the compression of information and exposing the residual effects of that process. Lots of frames had to go. Most had to go. How do we see an uninterrupted flow of movement, then, if most of the image is missing? Using John Ford’s classic film The Searchers, starring John Wayne, Goodwin and Baron translated the analog film to digital form and then retrieved what was lost in the process. The result is a strange, beautiful run of smeared and melting images of men and horses tearing across a desert. We can make out the men, the horses, the churning legs and upraised cowboy arms brandishing guns. But the images fracture, hesitate, jolt, and smear again. What are we seeing? Memory. Most of the original images are allowed to be forgotten. That leaves a lot of emptied frames, blanks waiting to be written. Then, Goodwin says, “these frames look backward and forward in time to paint the resolved image … We toss out the keyframes and let the file try to connect the intermediate frames.”
What I see is whole sections of story tossed out, forgotten, and the ghosts of the forgotten, lingering. What was lost becomes visible, and it is beautiful.
by Meredith Hall, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: Sarah Stone, Sir Ashton Lever's Museum, 1785 (State Library of New South Wales)
*
The morning light through the dusty old screens is fractured into tiny squares across the table. My grandmother, Twila, and my brother and I are the only ones awake. My parents and my sister and my brother and my grandmother’s old mother and her sisters and their husbands sleep on sagging beds and sofa beds and cots in all the rooms in the tilted little camp my grandmother rents each summer. The lake is silver. I have yanked my bathing suit from the line and pulled it, cold and still wet from last night, up over my warm skin. I am very young, maybe five, and I love this place and my grandmother and my parents and the sleeping people and the silver lake and the hatched yellow light on the old table.Twila comes and stands close to me. She peels the skin from a ripe peach with her small knife, then cradles the fruit in her palm and slices glistening sections into my bowl. Thick golden juice drips between her fingers onto the table. She pours milk over the peach and pushes the bowl gently toward me.
I said “parents.” Was my father there? I think so. But there is no way to know. What I remember is the peach.
*
Scientists with hard hearts can create mice with unusually high and unusually low levels of cannabinoids. In one experiment, the mice were subjected to a loud sound followed by an electric shock to their feet. The mice with low levels of cannabinoids remembered what was coming. An echo in their tiny brains warned them of harm on its way. They froze at the loud sound, with apparent dread. But the mice with high levels of cannabinoids didn’t freeze. The shock that followed was news each time. Which is the blessing—the memory of pain and with it the dread, the ability to make adjustments to keep ourselves safe? Or the bliss of forgetting, never imagining the harm that is coming?
*
There are not many stories to tell:My parents divorced when I was ten.
My father, unsurprisingly, was absent before and after.
Unsurprisingly, I loved him.
I got pregnant when I was sixteen. It was 1965.
I was expelled from school.
My mother kicked me out.
My father and his new wife took me in.
My baby was given away.
Later, I argued with my father’s wife.
She kicked me out, a permanent exile from my silent father.
I was ten, I was sixteen, I was nineteen. Now I am sixty-five. All of this was a long time ago.
There. I have named everything you need to know. I have told these stories in other places, for other reasons, and am reluctant to say them again. I was on a basketball team. I am simply looking for that lost fragment.
I still can smell the peach. My grandmother’s voice, silent for thirty years. What was she saying to me? Did she say, Don’t be afraid? Did she say, Hush, everyone who loves you is sleeping? Did she say, Remember these hands cutting this ripe peach for you. This moment is important. (...)
*
We need to forget. Imagine remembering every fractional moment of every morning, as you showered, fed your children or made your coffee, pulled the door closed and turned the key. Like bad narrative writing, every moment would be equally important, the golden juice dripping through fingers as significant as walking out of my high school in shame one cold winter day. What meaning could we make if every second asked for our full attention?We must forget in order to make room for remembering. We now have a metaphor for this process: delete. Here is oblivion. But here, too, is our hunger to know the full story. Our forgetting is the saboteur of that hope. I was on a basketball team with friends and classmates for three years. If we practiced or played games for one hundred twenty minutes five days of the week, for ten weeks of the season, where are those eighteen thousand minutes?
Maybe we are lucky if we produce a lot of cannabinoids. Wash the brain with forgetting. But what happens if we delete what lies near the center of our story? I remember, one day, running to the girls’ room to throw up again after lunch in the cafeteria. I remember moving past the school nurse, hunching over my five-month belly. Somehow later I was at her desk, and somehow I had in my hand a green expulsion card. I have it still, so I know this is memory, not fiction. I remember taking my mittens and jacket from my locker, walking down the long quiet hall, linoleum and echo, and past the big window in the office. The secretaries stared at me. I don’t remember any of their names. I remember the long walk home, and I remember terror. I remember a giving in, an understanding that this, finally, here, was the beginning of something too big and too sad. (...)
*
Artists Doug Goodwin and Rebecca Baron wanted to see—to really see—what is lost when analog film is translated to digital form. A moment-to-moment translation of an average 35 mm film would require four hundred DVDs. What happens when all that information is reduced to a single DVD? A lot of information is left out.Goodwin and Baron studied motion in their “Lossless” series, manipulating the compression of information and exposing the residual effects of that process. Lots of frames had to go. Most had to go. How do we see an uninterrupted flow of movement, then, if most of the image is missing? Using John Ford’s classic film The Searchers, starring John Wayne, Goodwin and Baron translated the analog film to digital form and then retrieved what was lost in the process. The result is a strange, beautiful run of smeared and melting images of men and horses tearing across a desert. We can make out the men, the horses, the churning legs and upraised cowboy arms brandishing guns. But the images fracture, hesitate, jolt, and smear again. What are we seeing? Memory. Most of the original images are allowed to be forgotten. That leaves a lot of emptied frames, blanks waiting to be written. Then, Goodwin says, “these frames look backward and forward in time to paint the resolved image … We toss out the keyframes and let the file try to connect the intermediate frames.”
What I see is whole sections of story tossed out, forgotten, and the ghosts of the forgotten, lingering. What was lost becomes visible, and it is beautiful.
by Meredith Hall, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: Sarah Stone, Sir Ashton Lever's Museum, 1785 (State Library of New South Wales)
Tuesday, November 17, 2020
Murphy's Law
Trump’s absurd insistence that he “WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!” is easy enough to ignore. What is harder to ignore is what his appointee who runs the General Services Administration (GSA) is doing. By statute, the GSA’s administrator has responsibility for ascertaining “the apparent successful candidates for the office of President and Vice President.” This crucial ascertainment sets the government’s support for the transition effort in motion. When Congress enacted the transition law and later amended it seven times, it does not appear to have contemplated the risk that a partisan loyalist appointed by a corrupt president would refuse to fulfill this duty when the outcome of the election was clear. Enter GSA Administrator Emily Murphy.
Murphy is refusing to ascertain the apparent winner of the 2020 election as the president who appointed her disputes the clear outcome. She has not been especially transparent about her rationale. A spokesperson for her agency unhelpfully said, “an ascertainment has not yet been made” and “[the] Administrator will continue to abide by, and fulfill, all requirements under the law.” Murphy, it seems, is putting her loyalty to Trump over her duty to the American people.
Much is at stake. The Congressional Research Service has written that “[t]he smooth and orderly transfer of power generally is a notable feature of presidential transitions, and a testament to the legitimacy and durability of the electoral and democratic processes.” Murphy’s misconduct is dangerous.
Her ascertainment is the legally necessary precursor to the government’s assistance to the Biden-Harris Presidential Transition Team. It releases $6.3 million dollars to the team, which is funded by public and private money; a loan of expanded federal office space and equipment; access to government agencies that will begin sharing information and records about ongoing activities, plans and vulnerabilities; national security briefings for the president; and other support. The New York Times reports that “transition officials said her inaction was preventing Mr. Biden’s teams from moving into government offices, including secure facilities where they can discuss classified information.” The Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently confirmed that it is not providing national security briefings to the president-elect. The Defense Department has also reportedly indicated that it will not meet with the Biden-Harris transition team until Murphy formally affirms the apparent winner.
Murphy’s refusal comes as great news to hostile foreign powers. Experts have cautioned that authoritarian governments see a benefit in having public confidence in democracy undermined. But one of Trump’s own former national security experts, Fiona Hill, has warned: “The biggest risk to this election is not the Russians, it’s us.” Four former Secretaries of Homeland Security, Republican and Democratic (Tom Ridge, Michael Chertoff, Janet Napolitano, and Jeh Johnson), have now called on Murphy to issue the ascertainment of an apparent winner of the election, counseling: “At this period of heightened risk for our nation, we do not have a single day to spare to begin the transition. For the good of the nation, we must start now.” (...)
Murphy has a sordid history in the Trump administration. As I recounted in my July 2 piece for the Review, she cancelled a long-planned relocation of the FBI’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. Circumstances suggest she may have been satisfying a desire on the part of President Trump to avoid opening real estate near his Washington, D.C., hotel that a competing hotel could acquire. Trump leases the government’s Old Post Office building from Murphy’s agency for his hotel, which sits less than a block from the J. Edgar Hoover building that houses FBI headquarters.
Murphy has declined to discuss a meeting with President Trump at the White House shortly before the cancellation. She refused to answer questions about it posed by the GSA’s inspector general, who noted that her testimony in an April 2018 hearing before Congress may have “left the misleading impression that she had no discussions with the President or senior White House officials in the decision-making process about the project.”
by Walter M. Shaub Jr., NYRB | Read more:
Image: White House
Murphy is refusing to ascertain the apparent winner of the 2020 election as the president who appointed her disputes the clear outcome. She has not been especially transparent about her rationale. A spokesperson for her agency unhelpfully said, “an ascertainment has not yet been made” and “[the] Administrator will continue to abide by, and fulfill, all requirements under the law.” Murphy, it seems, is putting her loyalty to Trump over her duty to the American people.
Her ascertainment is the legally necessary precursor to the government’s assistance to the Biden-Harris Presidential Transition Team. It releases $6.3 million dollars to the team, which is funded by public and private money; a loan of expanded federal office space and equipment; access to government agencies that will begin sharing information and records about ongoing activities, plans and vulnerabilities; national security briefings for the president; and other support. The New York Times reports that “transition officials said her inaction was preventing Mr. Biden’s teams from moving into government offices, including secure facilities where they can discuss classified information.” The Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently confirmed that it is not providing national security briefings to the president-elect. The Defense Department has also reportedly indicated that it will not meet with the Biden-Harris transition team until Murphy formally affirms the apparent winner.
Murphy’s refusal comes as great news to hostile foreign powers. Experts have cautioned that authoritarian governments see a benefit in having public confidence in democracy undermined. But one of Trump’s own former national security experts, Fiona Hill, has warned: “The biggest risk to this election is not the Russians, it’s us.” Four former Secretaries of Homeland Security, Republican and Democratic (Tom Ridge, Michael Chertoff, Janet Napolitano, and Jeh Johnson), have now called on Murphy to issue the ascertainment of an apparent winner of the election, counseling: “At this period of heightened risk for our nation, we do not have a single day to spare to begin the transition. For the good of the nation, we must start now.” (...)
Murphy has a sordid history in the Trump administration. As I recounted in my July 2 piece for the Review, she cancelled a long-planned relocation of the FBI’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. Circumstances suggest she may have been satisfying a desire on the part of President Trump to avoid opening real estate near his Washington, D.C., hotel that a competing hotel could acquire. Trump leases the government’s Old Post Office building from Murphy’s agency for his hotel, which sits less than a block from the J. Edgar Hoover building that houses FBI headquarters.
Murphy has declined to discuss a meeting with President Trump at the White House shortly before the cancellation. She refused to answer questions about it posed by the GSA’s inspector general, who noted that her testimony in an April 2018 hearing before Congress may have “left the misleading impression that she had no discussions with the President or senior White House officials in the decision-making process about the project.”
by Walter M. Shaub Jr., NYRB | Read more:
Image: White House
[ed. What started as an embarrassing temper tantrum has now devolved into just plain truculence and stupidity. The whole country is swirling around Trump's toilet. See also: History Suggests Delay In Trump-Biden Transition Could Mean Danger (NPR).]
Monday, November 16, 2020
Trump Administration, in Late Push, Moves to Sell Oil Rights in Arctic Refuge
The Arctic refuge is one of the last vast expanses of wilderness in the United States, 19 million acres that for the most part are untouched by people, home instead to wandering herds of caribou, polar bears and migrating waterfowl. It has long been prized, and protected, by environmentalists, but President Trump has boasted that opening part of it to oil development was among the most significant of his efforts to expand domestic fossil fuel production.
The Federal Register on Monday posted a “call for nominations” from the Bureau of Land Management, to be officially published Tuesday, relating to lease sales in about 1.5 million acres of the refuge along the coast of the Arctic Ocean. A call for nominations is essentially a request to oil companies to specify which tracts of land they would be interested in exploring and potentially drilling for oil and gas.
The American Petroleum Institute, an industry group, said it welcomed the move. In a statement, the organization said that development in the refuge was “long overdue and will create good-paying jobs and provide a new revenue stream for the state — which is why a majority of Alaskans support it.”
The administration’s announcement establishes a tight timeline for lease sales, with the earliest they could occur being on or about Jan. 17. The call for nominations will allow for comments until Dec. 17, after which the bureau, part of the Interior Department, could issue a final notice of sales to occur as soon as 30 days later.
Normally the bureau would take time to review the comments and determine which tracts to sell before issuing the final notice of sale, a process that can take several months. In this case, however, the bureau could decide to make the entire coastal plain available and issue the notice immediately.
by Henry Fountain, NYT | Read more:
Image: Christopher Miller for The New York Times[ed. Any reasonable court should throw this out just on process alone. oh, wait... See also:
Trump pushes extensive rollbacks of environmental protections on his way out of the White House (ADN).]
Trump pushes extensive rollbacks of environmental protections on his way out of the White House (ADN).]
Sunday, November 15, 2020
Social Media Managers Are Not Okay
Until recently, Christina Garnett worked at a global agency managing social media accounts for Fortune 500 companies, running a team that moderated and responded to people’s online questions. During the first months of the pandemic, she would wake up at 3 a.m. or 4 a.m., anxiously checking her phone and email to see if there was yet another crisis that required a quick response: Did the stock market crash? Did the president tweet about a specific brand? Was there a potential Covid-19 vaccine?
The 37-year-old social strategist often felt depressed and misunderstood by upper management, who didn’t fully understand how much time, effort, and stress social media work entails — and how toxic it can be for those who perform it every day, for hours and hours. “They don’t know what it’s like to live in that Twitter feed… to live in the comments section and to be able to see a populace that is agitated, that feels hopeless, that feels angry, that feels powerless,” she says. “It has turned to a point where we are either crying into the void or we’re yelling at it.”
In the relentless news cycle of 2020, social media managers are first responders. At a time when many are feeling social media’s impact on mental health and the burnout of working through a pandemic, they are under immense pressure to stay online, always be on call, respond quickly, and not make mistakes. In some cases they are on the verge of psychological collapse. Yet the importance of their work is still often invisible and undermined.
When Garnett shared her concerns about how 2020 is affecting social media managers in a blog post, messages started pouring in from dozens of peers who told her they were also struggling.
She had first tried to minimize her feelings. She told herself others had it worse than her, that she wasn’t working 24-hour shifts at a hospital and lives were not at stake in her job. But eventually, she couldn’t take it anymore. In June, she quit her job at the agency and now works as a strategist for a tech company. (...)
Social media managers are making important — and very public — decisions all the time. They need to respond to news and conversations quickly to be effective. The public voice and image of companies, media outlets, public figures, and institutions are in their hands at a very delicate time. Yet their job is still often seen as something anyone could do, or left to those who are just getting started in their careers.
“It’s like putting an intern to be your press secretary,” says Alan Rosenblatt, a social media consultant for political campaigns who teaches digital and social media strategy at George Washington University and Johns Hopkins University. “It’s a recipe for disaster.”
by Marta Martinez, OneZerop | Read more:
Image: Lia Liao
The 37-year-old social strategist often felt depressed and misunderstood by upper management, who didn’t fully understand how much time, effort, and stress social media work entails — and how toxic it can be for those who perform it every day, for hours and hours. “They don’t know what it’s like to live in that Twitter feed… to live in the comments section and to be able to see a populace that is agitated, that feels hopeless, that feels angry, that feels powerless,” she says. “It has turned to a point where we are either crying into the void or we’re yelling at it.”
When Garnett shared her concerns about how 2020 is affecting social media managers in a blog post, messages started pouring in from dozens of peers who told her they were also struggling.
She had first tried to minimize her feelings. She told herself others had it worse than her, that she wasn’t working 24-hour shifts at a hospital and lives were not at stake in her job. But eventually, she couldn’t take it anymore. In June, she quit her job at the agency and now works as a strategist for a tech company. (...)
Social media managers are making important — and very public — decisions all the time. They need to respond to news and conversations quickly to be effective. The public voice and image of companies, media outlets, public figures, and institutions are in their hands at a very delicate time. Yet their job is still often seen as something anyone could do, or left to those who are just getting started in their careers.
“It’s like putting an intern to be your press secretary,” says Alan Rosenblatt, a social media consultant for political campaigns who teaches digital and social media strategy at George Washington University and Johns Hopkins University. “It’s a recipe for disaster.”
by Marta Martinez, OneZerop | Read more:
Image: Lia Liao
[ed. Ok social media managers, just curious, what guidelines are you using to decide how to best do your job? That might be one source of stress.]
Saturday, November 14, 2020
Pardon Me?
Report: Trump has repeatedly asked if he can "preemptively" pardon himself (and family members)
At present, Donald Trump is embroiled in an absurd attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election because he’s physically incapable of admitting defeat and maybe also because he sees it as a possible way to collect a nice chunk of change from the easy marks that are his supporters. Eventually, though, his efforts will fail; Joe Biden will move into the White House on January 20, 2021, and Trump will revert to being just another civilian, albeit one with so much debt and bitterness that national security experts fear the possibly that he might reveal state secrets for money. Also: he’ll no longer be able to use the staff of the Justice Department as his personal legal team to fend off prosecutors, which is a very worrisome thing for a guy who’s potentially committed numerous crimes; we know this because, according to the New York Times, he’s concerned “not only about existing investigations in New York, but the potential for new federal probes as well.” And that obviously brings us to the question of whether or not he might actually try to pardon himself. And the answer to that question is: it definitely sounds like he might!
Not surprisingly, because Trump has the mind of a child, the former official said that “Once he learned about it, he was obsessed with the power of pardons. I always thought he also liked it because it was a way to do a favor.” So taken was Trump by the idea of the ability to wave a wand and get rid of any legal consequences for a criminal conviction that senior officials would apparently bring it up out of nowhere if they needed to get him to shut up about something else:
One former official said Trump was so fascinated by his pardon powers that senior-level officials would sometimes bring up their research on the matter just to get Trump off another subject they wanted to steer away from.“He asked stuff [about pardons] all the time—asking this stuff of everybody,” one person said, meaning there’s a nonzero chance Trump would bring up pardons with, like, the Secret Service, the East Wing housekeeper, and whoever was forced to dress up as the Easter Bunny after Sean Spicer was put out to pasture.
Regarding whether or not Trump would actually pardon himself, former aides who say he wouldn’t do it believe so only because “doing so would imply he’s guilty of something.” (“As has been stated by numerous legal scholars, I have the absolute right to PARDON myself, but why would I do that when I have done nothing wrong?” he tweeted in June 2018.) But others think it’s basically a given. “Of course he will,” the former White House official told CNN. And while he presumably wants to, it’s not actually clear Trump can, although apparently there is an insane scenario in which he could fake sick and temporarily make Mike Pence president just so he could do the honors:
Trump’s legal team and administration officials have downplayed the prospect [of a self-pardon]. There’s no precedent for doing so and the constitutionality of such a pardon is untested constitutionally, with legal experts split on whether it would be legitimate. The Justice Department looked at the question in the Nixon era and concluded it wasn’t within the president’s power to pardon himself. “Under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, the President cannot pardon himself,” the Office of Legal Counsel wrote in August 1974.The OLC memo laid out alternate possibilities of which Trump could avail himself: he could temporarily declare himself unable to perform his presidential duties, allowing the vice president to act as president, including by issuing him a pardon, and then the president could resume his duties as president, or resign.
Even if Trump can pardon himself or have Pence do it for him, a self-pardon would only protect him from federal crimes and not a number of ongoing investigations and civil suits currently underway, including two led by Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance and New York Attorney General Letitia James, who are pursuing possible criminal charges related to the Trump Organization.
by Bess Levin, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Image: via
“The Queen’s Gambit” Is the Most Satisfying Show on Television
In 1884, the American star chess player Paul Morphy was found dead in his bathtub, at the age of forty-seven. “The pride and the sorrow of chess is gone forever,” the Austrian chess master Wilhelm Steinitz wrote in an elegy, the following year. Morphy had begun winning citywide tournaments in his native New Orleans at the age of nine. By the time he was twenty, he was the United States champion, and by the time he was twenty-one, many considered him to be the best player on earth. In 1858, Morphy held a notorious “blindfold” exhibition, in Paris, at the Café de la Régence: he sat in one room while eight opponents sat in another and called out his moves without looking at a single board. He played for ten hours straight, without stopping to eat, and ended the night with six wins and two draws. But Morphy grew bored; he was so gifted at chess that he began to consider it a child’s game. He walked away from competition and opened a law office, but the business quickly failed. He spent his final two decades living as a vagabond on family money, growing increasingly paranoid and haunted by his former fame.
The parable of Paul Morphy and his squandered genius pops up halfway through the fifth episode of “The Queen’s Gambit,” Scott Frank and Allan Scott’s handsome, dexterous new Netflix miniseries, based on Walter Tevis’s 1983 novel of the same name, about a female chess prodigy from Lexington, Kentucky, and her pursuit of a world title in the late nineteen-sixties. The prodigy in question, Beth Harmon (Anya Taylor-Joy), is speaking to her friend and sometimes lover Harry Beltik (Harry Melling), a local chess champion with capped teeth and a nebbishy demeanor. Harry, who has been living with Beth to help her train for an upcoming match against the dominant Russian champion, Borgov, in Paris, announces that he will be moving out. He realizes that he has taught Beth all he knows, and that, in turn, she has taught him that his own passion for the game will never compare to hers. As he leaves, he hands her a tattered copy of the book “Paul Morphy and the Golden Age of Chess,” by William Ewart Napier. “You think that’s gonna be me?” Beth sneers, with a diffident jutting of her chin. “I think that is you,” Harry replies.
In Beth’s case, the sorrow that threatens to undercut her pride is not boredom with the game. She loves the game, and has since, as a young orphan, she began sneaking away from classes at the Methuen Home For Girls to play chess in the basement with the gruff janitor, Mr. Shaibel. Chess, for her, is a refuge; her trouble is everything else. When Beth was nine years old, her birth mother killed herself by crashing a car, with Beth still in it. As a teen-ager, Beth is adopted by an unhappy couple, the Wheatleys, who divorce soon after she moves in. Alma Wheatley (played, in a quietly devastating performance, by the film director and sometimes actor Marielle Heller, with a period-accurate, stilted manner of speaking that includes phrases like “my tranquility needs to be refurbished”) is a familiar type, the depressive midcentury housewife, chipper at the department store but a mess at home. She and Beth have an addiction in common: inhaling fistfuls of green tranquilizer pills in order to maintain a façade of equilibrium. Beth was first given the medication at Methuen, where she would take it at night and hallucinate chess games on the ceiling, the pieces dancing above her head like tipsy débutantes.
This premise might suggest that “The Queen’s Gambit” will be a predictable variation on the trope of the damaged genius, the poor brilliant maverick who is held back only by buried trauma. Yet the show, which begins with Beth as a child (played with a placid scowl by Isla Johnston) and then jumps forward to follow her through her teen years and early adulthood, proceeds less like a dark psychological drama or a gritty underdog sporting tale and more like the origin story of a wizard, or a superheroine. Beth is assiduous, serious, well-read, almost nunlike in her studies of strategies such as the Ruy Lopez and the Sicilian Defense (as a teen-ager, she’s so desperate to read chess magazines that she shoplifts them from the local pharmacy). We see her decimate her opponents, easily winning tournaments against men twice her age. She learns to speak Russian in anticipation of facing the Soviets one day. She plays through games by herself for hours—in her head, on the edge of the bathtub, on the kitchen counter. She rarely wavers in her confidence, and can often come across as arrogant, or at least disarmingly unflappable. When Alma discovers that Beth’s talent could be a ticket to a better life for them both—prize money, international travel, fame—Beth doesn’t resent the fact that she is soon supporting her adoptive mother (and her fondness for Gibson cocktails) but, instead, embraces their arrangement as business partners. Alma doesn’t really understand chess, but she has other skills to teach—through her, Beth is introduced to cosmetics, classical music, and her first beer, and gains a companion who is kind, if not quite maternal.
What makes “The Queen’s Gambit” so satisfying comes in large measure from the character Taylor-Joy brings to screen: a charming, elegant weirdo who delivers her lines with a cool, wintergreen snap, and never really reacts the way one might expect. Taylor-Joy, whose breakout role was in the 2015 horror film “The Witch,” starred in Autumn de Wilde’s eminently lovable new adaptation of “Emma,” and she will step into the role of Furiosa in the anticipated “Mad Max” prequel that starts filming next year. But “The Queen’s Gambit” is her star-making performance, a showcase for her particular oddball brand of elegance. Nearly every review of the series has mentioned Taylor-Joy’s eyes, which are the size of silver dollars and set far apart, giving her the appearance of a beautiful hammerhead shark. But what she brings to “The Queen’s Gambit” is a peculiar poise, a capricious hauteur that is willowy but never weak. Taylor-Joy’s background is in ballet, and as Beth she brings a subtle physicality to the game of chess. The chess masters Garry Kasparov and Bruce Pandolfini, who consulted on the show, taught Taylor-Joy how professionals move the pieces along the board, but, as she told the magazine Chess Life, she developed her own way of gliding her hands across the board. When she captures a piece, she floats her long fingers above it and then gently flicks it into her palm, like she is fishing a shiny stone out of a river. When she begins a game, she rests her chin on her delicate folded hands, like a female mantis preparing to feast, staring at her opponent with such unblinking intensity that at least once I had to glance away from the screen.
There has been some grumbling that Taylor-Joy’s twiggy beauty—as svelte, white, and doll-like as it is—undercuts the story “The Queen’s Gambit” tells; is it not enough for a woman to beat the boys without her having to look like a Richard Avedon editorial? But for me the glamour of the series is another of its quiet subversions. In life and on screen, chess is considered the domain of hoary men in moth-eaten cardigans, playing in smoky gymnasia that reek of stale coffee. “The Queen’s Gambit,” instead, finds an unlikely synergy between the heady interiority of chess and the sensual realm of style. Beth develops a prim, gamine flair for fashion with the same studied meticulousness that she brings to the chessboard, and in the course of the show her look evolves apace with her game. She spends her first chess winnings on a new plaid dress; she grows out her blunt baby bangs and adopts a more feminine, Rita Hayworth-esque waved bob. Her covetable wardrobe, of mod minidresses and boxy crepe blouses in creamy shades of mint green and eggshell, makes her a press darling, who gets asked about her look at chess junkets. Her clothing, along with the show’s dazzling interiors (not only the Wheatleys’ home, a sumptuous parade of sherbet-colored floral wallpaper, but the many swanky hotel suites that Alma and Beth stay in on the road), calls to mind the aesthetic enchantments of “Mad Men,” the nineteen-sixties period piece against which every other nineteen-sixties period piece will forever be measured (and the fervor around “The Queen’s Gambit” ’s costume design has similarly hijacked the zeitgeist, inspiring close readings in Vogue and a zazzy virtual exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum). In turn, the game of chess, in “The Queen’s Gambit,” sheds its schlubbiness and reveals a bewitching (and, it must be said, sometimes erotic) elegance. When a reporter from LIFE presses Beth for a juicy quote on what it’s like to be a girl competing among men, Beth demurs. “Chess isn’t always competitive,” she says. “Chess can also be beautiful.”
by Rachel Syme, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Netflix
In Beth’s case, the sorrow that threatens to undercut her pride is not boredom with the game. She loves the game, and has since, as a young orphan, she began sneaking away from classes at the Methuen Home For Girls to play chess in the basement with the gruff janitor, Mr. Shaibel. Chess, for her, is a refuge; her trouble is everything else. When Beth was nine years old, her birth mother killed herself by crashing a car, with Beth still in it. As a teen-ager, Beth is adopted by an unhappy couple, the Wheatleys, who divorce soon after she moves in. Alma Wheatley (played, in a quietly devastating performance, by the film director and sometimes actor Marielle Heller, with a period-accurate, stilted manner of speaking that includes phrases like “my tranquility needs to be refurbished”) is a familiar type, the depressive midcentury housewife, chipper at the department store but a mess at home. She and Beth have an addiction in common: inhaling fistfuls of green tranquilizer pills in order to maintain a façade of equilibrium. Beth was first given the medication at Methuen, where she would take it at night and hallucinate chess games on the ceiling, the pieces dancing above her head like tipsy débutantes.
This premise might suggest that “The Queen’s Gambit” will be a predictable variation on the trope of the damaged genius, the poor brilliant maverick who is held back only by buried trauma. Yet the show, which begins with Beth as a child (played with a placid scowl by Isla Johnston) and then jumps forward to follow her through her teen years and early adulthood, proceeds less like a dark psychological drama or a gritty underdog sporting tale and more like the origin story of a wizard, or a superheroine. Beth is assiduous, serious, well-read, almost nunlike in her studies of strategies such as the Ruy Lopez and the Sicilian Defense (as a teen-ager, she’s so desperate to read chess magazines that she shoplifts them from the local pharmacy). We see her decimate her opponents, easily winning tournaments against men twice her age. She learns to speak Russian in anticipation of facing the Soviets one day. She plays through games by herself for hours—in her head, on the edge of the bathtub, on the kitchen counter. She rarely wavers in her confidence, and can often come across as arrogant, or at least disarmingly unflappable. When Alma discovers that Beth’s talent could be a ticket to a better life for them both—prize money, international travel, fame—Beth doesn’t resent the fact that she is soon supporting her adoptive mother (and her fondness for Gibson cocktails) but, instead, embraces their arrangement as business partners. Alma doesn’t really understand chess, but she has other skills to teach—through her, Beth is introduced to cosmetics, classical music, and her first beer, and gains a companion who is kind, if not quite maternal.
What makes “The Queen’s Gambit” so satisfying comes in large measure from the character Taylor-Joy brings to screen: a charming, elegant weirdo who delivers her lines with a cool, wintergreen snap, and never really reacts the way one might expect. Taylor-Joy, whose breakout role was in the 2015 horror film “The Witch,” starred in Autumn de Wilde’s eminently lovable new adaptation of “Emma,” and she will step into the role of Furiosa in the anticipated “Mad Max” prequel that starts filming next year. But “The Queen’s Gambit” is her star-making performance, a showcase for her particular oddball brand of elegance. Nearly every review of the series has mentioned Taylor-Joy’s eyes, which are the size of silver dollars and set far apart, giving her the appearance of a beautiful hammerhead shark. But what she brings to “The Queen’s Gambit” is a peculiar poise, a capricious hauteur that is willowy but never weak. Taylor-Joy’s background is in ballet, and as Beth she brings a subtle physicality to the game of chess. The chess masters Garry Kasparov and Bruce Pandolfini, who consulted on the show, taught Taylor-Joy how professionals move the pieces along the board, but, as she told the magazine Chess Life, she developed her own way of gliding her hands across the board. When she captures a piece, she floats her long fingers above it and then gently flicks it into her palm, like she is fishing a shiny stone out of a river. When she begins a game, she rests her chin on her delicate folded hands, like a female mantis preparing to feast, staring at her opponent with such unblinking intensity that at least once I had to glance away from the screen.
There has been some grumbling that Taylor-Joy’s twiggy beauty—as svelte, white, and doll-like as it is—undercuts the story “The Queen’s Gambit” tells; is it not enough for a woman to beat the boys without her having to look like a Richard Avedon editorial? But for me the glamour of the series is another of its quiet subversions. In life and on screen, chess is considered the domain of hoary men in moth-eaten cardigans, playing in smoky gymnasia that reek of stale coffee. “The Queen’s Gambit,” instead, finds an unlikely synergy between the heady interiority of chess and the sensual realm of style. Beth develops a prim, gamine flair for fashion with the same studied meticulousness that she brings to the chessboard, and in the course of the show her look evolves apace with her game. She spends her first chess winnings on a new plaid dress; she grows out her blunt baby bangs and adopts a more feminine, Rita Hayworth-esque waved bob. Her covetable wardrobe, of mod minidresses and boxy crepe blouses in creamy shades of mint green and eggshell, makes her a press darling, who gets asked about her look at chess junkets. Her clothing, along with the show’s dazzling interiors (not only the Wheatleys’ home, a sumptuous parade of sherbet-colored floral wallpaper, but the many swanky hotel suites that Alma and Beth stay in on the road), calls to mind the aesthetic enchantments of “Mad Men,” the nineteen-sixties period piece against which every other nineteen-sixties period piece will forever be measured (and the fervor around “The Queen’s Gambit” ’s costume design has similarly hijacked the zeitgeist, inspiring close readings in Vogue and a zazzy virtual exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum). In turn, the game of chess, in “The Queen’s Gambit,” sheds its schlubbiness and reveals a bewitching (and, it must be said, sometimes erotic) elegance. When a reporter from LIFE presses Beth for a juicy quote on what it’s like to be a girl competing among men, Beth demurs. “Chess isn’t always competitive,” she says. “Chess can also be beautiful.”
by Rachel Syme, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Netflix
[ed. See also: I’m a Chess Expert. Here’s What ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ Gets Right (NY Times).]
Friday, November 13, 2020
How Enduring the Promise?
Economic Myths in a Time of Rupture
Thinking about their lives, their livelihoods, and their identities, Americans have long placed great stock in morally charged economic mythologies. The “land of opportunity,” the “American Dream,” the “pursuit of happiness”—all have survived crushing depressions, civil strife, and global wars to give meaning and value to Americans’ daily strivings. While the growing diversity of the American social landscape has made Norman Rockwell–like depictions of faith and family seem almost obsolete, the equally venerable imagery of the disciplined work ethic has demonstrated far more staying power, with only the occupations and demographics of workers requiring updating. The short-lived coworking space startup WeWork drew attention in 2018 for the pro-work messages inscribed on the produce floating in its watercoolers. “Don’t stop when you’re tired, stop when you’re done,” was just one of the exhortations etched into floating cucumber slices, intended to inspire indefatigable “creatives” beavering away at their MacBooks.
Such mythic notions draw on a different dimension of economics from the one presented in most textbooks. Yet this cultural dimension may ultimately be as vital to the well-being of society as all of the projections and prescriptions derived from highly mathematized models of econometric theory. As Max Weber and other social theorists have shown, the fundamental human need to confer meaning on events, particularly those bearing on livelihoods, makes people depend on mythic frameworks and “webs of meaning” not only to ennoble their daily efforts but to ward off the threat of nihilistic randomness or chaotic disorder. These frameworks serve to make sense of economic success, failure, prosperity, and devastation, not just for individuals but for groups as a whole.
In America, these frameworks have undergone gradual but significant changes. Early colonial settlers viewed their trade and commerce as contributing to the commonwealth and a wider covenantal order, subject to religious and civil authorities alike. Likewise, southern planters and others justified their exploitation of enslaved laborers through frameworks of a racialized hierarchical order and Christian paternalism. It was only toward the middle of the nineteenth century, as the American market economy was being transformed by advances in transportation and technology, that a new and more characteristically modern economic mythology took form. This one emphasized individual effort and reward as the basis of a new covenant, this one with sovereign market forces rather than the sacredly ordained hierarchical order. Adherents to this covenant believed they inhabited an economic world that was controllable, predictable, and largely fair. Provided that individuals were committed to working hard and playing by the rules, they were assured at least a fighting chance to survive the “prevailing gales of creative destruction.”
The 1843 McGuffey Reader confidently pronounced to millions of American schoolchildren that the “road to wealth” was “open to all, and all who will, may enter upon it with the almost certain prospect of success.” This became the “American assumption,” as W.E.B. Du Bois labeled it, which posited that wealth was mainly a result of a person’s effort and that “any average worker can by thrift become a capitalist.” While the relative inequality of American society always left such claims open to doubt and debate, such thinking had at least an aspirational role in the American experience throughout the twentieth century. In his 1992 campaign speeches Bill Clinton would continue to speak of America’s promise, that “if you work hard and play by the rules you should be given a chance to go as far as your God-given abilities will take you.”
But problems can result from tying individual and national identities to economic mythologies, particularly in our age of global capitalism, when extensive economic dislocations and disruptions have created uncertainty and precarity among wide swaths of the population. Since the passing of the postwar era’s “Golden Age of Capitalism” (generally pegged as the time between 1945 and 1973, or what the French have dubbed les trentes glorieuses), many Americans have begun to doubt that the economic system is keeping up its side of the bargain. Stagnant wages since the 1970s alongside instability brought on by oil supply shocks and stagflation were followed by the expanded influence of a profit-hungry financial sector and globalized trade that yielded even greater volatility of wages and employment. The disruptive force of the 2008 recession—and the relatively minimal consequences suffered by those leading the responsible institutions—unleashed new fires of anti-elite populism.
Our present moment finds not only workers but also politicians and business leaders seeking to renew the reigning economic mythologies in a manner that can either make sense of the post-2008 mode of capitalism or successfully counter its costly deviations from its earlier mode. Yet this task now confronts the social realities that were papered over in the simpler times of the McGuffey Reader. The growing recognition of institutionalized inequality and the disproportional power of financial elites seem to counter the doctrine that the road to prosperity is open to all Americans.
Writing about cultural systems and meaning, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz suggested that three sorts of events can send a society’s cultural frameworks into a tailspin: bafflement, suffering, and a sense of intractable ethical paradox. It is at these points that the interpretability of life begins to break down, that individuals lose confidence that they can effectively orient themselves. Societies are then pushed to the limits of understanding and endurance, as “chaos” threatens to “break in” upon them.
The last two decades provide ample evidence that conventional American mythologies have now reached such a breaking point. The rhetoric of populist politicians and surveys of the populace as a whole reveal a common sentiment: that the system is “rigged.” This sentiment has disproportionately taken hold among lower-income workers across both political parties, populations struggling to keep their heads above water as they try to cope with rising health-care costs and the disappearance of benefit-bearing jobs. Many workers in publicly traded corporations also see the stagnation of their own wages in sharp contrast with the relative stability and prosperity enjoyed by their employers.
But extending well beyond these populations is a more general skepticism toward institutions tasked with leading the economic and financial sectors and overseeing their well-ordered functioning. The last ten years have seen a growing suspicion that the “invisible hand” of global capitalism does not appear to be disbursing the spoils of free trade in a fair manner. Where the old economic mythologies preached submission to “the system” because of its essential fairness, a new politics of resentment now draws attention to those not-so-invisible hands that seem to have weighted the scales to favor the wealthy few. This has raised the possibility that perhaps the American Dream is not actually dying a peaceful death, the victim of job automation and declining American economic hegemony, but is instead being killed off and replaced with a walled garden of success that denies access to all but a select few. (...)
Indeed, in many respects, the present moment seems to recapitulate certain features of the late-nineteenth-century Populist movement. Then, too, dedication to hard work and its value as a source of personal dignity coexisted with concerns that the system was becoming “rigged.” The rise of industrialism and the consolidation of smaller economic entities into larger ones placed new stresses on once largely independent American workers, roughly two thirds of whom had been had been absorbed into wage labor positions by the end of the nineteenth century. As historian Daniel Rodgers observed of these workers, “No amount of sheer hard work would open the way to self-employment or wealth.” Yet the historical record reveals no rejection of the value of hard work among those objecting to the conditions of wage labor. Rather, criticism and protests were directed against “the system,” which workers believed was abandoning the principles of competition and fair access to opportunity. An 1891 editorial in a Nebraska Populist publication for farmers lambasted conditions that subjected workers to fourteen to sixteen hours of work a day while reducing their relationship to their employer to that of “servant to master, of a machine to its director.” The “competitive system” had become not the pathway to success and wealth but the source of alienation, with the survival of the fittest now serving as a “satanic creed.” Populist writers also blamed the industrial system for breaking its own rules by permitting an “artificial individual”—the publicly traded corporation—to bend the law and the conditions of competition to its own interests.
Calling out the transgressors did not signify a loss of faith in a fair economy, as Populists continued to praise the merits of the “productive classes” of “farmers, laborers, merchants, and all other people who produce wealth,” in the words of an 1896 Populist manifesto. It was the monopolists and financiers of the time who no longer complied with the dictates of fair and competitive capitalism. The Populists sought government remedies precisely to restore the competition and openness assured by the economic myths in which they continued to believe.
The Populist resistance to wage labor and corporate power had little staying power in the twentieth century. As the historian Christopher Lasch explained it, agrarian populism represented the last stand of “producerism” in American history, an ideology that equally valorized small proprietors, shopkeepers, and the yeoman farmer. Increased wages and rising standards of living offered by the Fordist production regimes led to general acceptance of the expanded power of corporations. But as it turned out, the Populist response to transgressions against the American economic mythology in the Gilded Age adumbrated some of the ways American working people since the early 1970s have kept their faith in the American Dream even while economic transformations have made it hard to attain.
Sadly, one of the signal defeats of the Populist movement—its failure to adequately address the continued exclusion of most African Americans from the full range of opportunities—also foreshadowed another problem in the present struggles against a “rigged” system. To be sure, the Populists at times made surprising inroads across racial lines, forming alliances with organizations of black farmers. Their gatherings occasionally brought together both black and white southerners to rally support for Populist candidates and organize strikes for higher farm wages. But as the historian Lawrence Goodwyn observed, the southern blacks joining these associations quickly saw that the protests against vicious corporate monopoly were not sufficient to challenge the underlying racial caste system. Economic improvement by way of higher commodity prices and flexible currency certainly offered some relief from their conditions, but it was not enough to ensure the needed level of protection from prejudice and the threat of violence. There was “no purely ‘economic’ way out,” as Goodwyn wrote.
It is fair to say that a new economic populism—at least as a coherent political movement with significant voting power—has been rendered impotent by cultural identity markers that shape voting patterns. But even more detrimental to any political organizing is the large number of the economically alienated who are swayed by neither left-wing nor right-wing appeals to populism. Their perception of a “rigged” economy goes hand in hand with perceptions of a “rigged” political system offering little hope for change. The best data on the 40 percent of eligible adults who do not vote in US elections (around 100 million Americans in 2016) suggests that they are, in comparison to voters, more likely to be people of color, more likely to make less than $30,000 a year, more likely to have had trouble paying bills in the past twelve months, less likely to have a savings account, and less likely to have any kind of retirement account or health care.
This political reality blunts the chance of real populist challenges to the monopolistic behavior of many of the large corporations that have in recent years consistently pursued anticompetitive acquisitions and mergers, exploited vender lock-in powers, forced no-compete clauses on low-wage workers, and taken advantage of general economies of scale to eliminate competition. A 2014 Wall Street Journal guest editorial by PayPal founder Peter Thiel sums up the view of the new monopolists: Competition, he wrote, is now only for “losers.” Winners, in other words, no longer have to play on a level playing field. Perhaps what Americans need from their leaders is not so much moralistic scolding about personal responsibility but greater reflection on why figures like Thiel have come to profess an economic mythology so contrary to traditional mythic commitments to fairness and equal opportunity.
by Andrew Lynn, The Hedgehog Review | Read more:
Such mythic notions draw on a different dimension of economics from the one presented in most textbooks. Yet this cultural dimension may ultimately be as vital to the well-being of society as all of the projections and prescriptions derived from highly mathematized models of econometric theory. As Max Weber and other social theorists have shown, the fundamental human need to confer meaning on events, particularly those bearing on livelihoods, makes people depend on mythic frameworks and “webs of meaning” not only to ennoble their daily efforts but to ward off the threat of nihilistic randomness or chaotic disorder. These frameworks serve to make sense of economic success, failure, prosperity, and devastation, not just for individuals but for groups as a whole.
The 1843 McGuffey Reader confidently pronounced to millions of American schoolchildren that the “road to wealth” was “open to all, and all who will, may enter upon it with the almost certain prospect of success.” This became the “American assumption,” as W.E.B. Du Bois labeled it, which posited that wealth was mainly a result of a person’s effort and that “any average worker can by thrift become a capitalist.” While the relative inequality of American society always left such claims open to doubt and debate, such thinking had at least an aspirational role in the American experience throughout the twentieth century. In his 1992 campaign speeches Bill Clinton would continue to speak of America’s promise, that “if you work hard and play by the rules you should be given a chance to go as far as your God-given abilities will take you.”
But problems can result from tying individual and national identities to economic mythologies, particularly in our age of global capitalism, when extensive economic dislocations and disruptions have created uncertainty and precarity among wide swaths of the population. Since the passing of the postwar era’s “Golden Age of Capitalism” (generally pegged as the time between 1945 and 1973, or what the French have dubbed les trentes glorieuses), many Americans have begun to doubt that the economic system is keeping up its side of the bargain. Stagnant wages since the 1970s alongside instability brought on by oil supply shocks and stagflation were followed by the expanded influence of a profit-hungry financial sector and globalized trade that yielded even greater volatility of wages and employment. The disruptive force of the 2008 recession—and the relatively minimal consequences suffered by those leading the responsible institutions—unleashed new fires of anti-elite populism.
Our present moment finds not only workers but also politicians and business leaders seeking to renew the reigning economic mythologies in a manner that can either make sense of the post-2008 mode of capitalism or successfully counter its costly deviations from its earlier mode. Yet this task now confronts the social realities that were papered over in the simpler times of the McGuffey Reader. The growing recognition of institutionalized inequality and the disproportional power of financial elites seem to counter the doctrine that the road to prosperity is open to all Americans.
Writing about cultural systems and meaning, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz suggested that three sorts of events can send a society’s cultural frameworks into a tailspin: bafflement, suffering, and a sense of intractable ethical paradox. It is at these points that the interpretability of life begins to break down, that individuals lose confidence that they can effectively orient themselves. Societies are then pushed to the limits of understanding and endurance, as “chaos” threatens to “break in” upon them.
The last two decades provide ample evidence that conventional American mythologies have now reached such a breaking point. The rhetoric of populist politicians and surveys of the populace as a whole reveal a common sentiment: that the system is “rigged.” This sentiment has disproportionately taken hold among lower-income workers across both political parties, populations struggling to keep their heads above water as they try to cope with rising health-care costs and the disappearance of benefit-bearing jobs. Many workers in publicly traded corporations also see the stagnation of their own wages in sharp contrast with the relative stability and prosperity enjoyed by their employers.
But extending well beyond these populations is a more general skepticism toward institutions tasked with leading the economic and financial sectors and overseeing their well-ordered functioning. The last ten years have seen a growing suspicion that the “invisible hand” of global capitalism does not appear to be disbursing the spoils of free trade in a fair manner. Where the old economic mythologies preached submission to “the system” because of its essential fairness, a new politics of resentment now draws attention to those not-so-invisible hands that seem to have weighted the scales to favor the wealthy few. This has raised the possibility that perhaps the American Dream is not actually dying a peaceful death, the victim of job automation and declining American economic hegemony, but is instead being killed off and replaced with a walled garden of success that denies access to all but a select few. (...)
Indeed, in many respects, the present moment seems to recapitulate certain features of the late-nineteenth-century Populist movement. Then, too, dedication to hard work and its value as a source of personal dignity coexisted with concerns that the system was becoming “rigged.” The rise of industrialism and the consolidation of smaller economic entities into larger ones placed new stresses on once largely independent American workers, roughly two thirds of whom had been had been absorbed into wage labor positions by the end of the nineteenth century. As historian Daniel Rodgers observed of these workers, “No amount of sheer hard work would open the way to self-employment or wealth.” Yet the historical record reveals no rejection of the value of hard work among those objecting to the conditions of wage labor. Rather, criticism and protests were directed against “the system,” which workers believed was abandoning the principles of competition and fair access to opportunity. An 1891 editorial in a Nebraska Populist publication for farmers lambasted conditions that subjected workers to fourteen to sixteen hours of work a day while reducing their relationship to their employer to that of “servant to master, of a machine to its director.” The “competitive system” had become not the pathway to success and wealth but the source of alienation, with the survival of the fittest now serving as a “satanic creed.” Populist writers also blamed the industrial system for breaking its own rules by permitting an “artificial individual”—the publicly traded corporation—to bend the law and the conditions of competition to its own interests.
Calling out the transgressors did not signify a loss of faith in a fair economy, as Populists continued to praise the merits of the “productive classes” of “farmers, laborers, merchants, and all other people who produce wealth,” in the words of an 1896 Populist manifesto. It was the monopolists and financiers of the time who no longer complied with the dictates of fair and competitive capitalism. The Populists sought government remedies precisely to restore the competition and openness assured by the economic myths in which they continued to believe.
The Populist resistance to wage labor and corporate power had little staying power in the twentieth century. As the historian Christopher Lasch explained it, agrarian populism represented the last stand of “producerism” in American history, an ideology that equally valorized small proprietors, shopkeepers, and the yeoman farmer. Increased wages and rising standards of living offered by the Fordist production regimes led to general acceptance of the expanded power of corporations. But as it turned out, the Populist response to transgressions against the American economic mythology in the Gilded Age adumbrated some of the ways American working people since the early 1970s have kept their faith in the American Dream even while economic transformations have made it hard to attain.
Sadly, one of the signal defeats of the Populist movement—its failure to adequately address the continued exclusion of most African Americans from the full range of opportunities—also foreshadowed another problem in the present struggles against a “rigged” system. To be sure, the Populists at times made surprising inroads across racial lines, forming alliances with organizations of black farmers. Their gatherings occasionally brought together both black and white southerners to rally support for Populist candidates and organize strikes for higher farm wages. But as the historian Lawrence Goodwyn observed, the southern blacks joining these associations quickly saw that the protests against vicious corporate monopoly were not sufficient to challenge the underlying racial caste system. Economic improvement by way of higher commodity prices and flexible currency certainly offered some relief from their conditions, but it was not enough to ensure the needed level of protection from prejudice and the threat of violence. There was “no purely ‘economic’ way out,” as Goodwyn wrote.
It is fair to say that a new economic populism—at least as a coherent political movement with significant voting power—has been rendered impotent by cultural identity markers that shape voting patterns. But even more detrimental to any political organizing is the large number of the economically alienated who are swayed by neither left-wing nor right-wing appeals to populism. Their perception of a “rigged” economy goes hand in hand with perceptions of a “rigged” political system offering little hope for change. The best data on the 40 percent of eligible adults who do not vote in US elections (around 100 million Americans in 2016) suggests that they are, in comparison to voters, more likely to be people of color, more likely to make less than $30,000 a year, more likely to have had trouble paying bills in the past twelve months, less likely to have a savings account, and less likely to have any kind of retirement account or health care.
This political reality blunts the chance of real populist challenges to the monopolistic behavior of many of the large corporations that have in recent years consistently pursued anticompetitive acquisitions and mergers, exploited vender lock-in powers, forced no-compete clauses on low-wage workers, and taken advantage of general economies of scale to eliminate competition. A 2014 Wall Street Journal guest editorial by PayPal founder Peter Thiel sums up the view of the new monopolists: Competition, he wrote, is now only for “losers.” Winners, in other words, no longer have to play on a level playing field. Perhaps what Americans need from their leaders is not so much moralistic scolding about personal responsibility but greater reflection on why figures like Thiel have come to profess an economic mythology so contrary to traditional mythic commitments to fairness and equal opportunity.
by Andrew Lynn, The Hedgehog Review | Read more:
Image: CalypsoArt/Alamy Stock Photo
[ed. See also: The Next Decade Could Be Even Worse (The Atlantic).]
Oregon’s Decriminalization Vote Might Be Biggest Step Yet to Ending War on Drugs
Thanks to voters, Oregon will be the first state in the country to decriminalize the personal possession of all drugs, including heroin and cocaine. Oregonians passed Ballot Measure 110, also known as the Drug Decriminalization and Addiction Treatment Initiative, with 59 percent of the vote; it’s the most far-reaching of numerous successful drug-related measures on ballots nationwide, including the legalization of recreational marijuana in New Jersey, Arizona, Montana, and South Dakota. Every one of these victories constitutes a long overdue challenge to the racist, carceral logic of drug criminalization. Oregonians have taken a historic step in recognizing that if a carceral approach to drug use is harmful, it is harmful regardless of the drug in question.
In a general election between two candidates proudly committed to “law and order” politics and aggressive policing — regardless of Joe Biden’s minimal gestures towards marijuana reform — Oregon’s ballot decision offered a glimmer of hope for those interested in significant criminal justice changes. The success of Measure 110, alongside other decriminalization and legalization efforts, is a rebuke to the notion that any person who uses illegalized drugs, no matter what the substance, is best served by an interaction with the police and prison system.
“This is part of how we reform policing: by getting them out of the drug business,” wrote Brooklyn College sociology professor Alex Vitale, author of “The End of Policing,” on Twitter. Vitale was referring to the four states that voted to legalize recreational marijuana, but he added that “Measure 110 in Oregon is even better.”
Oregon’s decriminalization measure should not be confused with the legalization of all drugs; it instead entails the removal of criminal penalties for the possession of small amounts of illegal substances. After February 1, the penalty for drug possession will be akin to a hefty traffic ticket: a $100 fine. Those who cannot or do not want to pay can choose to agree to a “health assessment” at an addiction recovery center. The ballot measure also includes the expansion of access to recovery treatments, housing, and harm reduction services, to be funded through the reallocation of tens of millions of dollars from Oregon’s cannabis tax. Money saved by not arresting, prosecuting, and caging people found with drugs will also be redirected to a fund for treatment services.
Measure 110 would reduce convictions for drug possession by nearly 90 percent: from 4,057 convictions in 2019 to an estimated 378 in the coming year, according to the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission. The same report found that racial disparities in drug arrests could drop by 95 percent, and that convictions of Black and Indigenous Oregonians could drop by a staggering 94 percent. These figures alone show the unerringly racist bent of drug arrests and convictions — just further proof of an insupportable system.
While a first step in the U.S., all-drug decriminalization is not an untested experiment. The Drug Policy Alliance, among other decriminalization and legalization advocates, point to Portugal, where all drugs have been decriminalized for the last two decades. Drug use rates in Portugal have remained lower than the average use rates in Europe, and far lower than those in the U.S. — even while Portugal has suffered through years of heightened economic crisis and extreme spikes in unemployment. Meanwhile, rates of HIV infection have fallen, from 1,575 cases in 2000 to 78 cases in 2013. Following decriminalization, arrest rates for drug-related offenses dropped by 60 percent, while the number of people enrolled in drug treatment programs increased by 60 percent in turn. The number of annual drug overdose deaths has plummeted.
“Usually the focus is on the decriminalization itself, but it worked because there were other services, and the coverage increased for needle replacement, detox, therapeutic communities, and employment options for people who use drugs,” Ricardo Fuertes, a Lisbon-based project coordinator with an outreach organization founded by people living with HIV, told Vice News in 2016. “It was the combination of the law and these services that made it a success. It’s very difficult to find people in Portugal who disagree with this model.”
by Natasha Lennard, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Yes on Measure 110
In a general election between two candidates proudly committed to “law and order” politics and aggressive policing — regardless of Joe Biden’s minimal gestures towards marijuana reform — Oregon’s ballot decision offered a glimmer of hope for those interested in significant criminal justice changes. The success of Measure 110, alongside other decriminalization and legalization efforts, is a rebuke to the notion that any person who uses illegalized drugs, no matter what the substance, is best served by an interaction with the police and prison system.
Oregon’s decriminalization measure should not be confused with the legalization of all drugs; it instead entails the removal of criminal penalties for the possession of small amounts of illegal substances. After February 1, the penalty for drug possession will be akin to a hefty traffic ticket: a $100 fine. Those who cannot or do not want to pay can choose to agree to a “health assessment” at an addiction recovery center. The ballot measure also includes the expansion of access to recovery treatments, housing, and harm reduction services, to be funded through the reallocation of tens of millions of dollars from Oregon’s cannabis tax. Money saved by not arresting, prosecuting, and caging people found with drugs will also be redirected to a fund for treatment services.
Measure 110 would reduce convictions for drug possession by nearly 90 percent: from 4,057 convictions in 2019 to an estimated 378 in the coming year, according to the Oregon Criminal Justice Commission. The same report found that racial disparities in drug arrests could drop by 95 percent, and that convictions of Black and Indigenous Oregonians could drop by a staggering 94 percent. These figures alone show the unerringly racist bent of drug arrests and convictions — just further proof of an insupportable system.
While a first step in the U.S., all-drug decriminalization is not an untested experiment. The Drug Policy Alliance, among other decriminalization and legalization advocates, point to Portugal, where all drugs have been decriminalized for the last two decades. Drug use rates in Portugal have remained lower than the average use rates in Europe, and far lower than those in the U.S. — even while Portugal has suffered through years of heightened economic crisis and extreme spikes in unemployment. Meanwhile, rates of HIV infection have fallen, from 1,575 cases in 2000 to 78 cases in 2013. Following decriminalization, arrest rates for drug-related offenses dropped by 60 percent, while the number of people enrolled in drug treatment programs increased by 60 percent in turn. The number of annual drug overdose deaths has plummeted.
“Usually the focus is on the decriminalization itself, but it worked because there were other services, and the coverage increased for needle replacement, detox, therapeutic communities, and employment options for people who use drugs,” Ricardo Fuertes, a Lisbon-based project coordinator with an outreach organization founded by people living with HIV, told Vice News in 2016. “It was the combination of the law and these services that made it a success. It’s very difficult to find people in Portugal who disagree with this model.”
Image: Yes on Measure 110
Thursday, November 12, 2020
Red Shirt
Kirk: All right, men, this is a dangerous mission. And it's likely one of us will be killed. The landing party will consist of myself, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, and Ensign Ricky.
Ensign Ricky: Aw, crap.
~Family Guy
This is the Good Counterpart of Evil Minions and Mooks — set filler for our heroes' side. Their purpose is almost exclusively to give the writers someone to kill who isn't a main character, although they can also serve as Spear Carriers. In a series where The Main Characters Do Everything, if you suddenly see someone else who you've never seen before involved in the main story, they are probably Redshirts.
They are used to show how the monster works, and demonstrate that it is indeed a deadly menace, without having to lose anyone important. Expect someone to say "He's Dead, Jim", lament this "valued crew member's senseless death", and then promptly forget him. Security personnel in general fall victim to the worst shade of this trope, as most of the time their deaths aren't even acknowledged at all; according to Hollywood, you could walk into a bank and shoot a security guard right in the face without anyone making a fuss. If you shot anyone else afterward, the headline would just read "Bank Customers Killed".
Please note: this Trope is actually very inaccurate when you compare it to Real Life. If you were to watch every episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, count the number of casualties that the Enterprise had, and then compare that to an actual military, you'd see that Kirk's record as a leader in this regard is excellent, far better than any general in U.S. history. Even war heroes like George Washington and Dwight D. Eisenhower had proportionately more casualties among their troops.
Also note that while this trope was true in a strictly numerical sense for the original Star Trek series (25 crew member died with red shirts on, 10 with gold, and 8 with blue), it is not true in terms of the percentage of red shirts shown. In percentages to total crew, 10 percent of red shirts died, against 18 percent of gold shirts.
In mass quantities, they make up the Red Shirt Army. Frequently overlaps with Men Are the Expendable Gender and Black Dude Dies First.
Ensign Ricky: Aw, crap.
~Family Guy
This is the Good Counterpart of Evil Minions and Mooks — set filler for our heroes' side. Their purpose is almost exclusively to give the writers someone to kill who isn't a main character, although they can also serve as Spear Carriers. In a series where The Main Characters Do Everything, if you suddenly see someone else who you've never seen before involved in the main story, they are probably Redshirts.
Please note: this Trope is actually very inaccurate when you compare it to Real Life. If you were to watch every episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, count the number of casualties that the Enterprise had, and then compare that to an actual military, you'd see that Kirk's record as a leader in this regard is excellent, far better than any general in U.S. history. Even war heroes like George Washington and Dwight D. Eisenhower had proportionately more casualties among their troops.
Also note that while this trope was true in a strictly numerical sense for the original Star Trek series (25 crew member died with red shirts on, 10 with gold, and 8 with blue), it is not true in terms of the percentage of red shirts shown. In percentages to total crew, 10 percent of red shirts died, against 18 percent of gold shirts.
In mass quantities, they make up the Red Shirt Army. Frequently overlaps with Men Are the Expendable Gender and Black Dude Dies First.
by TV Tropes | Read more:
Image: Star Trek: A Red Shirt in his natural state.[ed. We're all red shirts in this crazy reality show.]
Wednesday, November 11, 2020
'Make America Rake Again'
We begin in many people’s happy place, at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. As you may know, Donald Trump’s losing presidential campaign held a press conference that has passed immediately into the annals of political comedy. And also the annals of horticultural business marketing. Consider this Philadelphia gardening establishment the world’s leading purveyor of seasonal colour.
If you somehow missed the Four Seasons Total Landscaping story, it was truly the quattro stagioni of political events. Each time it seemed it couldn’t get any better, there turned out to be some new quarter of it to enjoy.
But let me briefly summarise. On Saturday, the current US president tweeted that a “big press conference” would be held that morning at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia. Shortly thereafter, his account offered clarification – that wasn’t the hotel, but somewhere called Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Double-taking at their satnavs, reporters scrambled to this prestige location in a suburban business park, where Trump branding had been hastily affixed to the roller door of a single-storey building. Then again, the backdrop was really the best of it. Pan out, and the venue lay next door to a sex shop and a crematorium.
Clearly this was … unconventional. Yet amazingly, the world’s media would indeed end up being addressed there. Not by Trump, but by his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Dead people were always voting in Philadelphia, Rudy claimed. Joe Frazier, and Will Smith’s dad (twice).
And as he said all this, he was flanked by a long line of unsmiling campaign guys trying to look like nothing could be more normal than standing in a forgotten corner of suburbia in front of some garden hoses. There are millions of potential captions to the picture. Let’s go with something befitting the tragedy: They Were Four Years In Power.
Perhaps the biggest question to come out of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference is: why did they carry on with it? Some sort of mistake had clearly been made, so why did they persist and pretend it hadn’t? Many speculate it was down to fear of not obeying the will of the White House idiot, however lunatic the reality of it may appear. Others simply think that by the time the campaign staff stopped screaming, they felt they were in too deep to turn around.
Either way, the upshot is the same: no matter the absurdity of any situation, no matter how ridiculous it looks when you get there, there will ALWAYS be a line of guys ready to butch it out like it was their plan along. There will ALWAYS be a line of guys who feel that it is somehow less ridiculous to look completely ridiculous than it is to simply say: “Oh wait, we made a mistake – give us half an hour and we’ll tell you the new venue.” There will ALWAYS be a line of guys who, even if they walked over a cliff, would leave very specific last words echoing behind them. “I meant to do that.”
by Marina Hyde, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Mark Makela/Reuters[ed. See also: From Obscure To Sold Out: The Story Of Four Seasons Total Landscaping In Just 4 Days (NPR). And, for more hilarity: Donald Trump's latest endeavor? Asking his supporters to pay his debts (Guardian).]
Masters 2020: A Hole by Hole Guide
Facebook, QAnon and the World's Slackening Grip on Reality
It’s hard to describe the movement that Philip fell into. QAnon has its roots in the “pizzagate” conspiracy, which emerged four years ago after users poring over hacked Democratic party emails on the message board 4chan said that, if you replaced the word “pizza” with “little girl”, it looked as if they were discussing eating children. That claim – whether it was made in jest or sincerity is impossible to tell – spiralled into allegations of a vast paedophilic conspiracy centred on Comet Pizza, a restaurant in Washington DC.
A year later, a 4chan user with the handle “Q Clearance Patriot” appeared, claiming to be a government insider tasked with sharing “crumbs” of intel about Donald Trump’s planned counter-coup against the deep state forces frustrating his presidency. As Q’s following grew, the movement became known as the Storm – as in, “the calm before …” – and then QAnon, after its founder and prophet. At that point, QAnon was a relatively understandable conspiracy theory: it had a clear set of beliefs rooted in support for Trump and in the increasingly cryptic posts attributed to Q (by then widely believed to be a group of people posting under one name).
Now, though, it’s less clearcut. There’s no one set of beliefs that define a QAnon adherent. Most will claim some form of mass paedophilic conspiracy; some, particularly in the US, continue to focus on Trump’s supposed fightback. But the web of beliefs has become all-encompassing. One fan-produced map of all the “revelations” linked to the group includes references to Julius Caesar, Atlantis and the pharaohs of Egypt in one corner, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and 5G in another, the knights of Malta in a third, and the Fukushima meltdown in a fourth – all tied together with a generous helping of antisemitism, from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to hatred of George Soros. QAnon isn’t one conspiracy theory any more: it’s all of them at once.
In September, BuzzFeed News made the stylistic decision to refer to the movement as a “collective delusion”. “There’s more to the convoluted entity than the average reader might realise,” wrote BuzzFeed’s Drusilla Moorhouse and Emerson Malone. “But delusion does illustrate the reality better than conspiracy theory does. We are discussing a mass of people who subscribe to a shared set of values and debunked ideas, which inform their beliefs and actions.”
At first, QAnon was a largely US phenomenon, with limited penetration in the UK. The pandemic, however, has changed that. According to recent polling by Hope Not Hate, one in four people in Britain now agree with some of the basic conspiracies it has promulgated: that “secret satanic cults exist and include influential elites”, and that “elites in Hollywood, politics, the media” are secretly engaging in large-scale child trafficking and abuse. Nearly a third believe there is “a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together”, and almost a fifth say that Covid-19 was intentionally released as part of a “depopulation plan”. (...)
For many, the existence of Facebook – and its sister products, including WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger – has been a lifeline in this period. The social network has always prided itself on connecting people, and when the ability to socialise in person, or even leave the house, was curtailed, Facebook was there to pick up the slack.
But those same services have also enabled the creation of what one professional factchecker calls a “perfect storm for misinformation”. And with real-life interaction suppressed to counter the spread of the virus, it’s easier than ever for people to fall deep down a rabbit hole of deception, where the endpoint may not simply be a decline in vaccination rates or the election of an unpleasant president, but the end of consensus reality as we know it. What happens when your basic understanding of the world is no longer the same as your neighbour’s? And can Facebook stop that fate coming to us all? (...)
Facebook has become a centre point of civil society. It’s more than just a place to share photos and plan parties: it’s where people read news, arrange protests, engage in debate, play games and watch bands. And that means that all the problems of civil society are now problems for Facebook: bullying, sexual abuse, political polarisation and conspiracy theorists all existed before the social network, but all took on new contours as they moved online.
And this year they really moved online. As the initial lockdown was imposed across much of the world, people’s relationship to the internet, and to Facebook in particular, evolved rapidly. Stuck socially distancing, people turned to social networking to fill an emotional void.
Suddenly, the company found itself staring at unprecedented demands. “Our busiest time of the year is New Year’s Eve,” says Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook’s vice-president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, over a Zoom call from her London home. “And we were seeing the equivalent of New Year’s Eve every single day.” It was, she says, the inevitable result of having “almost the entire planet at home at the same time”.
Rachel agrees. “I believe the lockdown played a huge part in altering people’s perception of reality,” she says. When Covid restrictions came in, the rules of social interaction were rewritten. We suddenly stopped meeting friends in pubs, at the coffee point or by the school gates, and our lives moved online. And for many of us, “online” meant “on Facebook”.
A year later, a 4chan user with the handle “Q Clearance Patriot” appeared, claiming to be a government insider tasked with sharing “crumbs” of intel about Donald Trump’s planned counter-coup against the deep state forces frustrating his presidency. As Q’s following grew, the movement became known as the Storm – as in, “the calm before …” – and then QAnon, after its founder and prophet. At that point, QAnon was a relatively understandable conspiracy theory: it had a clear set of beliefs rooted in support for Trump and in the increasingly cryptic posts attributed to Q (by then widely believed to be a group of people posting under one name).
In September, BuzzFeed News made the stylistic decision to refer to the movement as a “collective delusion”. “There’s more to the convoluted entity than the average reader might realise,” wrote BuzzFeed’s Drusilla Moorhouse and Emerson Malone. “But delusion does illustrate the reality better than conspiracy theory does. We are discussing a mass of people who subscribe to a shared set of values and debunked ideas, which inform their beliefs and actions.”
At first, QAnon was a largely US phenomenon, with limited penetration in the UK. The pandemic, however, has changed that. According to recent polling by Hope Not Hate, one in four people in Britain now agree with some of the basic conspiracies it has promulgated: that “secret satanic cults exist and include influential elites”, and that “elites in Hollywood, politics, the media” are secretly engaging in large-scale child trafficking and abuse. Nearly a third believe there is “a single group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together”, and almost a fifth say that Covid-19 was intentionally released as part of a “depopulation plan”. (...)
For many, the existence of Facebook – and its sister products, including WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger – has been a lifeline in this period. The social network has always prided itself on connecting people, and when the ability to socialise in person, or even leave the house, was curtailed, Facebook was there to pick up the slack.
But those same services have also enabled the creation of what one professional factchecker calls a “perfect storm for misinformation”. And with real-life interaction suppressed to counter the spread of the virus, it’s easier than ever for people to fall deep down a rabbit hole of deception, where the endpoint may not simply be a decline in vaccination rates or the election of an unpleasant president, but the end of consensus reality as we know it. What happens when your basic understanding of the world is no longer the same as your neighbour’s? And can Facebook stop that fate coming to us all? (...)
Facebook has become a centre point of civil society. It’s more than just a place to share photos and plan parties: it’s where people read news, arrange protests, engage in debate, play games and watch bands. And that means that all the problems of civil society are now problems for Facebook: bullying, sexual abuse, political polarisation and conspiracy theorists all existed before the social network, but all took on new contours as they moved online.
And this year they really moved online. As the initial lockdown was imposed across much of the world, people’s relationship to the internet, and to Facebook in particular, evolved rapidly. Stuck socially distancing, people turned to social networking to fill an emotional void.
Suddenly, the company found itself staring at unprecedented demands. “Our busiest time of the year is New Year’s Eve,” says Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook’s vice-president for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, over a Zoom call from her London home. “And we were seeing the equivalent of New Year’s Eve every single day.” It was, she says, the inevitable result of having “almost the entire planet at home at the same time”.
Rachel agrees. “I believe the lockdown played a huge part in altering people’s perception of reality,” she says. When Covid restrictions came in, the rules of social interaction were rewritten. We suddenly stopped meeting friends in pubs, at the coffee point or by the school gates, and our lives moved online. And for many of us, “online” meant “on Facebook”.
by Alex Hern, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Stephanie Keith/Getty Images
Tuesday, November 10, 2020
The Swamp Gets Nervous
Over the weekend, people started making lists.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez kicked things off on Friday with a tweet that terrified Trumpworld.
“Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future?” she wrote. “I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future.”
A group calling itself the Trump Accountability Project sprung up to heed AOC’s call.
“Remember what they did,” the group’s sparse website declares. “We should not allow the following groups of people to profit from their experience: Those who elected him. Those who staffed his government. Those who funded him.”
Rarely a healthy sign in any democracy, the enemies lists started to freak out some normally unflappable Trump officials in the White House.
“At first I brushed it off as ridiculous, but what is scary is that she’s serious,” said a White House official of AOC’s tweet. “That is terrifying that a sitting member of Congress is calling for something like that. I believe there is a life after this in politics for Trump officials, but the idea that a sitting member of Congress wants to purge from society and ostracize us should scare the American people. It definitely should scare the American people more than it scares me. That type of rhetoric is terrifying when you have 70 million Americans who voted for this president. It might start with Trump officials but what if they go further?”
Before the election, when polls suggested an anti-Trump rout, some current and former Trump officials seemed to be positioning themselves for a new era when they would be forced to shed their association with the president. One top official at the White House became a bit of an inside joke among Washington reporters for sending conspicuous private texts taking digs at the administration and claiming to crave post-election life without Trump.
And some Republicans found it curious when a recent RNC official suddenly tweeted his support of Biden the day before the election. Was he having trouble finding a new job? Did he move to Silicon Valley or Portland, Ore.?
But the results, at least for the moment, have changed that conversation, with more Republicans on the Hill and Trump officials now insisting there may be less of a penalty for service to Trump.
Many top Trump advisers now say they’re not worried, and they point to the aftermaths of similarly controversial administrations as reassurance. They argue that if the Bush-era politicians and staffers who led the country to war in Iraq survived without being purged from politics, media and corporate America, then Trump’s advisers won’t either.
“The Bush people faced this,” said one of the president’s closest advisers. “Bush left office very unpopular, people thought thousands of people died in an unnecessary war and he was responsible for it. Everybody forgets that now that he’s an artist who doesn’t do partisan politics.”
This person pointed to the wealth accumulated by the two main architects of the war since Bush left office. “Don Rumsfeld did very well for himself when he left government,” said the close Trump adviser, who already has an unannounced book deal in hand. “Dick Cheney? I’ve been to his house in Wyoming!”
The close Trump adviser did allow that some staffers could have trouble in pockets of corporate America or Hollywood but the adviser isn’t personally concerned about finding work. “For somebody like me, I'm writing a book, I'm going to write a sequel,” the close Trump adviser said. “I get paid handsomely to give speeches. I have my corporate consulting. Maybe that’s not everyone else. But I can’t imagine I’m alone in that way. Are people going to say, ‘Oh shit, Mike Pompeo, you’re not secretary of State anymore so we can’t talk to you!’ Even the younger staffers — people still want people who worked in the White House. You have breathed rarefied air.”
Interviews with numerous current and former Trump officials reveal that while the talk of lists and permanent cancelation bubbling up on social media is worrisome, few are taking it seriously. Most Trump officials feel that the president’s better-than-expected showing in the election, the history of Bush-era “warmongers” (as one Trump official called them) easily re-integrating into polite society, and the myopia of both the news media and the loudest voices on the left will all conspire to allow even the most controversial Trump aides to continue working in politics and the private sector. (...)
While Trump officials with good reputations and bipartisan relationships will likely land well in the private sector, other mid-level Trump aides might have to launder their experience by working on another campaign or two, or finding a job on Capitol Hill.
“The easier path for some of the people might be to go work on a campaign or go work for another official and then you have another line on your resume,” said a Senate GOP aide, adding that his LinkedIn page “has been getting lit up” with Trump aides seeking to chat about potential jobs.
by Ryan Lizza, Daniel Lippman and Meridith McGraw, Politico | Read more:
Image:J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
[ed. Screw these people and screw Politico. Getting rid of the rot in this system is definitely a sign of a healthy democracy. To be charitable, I hope they at least find a nice place under some warm overpass to pitch their tents. See also: Who Goes Nazi (Dorothy Thompson/Harpers).]
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez kicked things off on Friday with a tweet that terrified Trumpworld.
“Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future?” she wrote. “I foresee decent probability of many deleted Tweets, writings, photos in the future.”
A group calling itself the Trump Accountability Project sprung up to heed AOC’s call.
Rarely a healthy sign in any democracy, the enemies lists started to freak out some normally unflappable Trump officials in the White House.
“At first I brushed it off as ridiculous, but what is scary is that she’s serious,” said a White House official of AOC’s tweet. “That is terrifying that a sitting member of Congress is calling for something like that. I believe there is a life after this in politics for Trump officials, but the idea that a sitting member of Congress wants to purge from society and ostracize us should scare the American people. It definitely should scare the American people more than it scares me. That type of rhetoric is terrifying when you have 70 million Americans who voted for this president. It might start with Trump officials but what if they go further?”
Before the election, when polls suggested an anti-Trump rout, some current and former Trump officials seemed to be positioning themselves for a new era when they would be forced to shed their association with the president. One top official at the White House became a bit of an inside joke among Washington reporters for sending conspicuous private texts taking digs at the administration and claiming to crave post-election life without Trump.
And some Republicans found it curious when a recent RNC official suddenly tweeted his support of Biden the day before the election. Was he having trouble finding a new job? Did he move to Silicon Valley or Portland, Ore.?
But the results, at least for the moment, have changed that conversation, with more Republicans on the Hill and Trump officials now insisting there may be less of a penalty for service to Trump.
Many top Trump advisers now say they’re not worried, and they point to the aftermaths of similarly controversial administrations as reassurance. They argue that if the Bush-era politicians and staffers who led the country to war in Iraq survived without being purged from politics, media and corporate America, then Trump’s advisers won’t either.
“The Bush people faced this,” said one of the president’s closest advisers. “Bush left office very unpopular, people thought thousands of people died in an unnecessary war and he was responsible for it. Everybody forgets that now that he’s an artist who doesn’t do partisan politics.”
This person pointed to the wealth accumulated by the two main architects of the war since Bush left office. “Don Rumsfeld did very well for himself when he left government,” said the close Trump adviser, who already has an unannounced book deal in hand. “Dick Cheney? I’ve been to his house in Wyoming!”
The close Trump adviser did allow that some staffers could have trouble in pockets of corporate America or Hollywood but the adviser isn’t personally concerned about finding work. “For somebody like me, I'm writing a book, I'm going to write a sequel,” the close Trump adviser said. “I get paid handsomely to give speeches. I have my corporate consulting. Maybe that’s not everyone else. But I can’t imagine I’m alone in that way. Are people going to say, ‘Oh shit, Mike Pompeo, you’re not secretary of State anymore so we can’t talk to you!’ Even the younger staffers — people still want people who worked in the White House. You have breathed rarefied air.”
Interviews with numerous current and former Trump officials reveal that while the talk of lists and permanent cancelation bubbling up on social media is worrisome, few are taking it seriously. Most Trump officials feel that the president’s better-than-expected showing in the election, the history of Bush-era “warmongers” (as one Trump official called them) easily re-integrating into polite society, and the myopia of both the news media and the loudest voices on the left will all conspire to allow even the most controversial Trump aides to continue working in politics and the private sector. (...)
While Trump officials with good reputations and bipartisan relationships will likely land well in the private sector, other mid-level Trump aides might have to launder their experience by working on another campaign or two, or finding a job on Capitol Hill.
“The easier path for some of the people might be to go work on a campaign or go work for another official and then you have another line on your resume,” said a Senate GOP aide, adding that his LinkedIn page “has been getting lit up” with Trump aides seeking to chat about potential jobs.
by Ryan Lizza, Daniel Lippman and Meridith McGraw, Politico | Read more:
Image:J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
[ed. Screw these people and screw Politico. Getting rid of the rot in this system is definitely a sign of a healthy democracy. To be charitable, I hope they at least find a nice place under some warm overpass to pitch their tents. See also: Who Goes Nazi (Dorothy Thompson/Harpers).]
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