Everybody’s wrong sometimes. There’s nothing bad about that; we learn from being wrong, or should.
Often you can get a sense of what’s motivating a person or entity by observing how they behave when they’re caught being wrong.
A longtime friend and supporter showed me this article in which a recent meme from longtime clickbait/meme farm The Other 98 asserting off-hand that “Funny how we haven’t seen a single American mega church offer ANYTHING to the Ukrainians…” is entirely debunked as without factual basis.
Followup shows that the page didn’t pull the image but rather changed the description…which is only useful when people have shared the description and not just copied/pasted the image as is the case more often than not. They could have just as easily thrown a DEBUNKED stamp on the original and edited that into the original post while deleting the first image entirely, but they didn’t.
This is why you can’t just go sharing everything that confirms your biases. There’s nothing about the underlying values the meme ostensibly represents that’s wrong, it’s just that someone was in a bigger hurry to push people’s emotional buttons for easy traffic – 22K shares last I looked – than to get their facts straight.
Perhaps my failure to adopt that attitude even as all of social media fell into it is why I don’t have 5 million people following me rather than 5 thousand aside from the big page where I’m a co-admin, but I also really like knowing that nobody can credibly accuse me of putting my own advancement, comfort, or benefit over the principles I believe in and the messages I’m trying to get into the world.
Everybody gets it wrong sometimes, including me, and that’s okay. It’s what you do about it that matters. The right way to deal with this would have been to edit the post and replace the image with one showing clearly that it had been debunked.
As it happens, I’ve been through this precise situation myself, probably a decade or so ago; back then it wasn’t possible to change the image in a post after it was posted, all you could do is delete it and just deleting it wasn’t sufficient to notify people it wasn’t accurate. I created a new corrected image and linked it in the description of the old, with edited text making clear that the original image was inaccurate and should not be used. Back then that was about the best you could do; the tools have since evolved.
As a source of information, If performative ass-covering while still trying to reap the benefits of your error is your first instinct, it’s probably time to take a hard look in the mirror and ask yourself honestly what you’re really trying to do.
As an activist or activist organization it’s vital to keep your priorities straight and not do things like this, because every time you do you’re validating criticism from “the other side” that call you “fake news” or accuse you of “lying” or “misinformation” or “propaganda,” and not without solid merit to their argument. Journalism currently has a similar problem; sensationalism “puts asses in seats” but it’s not often accurate.
As a consumer of information it’s always imperative to make sure you’ve checked your facts – not just when something’s asserted that you don’t agree with anyway, but *even more so* when you do.
Understanding bias is a core component of information literacy, which is a critical life skill for the modern day and beyond. That very much begins with understanding our own biases, because those are the ones that are going to most often be used against us. This is something I’ve been teaching for a very long time, and is now one of the core concepts underpinning CUSTODE. Our vulnerability to being easily manipulated by mass media has far outpaced the growth of our ability to see through the malicious application of persuasive communication, and until we fix that none of the challenges we currently face will ever truly be resolved.
When it comes to glass ceilings, there are those who break them…and those who smash through them happily chewing the glass as they go.
Happy International Women’s Day, 2022!
I somehow manage to not remember this until it happens every year, but in a happy little bit of accident International Women’s Day, March 8th, is also my daughter Amber’s birthday, so happy birthday to her!
Back in the late 70’s and 80’s when we were all strung out on cocaine and wearing animal prints and most of the guys in rock music had more makeup and hairspray than most of the girls which was definitely a violation of norms at the time, one woman stood above so many other incredible trailblazers to permanently destroy the idea that women had to be nice and soft and innocent and pure.
A self-described “marginal nymphomaniac and terminal exhibitionist,” Wendy O. Williams was unabashedly foul-mouthed, aggressive, and dominant. In a time when the concept of a “strong” or “empowered” women was parsed socially to mean “masculine” or “aggressive” in popular culture, in the mold of Grace Jones or Brigitte Nielsen, Wendy O wasn’t just opening doors, she was smashing walls…and she was using your face for a hammer while screaming in a voice that sounded like a torch singer gargling razor blades.
It’ll look strange to the youngsters of 2022, to see this woman in what seems to be a weird take on a fairly typical cheesecake video, but in 1984 this was (sometimes literally) the bleeding edge of female empowerment. This was the woman who wrapped notorious womanizer Gene Simmons around her finger so tightly she got his entire band to work on her album plus one of the guy who had already left!
Of course I’m playing glib with Simmons’ reputation, but there can be no doubt that Wendy O. had a very special place in Gene’s heart, and he pushed hard for her, and good for him. It’s a little funny to see photos of the two of them back in the day, with the normally “Mr. Dominant/God Of Thunder” just about giggling at this amazing human being. (Kiss later took on a song of slightly disputed provenance which they’d given to Williams, “It’s My Life,” and recorded it as a single for their late 90’s album “Psycho Circus.” However even then it ended up being cut from the album and remained unreleased until their 2001 box set. I had a false memory of this being a much more successful KISS song than I thought, but it turns out not to be the case…which is actually a little weird, it’s a high-quality pop-commercial-arena-rock and they did it well.)
Fun fact: she did her own stunts in this.
Many of the bios you’ll find online now will tend to suggest that there was a lot of manufactured hype behind Williams and her band the Plasmatics, but don’t let the ability to see through that now in ways people just couldn’t and didn’t forty years ago skew the picture. It was theater macabre, in the grand tradition. Sledgehammers and shotguns and chainsaws casually being thrown around by a mohawked blonde woman wearing nothing but electrical tape on her nipples, patent leather bikini bottoms, and a sneer, sawing and hammering her way through guitars, televisions, and Cadillacs on stage.
It would be easy to blow her off from our perspective 40 years later as just another exploited woman in the age of hairbands when women in rock music were still largely relegated to the dressing rooms. In a world of nordic metal and buzz-saw punk you’d probably get kids laughing at you for even suggesting there was anything “metal” or “punk” about Wendy and the Plasmatics, but in the early 80’s this woman was the definition of “punk rock girl.” The now-largely-forgotten doors she broke down stayed open for eventually millions of girls and women to walk through whether as musicians or anything else they wanted to be.
There are a million bios of Ms. Williams out there and I don’t want to recreate them. There are also a million pre-fab hot takes on a million prominent women, every one of them well-accomplished and worthy of praise, and I don’t want to try to recreate that either.
Instead on this International Woman’s Day, I’d like us to think about the women who weren’t doctors or physicists or poets or dancers, who weren’t comfortable and whose success didn’t necessarily fit neatly into pre-established but traditionally male-dominated paradigms like academia, science, and business.
Ms. Williams’ long and, if you believe the image, surprising list of laudable personal behaviors and beliefs is exhausting – a committed vegetarian since the 60s, didn’t use drugs beyond some experimentation as a teenager, huge advocate for animal rights, anti-establishment rabble-rouser…her idea of a safe sex PSA in 1984 (when we barely knew what AIDS was, had only just begun to understand how it worked and what HIV was, other than a death sentence) – and this is no fooling – was “if it doesn’t taste good, don’t take it home and sleep with it.”
So speaketh Mama Wendy
One of the things that set Williams apart even from so many other women who own and leverage their sexuality for popular appeal is that she never left you with the impression she was coming out on stage wearing nothing but shaving cream (a set piece that got her arrested twice, which was the beginning of the electrical tape) to get anyone off but herself. She wasn’t “trying to get your attention,” she was taking it, and doing so for her own pleasure and satisfaction and amusement and fulfillment. She wasn’t out there showing you her chest because you wanted to see it, but because she wanted to show it to everyone. Whether they wanted to see it or not wasn’t taken into consideration…and the overtones there about consent weren’t an accident on her part, even if we didn’t really have the language in 1984 that we do now to say that.
Another of rock’s more forward-thinking leading female lights, Chrissie Hynde, once said “Remember you’re in a rock and roll band. It’s not ‘fuck me,’ it’s ‘fuck you!’” Wendy O. Williams strapped on a sneer and said “Both sounds like a lot of fun, along with some exploding sedans…” Sometimes compared to later trashpunk icon GG Allin, the comparison doesn’t hold up. Allin was a doped out self-absorbed nihilist. Williams was a hyper-theatrically inclined hedonist with a penchant for violent imagery and a lifelong habit of deliberately challenging of “traditional female behavior” at every turn, going back to getting arrested for sunbathing nude on the town common at fifteen…in 1964.
After the noise and hype had died down significantly and the unprecedented expressions and behavior she created became its own mainstream, Ms. Williams in 1991 declared herself “pretty fed up with people” and moved with her longtime partner Rod Swenson into a geodesic dome house they built together in a small town in Connecticut. There she worked rehabilitating animals and at a local food co-op.
Beginning in 1994, her lifelong depression combined with the fundamental conflict between her theatrical, hedonistic personality and the more pastoral existence of a post-fame middle-aged small-town animal caretaker and grocer in Connecticut led her to several suicide attempts, the last of which was successful in 1998. Unlike many high-profile (and low-profile for that matter), Williams went to great care to make certain it was known her decision came after many years of long consideration and contemplation, and was not a spur of the moment act prompted by an acute mental health crisis. In one of her suicide notes, she wrote:
The act of taking my own life is not something I am doing without a lot of thought. I don’t believe that people should take their own lives without deep and thoughtful reflection over a considerable period of time. I do believe strongly, however, that the right to do so is one of the most fundamental rights that anyone in a free society should have. For me much of the world makes no sense, but my feelings about what I am doing ring loud and clear to an inner ear and a place where there is no self, only calm.
Long before that, though, Williams was quite clear about her approach to her art and her purpose in performing it:
“We’re not out to pick fights. But then the essence of what we do is shaking up the middle class; I think if you don’t do that with your music, you’re just adding to the noise pollution.”
With her music and so much more, Wendy O. Williams was absolutely the most genuine of pioneers in the women’s movement while functioning almost entirely outside of it as she did nearly every other movement, group, club, cabal, trend, bandwagon, style, or cause. On this day of international celebration of women and their unique contributions to our world and our cultures, let’s those of us who live on the fringes remember the lady who shredded those fringes from an old pair of cut-off shorts around 1978, the incomparable Wendy O. Williams.
I would say “may she rest in peace,” but I’m pretty sure she’d rather be chainsawing a guitar in half on stage.
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Some rolling observations I made while watching the Big Speech.
“Freedom will always triumph over tyranny.” We start off with a few bold statements praising Ukraine and sharply criticizing Russia. “When dictators do not pay a price for their aggression, they cause chaos.” Biden makes a good solid speech and case here, discussing work on alliances, sharing and analysis of intelligence data, and the deliberate choices to speak clearly about these things as they were happening.
It’s a good case made, and I’m hard-pressed to think of a time there’s been this clear, sharp, and immediate response from the international community to provocative events.
Talking about going after the oligarchs. Wish our leaders in the Democratic Party were as enthusiastic about mitigating the power of oligarchs here in the US.
Biden reinforces that they’re not moving US forces “to fight Russia in Ukraine,” right before listing off all the countries where US forces are being moved and readied for conflict the minute one of those borders is crossed by Russians fighting in Ukraine.
Announcement of release of some oil reserves, 60Mbbl total.
“Iranian” instead of “Ukrainian,” and someone shouted something. We’ll see how the right-wing punditry handles that in this new era of anti-Russian sentiment.
LOL boos from the right as Biden mentions “unlike the two trillion from the previous administration that went to the top one percent.”
Economics. Lots of slogans and so forth, will there be any kind of solid announcements for any kind of relief? Applause line for infrastructure plan. Hearing more details on how that money’s being spent specifically, all of which is cool or cool-ish at least.
Passing econ bill with sales pitch including promise from Intel to drop $100Bn on manufacturing growth. Lots of revitalizing manufacturing talk and so forth. I think it’s short-sighted to continue focusing on “creating jobs,” but most of the world isn’t on that page yet.
Inflation and price conversation, lots of nativism in this conversation, but it is what it is. “USA” chant like we’re at a wrestling match. Validating the economic plan. Reducing prescription drugs, arguments in favor of reducing prices, political rhetoric but not ineffective, shout out to the kid in the audience, lots of well-used crowd-pleasing techniques here. Proposes capping cost of insulin at $35 a month. Let medicare negotiate prescription drug prices. Next up cutting energy cost & climate change. Tax credit for weatherization. Hints of subsidies for EVs and similar tech, but no specifics. Cutting child care costs, which is very popular and not a bad thing, but it’s not an issue super close to me as a single adult.
Not hearing anything to strongly disagree with here or be terribly cynical about so far, other than continued bleating about “back to work” and “continued economic growth.”
Discussions of fixing tax code and so forth, as well as a shot about confirming his fed nominations.
Watchdogs are back, the Justice Department “will soon be naming a chief investigator for pandemic fraud.”
“I’m a capitalist.” I’m not impressed, but that’s the frame we’re in. He’s not wrong about anything so far, staying within that framework.
Lots of pitching for some leftist favorite ideas, and some discussion of Covid impact.
Eh. Fund the police. Blugh. They’ve got funding; we need funding for everything else that feeds in to criminality.
Right to vote. Pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, the DISCLOSE act, etc. All good things, nothing particularly new here though.
Shoutout to Justice Stephen Breyer, which naturally goes to a pitch for nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Border security and immigration reform, some idiot – probably Boebert or Greene – trying to get a “built that wall” chant going that died quickly. More generally well-known talking points on that issue.
“Preserve a woman’s right to choose,” Equality Act and addressing the LGBTQ+ population with supportive statements that appear to be aimed not so subtly at some state-level oppression that’s been happening there.
“Unity agenda”
beat opioid epidemic, including the usual details
mental health, particular for kids
“hold social media companies accountable for the national experiment they’re conducting on our children for profit.”
support veterans
end cancer as we know it
This section of the whole thing seemed pretty cookie-cutter and not holding any gigantic announcements or headlines, but also nothing terribly objectionable or obnoxious.
Ah, here we go, ARPA-H, Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. I like this.
“The state of the union is strong because you the American people are strong. This is our moment to overcome the challenges of our time, and we will.”
Overall a solid performance, nothing to give progressives any huge enthusiasm, but some support for those priorities with a much heavier dose of status-quo dogwhistling…which isn’t unexpected. As a speech I’ll give it a B+. As a matter of hearing what I wanted to from a standpoint of advancing progressive priorities, C+.
Jake makes a number of excellent points and is clearly writing from a place of compassion and genuine concern. My primary issue with his letter is simply that it circles around the biggest issue – homelessness and what we’re failing to do about it – without addressing it directly. According to the latest Federal Reserve data there are about 15 million empty housing units and about half a million homeless people in this country. Perhaps another 2-5 million are housing insecure, depending on how you measure.
That means there are enough homes to not just give every homeless person two, but also every housing insecure person, and even in the “worst case scenario” you’d still have five million empty housing units left over for those who can afford two or more.
So let’s just kill this whole narrative right now: we have plenty of housing. We choose not to use it.
Why would we make that choice? Because the people who sit at the very top of the pile – the Musks and Bezoses and Waltons and Gateses – have taught us that’s the right choice to make, and it is…for them. It’s just not for anyone else.
The very wealthy, you see, need the poor to exist.
Not just “poor” but visibly oppressed, hopeless, wasted lives must be present, because they’re the biggest weapon the wealthy have to keep everyone in between them and the poor properly controlled to perpetuate the power and wealth of those at the top.
The poor must exist because without them, you wouldn’t be afraid to stand up to your abusive employer, or the broken local school system, or whatever else might be an option for you if you weren’t trained to believe, fundamentally, that doing so would cause you and those you love great harm.
The truth is the owners – the five or six hundred people who really do own nearly everything – need the poor and destitute and hopeless to exist, to keep you in line.
The Right Charities
The social, cultural, and business leaders of our world don’t want “good homeless policy” in the sense this writer means it. They only care about “good homeless policy” to the extent of “people who aren’t homeless aren’t forced to look at and deal with homeless people.”
There are BILLIONS of dollars in that valley, and plenty of room too. The only reason you don’t have a robust public housing system that more than adequately covers everybody’s needs is that you. don’t. want. one.
You can’t sit around patting yourselves on the back for how you charitably used a millionth of the available resources that you could to help some poors, if there aren’t any poors.
You can’t prop up the performative and often profit-motivated private ‘safety nets’ if the people choose to ensure all are provided for through the mechanisms of their duly elected government.
You don’t get that warm, fuzzy, patronizing feeling of cutting that check, if nobody needs it.
To actually solve these problems would end an entire system of funnels for making sure the “right people” are given the accolades and social reinforcement necessary to keep the money flowing in their direction.
The extremely wealthy *need* the very poor, because the very poor are how they keep the rest of us (the rest of YOU – I *am* very poor) complying with their prerogatives.
“You’d better stick to the program, you don’t want to become one of THEM, and we can make you one of THEM any time we want, so you keep your happy little head down and your happy little mouth shut and keep consuming AND generating profits for the producer on the products by selling your labor to them for far less than it’s worth, or else.
“Now here’s a bunch of home security systems and motion-trigger cameras and alarms and guns to keep yourself safe from all those filthy poors. Aren’t you glad we’re protecting you? Wouldn’t it be a shame if we stopped? So yeah, it’d be cool if you just cooperate. It’s so much easier than fighting back, isn’t it? Yeah, it sure is.
“Here’s a few thousand articles of pointless but emotionally stimulating bickering over the same old nonsense we’ve known how to fix for at least several generations but refuse because it’s not profitable for the ‘right people.’
“Here’s some vapid celebrity worship and pointless archaic pseudo-competition to keep your attention and a gambling industry so THAT can be used to further extract value from you too!
“Ooh and ahh at this news article about the plucky fifth grader who built a dialysis machine out of coffee cans, aquarium, tubing, and a hamster wheel because his mom can’t afford to pay for the dialysis that keeps her alive.
“Awwwwww, what a champ!”
Capitalism is nothing if not thorough.
The Right Systems
Since only the “right people” are allowed to run things and make decisions, none of it’s ever going to change, because they’re only ever going to make the most selfish decisions they can plausibly explain to the public – often with the cooperation of that segment of the public who don’t care to be bothered having to look at filthy poors.
The kicker is, for those of us who really do want to help, the only available options are those that cooperate with the whole charade.
There’s no way for someone like me to put together the knowledge I have in a way that is meaningful and accessible and available, unless I, too, go through the process of setting up a whole series of systems replicating the function of “the right people” while trying to keep the whole process honest. That’s why I created Musk For A Minute – not simply for myself but for others in my odd but not entirely unique position of being extraordinarily gifted at nearly everything except being financially stable.
Because there simply is no other way for people like us to survive and add our humanity to the world, and the world needs our humanity in it. The more of us can do our thing, the better off we’ll all be.
There’d be no need for it if we had meaningful structures in place to ensure those among us who produce non-material value are able, literally, to do so. If we were in a sane economic system – with a universal basic income + job guarantee administered by the same governments who own the money – what we call “charity” wouldn’t need to exist.
To be clear, in these hypercapitalist days what we call “charity” doesn’t simply mean “giving from the kindness of your heart to some cause which matters to you,” I’m not talking about girl scout cookies here.
I’m talking about the degree to which those who have more than they absolutely need are willing to part with some of it to help those who have less than they absolutely need because the systems and processes which are supposed to make sure everyone has what they absolutely need are badly broken and maladministered by those whose primary fealty is to the machinery of profit and exploitation.
So What’s Left?
You’re in a position of having to decide whether to support Musk For A Minute or the Red Cross or the Ukrainian military or COVID relief – or for most of us, how to effectively support them all and ourselves, just like I’m doing – because that’s how the people who own everything including the vast majority of information consumed by the average person in an average day want things to be.
The “right people” need the poor to keep everyone between them and the poor – and that’s most of you who read this – under control.
The most effective way they do this is to ensure that within that big chewy center, “right people” – people who are cooperative with the whole mess because they perceive the material or other personal benefit to them as being of more value than the ethics they’re compromising to gain that value – are nearly always selected to manage and govern and make decisions and be the foci of our attention, to create social proof for the validity of the whole system that keeps us all from being who we wanted to be back when we still believed we could.
The more willing you are to turn a blind eye to the very crimes and excesses and sins and mendacity and avarice necessary to maintain such a system, the more of a “right people” you are. The more you push back against that and demand equality of opportunity and justice and privilege (i.e. “human rights”), the less likely it is you will ever be allowed to become a “right people.”
If you get too mouthy about it, the right people will make sure you can’t even eat, so you end up with starving, unemployable geniuses running around. We’ll just dismiss them as “insane” and let them rot, we don’t need ’em. I mean after all, there’s a whole new series about Joe Exotic and that damn Carol Baskin!
And that’s what we’re calling a “free country” these days.
What can you do about it? Stop propping up clickbaiters and profiteers, and start supporting genuine voices of leadership and evolution. Having my own biases, I of course recommend Musk For A Minute.
As always: the revolution you’re looking for starts in the mirror.
BREAKING: Nazi Texas Governor Greg Abbot Orders State Agency To Kidnap Trans Children From Parents, Force Misgendering, Corrective Medical Procedures Outlawed.
First, They’re Coming For The Trans Kids
Image of original letter from Gov. Greg Abbott’s office, ordering state child welfare agencies to prosecute parents and physicians of any trans kids who are actively attempting transition for abuse.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott yesterday ordered the state child welfare agency to immediately begin investigating and prosecuting any parent or doctor of a trans minor who has taken any transitional steps e.g. hormone therapy.
In the letter, Abbott notes that “it is already against the law to subject Texas children to…elective procedures for gender transitioning, including reassignment surgeries that can cause sterilization, mastectomies, removals of otherwise healthy body parts, and administration of puberty-blocking drugs or supraphysiologic doses of testosterone or estrogen.”
He goes on to remind people of what “mandated reporter” means, thus making clear without stating it outright that as of now every single doctor, teacher, psychologist, or whomever else in Texas is aware of a child transitioning and does not immediately turn in the parents for abuse investigation, will themselves be sanctioned with the possibilities including loss of license and jail time.
Of course there are already plenty of state hotline numbers to call in “anonymous tips” and so forth.
This not only flies in the face of medical science and psychology and human rights and every other decent thing, it is a textbook execution of Nazi policies of identifying and scapegoating already-targeted social outgroups in order to encourage the more venal, ignorant, evil, and insane among the population to become even more aggressive and violent toward the scapegoats, and hiding behind the cover of abused authority in the form of oppressive, targeted regulation and cooperative lickspittles and lapdogs in the constabulary and judiciary.
Houston, We Have A Problem
There is simply no valid reasoning that supports the ongoing delusion we don’t have a fascism problem. A *Nazi* problem. This absolutely can not stand, not even for a day. Every activist in Texas needs to focus on ending this immediately and making damned sure nobody can try it again.
Greg Abbott is a Nazi. Not a Nazi-like thing, not an almost Nazi, not a wannabe Nazi. Everyone involved in making this possible is a Nazi.
The entire system and set of values and regulations described in his order are Nazism. It’s a whole good old boys’ system where anyone with a grudge can destroy lives under the auspices of obeying the law, and where even attempting to do the right thing is a criminal act. No different than encouraging schoolchildren to report parental disloyalty to the Nazis, or the USSR, or Big brother.
It’s meta-coercion, an entire new layer of abused power and oppression. Abbott and his fellow Nazis are sending the message loudly and clearly that not only will there be no tolerance for non-binary sexuality and identity in Texas, there will be no tolerance for any attempt to change that odious condition. If you’re a parent accused of abuse, your parental rights can be terminated and you may never get them back. Your kid will be shuttled into the foster system – or worse the shadow foster system – and subject to whatever “treatment” the state deems necessary to force them into “normality.”
In their confidence that a majority of Texans will support this behavior, the Nazis are sending the message that if you are trans, you are defenseless and without rights; if you are the parent of a trans child, you are defenseless and without rights; if you are a physician or psychologist treating a trans or intersex minor in any way the state of Texas concludes to be an attempt to help a patient physically transition, or if you even hear about it and fail to tell the authorities, you are defenseless and a criminal and legally forbidden to practice your profession.
When an abuse charge is levied, this immediately puts the option on the table of taking the kids out of their homes and putting them in foster care or some sort of state-mandated “correction” program like gay conversion therapy, as if electroshock and bullying and trauma are going to make these kids not who they are. The mere presence of this option in this instance is ludicrous, evil, and outrageous.
There is only one word for any of this.
Yes, Nazi.
You may now end your internal dialogue; this is what Nazism looks like
This is where that whole difficult discussion comes from about whether antisemitism is required for Nazism. (This discussion is largely made difficult by shallow, slow thinkers who can’t tell the difference between noting Nazism isn’t ONLY antisemitic, and claiming it’s not so at all.)
Antisemitism was waiting for a Hitler to show up and exploit it.
Racism and sexism and homophobia and transphobia have been waiting for a Trump to show up and exploit it – or more to the point, waiting for a Trump to show up who’s so mendacious and narcissistic any one of several dozen fascists and Nazis and autocrats can control him easily with threat or bribery.
It’s the same Nazism, folks, it’s just different targets. The targets now are the ones you see scaring bigots in the news – trans people, especially kids; the LGBTQIA+; the educated; the compassionate; black people who insist their lives matter; people who get angry when police keep murdering the innocent and getting away with it; the increasingly desperate, hostile, and populous ranks of the poor; and as always the anti-fascists who would stand in defense of all of those targets and indeed take the offense against fascist or Nazi or other autocratic/totalitarian power grab.
This is openly flaunted fascism, totalitarian autocracy that’s not merely autocratic and totalitarian but smug, laughing in your face as if to say “look how many stupid evil people there are, that we could so easily con them into giving us power, and you think you can stand against us? Please.”
They think we’re going to sit back and let this happen. The whole point of this is to terrorize us into sitting back and letting this happen.
Ab. So. Lute. Ly. Not.
What To Do About It
Due to my public profile it would be foolish of me to make any specific recommendations for direct action. If I said “it’s time to hit the streets,” one of the Nazis would find a way to make something bad happen on the streets and then hold me responsible. So I can’t tell you that you should be marching or protesting 24/7 in front of the Governor’s mansion or what have you.
I can say that whatever you choose to do, be careful. Consider your actions to avoid setting yourselves up to get hurt or have someone else’s crimes blamed on you.
But stand. Now. Activate your networks, be smart, work together, get on the phones, get on the TV stations, get on social media and END THIS, immediately. The ACLU / ACLU of Texas should already be in court.
Aside from covering my own backside legally, as a tactical matter I don’t advise creating a situation that could be exploited by inauthentic actors, for instance a large raucous march on the Capital. We have learned time and time again that this is most often the outcome the fascists and Nazis of the world hope for because it gives them cover to be even more violent, to actually hurt and kill people and imprison them under false pretenses and seize their assets and destroy their lives.
We have learned time and again that any time the Nazis and fascists – be they calling themselves the “Patriot Front” or the “Proud Boys” or the “Oathkeepers” or “Prayer Warriors” (a common phrase in evangelical and charismatic Christian sects that has been co-opted by white supremacists other fascist types because it’s about impossible to tell at a glance whether you’re looking at “prayer warriors” or “Prayer Warriors”) or whatever – believe they have a decent shot of getting away with it during antifascist demonstrations, they will absolutely murder, and their traitorous minions and lapdogs in law enforcement and the judiciary will do everything possible to facilitate oppression. One need look no further than Kyle Rittenhouse to validate that the American legal system has fully established a pathway to the open murder of antifascists during street protests.
Fortunately for the sane and decent among us, there are other tools in the box. Not every legislator and judge supports this and those who don’t need to know we’re behind them. The ACLU and other civic groups have active chapters in Texas who should already be activated on this. If you are a Texas citizen you have local legislators you can contact. This list gives you the phone contact information for every state representative. This one has your state senators. Some of them also include e-mail contact, but this is definitely more of a phone call situation anyway.
You may consider saying something like “The oppression and targeting of trans children and their families is not just scientifically and morally wrong and a direct assault on the fundamental rights of humanity which are the basis of our democracy. This order is an unquestionable attempt to employ tactics of persecution, and terrorism intended not only to oppress trans people but to intimidate their allies into silence and criminalize those allies who are medical, psychological, or psychiatric professionals, as well as the parents and other family and friends of trans minors in transition. The people of Texas will not stand for this, nor will we support anyone who does, regardless of party.”
You may consider reaching out to companies in the state encouraging them to do business in a less fascist environment, but don’t expect a great response there; fascism and Nazism are great for business. Maybe an approach like refusing to participate in SXSW would be useful; maybe it would be more effective to triple the size; that’s not my decision to make, but certainly activists and citizens in Texas should be having these conversations right now.
We’re not in the 80’s and 90’s anymore, when we should have been taking all of this kind of behavior more seriously and putting a stop to it before it got out of hand. We can’t keep pretending that if we just ignore it, it’ll go away. We can’t keep pretending that as long as it’s not us personally being persecuted, that this hasn’t gotten out of hand. We did that for decades.
Now it’s out of hand, and the good people of Texas are going to have to figure out how to get their state back from the Nazis when it appears half the voters in the state, at least, don’t want the Nazis to go away because they are Nazis.
It’s not up to me to tell y’all what to do…but you damned sure better do something, fast.
Because even if you’re not trans yourself, nor a parent of a trans person, or even know a trans person, two things are certain: that trans people are human beings, and that if these human beings can be treated this way, so can you.
While I personally am not a Democrat and have some major problems with the party, as an independent leftist I find that to be a valid statement. I’m less inclined to “go team” and personality cultism than some – although I’d hardly be an admin of a fan page for Barack Obama if I thought he wasn’t worthy of the effort, I don’t endorse or promote anything I don’t believe in – but I don’t think in its context this image is out of place or unreasonable.
When you look at the numbers and what gets done and why, as a general rule the US does better with Democratic presidents, and ideally we’d have about a 16-year run of them with significant periods of legislative majority, while the GOP continues falling off the right end of the spectrum into flat-out Neo-fascism, the Dems continue to drift rightward, and eventually a third party rises from the left within the Democratic party to fill the “other major party” void left by the declining Republicans.
As one might expect with that sort of content in that sort of context, reaction was largely positive. There was one that caught my eye though, because it was pretty hard but not without significant merit and truth. I’ve no interest in bringing any heat on the commenter so I’ll leave their name out and not screenshot lest anyone think I’m encouraging some kind of argument with them, but the comment was thus:
The ONLY good thing about Democrats, is that they’re not Republicans. Literally it. All 3 of those men suck major donkey balls, they were just a hell of a lot better than the alternatives.
Facebook
I don’t feel as negatively as the commenter, but I also sure wish there wasn’t quite so much truth in this as there is.
What really stood out for me wasn’t the harsh criticism in the first part of the post, but rather the last phrase: “they were just a hell of a lot better than the alternatives.”
That really struck me, because that’s been the core decision-making guidance in presidential (and most congressional) elections in my lifetime.
This “best of a bad lot” game has been going on for several cycles now. I think we got fairly lucky with Obama, frankly, and I put him well above Clinton. (I’m not taking a position on Biden’s presidency as a whole until it’s over.) Any of them I’d take over any republican president in my lifetime, which would start with Nixon. Eisenhower was a different breed and I’d have to take a closer look at his policies to say how much I’d care for him versus say Clinton.
But generally in my lifetime it’s been “horrible” versus “a little less horrible,” often with so little difference “horrible” wins. When this is not the case, for profit media (“independent” or not) will work diligently to make it seem so, because underneath this whole process is a matter of conditioning us as a population to always accept “just a little better than the worst” as the only alternative to anything.
This is exactly why we end up with people like Reagan and the Bushes and McConnell and Trump and may all the gods I don’t believe in forbid whatever the GOP is queuing up to be even worse than that. We’re conditioned to not only accept that bold progressive change is impossible, but that it’s rather flighty to even suggest. Here, have a personable character who will do far less than they should. Wouldn’t you like to have a beer with them? How could you reject someone so friendly and nice? At least he’s not as bad as that OTHER one…
The Game
The first half of the game is first finding a truly odious candidate, then getting a candidate who’s just slightly different enough to be “better than THAT guy” and conditioning voters to accept that this is the best we can do because look at the alternative.
The second half is to limit the alternatives to only those candidates sufficiently friendly to existing holders of wealth and power.
We’re not allowed to have good alternatives, and when one arises – see e.g. Sanders in ’16 and ’20 – they’re excluded from the process by manipulation and artifice, usually with a big assist from the media driving narratives that deliberately – and let’s be clear, artificially – induce a sense of hopelessness and failure among those supporting the good alternative, and a wearing away of the will until you throw up your hands and go well I guess this is what we’ve got, because there literally are no other choices.
More Of The Same
Those same influences of media and commerce will then throw support behind saccharine facades of the good alternative, like Gabbard or Sinema or Manchin, and manipulate us into believing the artificial is genuine…just long enough to get them into office where they can screw things up and make a big mess and confuse the conversation, lather rinse repeat.
You can count on two hands, if that, the number of currently seated US federal legislators who aren’t to at least some degree putting up a front of populist nonsense and cheap sloganeering in the pretense of working “for the people” while as soon as the cameras are off they’re having $25K/plate fundraisers with industrial tycoons. Maybe your toes too, if I’m being optimistic.
Whatever one may think about any given President’s ideology or accomplishments, all of this seems like one damned strange way to have a free country to me, and it’s bothered me for decades.
We never should have been ON this handcart, and now nobody wants to hit the brakes because then they’d have to deal with themselves.
We’ve had warnings – loud, clear, lucid, consistent warnings from subject matter experts in every imaginable field -that this mess was coming for decades, and we ignored them all because they were uncomfortable, inconvenient, and unprofitable.
Now just look at what we’ve done with all the privilege and liberty we were born into. Corrosion, corruption, connivance, exploitation, greed, and way too many of us are STILL sitting here insisting “no wait, we don’t know FOR SURE where this handcart is headed, let’s keep going!”
Because they’ve got good seats in the handcart and they’re comfortable and they think if they stay real still and don’t upset the handcart, they’ll stay that way and by the time it gets to hell who cares they’ll be dead anyway.
That has to end.
The entire way we think about everything is a broken cobbled-together mish-mash of superstitions and emotional manipulation leveraged by the powerful against the powerless, all hiding behind the facades of good will and best wishes and thoughts and prayers. We are dragging around thousands of years of ridiculous social nonsense and mechanisms of oppression and abuse, and it’s time we faced ourselves and started letting them go.
That’s not a suggestion; it’s going to happen because the only other option is extinction. The question is whether we lean into it and grow and evolve, or whether we choose to fight back and try to cling to old systems of inequality and oppression because they benefit us materially, and find ourselves miserable and tied up for generations in decline and oppression as we teach ourselves over and over that the old ways simply don’t work anymore, to the extent that they ever did.
But for too many of us right now, it’s almost like watching hardcore addicts, people who are deep into like meth or crack or opiates. They always think they’re getting away with something, and if you call them out they’ll just stand there lying straight to your face about it until one way or the other you leave them alone about it.
Every one of us from the most powerful personalities in government and commerce to any one of the half-million or so people who go to sleep homeless every night in the United States knows that we have a serious problem of our world being largely controlled by and for narcissists, egomaniacs, and sociopaths.
In our earnest desire for fairness and equity, we allow ourselves to be painted into a corner where if we stand up against autocratic or totalitarian or fascist or otherwise oppressive and harmful ideologies, we’re accused of “intolerance” and shouted down as though that’s really a substantive point.
Worse, trapped in a fog of disinformation, misinformation, malinformation, propaganda, advertising, marketing that begins assaulting our senses nearly from the moment of birth and follows us all the way to the grave, we’re often easily misled by cults of personality and pandering to our biases and egos and fears, and that goes in any direction; it’s no more rational to have unquestioning fealty to Obama or Biden or Clinton than to have any seething hate for them.
(Ah, but what about the Trumps of the world? Their whole function is to lower the basement by several dozen levels so the next fascist who shows up with table manners and less than grotesque personality will seem admirably restrained and lucid by comparison…and the one just a tiny bit less odious than that one will seem nearly messianic by comparison to the “new low.”
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.)
By failing to stand up for justice and equality, allowing our systems and processes to be corrupted because we believed ourselves beneficiaries of the corruption, we have sent the message to the most powerful and malicious people in the world that they can get away with anything, and now that’s what they’re trying to do.
So while there’s nothing wrong with showing respect for leaders you admire, it’s also well worth noting that we are in no way headed in any right direction at present, nor have we been for a very long time now, and if we don’t get serious about fixing it right now a whole lot of us are going to get hurt as the whole mess collapses on top of all of us – and it will be all of us, this isn’t just a US or “western democracy” or “modern world” thing.
The very underpinnings of human liberty are at grave risk of disappearing entirely. While it’s in no way my intention to insult or criticize memes like this one or celebrations like President’s Day or any of the particular people in the image, if we’re truly going to honor and respect our humanity in the veneration of historical figures we absolutely must reject the idea that “not as bad as the worst,” is the best we can do.
Yeah, I said it. Tiny houses suck. I don’t mean if you want a cute little cabin you have bad taste, I’m talking about as a solution to homelessness. The whole idea sucks. It’s horrible, rotten, terrible. It’s an idea that needs to die, and quickly, at least in terms of being an applied solution to American homelessness. It’s quite literally worse than useless, and by orders of magnitude.
Now that I have your attention: I’m not trying to hurt anyone’s feelings who might be among that growing group of folks who are advocating for tiny houses and building and engineering them to be ever more tiny.
I understand that once you get below a very high ceiling within the entire housing-construction-real estate complex, most of you engaged here are earnest and well-meaning, hard-working, diligent, and really truly trying your best to do a good thing in the world, and I don’t want to discourage you from doing that.
But I’d like you to give me a few minutes to explain, from the perspective of a person who has frequently been homeless and is currently housing insecure, why you may find, after consideration, that your talents and energy to do good things might be better spent on other angles for addressing homelessness.
I’m going to break this up into a couple of sections. In the original context I’d planned to go through the whole establishing of credibility thing by pointing to all the various work I’ve done out there over the years related to the topic, but then I realized the only reason I feel the need to do that is that this started out with some schmoe responding to a social media comment, and basically telling me I have no idea what homeless people think, want, or need, and screw that guy. My work is out there and easy to find and my arguments are well-formulated and not in need of further validation by character reference anyway.
This article started as a social media comment – as they often do – on a post about a local tiny house initiative and their latest step forward and maybe there’s a shipping issue and so forth. That post was a local news report updating the current status of a tiny house project here, mentioning that 14 acres had been purchased to place these new tiny houses on. My comment was thus:
I wonder how many full-sized real-human-being apartments could be built on 14 acres for what they’re paying for glorified boxes.
And naturally, here comes the schmoe brigade to tell me what I got wrong:
[citation needed] A+ for enthusiasm. F for argument construction though. And a five-yard penalty for abuse of punctuation.
With that introductory flourish out of the way, let’s talk about the meat of the matter. In part 2 we’ll discuss why the social, political, and psychological implications and impacts of the entire “tiny house narrative” are extraordinarily problematic. Then we’ll talk about why the very suggestion of “tiny houses” as a solution to homelessness in this country is, ultimately, an arrogant insult built on an entire group of industries trapped in a loop of aspirational delusion that’s going to collapse like a house of cards, and their absolute refusal to accept that you only need so many housing units for so many people before building more is a gigantic waste of resources benefiting no one. Before we wrap it up I’ll show you the numbers I think support that prediction.
First up: the personal perspective. Then the data, numbers, analysis, and conclusions that we will hopefully all agree support my core thesis, as difficult and maybe even painful as it may be for those of us who have really gone all-in on this in the hopes that it would be an effective solution to homelessness.
Between The Cracks, Between The Lines
From a standpoint of communication, messaging, and cultural expression of how we respect the humanity of the poor (and even that phrase is problematic, like “we” are doing “them” a favor), there is critical subtext in the entire notion of applying tiny house/alternative housing solutions to housing instability problems, and that subtext is being ignored to our great detriment and expense.
As someone who has struggled with poverty and housing insecurity all my life, here’s what the “on the streets” ear in my head hears every time I hear someone going on about how wonderful it is to create “tiny house communities” where the homeless can be:
“We’d love to help you out, but we can’t find a way to do it that both treats you as an equal among dignified free people and allows the gigantic kajillionaire conglomerates and the handful of people who own them to profit from you, so we’re going to train you instead to be so incredibly desperate that you’ll take ANYTHING, even a palette in an empty warehouse, and be glad to have it.
Then we’ll come up with something that we can sell to the kind-hearted as a philanthropic initiative to ‘address homelessness,’ sequester you in boxes that none of us would want to live in outside of a few minimalists and a whole lot of people making specious hypothetical arguments they don’t actually believe in on the internet because they don’t want to ‘lose’ The Battle Of The Comment Section. You still get to be separate, less than, beneath dignity, and lacking in basic resources but we can tell ourselves we ‘did something.’ Sorry. I mean, we feel bad and all but if there’s no money to be made on putting you in a dignified living situation, you’re not going to be in one. But here’s a token attempt exploiting the good will and sincere earnest positive intent of a whole bunch of folks in between you and us, to make sure if you are paying attention enough to say any of this out loud it will hurt feelings and people won’t want to hear it.
So, sorry Poors, you can have a tiny little imitation of a home and tell yourself how brave and strong you are for making the best of it to help distract you from the fact that your country doesn’t think you deserve a real place to live, and you’d probably better appreciate it and not complain or you won’t even have that.
Suddenly when you’re hearing that message, the whole “isn’t this a good and noble thing we’re doing” narrative doesn’t play so well to your good intentions and kind heart.
I’m sorry for that – genuinely, I’m not writing this to hurt anyone or make them feel like they’ve wasted their time or even hurt people by accident – but we’re not going to get moving on real solutions until we stop allowing ourselves to be sold on the idea that “good enough for them” constitutes human decency and the fulfillment of our immutable obligation to the ultimate morality of human life, i.e. the survival and propagation of the species.
There is another reason why the whole “tiny house” thing infuriates me to a degree that, at first glance, most reasonable people would think unwarranted by the situation. We’ll have to get into some hard data and stuff to fully understand that, so let’s do that now.
The Data
Oftentimes folks who do this sort of thing get attached to this notion that if they can just provide enough numbers, charts, and graphs to make their point, then their point will be taken as well-made and that’s the end. Then you end up getting lost in the weeds looking at excruciatingly fine details of abstruse statistics, and the whole point of the discourse is lost.
Fortunately in this case we have two very basic and easy to understand data sets to review: the number of “homeless people” – i.e. residents without a dwelling – in the US, and the number of “peopleless homes” – i.e. dwellings without a residence.
There’s this great little tool called FRED at the St. Louis Federal Reserve website, and it’s chock full of all this great information about various aspects of the economy including employment, housing, economic status of individuals, and so forth. Among this information: housing inventories, that is to day how many housing units there are in this country and their status as owned, rented, occupied, unoccupied, etc.
Here’s what FRED has to say about the number of currently vacant housing units in the US:
For clarity: this images is telling you there were roughly 15.2 million empty residences in the US in the 3rd quarter of 2021.
If you want to see the whole dataset with pretty charts over time and everything, it’s at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/EVACANTUSQ176N, but what you need to know is in that screenshot: there were, on any given day between July 1 and September 30 2021, about 15.2 million empty residential units in the US.
Coming up with homelessness data is a little more difficult, but when taking in all of the assertions put forth by reasonably trustworthy sources and trying to assemble a big picture, on the average day in the US there are about half a million people who are homeless. This number has remained remarkably steady for decades, and basically has stayed within that 500-600K range since the late 80s. I can’t find the link now because I’m an undisciplined writer and forgot to bookmark it while I was reading it, but while researching this I found some government report from 1970 saying there were then 300,000 homeless people.
…and 600,000 empty housing units.
I want you to think about that for a minute.
In this country, right this minute, there are half a million or so people who will sleep on the streets tonight…and we have enough empty housing units for every homeless person in this country to have thirty places to live.
There is absolutely no condition by which that is not an unforgivable outrage against our people. Germany recently took over something like 30K housing units from landlords who had a surplus of empty property under their eminent domain processes, and there’s exactly zero reason why we can’t do that here.
That’s where the angry attitude comes from. It’s one thing to be like “hey sorry, we’re short on housing and doing the best we can, here’s a temporary fix.” It’s something else entirely to say “hey we could give you THIRTY places to live if we really wanted you to have one or cared in the least that you’re homeless, but we just don’t want to because our money is more important to us than you having a home.”
And that’s not just how it is. That’s how it has been for my entire life. We have had at least twice as many empty housing units as homeless people for over half a century. That’s not just a bit of bad thinking, that’s a deliberately implemented system of oppression and waste for profit.
Just this matter of the outrageous oversupply of empty houses we have on one hand and the outrageous lack of housing for the poor on the other is plenty of argument supporting our core thesis and I could leave the article here, but there are some very important secondary implications that I feel are critical to understanding the entire argument I’m making, so let’s take a look at those and then wrap it up.
Economic Insanity
We’ve discussed the sort of socio-personal implications of this approach and the difficult and (for most folks below the top who are pushing this, I believe) unintentionally damaging messages that it carries, and the stark reality that it just isn’t necessary.
Now let’s set aside the social justice concerns and outrage and just talk plain old numbers, resources, and economics.
It should not require an economist to tell you that if you have fifteen million empty housing units and half a million homeless people, you have a rather startling surplus of housing units, and that’s not a good thing. Those are completely wasted resources, doing no good for anyone outside of a small group of folks we’ll talk about in a minute.
It should not require an economist to tell you that if you have fifteen million empty housing units and half a million homeless people, we darned well ought to be paying folks to take those wasted units off the hands of those who are wasting them.
As it happens, I’m privileged to include some economists – and I’m not gonna namedrop about it, but if I did you’d recognize them if you follow the field, unquestionably – in my circle of acquaintance, so I asked them. Now these are busy folks so I wasn’t expecting a dissertation, but I wanted to make sure I’d given people who know what the heck they’re talking about a chance to say hey no, JH, you’ve got it wrong. None of them did.
What we have here is economic insanity. If we gave a housing unit to every single homeless person in this country, there would still be 14.5 million empty housing units. Who’s gonna buy those when we only have half a million people un-housed? What could we have been doing with fourteen and a half million homes’ worth of building materials, infrastructure, and labor? Why are we overbuilding like this?
The truth is, the entire US housing and construction industry is a shell game played on a house of cards. Naturally there’s a small percentage of folks out there who can afford multiple homes, but they don’t cover 14.5 million.
Most of those empty units are owned by big landlords who have no intention of profiting from them or renting them out to begin with. One big property management company pays a few big construction companies to spend some millions at a few big supply houses to keep their economic ecosystem churning and generating profits. The big property management company mismanages and underutilizes the new properties at a loss for a while (nice tax break here, you can get it all the way to zero if you lose enough, or even get the government to pay YOU) until it becomes implausible to keep claiming it because why would a business keep losing money on purpose. They sell it at a loss, write the loss off their income, the next company does the same thing for a few years, later rinse repeat until the property has decayed to undesirability and then eventually it’s seized for property taxes or condemned for being in irrecoverable ill repair, it’s destroyed, and the cycle starts all over.
By and large those 14.5 million empty homes are a couple of dozen super-rich bankers, property managers, construction companies, etc. shuffling money back and forth so it looks like something’s happening.
Eventually the reality that we don’t actually need much in the way of new housing construction, haven’t in a while, and won’t for a while is going to catch up to this economic sector, and when it does things are going to be very, very chaotic and confusing across the economy for a while. Hopefully the folks who get paid to manage this stuff are working on a way to deflate this horrid balloon slowly before it explodes and takes a third of the economy with it. One good way would be to sieze several hundred thousand or even a couple of million newer, decent units under eminent domain (with reasonable and fair compensation to keep the fascists from whining too much about it) and start getting homeless people into them, but that’s getting back into the social aspects of things and I wanted to stick strictly to capitalist-economic argumentation, in this section.
In the end, the “tiny house” movement helps perpetuate this broken system by continuing to prop up the systems by which landlords justify refusing to rent their empty properties to people who need them. Don’t tell us we have to rent to those filthy poors, they’ve got tiny houses right there.
With that said, I did want to give a little positive energy to tiny houses in general, so let’s talk about that and get out of here.
Tiny Houses Aren’t Evil
I really do want to put some positive framing on tiny houses in general because they are, utilized properly, a wonderful idea that can save lives.
The problem isn’t the idea of a tiny house. The idea is that a tiny house should be anything but temporary emergency shelter. I’d have loved to see a few thousand tiny houses in New Orleans after Katrina. They’d be a great solution for migrant-border crises such as the one at the southern US border, or currently blowing up at the Poland-Belorus border. Refugees, the displaced, situations when you need dignified shelter on the ground for a lot of people fast, and many of them may be transient, and many of the shelters may be used by many people, and so forth.
That is a wonderful use of the tiny house concept and I don’t wish to discourage research and development in that area in the least.
It’s just not a serious or effective solution to homelessness.
We have the homes, and the only reason we’re keeping them away from those who need them is someone wants to make a buck.
It is my carefully considered, and hopefully now well-defended, opinion that this is just not the way to run a decent society, and in spite of the earnest good will and compassionate intent of so many of those working on them, applying the technology of tiny houses to the problem of homelessness only serves in every way to perpetuate and reinforce the social structures that create it in the first place.
It may well be that this approach can be useful in parts of the world where there aren’t enough homes to go around, but that just isn’t the case here. We have 15 million real people homes where we can put people who don’t have them if we want to, we just have to want to.
We don’t want to.
Maybe we should work as hard on changing that as we are on building tiny house Hoovervilles.
Thanks for reading, please don’t forget to do all the social media stuff to help get this information and conversation out into the world!
Welcome to the very first edition of what I hope will become a regular weekday post rounding up various bits of news and entertainment I’ve found during my online travels, and various thoughts, anecdotes, trivia, and analysis pertaining thereto. What ground I’ll cover is up for grabs; there’s sure to be some socio-political content every day because that’s where I live, and likely to be plenty of stuff about music, films, etc.
While “news” will play a role, it’s not my intent to be just another copy-paste gimmick that does crappy rewrites of articles from bigger sites and passes it off as original material. Expect anything that catches my attention and inspires 250-500 words of thought, with maybe four to eight stories per day.
With that said, let’s get right in to it!
In today’s issue: Greta Thunberg reminds us that she ran out of f**ks to give about five minutes after she was born and good for her; Neil Young sings about other people; YouTube bans antivaxx misinformation. Read more using the navigation links (pro tip: the header is a drop-down menu), and don’t forget to add me on social media so you don’t miss anything!
Greta Gives ‘Em Hell
Climate and autism activist Greta Thunberg hit another one out of the park this week while speaking at the Youth4Climate summit in Milan, Italy. Reading like a classic George Carlin stand-up routine, Thunberg read through the obligatory list of cliches and empty promises – creating a new prosperous future full of green jobs and so forth – with open scorn and mockery before dismissing the lot as “thirty years of blah blah blah.” CNN’s report is at https://us.cnn.com/2021/09/28/world/greta-thunberg-climate-intl/index.html and features some highlights or you can watch the video in the embedded tweet below. One of my favorite passages, via WaPo:
They invite cherry-picked young people to pretend they are listening to us, but they are not. They are clearly not listening to us. Just look at the numbers. Emissions are still rising. The science doesn’t lie.
– Greta Thunberg
What I love about this particular quote is that she doesn’t flinch even a little bit while citing her own presence in that place at that moment as another attempt at performative distraction, a bit of token attention to settle the kids down. In the “bigger picture” sense again we see a dramatic shift in decorum over the last few decades; no more are these folks all just showing up to have their pictures taken and get their name in the paper. They haven’t come to recycle the same old talking points that benefit nobody except those desperately working to preserve the status quo that keeps them extraordinarily wealthy. Moreover they’ve come to eject those who do.
It absolutely must be taken as critical to this conversation that we stop playing word games and employing euphemism and trying to protect the feelings of the guilty at the expense of the lives of the innocent. Seeing this ongoing evolution of discourse is heartening and I certainly encourage everyone to do what they can to emulate it. Enough with the “blah blah blah” already, let’s get something done.
This is the generation of kids I was trying to be in thirty-five years ago and we weren’t ready. We’re not ready now…but the universe isn’t gonna wait for us to be ready. Change is happening, evolution is here, and it’s get on board or get left behind.
When I think about what “on board” looks like, it usually looks like this.
“We can no longer let the people in power decide what hope is. Hope is not passive. Hope is not blah blah blah. Hope is telling the truth. Hope is taking action” My speech at #Youth4Climate#PreCOP26 in Milan. pic.twitter.com/BA62GpST2O
There’s a pretty nifty little trivia-listicle over at Far Out magazine (https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/neil-young-songs-wrote-about-fellow-musicians/) in the UK which lists songs Neil Young wrote about other musicians. If you’re into Young or music trivia it’s well worth scrolling through on your lunch break or whatever. Of course it’s not exhaustive, just a handful of tracks, but if you’re of a mind you can start following links and reading and learning all kinds of stuff about Young.
Of course it’s almost endemic to Neil Young that you think his songs are “about somebody,” and often their subjects are obscured through metaphor. Sometimes it’s an obvious homage (“Buffalo Springfield Again”), sometimes it’s a callback to himself (“Harvest Moon”). Sometimes he gets “feisty” ($1 Eddie Vedder, see embed) and takes on a whole idea (“This Note’s For You”), or a whole region of the country (“Southern Man”). Then there are the songs that you didn’t even realize he wrote, or about whom (“Lotta Love,” made famous by Young’s then-partner Nicolette Larson), and you could spend a lifetime speculating on the veiled references to his various interpersonal loves and hates with old bandmates like David Crosby and Stephen Stills.
Part of Young’s appeal as a songwriter is he knows how to make the specific feel general and vice-versa; he resonates, because he finds the resonance between the individual, subjective, personal experience and the collective, shared, objective “world” in which it happens.
Enjoy this fun video of Eddie Vedder inducting “Uncle Neil” into the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame, in 1995.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMmT6JN5Pqc
The Great Ticketmaster Food Fight of 1995 is rarely discussed today out of respect for the survivors.
Another entry in the “Big Brother?” argument: NPR reports (https://www.npr.org/2021/09/29/1041493544/youtube-vaccine-misinformation-ban) that YouTube has now announced a generalized ban on vaccine disinformation. This extends the existing ban on fake or misleading info about COVID and related vaccines and other management measures. You can read the details of YouTube’s position on the matter in the linked article.
This naturally brings to the surface questions about censorship and information control, and it’s quite reasonable to be concerned when any private company has the ability to exercise that level of content control over public discourse. Sorting out the imperatives of free expression and public safety in a moment like this was never going to be easy, and the flag-waving and sloganeering around the issue from all directions don’t help.
The real, core solution to all of this is of course education, but that takes time we don’t really have. The problems with our failure to sufficiently educate are manifest and must be dealt with on a basis of exigent need, even as we work diligently to construct robust, effective, and meaningful core solutions. How that will play out, I don’t know for sure, but I have a feeling free expression is going to take a hit in the end.
Meanwhile, those of us who would like to help educate others (or ourselves) should find this video from UNESCO quite handy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7hvv3z1gqc
Thanks for reading, please remember to like, share, comment, and subscribe, and we’ll be back Friday…you know The Drill 😉
(This post was updated on October 25, 2021 adding a link to mutation data and adjusting calculations resulting from a transcription error rendering “12,700” as “12,400.” Ultimately this results in the originally-reported 53-minute strain cycle being closer to 48-minutes. -jh)
I keep running into this dishonest, manipulative, and frankly stupid response from the murdering plague-bearers who refuse to do what’s necessary to end this pandemic. (Don’t @ me and don’t bother whining; if you don’t like the description, don’t fit it.) It goes like this:
“Well you’re vaccinated, so why do you care what anyone else does?”
This is a question that really does require quantum-singularity level stupidity to even ask, and a complete lack of self-respect to do so out loud, but it seems to be the narrative the boiler rooms are using to troll the stupid into killing as many people as possible, so since the stakes are that high let’s go ahead and answer the question definitively, then you can just link this article from now on when you run across that puerile, psychopathic, abjectly dim-witted and pathetically gross argument.
I care what anyone else does because I understand how viruses work (at least to a point sufficient to this conversation).
Makes a big difference in your attitude.
See, while a bunch of knuckle-dragging pencil-necked fit-throwing entitled twits decided this was their moment to claim the 15 minutes Andy Warhol promised them, this virus has been mutating. Last time I had solid numbers, between Feb 2020 and April 2021 it had mutated some 12,700 times (per https://srhd.org/news/2021/coronavirus-mutations-and-variants-what-does-it-mean using WHO & CDC data), which bakes down to about one new strain every forty-eight minutes or so. Given the radical increase in the number of cases since that time, I would imagine this estimate is if anything fairly optimistic, and the actual average time between new mutations is probably more like half an hour. That would mean 48 times a day, every day, all day long, we are spinning the chamber and pulling the trigger.
Someone who actually understands these things will immediately point out that probably 12,200 of those strains were self-terminating; they had a failed mutation that caused them to be non-viable, and they died out.
But someone who actually understands these things will also immediately point out that every single mutation carries the risk of hitting the big trifecta: resistant to existing antibodies, far more contagious, and far more deadly. If that combination hits, it’s the end of life as we know it, permanently. IF the species survives, the impact will be immeasurable and will absolutely and fundamentally change who we are, quite possibly thrusting us back into pre-technological and steampunk pockets of innovation at best for centuries.
Every time that virus mutates is another round of Russian Roulette we’re playing with the species because some Muffy somewhere misses her afternoon delight with the pool boy that she can’t have now that the kids are going to school in the living room.
Every hour we take the chance of wiping ourselves off this planet, and the ONLY reason it’s happening with that frequency is because people think they can argue opinion against science. I swear it’s like some of y’all WANT to meet Randall Flagg. If people get vaccinated, mask up, and stay home as much as POSSIBLE – which does not mean “as much as I want,” but “as much as is needed” – the possibility STILL remains that we can get a lid on this stupid thing, even though the chance of actually eradicating it are now very, very slim (15 months ago it would have been easy, if we’d done what we were supposed to THEN instead of cutting corners and letting the plutocrats rush us back to work).
The longer we continue this infantile, suicidal, ego-driven insanity, the greater the chances are that you and I will live to see at least the genuine beginnings of a civilizational collapse on a scale that simply can not be imagined.
And that is why your vaccination status is my business.
Hey, y’all, before you fall TOO much in love with the whole “will of the people” thing, I want you to think about something.
A few years ago majority of people in multiple states voted in favor of amending their state constitutions to make gay marriage illegal.
It took the US Supreme Court to make that un-happen, and they did so in direct opposition to the express will of the people.
Sometimes the majority is WRONG, and that is why we live in a democratic REPUBLIC. “The will of the people” is of paramount, but not ultimate, priority. This nation was not built to be ruled by “the will of the people,” but by “the will of the people as expressed through their chosen representatives who also have a moral and ethical duty to oppose that will when it’s harmful or destructive.”
That’s why our system is constructed the way it is – and I’ve wracked my brain trying to imagine a more effective set of mechanics that successfully balances all the necessary priorities of a free modern nation, and I couldn’t do it. And I’m a political scientist, so I’m definitely on the shortlist of people who should be able to, if one could.
The system works: when “the people” tried to put something over that sucked, the system said “no, we’re not doing that.”
We’ve completely forgotten that the purpose of government is not to make everyone happy, if we ever really grasped it in the first place. You don’t elect people to do “what you want,” any more than you hire a doctor to perform heart surgery to your specifications.
You elect people, which makes them accountable to your will but not bound by it, to do what’s right.
This silly fantasy people have of a perfect candidate is just that – a silly fantasy. I wouldn’t even agree with 100% of my own decisions if I was in office, and if I did I’d be worried about it.
The problem is, a whole lot of folks honestly don’t give the first drizzling shit about what’s “right,” they only care about what benefits them. They aren’t interested in electing someone who’s going to do the right thing; they’re only interested in electing someone who’s going to do the thing that’s beneficial to them.
Because those among us who are sane and reasonable don’t think in those terms, we haven’t taken the threat these folks represent seriously.
But the threat is very real, and it’s in your town. It’s running for school boards and library boards and county commissions and small-town mayoralities and sheriffs and judicial seats. It’s showing up at every public meeting to loudly browbeat local leadership into accepting or conceding to things they shouldn’t, just to make the bullies and aggressors shut up and go away.
It’s not that I’m saying “democracy is bad” or anything like that. But it’s a system that requires engagement to work. If people of conscience allow themselves to neglect their duties as citizens, then people without conscience can weaponize it against the rest of us, and that’s exactly what’s been happening for decades.
I really have to add here that this isn’t a secret or conspiracy. It’s been openly discussed since I was a kid in the late 70’s or early 80’s. Here’s a link to a google search. Once you get there by all means look at the raw web results but also check the news items. If you have access to a favored news or periodical archive like JSTOR check that for obvious keywords in content produced in the 70’s and 80’s. This is an ongoing thing, and it’s time we stopped kidding ourselves that it’ll just go away if we ignore it. It won’t go away. Every time we ignore it, every time we back down because it’s too much hassle to fight, they get stronger and sanity and reason get weaker.
That’s why we’re in this mess. The covid deniers, the trumpers, the white nationalists and neo-fascists like the Proud Boys and the Prayer Warriors and the Oath Keepers, this is where they came from. We thought we could live with it; we thought we could let it go and it would just fade on its own like any other bad idea.
But we can’t, and it won’t.
If you’re going to rely on “democracy,” then you have to be prepared to deal with the reality that democracy only functions properly in an educated and informed and engaged society. The entire 20th century of social philosophy revolved around the great truths of Orwell and Bernays: if you control the information you control EVERYTHING. You can wipe out the entire concept of freedom if you just have enough power over information.
The fascists and authoritarians and nazis and white nationalists of the world are absolutely willing to literally rewrite reality if they think it will benefit them materially, and we’ve been letting them gain the tools to do it for half a century.
It’s time to stand up and say no more, now. While we still can. Go to that school board meeting, that city commission meeting. Run for that uncontested office if you’re in any way qualified for it. Run even if it is contested. Run as a third-party candidate just so you can have some power to direct the narrative even if you lose…and you might not. If you can’t stand the idea of running yourself, find someone. You know somebody you think should be in office. Ask them to run. Get a bunch of mutual friends together and stage an intervention if necessary.
But act.
Because to the precise extent you don’t, you are abdicating your democracy.
