Hit me with your best shot

9 09 2014

I blame alcohol, George Clooney, and a coupla’ migraines.

For my being missing in action, that is. I could come up with more reasons, and there may actually be other reasons, but the first line is my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

Onward!

1. It should come as no surprise that I am uninterested in the newest Apple product, be it a smartphone or, yeesh, a smart watch—oh, excuse me “smartwatch”.

Really. A “smartwatch”.

I have a mere smart watch. It’s a Timex. It keeps time, and looks good—looks smart—doing it.

It cost me somewhere between 30 and 40 bucks and will last for years. It costs me ten bucks every coupla’ years to replace the battery.

The Applewatch (!) costs 350 bucks and will last, well, that doesn’t matter, since it’ll be ditched for ApplewatchII in 13.45 months (I made that up), and which battery likely cannot be replaced.

If you like your gadgets to do absolutely everything and Apple gives you faraway eyes, then enjoy your smartwatch.

I’ll be in the cave with my many devices, each of which does one thing, and cursing because I can’t find the right one.

2. I was sorely tempted to join the Democratic Party just so I could vote against Andrew Cuomo in the New York state primary.

I couldn’t, in the end, force myself into the Dems: I am pragmatic enough to vote for them, but leftwing enough not actually to become one.

Anyway, Andrew Cuomo is a conniving asshole who hates New York City and he almost certainly will be my governor for the next 4 years.

Better than Scott Walker, yes, but about par with a migraine and much worse than alcohol or George Clooney.

3. Speaking of Scott Walker, I would most like to win the lottery so I could drop a barge-full of money on the Badger state advocating for his opponent, Mary Burke.

I so so so want him to lose lose lose. Not only because I think he’s making Wisconsin worse, but also because that should put a stake in his presidential aspirations.

4. It has occurred to me that I might be better off if I just do one, grand, Fisking of all of Rod Dreher’s blog posts and be done with it.

I don’t think I will—see: migraine—but it might help to stop the mutterings and splutterings after reading him.

Of course, not reading him would also help to stop those mutterings and splutterings, but let’s not get all logical here, all right?

5. And logic? Please call Andrew Sullivan. In today’s “Best of” post (to which I’m not linking, because I still haven’t ponied up the double sawbucks for unlimited access and don’t want to waste a click), he states that:

I’ve never really felt totally comfortable identifying with a whole lot of what’s called gay culture.

This, from a man who runs a “Beard of the Week” feature.

Who gushes over Pet Shop Boys.

Who complains about the artifice of Lady Gaga by comparing her, unfavorably, to Miss Authenticity herself, Madonna.

Who has repeatedly mentioned how club culture and insta-fucking helped him feel more at ease with (gay) men of all races.

But because he doesn’t want to march in “lefty lockstep orthodoxy”, somehow he’s outside of a whole lotta gay culture.

Uh huh.

(To his credit, he does note the irony of writing this after having returned from his annual summer sojourn to Provincetown.)

6. Finally, I was going to write something about Joan Rivers, but wasn’t at all sure what to say.

I was huge fan in high school (Can we talk?) but my delight in her fell off rather considerably over the years: what had seemed daring later, to me curdled into mean, and I rarely laughed at her jokes anymore.

Still, she did help to form my sensibility that comics really ought to be able to say anything, and the only thing that mattered to the craft was: was it funny?

(And, it should be said, that bit on her reality show in which she got high with a friend was fucking hilarious. It’s not as funny on second viewing, but oh did I laugh the first time I saw it. Go here, and fast forward to about 26:05.)

Anyway, I read this, which seemed about perfect.

h/t Scott Lemieux, Lawyers, Guns & Money





Nevermind

2 09 2014

What a dick:

roddreherquote

It should be noted that Dreher is adding this comment to a long post criticizing both Ta-Nehisi’s recent essay on learning French and on his “Blue Period” generally.

I think Dreher misreads TNC, badly, but in the post itself he at least tries to make some sense of TNC’s argument.

But this, this in effect repudiates that attempt wholly, dismissing any need for understanding, and effacing what Dreher wrote before.

Which, fine, he’s free to do.

It’s still a dick move.

 





With the trust of a child

27 08 2014

Oh, did I laugh over this. . . :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nQT31Noq1eE

. . . because this small being reacts exactly as any being ought to react to having water dumped over her.

UPDATE: Okay, copyright disappeared this vid, but you can see a version at YouTube here. And it’s only 23 seconds long, so go watch it!

h/t: Dan Savage, The Stranger

 





Everybody knows the fight was fixed, 7

19 08 2014

Pay-to-play, celebrity version!

It’s only fair, of course: the NFL is a non-profit organization.

And, this being America, nothing like police abuse to juice the market.

Finally, why so much talk about inequality? Why, commoners today live better than kings yesterday!

(Shhhh, just don’t talk about how kings live today.)

~~~

h/ts: Erik Loomis, Lawyers, Guns & Money—3 times!





So now you see the light, eh

19 08 2014

So a cops writes that “yeah you might think you have rights blah blah but I will fuck you up if you try to pull that shit with me”. . . .

To which the only possible response is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyhq8rOgaiA





Everybody knows the deal is rotten, 6

14 08 2014

You want to work? Yeah?

You want to work for a job for which you won’t get paid?  Yeah?

How about paying to work for a job for which you don’t get paid? How does that sound?

How does $50,000 sound? What you pay to get the non-paying job, I mean?

It’s for charity, you know, so it’s all good.





An army of me

12 08 2014

I’d really like to see a woman president, I would.

And I have a certain admiration for Hillary Clinton, I do.

But if asked if I would support her over other, to-be-determined, Democratic candidates, I would not.

The thinking behind this interview is a big reason why.





Everybody knows the dice are loaded, 2

22 07 2014

Ariella Cohen, on “poor doors”:

Extell, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side asked the city to approve a plan for a 33-story luxury condo with a separate entry for the tenants residing in the publicly subsidized rent-stabilized units, which will be segregated from the rest of the building into a section facing the street while the luxury units will face the Hudson River.

This address isn’t the only one with citizen-subsidized egress segregation, but the overall numbers remain low, if only because, as Cohen notes, it’s hard to retrofit old buildings with separate-because-unequal entrances.

Still, one gets the sense that if it were possible, it would be more popular among the penthouse set. David Von Spreckelsen, a poor-door developer, defends the tender sensibilities of the wealthy living in tax-subsidized mixed-income housing:

I think it’s unfair to expect very high-income homeowners who paid a fortune to live in their building to have to be in the same boat as low-income renters, who are very fortunate to live in a new building in a great neighborhood.

Take it away, Jean-Jacques:

[I]f one sees a handful of powerful and rich men at the height of greatness and fortune while the mob grovels in obscurity and misery, it is because the former prize the things they enjoy only to the extent that the others are deprived of them, and because, without changing their position, they would cease to be happy, if the people ceased to be miserable.

~~~

It’s tempting to end on Rousseau, but Cohen makes an important point in her ending: such segregation is not inevitable. It was enabled by policy, and can be undone by policy.





Everybody knows the dice are loaded, 1

20 07 2014

Yeah, a new series! On the rationale and ravages of capitalism! Whoo-hoo!

Okay, most of the time it will just be quick hits, highlighting (mostly) where the pointy head of the stick pokes through the socio-economic skin and (sometimes) efforts to break that stick. And every one in a while I’ll try to stitch these bits together in an attempt to make my own sense of where we are and where we’re going.

Yep, there are others out there manifestly more qualified than I am, who’ve made long and deep study of political economy (and who I’ll crib from—with credit!—when I remember to look as needed), but I want to try to puzzle my way through this by thinking politically, not economically.

That’s some artificial line-drawin’ I’m doing there, I know, but I’m drawing in pencil, so it’s okay.

So: onward!

~~~

These two are pretty self-explanatory:

*Paul Carr: New San Francisco billboard warns workers they’ll be replaced by iPads if they demand a living wage

(h/t karoli, Crooks & Liars)

*David Ludwig, Obama Unveils New Initiative to Encourage Private Funding of Public Infrastructure

(h/t Paul Constant, The Stranger)

~~~

A bit of comment:

*Joe Pinsker, The ‘Facebook Cop’ and the Implications of Privatized Policing

Pinsker is apparently an optimist, because he concludes In all likelihood, the cop Facebook is funding will likely exert a positive force on the area, checking in on wayward kids and improving emergency evacuation procedures.

Which is an odd conclusion, given that immediately following this he notes private entities whose objectives diverge from the public’s can apply the law as they see fit. Who does Facebook’s security team pay attention to? Who do they ignore?

And I would add: What of our rights against their actions?

*Brendan Kiley, In Addition to Those 14,000 Layoffs, Microsoft is Tightening the Screws on Its Vendors and A Note from the Trenches of Microsoft Vendors and Permatemps

Temporary nation! Whoo-hoo! As a worker-mercenary myself, I can only confirm the delights of livin’ the free labor life—tho’ I must admit that I’m not completely free, union-bound as I am.

*Megan Rose Dickey, How Much Uber Drivers Really Make

Surprise: not as much as promised.

The real reason, tho’, that I picked this one out, is that the phrase “sharing economy” makes my teeth itch.

When Uber and Lyft and Airbnb and TaskRabbit are all grouped into some kind of happy-clappy “sharing economy”—sharing! it’s good! didn’t your mother teach you to share?—what is oh-so-gracefully elided is that these are really examples of the fee-for-service brokerage economy.

Uber, et. al., are brokers: they broker the relationship between provider and client/customer and take a fee for that service.

One the one, capitalist, hand, this isn’t bad: people are getting paid; on the other, socialist, one, these kinds of services demonstrate how far capitalist relations have penetrated and commodified human relations.

~~~

Deserving much comment, which I may or may not eventually get around to providing:

Kathleen Geier, Sarah Jaffe and Sheila Bapat, What Do the Recent Supreme Court Decisions Mean for Women’s Economic Security?

Esther Kaplan, Losing Sparta

~~~

How to fight back: Together! Solidarity!

Ansel Herz, Anti-Foreclosure Protesters Block Sheriff’s Eviction of Disabled Veteran in West Seattle

He will probably end up losing his home, because the law favors the house.

Still, it’s good to fight back, if only to remind ourselves we can fight back.





Which side are you on

15 07 2014

A few more short thoughts on recent Supreme Court decisions, and some connections between them:

1. That mashupCorporations are people, my friends, and some people are more equal than others—is a distressingly apt line:

Two recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings—AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion and American Express v. Italian Colors—have deeply undercut these centuries-old public rights, by empowering businesses to avoid any threat of private lawsuits or class actions. The decisions culminate a thirty-year trend during which the judiciary, including initially some prominent liberal jurists, has moved to eliminate courts as a means for ordinary Americans to uphold their rights against companies. The result is a world where corporations can evade accountability and effectively skirt swaths of law, pushing their growing power over their consumers and employees past a tipping point.

2. Is the Court’s contempt for labor leading or following a more general social contempt for labor?

3. Remember, reproductive labor is the first form of labor, the basis of all other labor.

.

And one non-Court related note:

I will never be an orthodox Marxist—I lack the optimism required of the orthodox—but if you want to understand the political culture in the US today, you’d do worse than to start with the domination of capital over our entire political-economy.

This doesn’t mean that all is determined by capitalist relations, that there is no autonomous space for politics and culture, or that there is no resistance to capital.

But it does mean that you can understand a lot if you understand that if capital is up against any other interest—labor, community, environmental, educational, safety, public—capital almost always wins.

If capital has no interest, then the politics is up for grabs.

We are left fighting over scraps.