Monday, August 26, 2024
Just Talking
Emerging adulthood is a time of life characterized by decision-making in romantic relationships. Most emerging adults (18 to 29-year-olds) utilize this time for romantic and sexual exploration with ambitions and expectations for marriage (see Millennial Marriage or The Marriage Paradox). Scholars such as Drs. Scott Stanley and Galena Rhoades have argued that the pathway to marriage has become increasingly ambiguous with fewer clear markers of relationship progression and commitment.
In recent years, we have seen increasing ambiguity about romantic relationship formation, along with a decrease in clear signals to clarify intentions of commitment. Unfortunately, current ambiguity in emerging romantic relationship transitions may make it difficult for partners to agree on when the relationship actually began due to multiple types of soft beginnings during which commitment is not clarified. Consequently, the pathways to sexual and romantic partnership have diversified, giving rise to several types of causal sexual relationships and experiences, such as hooking up and friends with benefits, and, as previously discussed on this blog, situationships. What seems to be facilitating the development of current romantic relationships, however, is a pre-dating stage known as “just talking.”
“We’re not dating. We’re not seeing each other. We’re just talking.”
I have continually heard this statement, or something similar, spoken by my students and therapy clients over the years. In 2014, while I was a doctoral student at Kansas State University, I taught two large sections of the course Introduction to Human Development with 700-800 students per semester. This is when my interest in researching the “just talking” trend began. During class discussions, my students explained that most were not going on dates but instead were engaging in a pre-dating phase of romantic relationship formation that they described as “talking” or “just talking.” I was shocked at the time to learn that instead of asking and being asked out on dates, most emerging adults seem to be focused on communicating through text messages, Snapchat, and other forms of social media. This just talking stage of romantic relationship formation was not unique to Kansas State University, and for the past 10 years at Northern Illinois University, I have continued collecting both qualitative and quantitative data.
Research is still in its infancy regarding the phenomenon of just talking; however, two of the first journal articles about just talking were recently published by Powell et al. (2021) and Hardesty et al. (2024). Thankfully, the concept of just talking finally seems to be gaining some traction as a viable research area, and journals and academic research conferences are increasingly showcasing some of the work that is being done.
In recent years, we have seen increasing ambiguity about romantic relationship formation, along with a decrease in clear signals to clarify intentions of commitment. Unfortunately, current ambiguity in emerging romantic relationship transitions may make it difficult for partners to agree on when the relationship actually began due to multiple types of soft beginnings during which commitment is not clarified. Consequently, the pathways to sexual and romantic partnership have diversified, giving rise to several types of causal sexual relationships and experiences, such as hooking up and friends with benefits, and, as previously discussed on this blog, situationships. What seems to be facilitating the development of current romantic relationships, however, is a pre-dating stage known as “just talking.”
“We’re not dating. We’re not seeing each other. We’re just talking.”
I have continually heard this statement, or something similar, spoken by my students and therapy clients over the years. In 2014, while I was a doctoral student at Kansas State University, I taught two large sections of the course Introduction to Human Development with 700-800 students per semester. This is when my interest in researching the “just talking” trend began. During class discussions, my students explained that most were not going on dates but instead were engaging in a pre-dating phase of romantic relationship formation that they described as “talking” or “just talking.” I was shocked at the time to learn that instead of asking and being asked out on dates, most emerging adults seem to be focused on communicating through text messages, Snapchat, and other forms of social media. This just talking stage of romantic relationship formation was not unique to Kansas State University, and for the past 10 years at Northern Illinois University, I have continued collecting both qualitative and quantitative data.
The Smartphone Effect
Even back in 2014, it was becoming abundantly clear that dating for the emerging adult (18–29-year-olds) population was being substantially impacted by the advent of smartphones and social media. Although pre-dating behaviors to get to know someone prior to officially dating have been around for decades, the integration of technology into emerging adults’ lives has fundamentally changed how people get to know potential romantic and sexual partners. Google Trends’ searches involving the phrase just talking began in September 2008 and continued to rise until January 2016, where it has remained a consistently prevalent search term (the highest prevalence so far was in February 2024).
It’s important to note that just talking relationships seem to be different than situationships or hooking up. In my research with 655 emerging adults, for instance, 60.9% of participants indicated that “just talking” is a step to entering a committed relationship, and only 21.5% agreed that it involves casual sex. Interestingly, regarding hooking up, our results were nearly evenly split with 35.6% disagreeing that just talking involves hooking up, 33.7% neutral, and 30.7% stating they believed it involved hooking up.
Proceed with Caution
This past July, I attended the International Association for Relationship Research 2024 Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, with two of my students, where we presented the findings from two of our research projects. In our paper presentation, “Proceed with Caution: How Emerging Adults Are Testing the Water in Just Talking Relationships,” we presented both qualitative and quantitative data. Click here to view the handout we distributed during the conference. As you can see in the figure below, there are some differences in the beliefs men and women have about this pre-dating behavior.
This mixed methods study was built from the results of a previous qualitative study my colleagues and I completed that has been submitted for publication. We collected data from nine emerging adult focus groups from two large Midwestern universities. Eleven unique themes were generated to identify how emerging adults:
A consistent finding is that most emerging adults would rather be asked out or ask someone on a date instead of just talking. In my sample of 655 emerging adults, only 7.6% stated that they would rather engage in just talking behavior rather than actually go on dates. In my qualitative interviews, many participants expressed frustration about just talking, but also indicated that just talking is the norm now due to the ease of smartphones and social media apps. It almost seemed foreign to many of our participants to not engage in this pre-dating behavior as a precursor for being ready to date. As one participant explained:
Even back in 2014, it was becoming abundantly clear that dating for the emerging adult (18–29-year-olds) population was being substantially impacted by the advent of smartphones and social media. Although pre-dating behaviors to get to know someone prior to officially dating have been around for decades, the integration of technology into emerging adults’ lives has fundamentally changed how people get to know potential romantic and sexual partners. Google Trends’ searches involving the phrase just talking began in September 2008 and continued to rise until January 2016, where it has remained a consistently prevalent search term (the highest prevalence so far was in February 2024).
It’s important to note that just talking relationships seem to be different than situationships or hooking up. In my research with 655 emerging adults, for instance, 60.9% of participants indicated that “just talking” is a step to entering a committed relationship, and only 21.5% agreed that it involves casual sex. Interestingly, regarding hooking up, our results were nearly evenly split with 35.6% disagreeing that just talking involves hooking up, 33.7% neutral, and 30.7% stating they believed it involved hooking up.
Proceed with Caution
This past July, I attended the International Association for Relationship Research 2024 Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, with two of my students, where we presented the findings from two of our research projects. In our paper presentation, “Proceed with Caution: How Emerging Adults Are Testing the Water in Just Talking Relationships,” we presented both qualitative and quantitative data. Click here to view the handout we distributed during the conference. As you can see in the figure below, there are some differences in the beliefs men and women have about this pre-dating behavior.
This mixed methods study was built from the results of a previous qualitative study my colleagues and I completed that has been submitted for publication. We collected data from nine emerging adult focus groups from two large Midwestern universities. Eleven unique themes were generated to identify how emerging adults:
- Conceptualize just talking (i.e., pre-dating, ambiguity about commitment, and unofficial romantic label)
- The reasons for just talking (pressure to keep options open, protection from rejection, testing the waters, and avoiding defining the relationship), and
- How technology may facilitate the just talking process (increases pool of potential partners, comfortable frequent contact, image crafting, and less effort required).
A consistent finding is that most emerging adults would rather be asked out or ask someone on a date instead of just talking. In my sample of 655 emerging adults, only 7.6% stated that they would rather engage in just talking behavior rather than actually go on dates. In my qualitative interviews, many participants expressed frustration about just talking, but also indicated that just talking is the norm now due to the ease of smartphones and social media apps. It almost seemed foreign to many of our participants to not engage in this pre-dating behavior as a precursor for being ready to date. As one participant explained:
Just talking means that the couple is in the beginning stages before dating. They have feelings towards each other and are getting to know one another more. There is flirting and hanging out, but they are not quite ready for dating.Unfortunately, for many of the women that we have interviewed in our focus groups or who have responded to some of our large surveys, the lived experience of just talking seems to favor men. Since just talking is not a “real committed relationship,” many men seem to be talking to multiple women at the same time. While women can also talk to multiple potential partners, it seems that a double standard exists. For instance, one female participant explained:
So, I think girls when they’re just talking, they’re just talking to one guy, and they’re committed and want it to be something more. But I think guys are kind of playing the field a lot of the time and looking at their options just in case they get friend zoned.Another one of the participants in the study explained how just talking can be frustrating, confusing, and even lead to emotional pain:
It is exhausting. You are constantly worrying whether the other person is into you and whether they are talking to other girls (which you know they are), which drives you insane….From my experience, you always end up with a broken heart. I ended up questioning my worth and became depressed the last time it didn’t work out. I ended up being so played by this guy. I spent the summer avoiding human contact and being bitter.The assumption for many emerging adults is that just talking is harmless since the commitment in the relationship is never defined. Many people, especially men, seem to be motivated to avoid rejection, and to still explore their options. Since commitment is not defined, some emerging adults may feel free to “talk” to multiple different partners at a time. This can create unbalanced relationships in which one partner is more committed than the other (see more regarding asymmetrically committed relationships here and here).
by D. Scott Sibley, Institute For Family Studies | Read more:
Images: Her/Warner Bros; and Northern Illinois Univ.
Sunday, August 25, 2024
Nanophone
Image: Nanophone
[ed. Not an endorsement (already have a hard time reading smartphone screens), but might be useful for some folks. See also: No one’s ready for this (The Verge) - Google's new Pixel 9.]
How Corporate Medicine Destroys Doctors
Five years ago, a remarkable article appeared in Stat News proposing a different way to think about the health care industry. Physicians, who typically work in high-pressure environments and establish relationships with sick patients whom they sometimes cannot save, have always been seen as susceptible to burnout, emotional pain, and even PTSD. But that wasn’t quite the way to think about it, according to physicians Wendy Dean and Simon G. Talbot. The problem isn’t coming from dealing with illness and death, which physicians are trained to endure. The problem is a for-profit system that impairs their ability to practice their craft and to protect their patients. And the way to describe it isn’t burnout—it’s moral injury.
Dean and Talbot received so many responses to their initial article that they collected the stories into a book released this year called If I Betray These Words: Moral Injury in Medicine and Why It’s So Hard for Clinicians to Put Patients First. The book traces the lives of several medical professionals who bumped up against a system of corporate-run medicine that renders inoperative a practice of treatment that doctors had been pursuing for decades. It’s not just about battles with insurance companies but hospitals and private equity–run practice groups, where most physicians are now employees, cogs in a wheel of for-profit health care.
The stories follow a pattern: Physicians are blocked from treating patients in the manner they want, and they fight against those who block them. In response, they are often drummed out of the profession or, in one case, driven to suicide. Together it’s a portrait of lost liberty, in a profession that has valued that independence as a way to ensure the best care for patients. In small ways, Dean and Talbot show physicians, administrators, and other professionals who are bucking this system, with new movements toward better organization and models of care. But it’s a long road back from corporate medicine. (...)
David Dayen: You have described the outpouring of contacts from other doctors after your initial moral injury article as unexpected. Do you feel like you gave voice to something that was already out there but by putting a name to it you were able to find a book’s worth of stories about the same phenomenon?
Wendy Dean: By the way, that book’s worth barely scratches the surface. What I think, in the seven years since we started having conversations, five years after the article was published [is it] taps into something that people have felt but have not had the language to express. In all honesty, it wasn’t what we set out to do. The first article was really a thought experiment. This is something that explains our experience. And explains the experience of the colleagues within reach of us that we can touch and talk to. But we don’t know if it’s a broader experience. I regularly have people come up to me almost in tears, and say to me, “This finally gives me language for the experience I had.”
We ran a piece recently about moral injury as it relates to schoolteachers, and how they have been restricted from applying their skills as well. Do you think the concept you gave voice to is a broader part of how we live today in a lot of different professions, where corporate interests hold sway?
I read that and I literally sent it to all my close connections, including the developmental editor for my book, who was a teacher and quit that profession because of moral injury. When I brought to her the initial concept, she said, “Oh my God, I don’t understand it in health care but I do in education.”
I had someone come to me and say, I left my job as a management consultant at McKinsey because of moral injury. After the initial article came out, we heard from not only all walks of clinicians. We heard from veterans, teachers, public defenders. In the fields that are becoming corporatized and where the practitioners are constrained in what they can do by corporate decisions, moral injury becomes a real risk.
We’ve seen private interests involved in health care really from the beginning, going back to the AMA. What is different about this era?
I think it’s like everything else. It happens gradually and then all at once. What used to be true … these are overly simplified explanations, but what used to be true is physicians were their own bosses, and hospitals were a workshop they went to. Hospitals owned the entity, and physicians did their work there. Surgeons did surgery there. But the clinicians were running the care of their patients, separate to how the hospital was run. There was no middleman between patient and physician, or between physician and insurer.
This allowed better checks and balances in a way. To take one example, prior authorization has exploded in the last couple years. Why did that happen? When physicians were still independent, they could make the decision that they were in-network for insurance. So if the insurance company harassed them too much, they could say, “I’m done.” They could tell patients, “Look, this is taking too much energy, I’m sorry for the inconvenience but I can’t do this anymore.” Insurers had a metric for that, called physician abrasion. They tracked it. They didn’t want physicians leaving their networks. What’s changed, physicians now are largely employed, and their employer decides if they’re in-network. They aren’t really tracking the abrasion on their clinicians. There’s no check and balance.
That’s one thing that comes through in the book; we hear a lot about the patient side of health care, the struggles of dealing with insurance and giant bills. But you bring in the other side of that transaction.
That’s the thing, part of the reason I wrote the book was to help patients understand that physicians are equally frustrated, equally angry, equally helpless, equally sad. It is deeply demoralizing to us that we can no longer control a patient’s care. The employment of physicians has really flipped the script in health care. Rather than negotiating as equal entities with hospitals on how to run care, as insurers get bigger, physicians and physician groups had to get bigger. It’s an arms race, who’s going to get bigger faster. But patients and clinicians lose out. Big corporations bashing against each other. What gets lost in that is the individual care.
I’ve called it concentration creep. You have a two-sided transaction, providers on one side and insurers on the other, and each side wants to gain leverage over that transaction, so there’s an incentive to concentrate and monopolize.
I will say, physicians are not entirely innocent in all of this. We did decide at some point that managing this business of health care was getting too complex. So we handed it over to administrators. We thought it would be done in good faith. But in fact that balance has shifted. Now that we are employees, subject to more of that power-wielding, we don’t have a sufficient voice.
One of the really interesting dynamics is how this is forcing doctors to think of themselves as workers in a way that I think we haven’t seen before. So there’s this rise in union activity among internists and residents and even doctors. How do you see that change?
I also think it’s a bit of a shift. The core principle of the book is that we’re separated from this covenant that we have with society, which defines us as a profession. When you separate us from that, what are we? If we don’t have autonomy, if we don’t have decision-making authority, are we a profession? If we are not, holy smokes.
You have this fascinating chapter about electronic medical records, and the downsides of efficiency and technology, what it does to the doctor-patient relationship. Which is the bigger problem: Is it the way this technology has evolved, or just the fact that there’s this technological barrier to care, period?
I think it was a combination of those two. The government requirement to be on electronic medical record systems in such a short time frame meant that the only way to do it was to build it on existing systems. All of the existing systems were billing systems. We now have a cash register, with a clinical note bolted on.
One of the things that medical school does, it trains you not just in the diseases that happen, but it trains you in a very systematic way of analyzing the data you’re getting. The clinical encounter flows in a routine way. The same things happen in a certain order. They get a general story, ask more detailed questions, conduct an exam, and then diagnose and devise a treatment plan. That is a systematic method that’s learned in medical school.
The electronic medical record disrupts that. You’re constantly interrupted by this pop-up, this set of questions: Do you have a flu shot, is there a pneumonia vaccination, does the patient have a throw rug. It’s interrupting that flow with nonsense. It doesn’t always make data available where you want it in an easy way. The workflow of the electronic medical record isn’t designed to mirror the clinical workflow of a patient encounter. That’s what makes it for the clinician so challenging. We’re constantly fighting this electronic record.
The stories follow a pattern: Physicians are blocked from treating patients in the manner they want, and they fight against those who block them. In response, they are often drummed out of the profession or, in one case, driven to suicide. Together it’s a portrait of lost liberty, in a profession that has valued that independence as a way to ensure the best care for patients. In small ways, Dean and Talbot show physicians, administrators, and other professionals who are bucking this system, with new movements toward better organization and models of care. But it’s a long road back from corporate medicine. (...)
David Dayen: You have described the outpouring of contacts from other doctors after your initial moral injury article as unexpected. Do you feel like you gave voice to something that was already out there but by putting a name to it you were able to find a book’s worth of stories about the same phenomenon?
Wendy Dean: By the way, that book’s worth barely scratches the surface. What I think, in the seven years since we started having conversations, five years after the article was published [is it] taps into something that people have felt but have not had the language to express. In all honesty, it wasn’t what we set out to do. The first article was really a thought experiment. This is something that explains our experience. And explains the experience of the colleagues within reach of us that we can touch and talk to. But we don’t know if it’s a broader experience. I regularly have people come up to me almost in tears, and say to me, “This finally gives me language for the experience I had.”
We ran a piece recently about moral injury as it relates to schoolteachers, and how they have been restricted from applying their skills as well. Do you think the concept you gave voice to is a broader part of how we live today in a lot of different professions, where corporate interests hold sway?
I read that and I literally sent it to all my close connections, including the developmental editor for my book, who was a teacher and quit that profession because of moral injury. When I brought to her the initial concept, she said, “Oh my God, I don’t understand it in health care but I do in education.”
I had someone come to me and say, I left my job as a management consultant at McKinsey because of moral injury. After the initial article came out, we heard from not only all walks of clinicians. We heard from veterans, teachers, public defenders. In the fields that are becoming corporatized and where the practitioners are constrained in what they can do by corporate decisions, moral injury becomes a real risk.
We’ve seen private interests involved in health care really from the beginning, going back to the AMA. What is different about this era?
I think it’s like everything else. It happens gradually and then all at once. What used to be true … these are overly simplified explanations, but what used to be true is physicians were their own bosses, and hospitals were a workshop they went to. Hospitals owned the entity, and physicians did their work there. Surgeons did surgery there. But the clinicians were running the care of their patients, separate to how the hospital was run. There was no middleman between patient and physician, or between physician and insurer.
This allowed better checks and balances in a way. To take one example, prior authorization has exploded in the last couple years. Why did that happen? When physicians were still independent, they could make the decision that they were in-network for insurance. So if the insurance company harassed them too much, they could say, “I’m done.” They could tell patients, “Look, this is taking too much energy, I’m sorry for the inconvenience but I can’t do this anymore.” Insurers had a metric for that, called physician abrasion. They tracked it. They didn’t want physicians leaving their networks. What’s changed, physicians now are largely employed, and their employer decides if they’re in-network. They aren’t really tracking the abrasion on their clinicians. There’s no check and balance.
That’s one thing that comes through in the book; we hear a lot about the patient side of health care, the struggles of dealing with insurance and giant bills. But you bring in the other side of that transaction.
That’s the thing, part of the reason I wrote the book was to help patients understand that physicians are equally frustrated, equally angry, equally helpless, equally sad. It is deeply demoralizing to us that we can no longer control a patient’s care. The employment of physicians has really flipped the script in health care. Rather than negotiating as equal entities with hospitals on how to run care, as insurers get bigger, physicians and physician groups had to get bigger. It’s an arms race, who’s going to get bigger faster. But patients and clinicians lose out. Big corporations bashing against each other. What gets lost in that is the individual care.
I’ve called it concentration creep. You have a two-sided transaction, providers on one side and insurers on the other, and each side wants to gain leverage over that transaction, so there’s an incentive to concentrate and monopolize.
I will say, physicians are not entirely innocent in all of this. We did decide at some point that managing this business of health care was getting too complex. So we handed it over to administrators. We thought it would be done in good faith. But in fact that balance has shifted. Now that we are employees, subject to more of that power-wielding, we don’t have a sufficient voice.
One of the really interesting dynamics is how this is forcing doctors to think of themselves as workers in a way that I think we haven’t seen before. So there’s this rise in union activity among internists and residents and even doctors. How do you see that change?
I also think it’s a bit of a shift. The core principle of the book is that we’re separated from this covenant that we have with society, which defines us as a profession. When you separate us from that, what are we? If we don’t have autonomy, if we don’t have decision-making authority, are we a profession? If we are not, holy smokes.
You have this fascinating chapter about electronic medical records, and the downsides of efficiency and technology, what it does to the doctor-patient relationship. Which is the bigger problem: Is it the way this technology has evolved, or just the fact that there’s this technological barrier to care, period?
I think it was a combination of those two. The government requirement to be on electronic medical record systems in such a short time frame meant that the only way to do it was to build it on existing systems. All of the existing systems were billing systems. We now have a cash register, with a clinical note bolted on.
One of the things that medical school does, it trains you not just in the diseases that happen, but it trains you in a very systematic way of analyzing the data you’re getting. The clinical encounter flows in a routine way. The same things happen in a certain order. They get a general story, ask more detailed questions, conduct an exam, and then diagnose and devise a treatment plan. That is a systematic method that’s learned in medical school.
The electronic medical record disrupts that. You’re constantly interrupted by this pop-up, this set of questions: Do you have a flu shot, is there a pneumonia vaccination, does the patient have a throw rug. It’s interrupting that flow with nonsense. It doesn’t always make data available where you want it in an easy way. The workflow of the electronic medical record isn’t designed to mirror the clinical workflow of a patient encounter. That’s what makes it for the clinician so challenging. We’re constantly fighting this electronic record.
by David Dayen, American Prospect | Read more:
Image: Ringo Chiu, AP
[ed. Just had a check-up with my old doctor, who I've been seeing for the last 40 years. He still has an independent practice, and I've often wondered what happened to that model. Now I know. The last time I was in a hospital/clinic for a prescription refill the doctor stared at a screen the whole time, asking questions sideways and typing in my answers - I can't even tell you what she looked like. What a system. Probably sees at least 20-30 patients each day - quantity over quality.]
Saturday, August 24, 2024
Taboo to Trendy: Dumpster Diving
When Annemarie Cox drives around San Diego, she scans the urban landscape for one thing that the rest of the population likely ignores: dumpsters. Where other people see trash, she sees possibilities – quirky secondhand clothes, collectible antiques, even family heirlooms and photographs that have been casually discarded.
On one recent Tuesday in southern California, the mid-morning sun already beating down, Cox’s usual quest was under way. She paid a visit to one of her favorite local dumpsters, first resting her forearms comfortably on the sides and then reaching barehanded towards whatever was at the bottom. Other than a broken TV atop a huge stack of cardboard boxes, there wasn’t much to find this time around.
But Cox wasn’t worried. She had already found a whole treasure trove of other items in this very same bin, including the feathered hat she was currently wearing, a plastic bag of brand-new T-shirts and a collection of decorative, hand-painted Easter eggs from Austria.
“I dumpster dive to save the world from drowning in trash,” Cox said. “A bit sappy, but my friends and family understand my passion.”
Catching a glimpse of Cox in her natural habitat – hovered over the lip of an overflowing dumpster – might make some onlookers typecast her in a certain way. But the 60-year-old defies stereotypes: she holds a bachelor’s degree in archeology and works as a marketing manager in southern California. She also peers into a trash can almost every day of the week, and shares photos of her finds to the Facebook group Dumpster Diving San Diego, which boasts several thousand members.
Cox and the other San Diego divers aren’t alone. Dumpster diving, once a firmly taboo act, is approaching the mainstream. Videos of people jumping into the bins behind stores and apartment buildings, and later showing off their trash hauls, have become a wildly popular corner of social media.
On TikTok alone, tens of thousands of #dumpsterdiving posts have racked up billions of views. A varied cohort of people – from Annemarie Cox, to a 32-year-old YouTuber in Texas, to a self-described “freegan” who leads trash tours in New York City – now devote their lives to dumpster diving.
The reasons behind the unexpected boom are manifold. As many Americans worry about the rising cost of living, some look to the trash to find food and cut down on expensive grocery bills. Others love the prospect of scoring heaps of clothing and furniture to donate or sell.
But often, the prevailing motivation is simple: to ensure that less trash ends up rotting in landfills. The US has an ever-growing trash problem, generating more than 292m tons of municipal solid waste in 2018, or nearly 5lbs for each person each day, according to the most recent statistics from the Environmental Protection Agency. Roughly half of that trash went to a landfill. Food waste is particularly egregious, with an estimated 30-40% of the country’s food supply thrown away.
Going dumpster diving is one creative way to stop that cycle of waste, Cox said.
“When you throw something away, what is ‘away’?” she said. “It’s away from you, but it’s towards someone else.”
‘Shocking amount of waste’
Kitchen appliances and laundry detergent. Boxes of unopened hand sanitizer. Mountains of never-used Christmas and Halloween decorations. Laundry hampers filled with folded, freshly washed clothes. iPhones. A Western Union telegram from 1964 (“Come a week later,” it read, “I’m sick. -Mom”). Even a signed letter from former president George Bush to a local school.
Those are just a few of the things that Kelly Sparks, better known as @breafkast on YouTube, has found in the dumpsters of northern Texas, more than 1,000 miles (1,600km) to the east of where Cox salvages trash in California.
“Dumpster diving,” she said, “is the epitome of a treasure hunt.”
Sparks started diving more than a decade ago, first by exploring the Trader Joe’s dumpsters in Los Angeles, where Cox’s now husband and fellow YouTube collaborator went to college. In the span of nine months, the only grocery item that Sparks bought from a store was soy sauce.
“It was overwhelming, the amount of food that was in their dumpster,” Sparks said. “We would dumpster dive every night. We got so hooked on it.”
Sparks created her YouTube channel six months before the pandemic, initially thinking that her dad, who loved to hear about her dumpster finds, might be her only fan. “I really didn’t expect other people to be interested in it,” she said.
Instead, the page took off. Sparks now has nearly a quarter-million subscribers on YouTube, and also created a Facebook group for other dumpster diving enthusiasts, which quickly took on a life of its own; it now has about 15,000 members. (...)
Sparks and her husband have since graduated beyond Trader Joe’s dumpsters to the trash behind other retail stores and apartment complexes. They wear gloves and closed-toed shoes, and come prepared with “grabbers” (think a plastic claw on the end of a stick) and a small rake that they use to sift through the garbage.
Their biggest yearly event (akin to the “Christmas of dumpster diving”, Sparks said) is when college students move out of their dorms in the spring, and usually only have a day or two to leave campus. Sparks has scored big at schools across Texas – finding towers of working mini fridges and microwaves, stacks of plastic shelves and a huge host of other dorm necessities.
by Amanda Ulrich, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Amanda Ulrich
On one recent Tuesday in southern California, the mid-morning sun already beating down, Cox’s usual quest was under way. She paid a visit to one of her favorite local dumpsters, first resting her forearms comfortably on the sides and then reaching barehanded towards whatever was at the bottom. Other than a broken TV atop a huge stack of cardboard boxes, there wasn’t much to find this time around.
“I dumpster dive to save the world from drowning in trash,” Cox said. “A bit sappy, but my friends and family understand my passion.”
Catching a glimpse of Cox in her natural habitat – hovered over the lip of an overflowing dumpster – might make some onlookers typecast her in a certain way. But the 60-year-old defies stereotypes: she holds a bachelor’s degree in archeology and works as a marketing manager in southern California. She also peers into a trash can almost every day of the week, and shares photos of her finds to the Facebook group Dumpster Diving San Diego, which boasts several thousand members.
Cox and the other San Diego divers aren’t alone. Dumpster diving, once a firmly taboo act, is approaching the mainstream. Videos of people jumping into the bins behind stores and apartment buildings, and later showing off their trash hauls, have become a wildly popular corner of social media.
On TikTok alone, tens of thousands of #dumpsterdiving posts have racked up billions of views. A varied cohort of people – from Annemarie Cox, to a 32-year-old YouTuber in Texas, to a self-described “freegan” who leads trash tours in New York City – now devote their lives to dumpster diving.
The reasons behind the unexpected boom are manifold. As many Americans worry about the rising cost of living, some look to the trash to find food and cut down on expensive grocery bills. Others love the prospect of scoring heaps of clothing and furniture to donate or sell.
But often, the prevailing motivation is simple: to ensure that less trash ends up rotting in landfills. The US has an ever-growing trash problem, generating more than 292m tons of municipal solid waste in 2018, or nearly 5lbs for each person each day, according to the most recent statistics from the Environmental Protection Agency. Roughly half of that trash went to a landfill. Food waste is particularly egregious, with an estimated 30-40% of the country’s food supply thrown away.
Going dumpster diving is one creative way to stop that cycle of waste, Cox said.
“When you throw something away, what is ‘away’?” she said. “It’s away from you, but it’s towards someone else.”
‘Shocking amount of waste’
Kitchen appliances and laundry detergent. Boxes of unopened hand sanitizer. Mountains of never-used Christmas and Halloween decorations. Laundry hampers filled with folded, freshly washed clothes. iPhones. A Western Union telegram from 1964 (“Come a week later,” it read, “I’m sick. -Mom”). Even a signed letter from former president George Bush to a local school.
Those are just a few of the things that Kelly Sparks, better known as @breafkast on YouTube, has found in the dumpsters of northern Texas, more than 1,000 miles (1,600km) to the east of where Cox salvages trash in California.
“Dumpster diving,” she said, “is the epitome of a treasure hunt.”
Sparks started diving more than a decade ago, first by exploring the Trader Joe’s dumpsters in Los Angeles, where Cox’s now husband and fellow YouTube collaborator went to college. In the span of nine months, the only grocery item that Sparks bought from a store was soy sauce.
“It was overwhelming, the amount of food that was in their dumpster,” Sparks said. “We would dumpster dive every night. We got so hooked on it.”
Sparks created her YouTube channel six months before the pandemic, initially thinking that her dad, who loved to hear about her dumpster finds, might be her only fan. “I really didn’t expect other people to be interested in it,” she said.
Instead, the page took off. Sparks now has nearly a quarter-million subscribers on YouTube, and also created a Facebook group for other dumpster diving enthusiasts, which quickly took on a life of its own; it now has about 15,000 members. (...)
Sparks and her husband have since graduated beyond Trader Joe’s dumpsters to the trash behind other retail stores and apartment complexes. They wear gloves and closed-toed shoes, and come prepared with “grabbers” (think a plastic claw on the end of a stick) and a small rake that they use to sift through the garbage.
Their biggest yearly event (akin to the “Christmas of dumpster diving”, Sparks said) is when college students move out of their dorms in the spring, and usually only have a day or two to leave campus. Sparks has scored big at schools across Texas – finding towers of working mini fridges and microwaves, stacks of plastic shelves and a huge host of other dorm necessities.
Image: Amanda Ulrich
[ed. Makes sense. I'd do it myself except a lot of dumpsters around here are locked, and neither management nor the police seem too interested in encourging forgagers. Probably a small ladder, pitchfork, garbage bags, and bug net are all you'd need. And gloves. And a mask.]
The Minnesota Model
Kamala Harris has named Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate for the 2024 election. It has become increasingly apparent that this was about the best choice she realistically could have made. Walz seems like a man constructed in a lab to help Democrats win a close election: a midwestern governor who not only has “Aggressively Normal Dad” vibes, as the New York Times put it, but who is also an aggressively sincere advocate for something resembling social democracy with the policy record to back it up.
A lot of the excitement surrounding Walz right now seems to stem from the assumption that he’ll help the Harris campaign defeat Trump in November. That’s understandable, given how real and dangerous the possibility of a second Trump term has felt over the past few months. Just a month ago, some Democrats were going on the record saying that they were “resigned” to a second Trump term. At the very least, it’s a relief to see them actually trying to win. But the value of Walz goes beyond his ability to get Kamala Harris into the White House. He provides a blueprint for how she can be successful once she’s there. If she does win, she’ll face the challenge of actually governing, and she’ll need all the help she can get. If she does manage to win the presidency, current predictions suggest that in the best-case scenario, she’ll come in with a gossamer thin majority in the House and Senate with which to try to pass policy. Looking back at Walz’s domestic agenda as governor of Minnesota provides us with a sense of direction for what Democrats could accomplish nationally.
The Biden administration was an example of how not to govern. Elected on a mandate to improve conditions in a nation being pummeled by the COVID pandemic and Trump’s failure to adequately address it, the Biden administration squandered the brief period of popularity they enjoyed in the first few months of their term, dragging their feet on filibuster reform until it was far too late. As a result, many of their policy priorities were either winnowed down (like gun reform, green energy expansion)—or completely abandoned (like maintaining the expanded child tax credit, passing the PRO Act, and protecting abortion rights nationally after the reversal of Roe v. Wade).
Joe Biden spent much of his early presidency laboring under the delusion that Republicans would have some “epiphany” and decide to meet his party halfway to pass significant legislation, something that largely did not happen. And in the rare cases that it did, like the bipartisan infrastructure bill or the post-Uvalde gun reforms, the result was something thoroughly watered down from what Democrats had initially hoped to pass. Of course, defenders of the Biden administration at the time would tell you that Biden was at the mercy of obstinate members of his own party, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who refused to sign onto any legislation that lacked Republican support. But as Branko Marcetic argued at the time in Jacobin, Biden had plenty of tools of coercion and persuasion he could have used to get them on board. A hypothetical President Harris will not have to deal with Manchin and Sinema obstructing her legislative agenda like Biden did—as they will both be out of the Senate. But the problem ran deeper than those two. As Sam Brodey reported for the Daily Beast, other Democrats considered Manchin and Sinema to be a “heat shield” that allowed them to avoid having to stick their own necks out to tank liberal proposals.
The lesson you could take from this is that with a slim majority, you simply have to lower your expectations for what can be accomplished. But this is not true at all. It is still possible to not only govern in such conditions but to have one of the most productive legislative sessions in recent memory. We know this because it’s exactly what Tim Walz did in Minnesota last year.
Walz didn’t achieve much during his first term as governor, for the most part because any legislative goal he attempted to achieve had to make it through a Republican-controlled legislature. In 2022, an election where both chambers were expected to lean Republican, Walz’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party surprisingly achieved a legislative trifecta for the first time since 2012 by the slimmest of margins: with a 34-33 Senate majority and just a six-vote edge in the House, a situation that gave him even less room for defections than Biden had at the beginning of his term.
At the national level, Democrats took their narrow majority as a sign that they needed to proceed with caution and seemed to govern from a place of fear. But in Minnesota, the DFL saw their first opportunity to wield power in a decade and decided to make the most of it.
In response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, which had unleashed a wave of ruthless state-level abortion bans around the country, one of the Minnesota DFL’s first acts in 2023 was to codify the rights to an abortion and contraception into state law, which would make it more difficult for it to be overturned by a future state supreme court case. In a display of exceptional party discipline, the caucus weathered dozens of Republican amendments designed to weaken the bill. Two months later, the legislature passed another bill which made the state a “safe haven” for abortion seekers in the many surrounding states where it is banned or heavily restricted. Minnesota also declared itself a refuge for transgender people living in states with bans on gender-affirming care. It also banned the abusive practice of gay “conversion therapy.”
Minnesota took steps toward a more humane criminal justice system. The legislature granted voting rights to 55,000 people with prior felony convictions, something which had been a legislative priority for attorney general Keith Ellison since he entered the legislature two decades before. Minnesota banned the practice of sentencing minors to life in prison and allowed for the possible supervised release of at least 40 people who’d been behind bars since they were children. It granted undocumented immigrants the right to obtain a driver’s license. (Republicans are currently losing their minds over this one even though this policy has allowed undocumented immigrants to more easily participate in society and has also improved road safety in general.) And Minnesota became the 23rd state in the country to legalize recreational cannabis and wiped out conviction records for 58,000 people, with more on the way.
The Minnesota legislature also entered government with a large budget surplus that they put to fantastic use. One of their biggest goals was to tackle child poverty, which had doubled nationally in 2022 after the U.S. Congress allowed the expanded child tax credit to expire. If you know about any of the Minnesota legislature’s policy accomplishments, it’s that they passed free breakfast and lunch for all public school children. But Minnesota also passed its own sizable child tax credit that is expected to cut child poverty in the state by a third and has already benefited nearly half a million children. Minnesota introduced the “North Star Promise,” which guarantees free tuition at public colleges for students from families who make less than $80,000 per year. The state has poured huge investments into education, affordable housing, public infrastructure, and green energy.
And Minnesota became perhaps the nation’s most progressive state for workers. Last June, it passed a package of policies, including 12 weeks of paid family leave and 12 weeks of paid medical leave. And against furious objections from business interests, it introduced numerous new workplace protections: it banned non-compete clauses in employee contracts, prevented employers from holding “captive audience” union-busting meetings, allowed teachers’ unions to bargain over educator-to-student ratios in their classrooms, and introduced new regulations on the conditions of work in Amazon warehouses and meatpacking plants. Last month, a new $15 minimum wage took effect.
At the same time, neighboring red states were going hog wild enacting right-wing policies: banning abortion, cracking down on the freedoms of LGBTQ people, and gutting labor protections and welfare spending. This created a sense among Minnesota Democrats that their power was ephemeral and needed to be used to its fullest potential to prevent future backsliding.
Journalist Peter Callaghan, who has covered the legislative session extensively for MinnPost, described their attitude as follows in an interview with Democracy Now!:
It’s clear that Walz’s attitude towards governing is fundamentally opposite to that of the national party and a lot of other state level Democratic governments who tend to err on the side of caution at the risk of jeopardizing their electability. As he put it in an interview with the Washington Post, “I thought this would be a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and it should be viewed that way. And I've always said you don't win elections to bank political capital. You win elections to burn the capital to improve lives.” (...)
On one level, the benefit of passing these policies speaks for itself: they are likely to improve a lot of people’s lives. But they have also generated a sense of possibility about what more can be achieved and that is generating enthusiasm for political participation. As Sarah Jaffe recently chronicled in a piece for In These Times, the last few years have seen an explosion of activism under the so-called “Minnesota Model”:
The modern Republican Party, by contrast, is built upon a loathing of the government. Some of its members want to see the government shrunk and hamstrung. This is the old ethos, best described by Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist who famously said: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” [ed. Good thing Medicare and Medicade, Social Security, school lunches for children, infrastruce improvement (roads, bridges, electrical grid, waste disposal, web connectivty, fire response, public parks, libraries, etc). - aren't all on the kill switch.. oh, wait...]. The Trumpist faction is more focused on purging government institutions of the disloyal [ed. like Nazi's]. “I think that w hat Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single middle-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,” JD Vance said in a 2021 podcast interview. “Replace them with our people, and when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and when the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
Either way, to become part of the government as it exists now — to be engaged in the day-to-day process of governing — is to open yourself to suspicion and potentially mark yourself for a later purge." Ezra Klein - Trump Turned the Democratic Party Into a Pitiless Machine (NYT).]
A lot of the excitement surrounding Walz right now seems to stem from the assumption that he’ll help the Harris campaign defeat Trump in November. That’s understandable, given how real and dangerous the possibility of a second Trump term has felt over the past few months. Just a month ago, some Democrats were going on the record saying that they were “resigned” to a second Trump term. At the very least, it’s a relief to see them actually trying to win. But the value of Walz goes beyond his ability to get Kamala Harris into the White House. He provides a blueprint for how she can be successful once she’s there. If she does win, she’ll face the challenge of actually governing, and she’ll need all the help she can get. If she does manage to win the presidency, current predictions suggest that in the best-case scenario, she’ll come in with a gossamer thin majority in the House and Senate with which to try to pass policy. Looking back at Walz’s domestic agenda as governor of Minnesota provides us with a sense of direction for what Democrats could accomplish nationally.
Joe Biden spent much of his early presidency laboring under the delusion that Republicans would have some “epiphany” and decide to meet his party halfway to pass significant legislation, something that largely did not happen. And in the rare cases that it did, like the bipartisan infrastructure bill or the post-Uvalde gun reforms, the result was something thoroughly watered down from what Democrats had initially hoped to pass. Of course, defenders of the Biden administration at the time would tell you that Biden was at the mercy of obstinate members of his own party, Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who refused to sign onto any legislation that lacked Republican support. But as Branko Marcetic argued at the time in Jacobin, Biden had plenty of tools of coercion and persuasion he could have used to get them on board. A hypothetical President Harris will not have to deal with Manchin and Sinema obstructing her legislative agenda like Biden did—as they will both be out of the Senate. But the problem ran deeper than those two. As Sam Brodey reported for the Daily Beast, other Democrats considered Manchin and Sinema to be a “heat shield” that allowed them to avoid having to stick their own necks out to tank liberal proposals.
The lesson you could take from this is that with a slim majority, you simply have to lower your expectations for what can be accomplished. But this is not true at all. It is still possible to not only govern in such conditions but to have one of the most productive legislative sessions in recent memory. We know this because it’s exactly what Tim Walz did in Minnesota last year.
Walz didn’t achieve much during his first term as governor, for the most part because any legislative goal he attempted to achieve had to make it through a Republican-controlled legislature. In 2022, an election where both chambers were expected to lean Republican, Walz’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party surprisingly achieved a legislative trifecta for the first time since 2012 by the slimmest of margins: with a 34-33 Senate majority and just a six-vote edge in the House, a situation that gave him even less room for defections than Biden had at the beginning of his term.
At the national level, Democrats took their narrow majority as a sign that they needed to proceed with caution and seemed to govern from a place of fear. But in Minnesota, the DFL saw their first opportunity to wield power in a decade and decided to make the most of it.
In response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, which had unleashed a wave of ruthless state-level abortion bans around the country, one of the Minnesota DFL’s first acts in 2023 was to codify the rights to an abortion and contraception into state law, which would make it more difficult for it to be overturned by a future state supreme court case. In a display of exceptional party discipline, the caucus weathered dozens of Republican amendments designed to weaken the bill. Two months later, the legislature passed another bill which made the state a “safe haven” for abortion seekers in the many surrounding states where it is banned or heavily restricted. Minnesota also declared itself a refuge for transgender people living in states with bans on gender-affirming care. It also banned the abusive practice of gay “conversion therapy.”
Minnesota took steps toward a more humane criminal justice system. The legislature granted voting rights to 55,000 people with prior felony convictions, something which had been a legislative priority for attorney general Keith Ellison since he entered the legislature two decades before. Minnesota banned the practice of sentencing minors to life in prison and allowed for the possible supervised release of at least 40 people who’d been behind bars since they were children. It granted undocumented immigrants the right to obtain a driver’s license. (Republicans are currently losing their minds over this one even though this policy has allowed undocumented immigrants to more easily participate in society and has also improved road safety in general.) And Minnesota became the 23rd state in the country to legalize recreational cannabis and wiped out conviction records for 58,000 people, with more on the way.
The Minnesota legislature also entered government with a large budget surplus that they put to fantastic use. One of their biggest goals was to tackle child poverty, which had doubled nationally in 2022 after the U.S. Congress allowed the expanded child tax credit to expire. If you know about any of the Minnesota legislature’s policy accomplishments, it’s that they passed free breakfast and lunch for all public school children. But Minnesota also passed its own sizable child tax credit that is expected to cut child poverty in the state by a third and has already benefited nearly half a million children. Minnesota introduced the “North Star Promise,” which guarantees free tuition at public colleges for students from families who make less than $80,000 per year. The state has poured huge investments into education, affordable housing, public infrastructure, and green energy.
And Minnesota became perhaps the nation’s most progressive state for workers. Last June, it passed a package of policies, including 12 weeks of paid family leave and 12 weeks of paid medical leave. And against furious objections from business interests, it introduced numerous new workplace protections: it banned non-compete clauses in employee contracts, prevented employers from holding “captive audience” union-busting meetings, allowed teachers’ unions to bargain over educator-to-student ratios in their classrooms, and introduced new regulations on the conditions of work in Amazon warehouses and meatpacking plants. Last month, a new $15 minimum wage took effect.
At the same time, neighboring red states were going hog wild enacting right-wing policies: banning abortion, cracking down on the freedoms of LGBTQ people, and gutting labor protections and welfare spending. This created a sense among Minnesota Democrats that their power was ephemeral and needed to be used to its fullest potential to prevent future backsliding.
Journalist Peter Callaghan, who has covered the legislative session extensively for MinnPost, described their attitude as follows in an interview with Democracy Now!:
They pretty much decided a couple of things. One, they had four years, meaning they could lose the House in two years, but they couldn’t lose the Governor’s Office or the state Senate until '26. So, whatever they passed could stay in place for these four years — it's harder to rescind things than it is to pass things — and that they were going to make a list and check it off as they went.This was not just a figurative list, but a literal one that Walz kept in his office.
It’s clear that Walz’s attitude towards governing is fundamentally opposite to that of the national party and a lot of other state level Democratic governments who tend to err on the side of caution at the risk of jeopardizing their electability. As he put it in an interview with the Washington Post, “I thought this would be a once-in-a-generation opportunity, and it should be viewed that way. And I've always said you don't win elections to bank political capital. You win elections to burn the capital to improve lives.” (...)
On one level, the benefit of passing these policies speaks for itself: they are likely to improve a lot of people’s lives. But they have also generated a sense of possibility about what more can be achieved and that is generating enthusiasm for political participation. As Sarah Jaffe recently chronicled in a piece for In These Times, the last few years have seen an explosion of activism under the so-called “Minnesota Model”:
It’s a process that has built up over years, as a small group stacked up wins and more and more groups joined them. […] The Minnesota Model has yielded gain after gain: free school meals and driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants; getting Amazon to negotiate with workers for the first time; a $15 minimum wage (with proposals to bring it up to $20); so many union contracts it’s hard to count, for janitors and tenants and teachers.…And while Minnesota’s legislative blizzard was framed as something done with the expectation that lawmakers would soon lose power, this might not happen. Nationwide, Democrats, who failed to pass much of their professed agenda during the years 2021-2024, are still polling better than Republicans on the generic ballot, and at least one pollster projects them to hold onto the House in Minnesota. If people will vote for a party that delivered only a sliver of its professed agenda, imagine what accomplishing many things that make people’s lives better could do! (...)
[T]hat alliance changed the face of Minnesota politics, bringing about the Democratic trifecta that passed policies statewide that were goals for members of the alignment.
It speaks to how little we’ve come to expect from the Democratic Party—both at the national level and in other states—that Minnesota’s legislative session is seen as such a departure from what is normal. But if the Democrats have power after 2024, there’s a good chance that the circumstances will look something like what Walz stepped into in Minnesota. They have an obligation to learn from what that state has been doing right. Walz seems to be an exceptional talent for a lot of reasons. But I think the single most important thing is that he understands the importance of taking action while you have the opportunity.
by Stephen Prager, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Sorry for the politics. Not much else going on at the moment with the convention sucking the air out of everything. Naturally, if you read through the whole article, you'll see the inevitable cries of Socialism! Marxism! Progressives! Screw 'em. Most people who throw those labels around have almost no reading or historical perspective to know what they even mean (or their different flavors). C'mon Dems. See what works, and get rid of what doesn't (at least try!)
***
"There is a contradiction at the heart of the Republican Party that does not exist at the heart of the Democratic Party. Democrats are united in their belief that the government can, and should, act on behalf of the public. To be on the party’s far left is to believe the government should do much more. To be among its moderates is to believe it should do somewhat more [ed. like helping normal people avoid not getting punked by corporations at every turn]. But all of the people elected as Democrats, from Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Senator Joe Manchin, are there for the same reason: to use the power of the government to pursue their vision of the good. The divides are real and often bitter. But there is always room for negotiation because there is a fundamental commonality of purpose.The modern Republican Party, by contrast, is built upon a loathing of the government. Some of its members want to see the government shrunk and hamstrung. This is the old ethos, best described by Grover Norquist, the anti-tax activist who famously said: “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” [ed. Good thing Medicare and Medicade, Social Security, school lunches for children, infrastruce improvement (roads, bridges, electrical grid, waste disposal, web connectivty, fire response, public parks, libraries, etc). - aren't all on the kill switch.. oh, wait...]. The Trumpist faction is more focused on purging government institutions of the disloyal [ed. like Nazi's]. “I think that w hat Trump should do, like if I was giving him one piece of advice: Fire every single middle-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state,” JD Vance said in a 2021 podcast interview. “Replace them with our people, and when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and when the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”
Either way, to become part of the government as it exists now — to be engaged in the day-to-day process of governing — is to open yourself to suspicion and potentially mark yourself for a later purge." Ezra Klein - Trump Turned the Democratic Party Into a Pitiless Machine (NYT).]
Friday, August 23, 2024
Thursday, August 22, 2024
How Right-Wing Propaganda Works
“In its second minute the Hate rose to a frenzy. People were leaping up and down in their places and shouting at the tops of their voices in an effort to drown the maddening bleating voice that came from the screen.…The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out ‘Swine! Swine! Swine!’ and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen.…In a lucid moment Winston found that he was shouting with the others and kicking his heel violently against the rung of his chair. The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge-hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.” — George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four via:
Kat Abughazaleh has watched a lot of Fox News. As an analyst for Media Matters, her job was to monitor the Fox primetime shows, producing videos documenting some of the most deranged stories to appear on the network. Somebody has to keep track of what's going on in the right's media ecosystem, and we're glad that Kat performs this valuable public service. Examples of her work include videos about Mike Huckabee's indoctrination program, the "right-wing Amazon", Tucker Carlson's post-Fox career, Conservapedia, and her weekly Fox roundups. We can laugh at the right's media, but its effects are alarming. Introducing Fox News to a market turns people more conservative and many people have disturbing stories of how their relatives have had their minds poisoned by the stream of hatred and paranoia that Fox transmits into their brains. See our Current Affairs profile of Rupert Murdoch for more.
Kat joined us recently to talk about how right-wing propaganda works. What is the typical story? Why is it effective? How can we fight this stuff? How is the right trying to ensure that its messages go unchallenged? Kat tells you everything you didn't know about the right's media apparatus and gives us some practical advice for how we can combat it.
Kat Abughazaleh
It's kind of fun if you're the specific brain type that I have—if you're a masochist, that's what it is. It's kind of fun if you're a masochist.
Robinson
Other people would not have fun doing what you do.
Abughazaleh
My job when I was on night shift was to watch Fox, 4 to 11pm. All of us had different shows that we watched regularly. But, people would get out sick, or just get tired of listening to Hannity's voice. When I started at Media Matters, I watched Laura Ingraham for the first couple months, and then moved to Hannity.
Watching Hannity is its own special type of mind melt. It gets to a point that after a couple of weeks, you can do an entire 20-minute Sean Hannity monologue, just off the cuff. He says the same shit every single night. And then I moved on to Tucker Carlson, who then got fired. Since then, I've been watching The Five a lot.
You build up this knowledge—when you first start, it's kind of hard because you're trying to figure out these inside jokes that others in the field might have, or what the hell someone's talking about. There's a lot of lore in the Fox News and the right-wing mediaverse. There's so much lore, and all of it is useless. But when you do this job, you learn all of it. (...)
Abughazaleh
The thing that I think many people ignore when it comes to this stuff is the danger in Fox News is it's the most watched cable news channel. Sure, the audience skews very much on the older side—you can just look at the ads to know that—but also, the chokehold it has over the GOP.
My old boss, Andrew Lawrence, used to say, Roger Ailes started Fox to help the GOP, and now the GOP is doing everything it can do to get on Fox. It's inverted. It's flipped upside down. When Tucker was on Fox News, every single thing the GOP did was to get two minutes on Tucker's show—everything. And he was dictating policy.
You think about when Kevin McCarthy was running for Speaker, and they did, what, 15 votes? That's because Tucker held the Speakership hostage. He listed demands for the House Speaker, and until McCarthy agreed to meet those demands, the vote didn't go through. That's a cable news host holding the third most powerful position in the country hostage to get the January 6th tapes. That was one thing Tucker really wanted, and Kevin McCarthy gave them to him. He also wanted a Frank Church style committee to investigate how Big Tech is attacking conservatives led by Thomas Massie, and then Massie came on the Friday after Kevin McCarthy was elected Speaker, to thank Tucker for getting him that committee.
It's less to that point now. You have things that show up on Fox News that are coming up in the GOP and vice versa: DEI, all these things about drag brunches and banning that. It's less centralized now that Tucker is interviewing Catturd.
Robinson
Tell us about some of those things then, and about what Fox News is trying to do to its audience. Because there's a Fox News method. You've done this feature where each week, you highlight stories that appear on Fox that don't appear anywhere else. There seems to be a common technique that underlies all of this, which is, "here's a thing that you should be mad about," or some new people for you to hate.
Abughazaleh
Exactly. And different hosts have different strategies for this. Like I said, when Tucker was there, he was really good at this. He had almost a week-long schedule where he’d slowly introduce a topic, for example, with the theory that 80,000 IRS agents were going to audit you at gunpoint. But now you have different hosts. There's less of that centralization.
But you look at, for example, when Trans Day of Visibility landed on Easter this year. You were being attacked with it every hour, with them saying Joe Biden is "transing" Easter. And that makes no sense. But then, you go to Easter dinner that night and you kind of hear from your grandfather about how Easter is trans now. It's just kind of repetition. I don't want to be like "everything's Orwellian," but when I actually read Nineteen Eighty-Four, I thought, damn, that's a really good tactic to make people think a certain way. (...)
Robinson
It's really very sad, though, because there have been all these news reports about how this poison that is put in people's brains destroys families. People talk about how their relative that they loved, who was a totally normal, loving, wonderful person, but now just watches Fox News all day, and all they do is rant. And the level of paranoia and terror on this network—there was the story about the guy who watched Fox News, and then a teenage Black kid came to his door and rang the doorbell and he just shot him. He's just sitting there in absolute terror that there are people coming for you. It seems to be that one of the core Fox News messages is just "be afraid." (...)
Robinson
There's a cartoon that I always liked, which features Rupert Murdoch, an immigrant, and a construction worker, and Rupert Murdoch has a big plate of cookies. The construction worker has one cookie, and the Rupert Murdoch is telling the worker that immigrants are trying to take your cookie. Meanwhile, Murdoch has the giant pile.
What you discussed there indicates something that's really important about a media organization like this, which is the attempt to redirect people's ire away from the actual power elite. Take the Boeing story: we know the Boeing story is a story of corporate malfeasance, a story of the pursuit of profit at the expense of safety. It's actually a pretty clear-cut situation. It's a great parable of how capitalism will kill you because people will cut corners to make more money. And yet, that can be reframed and shifted to point to those who have absolutely no power. Now they are the ones trying to crash your planes, kill your children, and put everything you care about at risk.
Abughazaleh
Right. And completely ignoring international politics—not even touching that, just the national stuff—the way that Fox treats labor unions and just straight up ignores gigantic labor movements here is disgusting. They love to fetishize the working class and the middle class and how we're all good American boys here, but you're spitting in the face of anything that could help what you hope to be your audience and idealizing as your audience.
That's something that a lot of Boomers do in the first place. I grew up in Texas, where "union" is a bad word. They really do—not just Fox, but all American power structures—as much as they can try to get us to want what's worse for ourselves. (...)
[ed. I would've titled this Fox in the Whorehouse, but that's just me. How many people have the same story: some relative or friend who's deeply into watching Fox News and now is no longer recognizable. It's like a cross between cult indoctrination and Stockholm Syndrome. See also: What I’ve Learned From Collecting Stories of People Whose Loved Ones Were Transformed by Fox News (Intelligencer).]
Kat Abughazaleh has watched a lot of Fox News. As an analyst for Media Matters, her job was to monitor the Fox primetime shows, producing videos documenting some of the most deranged stories to appear on the network. Somebody has to keep track of what's going on in the right's media ecosystem, and we're glad that Kat performs this valuable public service. Examples of her work include videos about Mike Huckabee's indoctrination program, the "right-wing Amazon", Tucker Carlson's post-Fox career, Conservapedia, and her weekly Fox roundups. We can laugh at the right's media, but its effects are alarming. Introducing Fox News to a market turns people more conservative and many people have disturbing stories of how their relatives have had their minds poisoned by the stream of hatred and paranoia that Fox transmits into their brains. See our Current Affairs profile of Rupert Murdoch for more.
Kat joined us recently to talk about how right-wing propaganda works. What is the typical story? Why is it effective? How can we fight this stuff? How is the right trying to ensure that its messages go unchallenged? Kat tells you everything you didn't know about the right's media apparatus and gives us some practical advice for how we can combat it.
Nathan J. Robinson
I suppose the first thing I want to do is thank you for your service. Your bio on Twitter says that you watch Fox News so the rest of us don't have to. So, perhaps you could begin by telling our listeners and our readers some of what you do endure this on a regular basis.
Kat Abughazaleh
It's kind of fun if you're the specific brain type that I have—if you're a masochist, that's what it is. It's kind of fun if you're a masochist.
Robinson
Other people would not have fun doing what you do.
Abughazaleh
Yes, when I was at Media Matters, I was on night shift, which was a small team, and we all got along really well. There was never any conflict on night shift. And that's because our brains were all broken in the same way. We knew so many things about Dan Bongino and Brian Kilmeade that the average person, even the pretty fervent Fox viewer, just wouldn't know. I know about Sean Hannity's eclectic blend of martial arts that he does, including “pain day”, which is a regular day on his schedule where he gets his sensei to beat the shit out of him.
Yes, when I was at Media Matters, I was on night shift, which was a small team, and we all got along really well. There was never any conflict on night shift. And that's because our brains were all broken in the same way. We knew so many things about Dan Bongino and Brian Kilmeade that the average person, even the pretty fervent Fox viewer, just wouldn't know. I know about Sean Hannity's eclectic blend of martial arts that he does, including “pain day”, which is a regular day on his schedule where he gets his sensei to beat the shit out of him.
Do I wish I knew that? No.
Do I know that? Forever.
Robinson
It's fascinating, the knowledge that you now have because you have watched so much Fox News. As I understand it, you watch the prime-time schedule of Fox News, look for important or ridiculous things to cover, note it down.
Could you tell us about your process?
It's fascinating, the knowledge that you now have because you have watched so much Fox News. As I understand it, you watch the prime-time schedule of Fox News, look for important or ridiculous things to cover, note it down.
Could you tell us about your process?
Abughazaleh
My job when I was on night shift was to watch Fox, 4 to 11pm. All of us had different shows that we watched regularly. But, people would get out sick, or just get tired of listening to Hannity's voice. When I started at Media Matters, I watched Laura Ingraham for the first couple months, and then moved to Hannity.
Watching Hannity is its own special type of mind melt. It gets to a point that after a couple of weeks, you can do an entire 20-minute Sean Hannity monologue, just off the cuff. He says the same shit every single night. And then I moved on to Tucker Carlson, who then got fired. Since then, I've been watching The Five a lot.
You build up this knowledge—when you first start, it's kind of hard because you're trying to figure out these inside jokes that others in the field might have, or what the hell someone's talking about. There's a lot of lore in the Fox News and the right-wing mediaverse. There's so much lore, and all of it is useless. But when you do this job, you learn all of it. (...)
Robinson
What I like about what comes of this total immersion over time is that, as you've been describing, you start to understand how the propaganda machine works. Fox News is very powerful. People might ask, and I'm sure they ask you, why would you do this? Why would you subject yourself to this? Is this really important? These people are so full of shit and their material is so lazy.
But I think it is important because there are studies that show that when Fox News comes into a market, it turns the audience more conservative in that city or town. It's very effective. So, what have you come to understand about how this propaganda is put together?
What I like about what comes of this total immersion over time is that, as you've been describing, you start to understand how the propaganda machine works. Fox News is very powerful. People might ask, and I'm sure they ask you, why would you do this? Why would you subject yourself to this? Is this really important? These people are so full of shit and their material is so lazy.
But I think it is important because there are studies that show that when Fox News comes into a market, it turns the audience more conservative in that city or town. It's very effective. So, what have you come to understand about how this propaganda is put together?
Abughazaleh
The thing that I think many people ignore when it comes to this stuff is the danger in Fox News is it's the most watched cable news channel. Sure, the audience skews very much on the older side—you can just look at the ads to know that—but also, the chokehold it has over the GOP.
My old boss, Andrew Lawrence, used to say, Roger Ailes started Fox to help the GOP, and now the GOP is doing everything it can do to get on Fox. It's inverted. It's flipped upside down. When Tucker was on Fox News, every single thing the GOP did was to get two minutes on Tucker's show—everything. And he was dictating policy.
You think about when Kevin McCarthy was running for Speaker, and they did, what, 15 votes? That's because Tucker held the Speakership hostage. He listed demands for the House Speaker, and until McCarthy agreed to meet those demands, the vote didn't go through. That's a cable news host holding the third most powerful position in the country hostage to get the January 6th tapes. That was one thing Tucker really wanted, and Kevin McCarthy gave them to him. He also wanted a Frank Church style committee to investigate how Big Tech is attacking conservatives led by Thomas Massie, and then Massie came on the Friday after Kevin McCarthy was elected Speaker, to thank Tucker for getting him that committee.
It's less to that point now. You have things that show up on Fox News that are coming up in the GOP and vice versa: DEI, all these things about drag brunches and banning that. It's less centralized now that Tucker is interviewing Catturd.
Abughazaleh
I hope they don't, but yes, Tucker's irrelevant now. Fox didn't need Tucker, Tucker needed Fox, despite what Alex Jones said last week on a show with Tucker. It's more about how Fox informs the right-wing political apparatus that shows what's being introduced into the mainstream. Because there's stuff from the far right that once you see it on Fox, that's how you know the window is shifted.
I hope they don't, but yes, Tucker's irrelevant now. Fox didn't need Tucker, Tucker needed Fox, despite what Alex Jones said last week on a show with Tucker. It's more about how Fox informs the right-wing political apparatus that shows what's being introduced into the mainstream. Because there's stuff from the far right that once you see it on Fox, that's how you know the window is shifted.
Robinson
Tell us about some of those things then, and about what Fox News is trying to do to its audience. Because there's a Fox News method. You've done this feature where each week, you highlight stories that appear on Fox that don't appear anywhere else. There seems to be a common technique that underlies all of this, which is, "here's a thing that you should be mad about," or some new people for you to hate.
Abughazaleh
Exactly. And different hosts have different strategies for this. Like I said, when Tucker was there, he was really good at this. He had almost a week-long schedule where he’d slowly introduce a topic, for example, with the theory that 80,000 IRS agents were going to audit you at gunpoint. But now you have different hosts. There's less of that centralization.
But you look at, for example, when Trans Day of Visibility landed on Easter this year. You were being attacked with it every hour, with them saying Joe Biden is "transing" Easter. And that makes no sense. But then, you go to Easter dinner that night and you kind of hear from your grandfather about how Easter is trans now. It's just kind of repetition. I don't want to be like "everything's Orwellian," but when I actually read Nineteen Eighty-Four, I thought, damn, that's a really good tactic to make people think a certain way. (...)
Robinson
It's really very sad, though, because there have been all these news reports about how this poison that is put in people's brains destroys families. People talk about how their relative that they loved, who was a totally normal, loving, wonderful person, but now just watches Fox News all day, and all they do is rant. And the level of paranoia and terror on this network—there was the story about the guy who watched Fox News, and then a teenage Black kid came to his door and rang the doorbell and he just shot him. He's just sitting there in absolute terror that there are people coming for you. It seems to be that one of the core Fox News messages is just "be afraid." (...)
Robinson
Tell us then, for those of us who haven't exposed ourselves to a similar amount of this stuff, if I were to watch Fox News for a week in the prime time, what are the sorts of things that I could expect to see? What's the typical week of stories?
Tell us then, for those of us who haven't exposed ourselves to a similar amount of this stuff, if I were to watch Fox News for a week in the prime time, what are the sorts of things that I could expect to see? What's the typical week of stories?
Abughazaleh
Things have really flared up with a bunch of different big stories between the Trump verdicts and Hunter Biden and all this stuff, but definitely something about Hunter Biden. Doesn't matter what it is, it’s something about Hunter Biden. We all know that's who we're voting for in this election: it’s Donald Trump versus Hunter Biden. Something about DEI, especially if there's anything that happened on a plane—someone's going to blame that on hiring too many Black people.
Things have really flared up with a bunch of different big stories between the Trump verdicts and Hunter Biden and all this stuff, but definitely something about Hunter Biden. Doesn't matter what it is, it’s something about Hunter Biden. We all know that's who we're voting for in this election: it’s Donald Trump versus Hunter Biden. Something about DEI, especially if there's anything that happened on a plane—someone's going to blame that on hiring too many Black people.
Abughazaleh
No, it's not a labor story about how Reagan fucked up the entire airline industry, even now, 40 years later. It's a story of how DEI, about how diversity and equity initiatives, are making airlines hire unqualified Black people, and therefore, that's why Boeing has all the doors fly off their planes, despite the fact that all pilots have to have the exact same qualifications. The reason that there's a race disparity—sorry, this gets me so pissed off—the reason there are equity initiatives in the first place is because there is a racial disparity that doesn't provide opportunities to people who are qualified. But to Fox, doors are flying off planes because of too many Black people. So, you'll definitely hear something about that. And the trans people are trying to get your kids or whatever.
No, it's not a labor story about how Reagan fucked up the entire airline industry, even now, 40 years later. It's a story of how DEI, about how diversity and equity initiatives, are making airlines hire unqualified Black people, and therefore, that's why Boeing has all the doors fly off their planes, despite the fact that all pilots have to have the exact same qualifications. The reason that there's a race disparity—sorry, this gets me so pissed off—the reason there are equity initiatives in the first place is because there is a racial disparity that doesn't provide opportunities to people who are qualified. But to Fox, doors are flying off planes because of too many Black people. So, you'll definitely hear something about that. And the trans people are trying to get your kids or whatever.
Robinson
There's a cartoon that I always liked, which features Rupert Murdoch, an immigrant, and a construction worker, and Rupert Murdoch has a big plate of cookies. The construction worker has one cookie, and the Rupert Murdoch is telling the worker that immigrants are trying to take your cookie. Meanwhile, Murdoch has the giant pile.
by Denis Lushch
What you discussed there indicates something that's really important about a media organization like this, which is the attempt to redirect people's ire away from the actual power elite. Take the Boeing story: we know the Boeing story is a story of corporate malfeasance, a story of the pursuit of profit at the expense of safety. It's actually a pretty clear-cut situation. It's a great parable of how capitalism will kill you because people will cut corners to make more money. And yet, that can be reframed and shifted to point to those who have absolutely no power. Now they are the ones trying to crash your planes, kill your children, and put everything you care about at risk.
Abughazaleh
Right. And completely ignoring international politics—not even touching that, just the national stuff—the way that Fox treats labor unions and just straight up ignores gigantic labor movements here is disgusting. They love to fetishize the working class and the middle class and how we're all good American boys here, but you're spitting in the face of anything that could help what you hope to be your audience and idealizing as your audience.
That's something that a lot of Boomers do in the first place. I grew up in Texas, where "union" is a bad word. They really do—not just Fox, but all American power structures—as much as they can try to get us to want what's worse for ourselves. (...)
They do have contempt for their audience. That's what it is. The anti-intellectualism movement is so dangerous. I think it is one of the most dangerous things in our country right now, and it's being led by people like Fox News hosts, who all have college educations and degrees. I remember Pete Hegseth talking about Donald Trump with other guests, and all three of those guys went to Ivies. All of them studied history or literature. It's so hypocritical. And by targeting education—what they're doing with charter schools and DEI, taking out CRT, banning books, all of this stuff—they want you to want what's worse for yourself.
So many of our parents, especially if you're a woman or someone of color, have died or uprooted their entire lives to give us education, and Fox News is getting people to turn it away voluntarily, and that's what they want. They want you to be uneducated.
So many of our parents, especially if you're a woman or someone of color, have died or uprooted their entire lives to give us education, and Fox News is getting people to turn it away voluntarily, and that's what they want. They want you to be uneducated.
Robinson
I remember when Gretchen Carlson was on Fox News. She went to Stanford and Oxford, and yet she would play a moron on Fox News, and pretended that she didn't know what the word ignoramus or czar meant. She'd just play a dummy on purpose.
I remember when Gretchen Carlson was on Fox News. She went to Stanford and Oxford, and yet she would play a moron on Fox News, and pretended that she didn't know what the word ignoramus or czar meant. She'd just play a dummy on purpose.
Abughazaleh
Tucker used to that too. He used to say, I don't even know what “stochastic” means, that's not even a real word. You know what that means, because you're inspiring it. (...)
Tucker used to that too. He used to say, I don't even know what “stochastic” means, that's not even a real word. You know what that means, because you're inspiring it. (...)
Robinson
I do want to just take a moment to remind people Fox News was built by a serial sexual predator, Roger Ailes. This guy was kind of undiscussed.
I do want to just take a moment to remind people Fox News was built by a serial sexual predator, Roger Ailes. This guy was kind of undiscussed.
Robinson
One of the most evil people in the history of television, just a total and complete monster, although Murdoch manages to slip out of view a little bit. You pointed out earlier that the hosts are kind of interchangeable. Tucker thought he mattered, but he didn't. He's dispensable. He didn't even realize, I don't think, that he was dispensable. Glenn Beck was once huge on Fox News.
One of the most evil people in the history of television, just a total and complete monster, although Murdoch manages to slip out of view a little bit. You pointed out earlier that the hosts are kind of interchangeable. Tucker thought he mattered, but he didn't. He's dispensable. He didn't even realize, I don't think, that he was dispensable. Glenn Beck was once huge on Fox News.
Abughazaleh
O'Reilly. I think O'Reilly had a bigger cultural impact than Tucker. Tucker is still relevant on the far right. But with O'Reilly, you had people in the center who claim they were liberals that would say, sometimes I just turn on O'Reilly to see what he has to say, he has some ideas—almost like a Bill Maher figure now, except no one had caught on yet. And Tucker didn't really have that appeal to a wider audience, but the appeal he did have was very focused. It was very effective. They're still suffering a bit from firing him, but they still have the numbers. They still have a shit ton of money. All these hosts are dispensable.
Robinson
And behind it all is this evil Australian billionaire.
O'Reilly. I think O'Reilly had a bigger cultural impact than Tucker. Tucker is still relevant on the far right. But with O'Reilly, you had people in the center who claim they were liberals that would say, sometimes I just turn on O'Reilly to see what he has to say, he has some ideas—almost like a Bill Maher figure now, except no one had caught on yet. And Tucker didn't really have that appeal to a wider audience, but the appeal he did have was very focused. It was very effective. They're still suffering a bit from firing him, but they still have the numbers. They still have a shit ton of money. All these hosts are dispensable.
Robinson
And behind it all is this evil Australian billionaire.
Abughazaleh
I just have to say, one of my least favorite things in the world is when people say the FCC should do something about Fox. Because, guess what? The FCC does not have jurisdiction over Fox News or any cable news channel. And there's one of these almost Boomer type memes, where it has a bunch of text, and it's like a history lesson: in 1980 whatever, Rupert Murdoch came here, and then Reagan eliminated all these laws. I did an entire series debunking this myth. There aren't really any legal measures that the country can take against cable news. There isn't really a classification for cable channels, but CNN is in the same classification as Fox. They're all entertainment, if you want to call them that. And honestly, the government shouldn't be responsible for arbitrating the truth.
I just have to say, one of my least favorite things in the world is when people say the FCC should do something about Fox. Because, guess what? The FCC does not have jurisdiction over Fox News or any cable news channel. And there's one of these almost Boomer type memes, where it has a bunch of text, and it's like a history lesson: in 1980 whatever, Rupert Murdoch came here, and then Reagan eliminated all these laws. I did an entire series debunking this myth. There aren't really any legal measures that the country can take against cable news. There isn't really a classification for cable channels, but CNN is in the same classification as Fox. They're all entertainment, if you want to call them that. And honestly, the government shouldn't be responsible for arbitrating the truth.
Robinson
Right. That's its own set of dangers. (...)
Right. That's its own set of dangers. (...)
Robinson
For people who are on the Left like you and me, but who are not like you and me in that they don't expose themselves to right-wing media, is there anything that they misunderstand or don't really realize about right-wing media? Or something that you've come to understand by watching so much of this stuff that you wish other people who share your politics would understand or appreciate?
For people who are on the Left like you and me, but who are not like you and me in that they don't expose themselves to right-wing media, is there anything that they misunderstand or don't really realize about right-wing media? Or something that you've come to understand by watching so much of this stuff that you wish other people who share your politics would understand or appreciate?
Abughazaleh
Two things: one is from the perspective of a monitor of this type of stuff, and the other is from the perspective of someone who grew up conservative.
Many people that watch this stuff and that are very entrenched in right-wing media, that consume it like the air they need to breathe. They don't care if they're wrong. If you have something to debunk their latest insane theory, they don't care. Their brain will find a way to warp around that and come up with an entirely new reality in just moments. You look at the inauguration, scrolling down on Rumble, there were so many people who were devastated because Joe Biden wasn't executed right before he swore himself into office. And within about 30 minutes—probably less than that, in 10 minutes—those same people would say, "actually, this is just a part of all the plan that Trump has to take over the world again," or take over the country and take it away from Joe Biden.
So, they're able to shift their thoughts. They can keep the cognitive dissonance. And once you get a crack in it, that's one of the best things you can do. Just get one teeny, tiny crack. But unless they're ready to face that, if someone's not going to take all of your well-researched arguments in good faith, you can't make them.
But also, at the same time, I grew up conservative, and I think about how a lot of people want to lecture others or shame them, people that just genuinely don't know better. We do such a great job in this country of brainwashing people who are raised conservative. You're taught an alternate set of truths, and you have to relearn all that when you realize they're not real, and that's hard. It's hard to admit that the things you were taught, the things that you and your loved ones believe or believed, are not real. That's difficult to admit. You feel embarrassed, you feel kind of lonely. It's confusing.
And I think instead of trying to write everyone off, especially like in the South—there are so many progressive and liberal people in the South that are just being repressed by the same people who are creating the brainwashy type material for the well-intentioned people that are on the Right there. Not everything's a lost cause. I think a lot more empathy and realizing that these people are people—there's a whole system that's been created to keep these ideas in place—would help people on the Left a lot. There wouldn't be propaganda if we weren't winning.
Two things: one is from the perspective of a monitor of this type of stuff, and the other is from the perspective of someone who grew up conservative.
Many people that watch this stuff and that are very entrenched in right-wing media, that consume it like the air they need to breathe. They don't care if they're wrong. If you have something to debunk their latest insane theory, they don't care. Their brain will find a way to warp around that and come up with an entirely new reality in just moments. You look at the inauguration, scrolling down on Rumble, there were so many people who were devastated because Joe Biden wasn't executed right before he swore himself into office. And within about 30 minutes—probably less than that, in 10 minutes—those same people would say, "actually, this is just a part of all the plan that Trump has to take over the world again," or take over the country and take it away from Joe Biden.
So, they're able to shift their thoughts. They can keep the cognitive dissonance. And once you get a crack in it, that's one of the best things you can do. Just get one teeny, tiny crack. But unless they're ready to face that, if someone's not going to take all of your well-researched arguments in good faith, you can't make them.
But also, at the same time, I grew up conservative, and I think about how a lot of people want to lecture others or shame them, people that just genuinely don't know better. We do such a great job in this country of brainwashing people who are raised conservative. You're taught an alternate set of truths, and you have to relearn all that when you realize they're not real, and that's hard. It's hard to admit that the things you were taught, the things that you and your loved ones believe or believed, are not real. That's difficult to admit. You feel embarrassed, you feel kind of lonely. It's confusing.
And I think instead of trying to write everyone off, especially like in the South—there are so many progressive and liberal people in the South that are just being repressed by the same people who are creating the brainwashy type material for the well-intentioned people that are on the Right there. Not everything's a lost cause. I think a lot more empathy and realizing that these people are people—there's a whole system that's been created to keep these ideas in place—would help people on the Left a lot. There wouldn't be propaganda if we weren't winning.
Robinson
On the subject of the failure of fact-checking: I've just been observing debates online between a lot of people on the Right and those who are saying, "but crime is going down." And the reaction is very interesting. The first person says "look, the statistics are actually showing that crime goes down." And immediately it's just, "Well, the statistics are fake, and the Left is not reporting all the crimes that are happening." And so, your fact checks with your little charts are just going to produce a new conspiracy about the making of the charts.
I want to ask you about what lessons have come out of your studies about how to fight this stuff. What you're saying is consistent with what I got from an interview I recorded with an ex-Jordan Peterson fan. We talked about the process of leaving Jordan Peterson behind and what it had taken to shatter his faith in this man. He really believed that this man was a brilliant intellectual, and so to not believe that made him feel stupid. He had to think, I was a fool—I believed this man was smart, and I didn't know how to identify a smart man clearly, so I must be a stupid person. That's really not easy to come to terms with.
And so, two of the lessons that came out of what you said there are first, we actually have to have some empathy for people who swallow propaganda, and then second, we need a kind of positive alternative that is more than just fact checks.(...)
On the subject of the failure of fact-checking: I've just been observing debates online between a lot of people on the Right and those who are saying, "but crime is going down." And the reaction is very interesting. The first person says "look, the statistics are actually showing that crime goes down." And immediately it's just, "Well, the statistics are fake, and the Left is not reporting all the crimes that are happening." And so, your fact checks with your little charts are just going to produce a new conspiracy about the making of the charts.
I want to ask you about what lessons have come out of your studies about how to fight this stuff. What you're saying is consistent with what I got from an interview I recorded with an ex-Jordan Peterson fan. We talked about the process of leaving Jordan Peterson behind and what it had taken to shatter his faith in this man. He really believed that this man was a brilliant intellectual, and so to not believe that made him feel stupid. He had to think, I was a fool—I believed this man was smart, and I didn't know how to identify a smart man clearly, so I must be a stupid person. That's really not easy to come to terms with.
And so, two of the lessons that came out of what you said there are first, we actually have to have some empathy for people who swallow propaganda, and then second, we need a kind of positive alternative that is more than just fact checks.(...)
Abughazaleh
Yes, it's very entertaining to watch. If you divorce yourself from the awfulness of knowing that people are watching this and thinking that they're being educated, it becomes really funny. (...)
Yes, it's very entertaining to watch. If you divorce yourself from the awfulness of knowing that people are watching this and thinking that they're being educated, it becomes really funny. (...)
But it can get violent. I know many people who have been swatted. I know people who are currently living in a hotel because someone just showed up at their door. I make a point whenever I post something to make sure that there is nothing that sees out my window. When I'm in Texas, if someone asks what I do, when I visit my family, I just say research or whatever. I don't elaborate because it's easy to say you're being dramatic or this is ridiculous. But looking at so many people in progressive spaces, the threats that we get are not ridiculous. You get threats with people saying, "I saw you at such and such place wearing this outfit."
And that goes for every individual that I know. Institutions like Media Matters took great care of their employees in making sure that their safety was a priority, making sure that if they were being attacked they had the support they needed. I remember when OAN was a big thing. They would put my coworkers faces on the screen, and then they would have to go private on all their accounts because you just get a bunch of OAN watchers flooding their DMs. They thrive on attacking because they don't have anything else.
And that goes for every individual that I know. Institutions like Media Matters took great care of their employees in making sure that their safety was a priority, making sure that if they were being attacked they had the support they needed. I remember when OAN was a big thing. They would put my coworkers faces on the screen, and then they would have to go private on all their accounts because you just get a bunch of OAN watchers flooding their DMs. They thrive on attacking because they don't have anything else.
Robinson
No, and obviously, what we have discussed is the way that this propaganda machine is trying to whip those people into a frenzy of hatred and get them to feel like people like yourself and your colleagues are destroying Western civilization, or whatever it is that they are in a war against. They're told outright that they are fighting evil.
No, and obviously, what we have discussed is the way that this propaganda machine is trying to whip those people into a frenzy of hatred and get them to feel like people like yourself and your colleagues are destroying Western civilization, or whatever it is that they are in a war against. They're told outright that they are fighting evil.
Abughazaleh
And with everything that's going on abroad—I'm Palestinian, so I get a fun little addition on there. I got that before everything, but now it's really bad. But you have people like a certain billionaire who owns a social media company, and Libs of Tiktok—people like that—and they'll tweet about you and say that it wasn't intended to have you targeted or anything, but that's what happens. And they know that. Chaya Raichik of Libs of Tiktok literally posed with a newspaper, pointing out that everywhere she targets faces bomb threats: children's hospitals, libraries, schools. She is delighted by it because they know that when they say something, when they say such and such school is hosting a parent's night for anyone who has two daddies, that place is going to get threats.
It’s just like when Tucker Carlson used to put someone's face on the screen and say their name over and over again, instead of using a pronoun. I remember he did one episode on Nina Jankowicz, and he just kept saying her name over and over and over again because he wanted to get it in your head. This is the target.
And with everything that's going on abroad—I'm Palestinian, so I get a fun little addition on there. I got that before everything, but now it's really bad. But you have people like a certain billionaire who owns a social media company, and Libs of Tiktok—people like that—and they'll tweet about you and say that it wasn't intended to have you targeted or anything, but that's what happens. And they know that. Chaya Raichik of Libs of Tiktok literally posed with a newspaper, pointing out that everywhere she targets faces bomb threats: children's hospitals, libraries, schools. She is delighted by it because they know that when they say something, when they say such and such school is hosting a parent's night for anyone who has two daddies, that place is going to get threats.
It’s just like when Tucker Carlson used to put someone's face on the screen and say their name over and over again, instead of using a pronoun. I remember he did one episode on Nina Jankowicz, and he just kept saying her name over and over and over again because he wanted to get it in your head. This is the target.
by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs | Read more:
Image: Denis Lushch[ed. I would've titled this Fox in the Whorehouse, but that's just me. How many people have the same story: some relative or friend who's deeply into watching Fox News and now is no longer recognizable. It's like a cross between cult indoctrination and Stockholm Syndrome. See also: What I’ve Learned From Collecting Stories of People Whose Loved Ones Were Transformed by Fox News (Intelligencer).]
Billie Eilish
[ed. Listening to Billie on my new headphones. Yay... : ) See also: The Best Of Billie Eilish ~ Greatest Hits Full Album 2024.]
The Little Streamer That Could
When Nicole Parlapiano joined Tubi as its marketing chief two years ago, one of the most searched questions about the decade-old streaming service was, “Is it a scam?” It was free, after all, and consumers were skeptical.
“Would it put a virus on your computer?” Ms. Parlapiano said. “People wouldn’t even touch it.”
That’s not an issue now.
Tubi has exploded in popularity over the last 18 months, establishing itself as one of the most popular streaming outfits in the United States. It now consistently outranks Peacock, Max, Paramount+ and Apple TV+ in total viewing time, according to Nielsen — and is drawing even with Disney+. Only YouTube, Netflix, Amazon and Hulu are still ahead.
The streaming service, which is owned by the Fox Corporation, runs a different business model from those competitors. In addition to being free — with revenue coming from advertising — it doesn’t require an account to use, making it more similar to services like Roku and Pluto. And it comfortably commands more engagement than those peers, according to Nielsen.
“We’re like the little engine, and it’s just getting better and better,” Anjali Sud, Tubi’s chief executive, said.
Its sudden rise has come as something of a shock to many competitors, as well as investors.
Unlike its biggest rivals, which allocate huge budgets for original programs or premium sports rights like the N.F.L. or the N.B.A., Tubi’s library contains tens of thousands of older shows and movies, many that seem to have been collected from the bargain bin. Some popular programs on the service include the 1970s procedural “Columbo,” and an early 2000s UPN sitcom, “Everybody Hates Chris.”
Horror, thriller and true crime programs also do particularly well, executives said. Tubi also has reruns of older network programming like “Empire” and “Scandal.” (...)
For the vast majority of the last decade, Tubi was not a serious player in the streaming wars. Ms. Sud said that before she joined the company last year, she was only dimly aware of it. “None of my family, none of my friends were Tubi viewers,” she said.
Fox bought Tubi for $440 million in 2020, the media company’s effort to move into streaming. It has since become something of a favorite for Lachlan Murdoch, Fox’s chief executive, who often touts its growth to investors in earnings calls.
Rich Greenfield, an analyst at LightShed Partners, said that consumers have become increasingly tolerant of commercials on streaming, and Tubi’s popularity boils down to one thing: “People love free.”
Another analyst, Tim Nollen of Macquarie, said that he was caught off guard by the sudden success of Tubi, along with other free streaming services.
“They seem to be largely venues for people to find random old things that they wouldn’t have normally thought to watch,” he said. “In many households, they have replaced the TV set that people would just leave on all the time. Now they put on Tubi and leave it on.” (...)
Revenue is growing. Mr. Nollen, the analyst, estimated that Tubi drew about $900 million in revenue over the last year compared to $775 million from the year before. (A Tubi spokeswoman declined to comment.)
At this point, there are advantages to forgoing a subscription business. Profits have been difficult to wrangle in streaming for major media companies, and cancellation rates are surging. Between April and June, there were roughly 45 million sign-ups in the United States for video subscription services, but also 43 million cancellations, according to Antenna, a subscription research firm. That’s the narrowest quarterly margin since Antenna began keeping records.
But Tubi executives also said that the volatility of the streaming business is benefiting them. As other companies raise prices — the Disney+ no-commercial tier will increase to $16 a month this fall, up from $7 a month just five years ago — and produce fewer shows and movies, a free service like Tubi is helping fill the vacuum for consumers, they said.
“Would it put a virus on your computer?” Ms. Parlapiano said. “People wouldn’t even touch it.”
That’s not an issue now.
The streaming service, which is owned by the Fox Corporation, runs a different business model from those competitors. In addition to being free — with revenue coming from advertising — it doesn’t require an account to use, making it more similar to services like Roku and Pluto. And it comfortably commands more engagement than those peers, according to Nielsen.
“We’re like the little engine, and it’s just getting better and better,” Anjali Sud, Tubi’s chief executive, said.
Its sudden rise has come as something of a shock to many competitors, as well as investors.
Unlike its biggest rivals, which allocate huge budgets for original programs or premium sports rights like the N.F.L. or the N.B.A., Tubi’s library contains tens of thousands of older shows and movies, many that seem to have been collected from the bargain bin. Some popular programs on the service include the 1970s procedural “Columbo,” and an early 2000s UPN sitcom, “Everybody Hates Chris.”
Horror, thriller and true crime programs also do particularly well, executives said. Tubi also has reruns of older network programming like “Empire” and “Scandal.” (...)
For the vast majority of the last decade, Tubi was not a serious player in the streaming wars. Ms. Sud said that before she joined the company last year, she was only dimly aware of it. “None of my family, none of my friends were Tubi viewers,” she said.
Fox bought Tubi for $440 million in 2020, the media company’s effort to move into streaming. It has since become something of a favorite for Lachlan Murdoch, Fox’s chief executive, who often touts its growth to investors in earnings calls.
Rich Greenfield, an analyst at LightShed Partners, said that consumers have become increasingly tolerant of commercials on streaming, and Tubi’s popularity boils down to one thing: “People love free.”
Another analyst, Tim Nollen of Macquarie, said that he was caught off guard by the sudden success of Tubi, along with other free streaming services.
“They seem to be largely venues for people to find random old things that they wouldn’t have normally thought to watch,” he said. “In many households, they have replaced the TV set that people would just leave on all the time. Now they put on Tubi and leave it on.” (...)
Revenue is growing. Mr. Nollen, the analyst, estimated that Tubi drew about $900 million in revenue over the last year compared to $775 million from the year before. (A Tubi spokeswoman declined to comment.)
At this point, there are advantages to forgoing a subscription business. Profits have been difficult to wrangle in streaming for major media companies, and cancellation rates are surging. Between April and June, there were roughly 45 million sign-ups in the United States for video subscription services, but also 43 million cancellations, according to Antenna, a subscription research firm. That’s the narrowest quarterly margin since Antenna began keeping records.
But Tubi executives also said that the volatility of the streaming business is benefiting them. As other companies raise prices — the Disney+ no-commercial tier will increase to $16 a month this fall, up from $7 a month just five years ago — and produce fewer shows and movies, a free service like Tubi is helping fill the vacuum for consumers, they said.
by John Koblin, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Richard B. Levine/Alamy Stock Photo
Wednesday, August 21, 2024
Chappell Roan Confronts The Sickness Of Modern Fandom
Chappell Roan Confronts The Sickness Of Modern Fandom
Over the past few years, I’ve become increasingly hesitant to identify as a fan of any living artist. There are plenty of artists whose work I like, or even love, but the entire concept of being a fan, and what the act of fandom entails, has shifted in ways I find both alienating and disturbing. What was once a straightforward expression of admiration—I’m such a fan!—has lately become more like a claim of obsessive entitlement.
Fans do not simply enjoy an album; they are in love with the person who created the work. Fans follow the celebrity object of their affection on Twitter and Instagram and TikTok and watch their every move. Fans join forums with other fans, who all believe that the celebrity is communicating with them via a series of riddles and hidden messages, which sometimes they really are.
I’m not the only one made uncomfortable by this situation. Artists, unsurprisingly, are expressing their distaste for the consequences of modern fan culture. Indie pop darling Chappell Roan posted two videos to TikTok yesterday that went megaviral. In the two videos, which combined have more than 15 million views, Roan speaks straight to the camera, imploring her fans to realize that she is not an object for them to play with, and more importantly, that they do not actually know her at all.
“I don’t care that abuse and harassment, stalking, whatever, is a normal thing to do to people who are famous or a little famous or whatever,” Roan says. “It’s weird how people think that you know a person just 'cause you see them online, and you listen to the art they make. That’s fucking weird!”
A number of the comments on these videos were from people replying to this plea for privacy with the exact sort of behavior that prompted it. It’s the cost of being famous, they said. Cry me a river, they said. We made you, they said. Maybe that’s because it is rare for a celebrity to set a firm boundary on how their fans interact with them. She is refreshingly direct—there’s no perfunctory hedging about how of course she is grateful for the attention, no self-effacing asides where she explains how she knows what a privilege this all is. She is not going on Oprah, teary-eyed, to explain how she has been hurt. She is looking her fans right in their eyes and telling them to knock it off.
The comments for the videos have since been turned off. The boundary is clear. The question is whether or not the fans will be able to respect it.
Roan’s rise to fame has been rapid, and somewhat unexpected. After signing to Atlantic Records as a teen, the label dropped her after the release of her single “Pink Pony Club” in 2020. The album she’s blowing up for this year, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, was released in September of 2023, to some critical acclaim but not a ton of attention. What did get her attention was opening on Olivia Rodrigo’s sell-out Guts Tour last summer, along with memorable performances on NPR’s Tiny Desk and at Coachella. She released a new single in April, in the midst of this spike in attention, called “Good Luck, Babe,” that peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100.
A chart released by the company Chartmetric shows her monthly Spotify listens rocketing over the past year like a hockey stick graph. Currently, she has over 30 million listens per month. A few months ago, she had only 1 million. Her song “HOT TO GO!” with its helpful spelling and arm-centric coordinated dance, has become equally popular among Peloton moms, sorority girls, and alt lesbians. Many people believe that the camo Harris-Walz campaign hats are inspired by Roan’s camo Midwest Princess hats.
Roan's rise has been meteoric, and she has shared already how hard this has been on her. During a June show in North Carolina, she cried on stage. “I just want to be honest with the crowd and I just feel a little off today because I think that my career has just kind of gone really fast, and it’s really hard to keep up,” she said. “And so I’m just being honest that I’m just having a hard time today.” In June, she told host Drew Afualo on the podcast The Comment Section that “People have started to be freaks—like, follow me and know where my parents live, and where my sister works. All this weird shit.”
by Kelsey McKinney, Defector | Read more:
Video: HOT TO GO/YouTube
Over the past few years, I’ve become increasingly hesitant to identify as a fan of any living artist. There are plenty of artists whose work I like, or even love, but the entire concept of being a fan, and what the act of fandom entails, has shifted in ways I find both alienating and disturbing. What was once a straightforward expression of admiration—I’m such a fan!—has lately become more like a claim of obsessive entitlement.
Fans do not simply enjoy an album; they are in love with the person who created the work. Fans follow the celebrity object of their affection on Twitter and Instagram and TikTok and watch their every move. Fans join forums with other fans, who all believe that the celebrity is communicating with them via a series of riddles and hidden messages, which sometimes they really are.
I’m not the only one made uncomfortable by this situation. Artists, unsurprisingly, are expressing their distaste for the consequences of modern fan culture. Indie pop darling Chappell Roan posted two videos to TikTok yesterday that went megaviral. In the two videos, which combined have more than 15 million views, Roan speaks straight to the camera, imploring her fans to realize that she is not an object for them to play with, and more importantly, that they do not actually know her at all.
“I don’t care that abuse and harassment, stalking, whatever, is a normal thing to do to people who are famous or a little famous or whatever,” Roan says. “It’s weird how people think that you know a person just 'cause you see them online, and you listen to the art they make. That’s fucking weird!”
A number of the comments on these videos were from people replying to this plea for privacy with the exact sort of behavior that prompted it. It’s the cost of being famous, they said. Cry me a river, they said. We made you, they said. Maybe that’s because it is rare for a celebrity to set a firm boundary on how their fans interact with them. She is refreshingly direct—there’s no perfunctory hedging about how of course she is grateful for the attention, no self-effacing asides where she explains how she knows what a privilege this all is. She is not going on Oprah, teary-eyed, to explain how she has been hurt. She is looking her fans right in their eyes and telling them to knock it off.
The comments for the videos have since been turned off. The boundary is clear. The question is whether or not the fans will be able to respect it.
Roan’s rise to fame has been rapid, and somewhat unexpected. After signing to Atlantic Records as a teen, the label dropped her after the release of her single “Pink Pony Club” in 2020. The album she’s blowing up for this year, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, was released in September of 2023, to some critical acclaim but not a ton of attention. What did get her attention was opening on Olivia Rodrigo’s sell-out Guts Tour last summer, along with memorable performances on NPR’s Tiny Desk and at Coachella. She released a new single in April, in the midst of this spike in attention, called “Good Luck, Babe,” that peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100.
A chart released by the company Chartmetric shows her monthly Spotify listens rocketing over the past year like a hockey stick graph. Currently, she has over 30 million listens per month. A few months ago, she had only 1 million. Her song “HOT TO GO!” with its helpful spelling and arm-centric coordinated dance, has become equally popular among Peloton moms, sorority girls, and alt lesbians. Many people believe that the camo Harris-Walz campaign hats are inspired by Roan’s camo Midwest Princess hats.
Roan's rise has been meteoric, and she has shared already how hard this has been on her. During a June show in North Carolina, she cried on stage. “I just want to be honest with the crowd and I just feel a little off today because I think that my career has just kind of gone really fast, and it’s really hard to keep up,” she said. “And so I’m just being honest that I’m just having a hard time today.” In June, she told host Drew Afualo on the podcast The Comment Section that “People have started to be freaks—like, follow me and know where my parents live, and where my sister works. All this weird shit.”
by Kelsey McKinney, Defector | Read more:
Video: HOT TO GO/YouTube
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