Among the worst parts of climate anxiety is knowing full well that when the Earth ends up literally just being one giant ball of fire, the final tweets will be Republicans insisting there’s no climate crisis & Dems saying they can’t do anything because of the parliamentarian.
— David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 28, 2021
The use of the word “Literally” here is accurate.
Yet another interview/profile of Larry Summers where the word “Epstein” never appears and where he’s never asked how many times he visited Epstein’s private island. I’m genuinely fascinated by how he’s *so* good at avoiding that question. https://t.co/xItFzoIgED
— Felix Salmon (@felixsalmon) June 25, 2021
There is a LOT in this seemingly innocuous question.
When an Eel Climbs a Ramp to Eat Squid From a Clamp, That’s a Moray
It’s an interesting article, but I have to think that they spent WAY more time on the headline than they did on a story about Moray Eels hunting on land.
Disturbing new survey finds that 30% of workers now expect to not be treated like shit. Here’s why that’s a problem for the economy:
— Being nice, feeling nice (@InternetHippo) June 21, 2021
Literally 99% of all economic coverage on jobs these days is an exercise in ignoring this fact.
The Onion is America’s ONLY news source.
Desperate Employer Offers Basic Dignity To Incentivize New Hires
Calling the benefit the only way to lure employees back into the workforce following the pandemic, local employer Apex Insurance announced Wednesday that it would begin offering basic dignity as an incentive for new hires. ………
This is as true as taxes is. And nothing’s truer than them.
‘Bipartisan’ Is How Republicans Say ‘Sucker!’
This is the truest headline that I have read in a very, VERY long time.
When you read this, you know that you are in for one hell of a ride:
I was hired as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man’s dong in print. But then the editors cornered me drunk at a party, and here we are.
—Patricia Lockwood in London Review of Books
Just in case you are wondering, while many admire the author’s prose, it also considered to be extremely misogynistic by many.
H/t Naked Capitalism for finding this 2019 gem.
Australia Is A Giant US Military Base With Kangaroos
The Australians do appear to be in a fierce competition with the UK over who will be the US’s top poodle.
Karmically, Trump Is Very Screwed and Coming Back in His Next Life as a Urinal Cake. Legally? He Might Be Pretty Screwed There, Too.
—Bess Levin in Vanity Fair
Trump could be facing New York State’s “Little RICO” law, which could mean 25 years in prison.
These are not the Tweets of the day:
The real poetry will come when the self-interested narcissist who weaponised falsehood realises he cannot inflict damage on the other self-interested narcissist who weaponised falsehood, because he undermined truth-telling as a functional quality in political discourse.
— Ian Dunt (@IanDunt) May 26, 2021
These are the two Tweets before the Tweet of the day.
The Tweet of the day is the one following, which I am quoting and Bowlderizing, because it reads, “It’s like Aesop’s Fables for c%$#s,” and I just don’t feel comfortable dropping the “C-Bomb” on the blog.
It is, however a perfect metaphor for Boris Johnson former senior political advisor, Dominic Cummings, testifying against the PM’s handling of the pandemic.
The man who made fecklessness the new normal in British politics is now complaining that Boris Johnson is a feckless git.
https://t.co/xJ0yYHBqlt pic.twitter.com/7KQtzOam1p
— Human Rights Watch Watcher (@queeralamode) May 27, 2021
When someone suggests that, “It’s hard to find a large friend group of only sociopaths.”
QED, motherf%$#ers, QED.
There are infinite kinds of irresponsible books that a well-credentialed media insider can write.
First are the total farces of fact. These include former New York Times chief Jill Abramson’s mangling of basic details about her subjects in her book on new media, or the time that Naomi Wolf, once an adviser to Al Gore, learned on the air in an interview with the BBC that the thesis of her latest book was based on her complete misreading of a nineteenth century legal definition.
A second variety of irresponsible books are those whose primary purpose is to market their authors at the expense of humane and rational thinking and behavior. For example, The Problem From Hell allowed Samantha Power to parlay her journalism into a Beltway policy career as the human face of the American forever war. Hillbilly Elegy’s J.D. Vance is reportedly preparing a run for the Republican nomination for Senate in his home state of Ohio.
And then there are books whose fusion of factual inaccuracy and moral sophistry is so total that they can only be written by Malcolm Gladwell.
—Noah Kulwin in The Baffler
I love me a scathing review, and this one is entertaining, and the subject is so eminently deserving of the treatment, that it is a joy to read.
It is also more generally an indictment of the “Very Serious People” sit as gate-keepers to acceptable thought in our society.
How I feel about our current precarious pandemic situation. Some wealthy countries think they got it under control… for now… what could possibly go wrong? 🤷🏻♂️ #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/yHGc8wgnr3
— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) May 24, 2021
This is marvelous metaphor for premature reopening.
Credit where credit is due, Democratic Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has just given right wing conspiracy theorists a reason to get a vaccine:
Go Get Vaccinated So You’re Alive to Vote against Me in the Next Election
This is one for the ages.
Bitcoin and blockchain are often confused. Bitcoin is a shitty asset pretending to solve the problem of money, while Blockchain promises shitty solutions for a much wider array of problems.
— nate tkacz (@__nate__) April 28, 2021
Boom!
Drops mic.
I did read Plato in high school, and tagged the Greek philosopher as a proto-Fascist, and read a fair amount more modern philosophy, and mave made an effort to understand the basic concepts at the heart of what is generally called, “Western Thought,” but it’s never been a huge part of my life or my, “Thinking.”
So I am not one of those people completely losing their sh%$ over Howard University abandoning the classics in its curriculum.
What I am surprised by is that one of the people who wrote this OP/ED in the Post is the luminaries of African American academe, Cornell West.
I should not be surprised, if you look at his background, it is clear that he spent much of his formative years in the study of philosophers and philosophies from across the world, including those who are lumped under the sobriquet of, “The Classics.”
One of the best things about the article is that it is so much more thoughtful and well written that we can expect to hear from Fox News in the next few days:
Upon learning to read while enslaved, Frederick Douglass began his great journey of emancipation, as such journeys always begin, in the mind. Defying unjust laws, he read in secret, empowered by the wisdom of contemporaries and classics alike to think as a free man. Douglass risked mockery, abuse, beating and even death to study the likes of Socrates, Cato and Cicero.
Long after Douglass’s encounters with these ancient thinkers, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would be similarly galvanized by his reading in the classics as a young seminarian — he mentions Socrates three times in his 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”
Yet today, one of America’s greatest Black institutions, Howard University, is diminishing the light of wisdom and truth that inspired Douglass, King and countless other freedom fighters. Amid a move for educational “prioritization,” Howard University is dissolving its classics department. Tenured faculty will be dispersed to other departments, where their courses can still be taught. But the university has sent a disturbing message by abolishing the department.
Academia’s continual campaign to disregard or neglect the classics is a sign of spiritual decay, moral decline and a deep intellectual narrowness running amok in American culture. Those who commit this terrible act treat Western civilization as either irrelevant and not worthy of prioritization or as harmful and worthy only of condemnation.
It is a glorious expression of intellectual fury.
Insecure, Frustrated Bully With Something To Prove Considering Career In Law Enforcement
The reporting goes on to note that, “Sources also felt it bears mentioning that Lockhart is an impassioned and unapologetic racist.”
The Onion can be a treasure sometimes.
holy shit I’ve rarely seen a footnote used to such devastating effect. https://t.co/FjHRNcZYzE pic.twitter.com/sk597elmBR
— Jathan Sadowski (@jathansadowski) April 13, 2021
The Tweet that led me to the footnote
A while ago, (correctly) I called Bill Gates a mass murderer for his efforts to prevent open source vaccines from being released, with his insistence that any vaccine be licensed exclusively to one for-profit entity.
I still say that and now The New Republic says the same thing, complete with a ghastly portrait of Gates with horns.
They go through the history of IP absolutism and how it has harmed people, and refer us to the case of South Africa and AIDS drugs where Big Pharma and their evil minions in government and the media suggested that compulsory licensing and generics would lead to the spread of drug resistant variants of HIV, because Africans are lazy and disorganized people who won’t take their pills regularly. (In reality, Africans took their pills more reliably than their privileged brothers in the rest.
After mentioning this, there is an asterisk, and at the bottom of the page is a footnote about TNR‘s former editor-in-chief Andrew Sullivan:
*Among journalists echoing this argument was former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan. When The New York Times reported Sullivan was defending the companies’ lawsuit while taking undisclosed funding from PhRma, the industry trade association, Sullivan remained defiant in the face of evidence-based accusations that he was an unethical journalist. “It behooves me to say I see absolutely no problems with [drug industry sponsorship],” he told Salon. “In fact, I am extremely proud to get some support from a great industry.” It later turned out that Africans adhered more closely to the twice-daily pill regimens than patient populations in rich countries.
They just called their editor in the early 1990s, a racist hypocrite dirtbag. (Mark Ames has a rather good bill of particulars on his entire career).
I think that the publication is distance themseves the damage done by two profoundly toxic people, Sullivan, and former publisher Marty Peretz.
It’s a glorious take-down of a thoroughly contemptible human being.
Just so you know, his “storied career” at TNR included:
And that’s just the sh%$ that he did while he was at TNR.
H/T Atrios.
I just read a review of Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class, and the book sounds like a real barn-burner:
Who are the members of the professional managerial class? Neither capitalists nor workers, one strains to define them in purely economic terms. If you have ever dealt with members of the PMC, the first word that comes to mind is annoying. It might be part of a slightly larger summation of annoying and pretentious. But annoying is always going to make the cut because members of the PMC are not just managers by vocation, but also by personality. They love to regulate and micromanage: their subordinates, their children, and even themselves.
Is it due to nature or nature? Occupational hazard or innate insufferableness? No one really knows for sure. What is known is that these are the most annoying people on the planet. People who get positively aroused at the idea of telling you what to do, correcting you, and telling you that they just read an article in The New York Times about just that issue and now have something old to say in a new way. A day without them giving out a did you know factoid is like a day without sunshine. The type of people who can only have an orgasm if they see someone getting a parking ticket.
Catherine Liu lives among these people and seems rather fed up. Her new book Virtue Hoarders: The Case against the Professional Managerial Class makes it crystal clear that she is having a lot of passive-aggressive lunch meetings with other members of the University of California, Irvine faculty.
(emphasis mine)
That line made me laugh.
………
However, Liu focuses on another way the PMC mask their will to power: moral preening. She claims the professional managerial class hoards virtue for itself as part of its war against the working class. Which is to say, Liu recognizes that the PMC and the working class are, in fact, class enemies.
Building on the work of Barbara Ehrenreich, she accepts that the PMC at one time played a positive role in society by challenging the barbarity of earlier iterations of capitalism; specifically when members of the PMC were advocates for creating professional standards in fields like medicine and social research, and were advocating for welfare state economic reforms. But as the post-World War 2 capitalist settlement soured and neoliberalism became ascendant, Liu claims “the PMC preferred to fight culture wars against the classes below while currying favor with the capitalists it once despised.”
This was not a moral awakening, but an awokening. A power play by the PMC to secure their class position within the capitalist system using the lofty language of social justice to defend basic material interest.
I also call them Hillary Clinton voters.
………
The main argument of the book, or so it seems to me, is that the professional managerial class of present is actively working against building socialism in the United States. That the PMC could really be considered the prime obstacle to unifying the working class as they continually divide working people along the rigid lines of identity to serve their own class interests:
[The PMC] prefers obscurantism, balkanization, and management of interest groups to a transformative reimagining of the social order. It wants to play the virtuous social hero, but as a class, it is hopelessly reactionary. The interests of the PMC are now tied more than ever to its corporate overlords than to the struggles of the majority of Americans whose suffering is merely background decor for the PMC’s elite volunteerism. Members of the PMC soften the sharpness of their guilt about collective suffering by stroking their credentials and telling themselves that they are better and more qualified to lead and guide than other people.
Looks like someone just got herself uninvited to an 80s party.
What the review, and probably the book, do not address is how so much of this is driven by what the late Dave Graeber called Bullsh%$ Jobs.
I would argue that much of the dysfunction described in this review is an artifact of what Graeber described as the, “profound psychological violence,” of having a career that one knows on some level has no value.
Here is how preventing a merger led to lower prices and better products:
Stopping mergers is good for business. Take a very simple consumer product – razors and razor blades for shaving, or disposable wet shave safety razors.
Short version: A couple of competitors to the disposable razor duoopoly went from online to store shelves, and forced the incumbents to reign in their high prices, particularly when one of the attempts to buy out one of the companies was stopped by the FTC.
It’s a 5-10 minute read, and well worth it.