Doom Report (Week -6)

This week, I really enjoyed The Weekly Show, where Jon Stewart interviewed billionaire Mark Cuban.  Cuban is famous for supplanting Warren Buffet as “the good billionaire”: a billionaire who seems to want to do some good in the world instead of just screwing over everyone else.  When Stewart talks about how people only rail againt billionaires on the “other” side—basically, that whatever billionaires do is fine, but only if they’re “our” billionaires—the billionaires he’s talking about as being “ours” are Cuban, Buffet, and perhaps George Soros, who of course has long been the boogeyman billionaire of Fox “News,” where they constantly trot him out to cover for the much more sinister billionaires behind the curtain that are propping them up, like Murdoch and the Koch Brothers and Harlan Crow (most notable for being the “emotional support billionaire,” as the ladies of Strict Scrutiny put it, of at least one Supreme Court justice).  One gets the idea that Stewart is vaguely saying that all billionaires are probably bad, though he typically has a good enough time talking to Cuban that he doesn’t want to go quite that far explicitly.  And, if you’d like to hear a well-reasoned rant on why all billionaires are bad, Adam Conover has you covered, and, if you’d like to hear specifically why George Soros is the target of so many right-wing conspiracies, and which ones may actually have some foundation in reality, the Some More News team has got you covered there too.  But, in general, I think that people like Cuban—and maybe even only Cuban, since I’ve never heard Buffet or Soros talk as openly about their philosophies—are a fascinating mix of good billionaire and bad billionaire.  Many people (such as Ingrid Robeyns and, to a lesser extent, Bernie Sanders) have argued that you can’t be both a billionaire and a good person, and I think there’s some grain of truth to that.  Certainly there are times when I’ve listened to Cuban and thought, ah, there’s the coldness and moral apathy that earned him those billions.  But there are also times when he says things that are both articulate and progressive.  So I always have a fun time listening to his interviews.

I noted this one for a couple of places where he seemed to be agreeing with some of my prior posts.  For instance, when talking about AI, he said this:

Cuban: Then there’s using AI.  And so there are things like NEPA, which go into the environmental protection stuff to try to find out if there’s a little frog or whatever before something’s built.  In my opinion, in the conversations I had with some of the Harris folks, is that’s where AI really, really can apply.  Because there’s a process designed for the people in NEPA who go through and determine what should be approved and what data is required and what friction should be added or what friction should be removed.  Artificial intelligence is great for that. All the rules that the individuals on those councils and boards that make those determinations, they have rules that they follow. They have guidebooks that they follow.

Stewart: It’s onerous.

Cuban: Yeah, it’s onerous.  There’s tons of bureaucracy, but tons of data there.  You put that into artificial intelligence,
into a large language model, and you use that to train the large language model.  And then when a new project comes along, you set up agents which then feed the questions and the answers, and the answers to the responses to that new organization, whatever it is they may be building.

Which is exactly correct: this is using AI in how it’s meant to be used.  There’s a process, and it takes a long time for humans to complete that process, but a computer can do it faster.  Up until now, whenever that process involved people weighing different abstract factors and trying to figure out what’s the best approach, you just couldn’t use a computer to speed things up, because computers can’t do that.  But AIs—more specifically, LLMs—can.  (You can read more of my thoughts on the current crop of AIs in my post questioning is AI intelligent and several other posts: just click “technology” in the “Things about Things” box over there to the left.)

But Jon comes back with this:

Stewart: Does that abdicate our autonomy?  ...

Cuban: ...  The challenge is, who makes that decision?  When it’s obvious, it’s easy.  When it’s not so obvious, it’s far more difficult.  And so that’s where the AI comes in and large language models.  Because across the breadth, however many instances of evaluations that need to take place across the country, you don’t want individuals having to make those decisions.

Stewart: But I thought that’s the whole point.  I thought the whole point of people running for office is that they’ve got a vision and they earn our trust, as opposed to AI. And this, again, may be more of the Luddite’s view of not understanding ... AI. I’m nervous about abdicating that.  At least with people, there is a certain regime of accountability that we can bring through.  I can’t vote out a large language model.

And Cuban was, surprisingly, not able to mount a cogent response to this.  I, however, am.

• You can’t vote out the dozens—sometimes hundreds—of people in the EPA or whichever bureaucracy we’re talking about who are making the decisions about how to navigate all those regulations either.  You can vote out the guy at the top, maybe, but they’re just the person who either approved or rejected the work of all those faceless bureaucrats.  How is that different from the AI example?  Asking the AI to help make a decision doesn’t automatically mean that there’s not someone at the end of the day who will either approve or reject the AI’s plan.
• Jon says it would be better to just get rid of all the red tape.  Well, duh.  Of course that would be better.  Sadly, the “science fiction” plan of replacing the work of all those bureaucrats with AI is more feasible (and likely) than any plan to reduce the current bureaucracy of our governmental agencies.
• Jon also says that people can cut through the red tape too, like Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro did when fixing the collapse of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia.  Cuban points out that humans can do things quickly when the answer is easy, but not so much when the answer is harder.  This is vaguely correct, but it doesn’t explain things well enough.  He was closer when he talked about the “little frog.” There are always going to be cases where the “right” decision means weighing environmental factors vs economic ones (to take a simple example), and for the most part we have a tendency to devolove into camps.  There are people who are always going to take the side of the environment, regardless of the cost, and there are people who are always going to take the side of the business, regardless of the impact on the planet.  But an AI doesn’t have a predetermined agenda.  It can weigh factors, given all the background context, and make a dispassionate decision on where to draw the balance.
• And, despite the fact that people are predisposed (by scifi thrillers, mostly) to believe that AIs are black boxes and we can never understand how they arrive at their decisions, the truth is that, at least for the LLMs that are currently what we mean when we say “AI,” we actually do know exactly how they arrive at those decisions.  LLMs use something called “chain of thought reasoning” (usually abbreviated in LLM literature as CoT), which basically means that LLMs “think out loud” so that humans can review all their logic and make sure it’s sound.
• Which also knocks down Jon’s other objection (which is expanded upon in the show’s closing segments, where his producers talk about the very real cases of people losing their jobs to AI): that this process will eliminate people’s jobs.  Sure, in business this is a very real problem: many businesses look at AI as a way to save money, and eliminating jobs is one way to do that.  But that ain’t an AI problem.  Why do so many companies lay off people right around Christmas?  Because it makes their bottom line look better at end-of-year.  Companies killing jobs to improve their bottom lines ain’t an AI problem: it’s a shitty company problem.  But government is different.  Most government workers have protection from being downsized in this fashion.  Plus, the whole reason all this red tape takes forever is that the government is constantly understaffed.  Having AI make decisions which are then reviewed by experts doesn’t in any way reduce how many people you need to get the thing accomplished: it only reduces the amount of time those people have to devote to the job.

Anyway, another place Cuban appeared to agree with me is on the topic of insurance, which I broached in a long tangent last week.

Cuban: But it gets worse.  It gets worse.  And so now these providers, the hospitals and doctors, they negotiate with the big insurance companies.  And it’s fascinating.  If you walk into a hospital to pay for an MRI, as an example, and you don’t mention your insurance, you just say, I want a cash price, they’ll probably say it’s $350 to $450, depending on where you live.  That same hospital will negotiate with what they call the BUCAs, the big insurance companies.  For that same thing, they’ll negotiate a price of $2,000.

Stewart: What?

Cuban: Yeah.  So you would think that big insurance company negotiating with the hospital and that insurance company
covers millions of lives.  They insure or deal with—

Stewart: Why wouldn’t they negotiate that if it’s a bulk thing to $100?  Why would it be higher?

Cuban: Because the hospital needs the insurance company as a sales funnel to bring patients in so they can pay their bills. And the insurance company wants that price to be higher, particularly for things like the ACA, because the ACA requires for all the plans they cover that they spend up to 85%.

Again, I’m not sure Cuban is explaining it particularly well, but remember how I put it last week: “companies couldn’t charge that much for medical care if the insurance companies weren’t picking everyone’s pockets ...  insurance is enabling the whole cycle.”

Anyway, that’s my too-long review of the Mark Cuban interview.  I’ll just ding Stewart one last time—and I really do love Jon Stewart, don’t get me wrong, but he’s not always right, and I’m not afraid to call him out on it—on some lack of self awareness.  In the wrap-up with his producers, he reiterates his skepticism on using AI that I talked about above: he refers to it as “dystopian” and then extrapolates to “hey, just so we’re clear here, you’re saying that the computer controls the entire hospital and decides what oxygen to turn on and turn off through analytics?” Then, less than a minute later, he answers a listener question about what he thinks his mistakes were for the year.

Well, you guys know this.  I get annoyed at myself for being a little high-horsey.  And you get a little of the sanctimony in there.  So I try to relax sometimes on the certainty of my opinions.

Oh, you get a little sanctimonious, do you?  You mean, like you did a few seconds ago?  Work harder on the relaxation part, my man.

But, all that aside, still a great host, very incisive, very trenchant.  Looking forward to more shows next year.

Doom Report (Week -7: Stop Calling It Inflation!)

This week, many of my normal political shows collided, either in radical agreement, or complete contradiction.  While I’m not a political expert by any means, I do seem to have the advantage of apparently being the only person in the world watching all these sources at once.  At the very least, they’re definitely not watching each other.  Here, then, is my synthesis of the week’s news.

These are the shows I’ll be referencing throughout this week’s report; feel free to watch them yourselves and evaluate whether you think I’m fairly representing their views:

• On this week’s episode of The Weekly Show, Jon Stewart interviews Bernie Sanders on “Rebuilding Trust & Efficacy in the Government”.  Stewart is of course the former host of The Daily Show, and is now back there one night a week; I trust I don’t need to explain who Sanders is.
• On this week’s episode of Some More News, Cody Johnston and Katy Stoll do a fairly in-depth post-mortem on the election somewhat incisively titled “Is Everyone Stupid?” Cody and Katy were writers for Cracked.com, where they worked on a faux news report à la SNL’s “Weekend Update” called “Some News”; Some More News is a continuation of that.  They’re super-progressive and not particularly fond of the Democrats.
• On this week’s episode of The Coffee Klatch, Robert Reich, Heather Lofthouse, and Michael Lahanas-Calderón do their weekly news roundup, this week entitled “Rage Against the Machine”.  Reich was Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton (meaning he’s as old as Biden and Trump), and has been a professor and political pundit in the years since, mainly expounding on our growing income inequality (much like Sanders).  He cofounded Inequality Media; Lofthouse is the president of Inequality Media’s Civic Action org.  Calderon is their director of digital strategy, and the official Gen Z represntative on the panel.  These guys are fairly pro-Democrat and moderately progressive.
• This week, Brian Tyler Cohen interviewed Mehdi Hasan on his YouTube channel.  BTC is a staunch Democrat, and the only “serious” news source that I picked up during the writer’s strike that I still watch.  He’s often too pro-Dem for my tastes, but he also covers things I can’t get elsewhere.  Mehdi is a British-born journalist perhaps most famous having his MSNBC show cancelled during the early days of the genocide in Gaza; the network said that fact that he was Muslim was “coincidental.” Yeah, right.  This year he started a new website and YouTube channel called Zeteo (a Greek word meaning “to seek out the truth”); contributors will reportedly include Greta Thunberg and Bassem Youssef.  He’s fairly liberal and not afraid to drop an F-bomb, so I might watch some of the Zeteo videos.¹

So, first and foremost, we need to stop calling the horrible price increases we’re all dealing with “inflation.” I really think this is part of the messaging problem that the Kamala campaign was suffering from.  As I talked about in our last Doom Report, there does seem to be a strong concensus developing that a big part of Kamala’s defeat—if not the entirety of it—was because she toed the Biden party line that the economy is going great, even though people can easily see (and feel) that it really isn’t.  Mehdi Hasan talked about how the administration has done all these great economic things, but they aren’t getting “credit” for it.  BTC ate this up, since it reinforces the line he’s been harping on since the election: the right-wing media machine is very effective, and the left-wing media machine basically doesn’t exist.  And this, of course, is why voters were too stupid to realize that the economy is actually great.

I malign BTC, of course: he didn’t actually call the voters stupid.  Even Cody wouldn’t go that far, and he was hosting a video titled “Is Everyone Stupid?” But, in the first section, Cody opined that people aren’t stupid ... they just don’t know as much about politics as the rest of us.  You know, us smart people.  I’m being a bit unfair to Cody as well, but I think both of these takes are missing the point.  While it’s been reported that Google searches for “what are tarriffs” spiked after the election, understandably leading many to (figuratively) facepalm and wonder why folks couldn’t have Googled that before they voted, it’s still overly dismissive to ascribe this disconnect to ignorance.

So what, in my opinion, is the problem?  The problem is that the Democrats kept telling people that inflation was going down, and it was.  But prices aren’t coming down.  And that has nothing to do with inflation.  Inflation, as an economic term, is defined as follows: “a persistent, substantial rise in the general level of prices related to an increase in the volume of money and resulting in the loss of value of currency.” But when prices are high because corporations are just gouging us—which they can do because Reagan (primarily following the philosophy his solicitor general Robert Bork) gutted antitrust enforcement—that ain’t inflation.  Bork tried to convince us that consumers benefit from corporate mergers in his 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox, but 40+ years of actual experience (and data) show us that that’s bullshit.  If a corporation can raise prices, they will, and, during the pandemic, they could, so they did.  Why would they bother to bring them back down?  Well, in a marketplace with vigorous competition, they’d bring them back down because, if they didn’t, the competitors would eat their lunch.  But when you’re a company that controls 85% of the market (which is true of multiple industries in our country at this point), you’ve got no real competition, so fuck it: keep on gougin’.

So, when the Democrats were saying “inflation is down” and “the economy is much better,” they were right.  And also completely missing the point.  What they should have said is, “yes, you’re paying too much for everything these days, but it’s nothing to do with inflation: you’re getting screwed by corporations.”

And, here’s the fucked up part: as SMN pointed out, The Atlantic broke the story that Kamala wanted to go after big business, but apparently her brother-in-law Tony West—the chief legal officer of Über—wrote her a letter urging her not to do that.  So she didn’t.  So she lost.

Okay, I’m oversimplifying again.  But try to imagine how much different things would be if Kamala had answered the question “what will you do differently than Biden?” by saying “I’m going to go after these corporate oligarchs who are raping and pillaging our country and picking your pocket.” It makes for an interesting thought experiment at the very least.

Sadly, the Dems are not only not going to start doing that, they’re probably not going to start doing much of anything differently.  The people who advised Harris, as well as other Democratic strategists, are already looking for other people to blame.  In reponse to Maureen Dowd’s contention that “politically correct” language like “Latinx” and “BIPOC” are responsible for the Democrats’ loss, Katy Stoll responds:

Does she present any actual data that the term “BIPOC” alienated half of the country or more?  Let’s see ... no, no, that’s dumb.  Who needs data?  Data’s for wokes.  Also, as we already showed, there isn’t any data.  It’s just vibes.  But, beyond vibes, these people are transparently trying to cover their own asses.  Kamala Harris ran the campaign they wanted.  Joe Biden reads Matt Yglesias and watches Joe Scarborough.  They got the centrist, non-woke campaign they’re complaining that they didn’t, and now they’re scrambling to blame someone else, because that campaign lost.

Mehdi Hasan goes further:

We’ve seen ... all the team of advisors around Harris ... basically saying, we got nothing wrong.  We did nothing wrong, we’re not contrite, we have no apologies, we’d do it all the same.

Sure, it’s true that incumbents lost all around the world.  But, as Mehdi points out: okay, but why did they all lose?

They [Harris’ campaign strategists] keep going, “well, you have to understand: we inherited a really bad situation.  The internal polling was really bad.  Joe Biden was more unpopular than even you knew.” Then why the F did you not break with Biden ... ?  It actually makes it worse for them, not breaking with Biden, by them now admitting that they knew he was more unpopular than the public knew.  Because, then, the arguments were “oh, well, we can’t break with a sitting president”—you can if your internal polling is telling you that he is toxic and pulling you down.²

Blaming phrases like “Latinx” is just blame-shifting.  Sure, it’s true that, as a strategist pointed out in a clip that Katy showed, Latine people don’t themselves use “Latinx,” because it’s impossible to pronounce and it’s just weird.³  But to then extrpolate that that’s why Latine’s didn’t vote for Harris is just insane.  I’m not sure I want to go so far as Katy in saying that a lot of these liberal elites are just blaming minorities the same way that Republicans are, but it’s also fair to note that Maureen Dowd is absolutely a Boomer (and white): she’s just 6 years younger than Trump.

Look, at the end of the day, Jon Stewart nails the whole shebang right in the opening sentences of his interview:

But I got the sense that, what kind of happened to the Democrats was that they were in a position to defend a status quo that most voters—certainly, many—felt was no longer delivering for them.  ...  that many Democrats felt like: oh, no, we are improving your lives.  You just don’t realize it.

Sanders responds that, among other things, Citizens United has turned Congresspeople into employees of megacorps.  Which means that any party that wants to appeal to working class voters has two options: pretend that the system is working just fine, even when people can clearly see that it’s not, or .... you know, just lie.  Also known as, the Democratic strategy and the Republican strategy.  Sigh.

Reich bemoans that we now take democracy for granted (contrasting us with South Korea, who this week quashed a coup by barricading the doors of the National Assembly and just voting; Riech’s point was that democracy in South Korea is new enough that their people are still willing to fight for it).  But this is naïve: Stewart points out that defending democracy isn’t appealing to people for whom democracy is failing them.  Or, as BTC puts it:

By saying, “we have to protect our institutions; we have to protect our democracy,” for so many people out there for whom democracy (and our institutions) isn’t working, that is not the message they want to hear.  That is the message that’s going to push them away.

So what should the message be?  Mehdi points out that, with the exception of Joe Biden in 2020, when the Dems put up an “establishment” candidate (e.g. Kerry, Hillary, Kamala, Al Gore), they lose.  When they put up a “Washington outsider” (e.g. Clinton, Obama), they win.  And that’s probably not a coincidence.  As Cody pointed out, Obama won by running on hope and change.  Maybe we didn’t get enough of that once he actually got in office, but that’s what he ran on, and he won.  Twice.  When BTC asks why so many Dems won House seats even though the country shifted to the right in the Presidential election, and mentions the success of Golden in Maine and Perez in Washington, and wonders if they won because they tacked right, Mehdi responds:

You mention Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez: yeah, I don’t share their politics; they’re definitely to the right of me.  But, did they run right-wing campaigns, or did they run populist, authentic campaigns?  Did they say “right to repair” (in her case); ... “anti-monopoly” (in his case)?  All right, this is what we need to be talking about right now.  It’s not about whether you sign a tick-box of “I’m left,” “I’m right,” “I do these policies”; it’s about: Who are you fighting for? Do you have a fighting spirit? Do people know what you stand for? Are you authentic, or are you just a kind of, poll-tested, focus-group-tested, bland person who no one thinks is going to fight for them in Washington, D.C.?

Will the Dems do this?  Unlikely.  They’re still trapped by the corporate profit cycle.  Stewart and Sanders talked about the food corps spending all this money to design food which is making us diabetic, and then the drug corps spending all this money to develop drugs to cure our diabetes.  And they do this because it makes them money.  (I would have added that the insurance companies enable this.  You think you need insurance because otherwise you couldn’t afford medical care, but of course companies couldn’t charge that much for medical care if the insurance companies weren’t picking everyone’s pockets and funneling the cash to big pharma and big healthcare companies such as United Health Care.  If no one could afford to pay those exorbitant costs, we’d all just die and the companies would go out of business.  Instead, insurance is enabling the whole cycle.  But I digress.)  Stewart asks Sanders what it would take for Congress to wake up and understand how badly things are going for ordinary people, but Sanders points out that they do understand: it’s just that all the corporate money prevents them from voting their conscience.  Stewart says that that’s depressing: it means they know they’re screwing us and it’s all cynical.  Sanders counterpoints that when megacorps have millions of dollars to devote to destroying you in your next election, and you realize that the guy who replaces you could be much worse, it’s not you that sucks, but the system.

Basically, as Cody and Katy point out, the Repubs have the Dems playing defense, and you can’t win playing defense.  These episodes—and my synthesis of them—contains several ideas on how they might turn that around into playing offense, but they don’t seem inclined to want to do that.  Hell, take a simple example: Cody points out that campaign strategists told Walz to “lay off” calling the Repubs “weird,” even though it was actually working.  Mehdi goes further and says Walz was “buried”; when Walz badmouthed the electoral college; the Harris campaign disavowed his remarks, even though the American public really hates the electoral college.  Yeah, Tim: stop saying all that stuff that actually appeals to people!  Walz was really hard-done by these “strategists.”

Gaza is another place where the Dems could have made some inroads, but dropped the ball.  Mehdi said that he had at first decided that Trump’s margin was so large that the loss of Muslim-Americans over the Dems’ Gaza policy must not have made any difference.  But he later reconsidered: sure, 65% of Muslims voted for Harris, but it’s also true that Harris lost Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by a combined 230,000 votes (roughly).  If slightly more than 115,000 Muslim-Americans in those three states had switched from voting for Trump to voting for Kamala, she might well have won the electoral college while losing the popular vote (and what delicious irony that would have been).  Impossible to say whether he’s right on that score, but he also points out that, even above and beyond the numbers, vowing to do better than Biden on the Gaza situation would have at least been a difference from Biden, the lack of which was, again, her biggest weakness.

I’m also pretty sick of hearing this, which Reich repeated this week:

Well, in fairness, she only had 3 months.

THE ENTIRE UK GENERAL ELECTION TOOK 43 DAYS.  Kamala had 107.  Shut the fuck up about not having enough time.

Speaking of United Health Care (as I was a few paragraphs ago), their CEO was assassinated this week.  There was a lot of hand wringing about how awful it is that some people on the Internet are ... shall we say ... lacking in sympathy over this incident.  Lofthouse and Reich had this exchange:

Heather: But, so what are the big take-homes from this?  Medicare for all?
Reich: Well, I would say ... you can’t use somebody’s death ... to do anything with.

On which I have to call bullshit.  This is the crap that Republicans say when there’s a school shooting.  When a tragedy happens is exactly the time to talk about the factors that led up to it, and how we can change things to make sure it doesn’t happen again.  And it is possible to say that the killing of this man is a horrible tragey on a personal level, and to feel overwhelming grief for his family, and to note that he made $10 million dollars a year and that UHC has made a policy of denying claims which has led to the deaths of thousands of Americans ... probably more.  If you need more info on how terrible a company UHC is, More Perfect Union has a good video on the topic.  Does that mean he deserved to die?  No, of course not.  It also doesn’t mean we should pretend that none of that is true.⁴

I have two big takeaways.  The first is that the Democratic party is not the answer.  I am strongly considering joining the Working Families Party.  It’s in some ways a faction inside the Democratic party (much like the Tea Party Republicans), but also in many ways a completely separate party, with a strategy for creating a third party alternative that doesn’t take votes away from one party or another.  Which sounds like a fantasy, but they’ve been working at it since 1998, and they’ve achieved some amazing things.  On the city council of Philadelphia, there are 2 WFP members to only 1 Republican; on the Hartford CT city council, there are 3 WFP members and no Repubs at all.  In a few states, such as New York, you can vote for the Democratic candidate on a separate line; this helps the candidates understand where their support is coming from.  Beyond some good articles on the Internet, there are 3 videos that I think help people understand who they are:

• quick intro by Maurice Mitchell, the National Director (brief)
• Building Blocks of WFP Power, a bit more info (informative)
• Maurice Mitchell on WFP Post-Election Mass Call, the WFP election response (inspiring)

Secondly, when I wrote my election reflections post, I went on for some time about how I hoped I was wrong about all my dire predictions.  I was somewhat pleased to hear Cody Johnston echo my words nearly exactly:

We have to assume Trump is going to do all the stuff he said he wants to do.  Granted, there are things that might prevent him from doing those things, and, if he is prevented from doing them, people are gonna call us alarmists for saying he’ll do bad stuff, but frankly, that would be great.  I would love—love—to be wrong.  I would love to prepare for the worst and for that to be a waste of time.  But that’s not gonna stop me from preparing.

Can’t sum it up better myself.

__________

1 But probably only the non-serious ones.  They have a series where they talk to comedians about news that sounds pretty interesting.

2 Yes, he actually said the letter “F” instead of “fuck.” It was early in the interview.  He loosened up a bit by the end.

3 If you need more details about this difference, there are good articles about that on the Internet.  Short answer: “Latinx” is a white people thing.

4 Speaking of More Perfect Union and healthcare, they just did a fantastic video on Medicare “Advantage”, which I, sadly, am rapidly approaching the age where I really need to know that.  Spoiler alert: it’s not particularly advantageous.

Doom Report (Week -9)

This week, the saga of Trump’s cabinet is both better and worse.  Matt Gaetz at least is gone, and he was certainly the worst of the bunch.  But, then, Gaetz is the very epitome of shifting the Overton Window.  If you don’t know that is (and aren’t willing to click that perfectly good link I just dropped on you, though you really shoud), I’ll give you a quick precis:  The Overton Window is the set of what’s acceptable to voters.  But it’s constantly shifting over time, usually in small increments.  For instance, gay marriage wasn’t even remotely acceptable in the 50s—you couldn’t even bring it up in conversation.  Now it’s legal (at least temporarily).  Same for smoking pot, although that was still considered verboten as late as the 80s, and isn’t legal everywhere even today.  Those are things that took decades for the window to shift.  But, if you’re clever (and have some sort of authority behind you, like being an intellectual thinktank, or a president-elect), you can shift the Overton Window much more quickly.  All you need to do is, put forward an idea that is so ridiculous, so outlandish, so ... well, to use the official Overton term, unthinkable ... that suddenly the ideas that seemed radical before are now not so crazy.

So Matt Gaetz was a bridge too far.  To the point where everyone was stunned by it—even the Republicans.  Susan Collins, who you may remember from her comment that Trump had “learned” his lesson after the first impeachment (her exact quote was that he would be “much more cautious in the future”), said she was “shocked” by the Gaetz nomination.  (Apparently there’s much money to be made on betting whether Collins will see things coming, like, say, the changing of the seasons.)  Lisa Murkowski and John Thune (the latter set to be the new Sentate Majority Leader now that Mitch McConnell is finally being put out to pasture) also expressed doubts.  And now Gaetz is stepping down.  See, the system works, right?

But, the thing is, that was all a distraction from the other insane picks.  Which keep on coming: Linda McMahon (yes, the wrestling executive) to head the Department of Education, and Dr. Oz, the TV quack huckster, to run Medicare and Medicaid.  And let’s not forget the previous insane picks: Pete Hegseth, the Fox “News” host, is in no way qualified to run the two trillion dollar Defense Department, and is also apprently a sexual predator.  Then again, as many have pointed out, that’s apparently a unifying theme for his cabinet: Hegseth, RFK Jr, Musk ... even McMahon has been sued for enabling sexual abuse.  But I suppose that makes sense for the adjudicated rapist who’s hiring them.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are falling over themselves to blame each other for why Kamala lost.  Many, for instance, are saying that her campaign was “too woke.” Which is completely moronic, because the Kamala campaign flew so far to the center that they were actively pissing off the proper liberals: from trans folk to people opposed to the Palestinian genocide.  Palling around with the Cheneys, for fuck’s sake, is about as far from “woke” as you can get.  But still people want to believe it’s someone else’s fault.  Awfully convenient for the white supremacists that the Dems now apparently want to blame the same “others” that the Republicans do.

As to what is the real reason why Kamala lost, I’ve heard a lot of theories in the past weeks.  But probably the best one came from the author of Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class, in a recent Jon Stewart interview:

So yeah, people are hurting.  And if you’re looking at them in the face and saying, “actually, you’re not” ... whether that’s a move to kind of defend your own administration that, of course, the Democratic candidate was part of—and that’s very difficult to thread that needle, the task she was handed to propose how we’ll change, but also still be riding with the last administration.  ...  But most people are hurting. And here’s the thing, because I know that a lot of liberals and Democrats and progressives alike might be saying: ... the Democrats have the better policies. They address all of those needs better, even if imperfectly.  In the end, ain’t the Republicans worse?  And while I happen to agree with that, here’s the trick: the Republicans, meanwhile, are the ones validating the pain.  And politics is an emotional business before it’s a rational one.  And that’s why they win.

— Sarah Smarsh, The Weekly Show, 11/14/24

Partially I like this because it lines up with my own theories that I talked about nearly a year ago, and partially because it’s the more insightful version of what James Carville pegged as the reason.  Carville is a bit of an asshole, but he ain’t stupid, and his assessment was that it all came down to when Kamala was asked (in her interview on The View) what she would do differently from Biden, “and she froze.” Or at least that’s how Carville put it; I would instead say that she waffled and ducked the question, but the end result is the same.  And while trying to boil down an entire failed campaign to one moment is overly simplistic as well as reductive, it is emblematic of the point that she was trying to toe the party line that everything was going great with the economy while ignoring the real concerns of real people.  And, even more incisive to me personally, it’s exactly what my friend said to me in the conversation I reported on a couple of weeks ago.  It’s a trenchant observation.

Of course, let’s not discount the sexism!  Here’s one of Stewart’s producers on another episode:

It can also be true that there’s some sexism and racism ...  Every election, the person who has spent the most money has won, except in two cases: the women.  Just saying.

— Lauren Walker, The Weekly Show, 11/21/24

Again, haven’t fact-checked this, but it certainly wouldn’t surprise me.  I’m not entirely sure what it says about says about us that we’re finally willing to elect a member of a religious minority that’s around 25% of the population, and a member of a racial minority that’s around 15% of the population, but not a member of the gender that’s not a minority at all.  But not anything good, I don’t think.

Will things get worse before they get better?  No one can say for sure, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that’s where the smart money is.  I guess we’ll have to stay tuned to find out.

Doom Report (Week -10)

This week, I’m watching the news and wondering where all those people my friend was talking about last week are ... you know, the ones that are supposed to stop the idiot we just elected from doing bad things if he goes too far.  And yet, our future president has suggested we put a climate denier in charge of the EPA, a Russian asset as head of national intelligence, a pedophile as the Attorney General, a person who believes in neither vaccination nor pasteurization to run the CDC and the FDA, and a Fox “News” host who thinks that women shouldn’t serve in combat to head up the Department of Defense.  Theoretically, all those people have to be approved by the Senate, but he’s already asked the new Sentate majority leader to keep the Senate in “recess” until he appoints whoever he wants to wherever he wants, and it’s not clear whether that request will be rejected or not.  And, even if it is, it’s not clear whether the new Republican-led Senate will just do whatever he wants anyway.  And that’s not even considering that he wants to put a guy with billions in government contracts in charge of the budget by inventing a new government department (which, technically, the president can’t do, but, again: if Congress is just going to give him whatever he wants, that’s not much of an obstacle).

I continue to hope I’m wrong.  I mean, the guy’s not even president yet, so all of this dreck may not come to pass.  And, as I mentioned last week, I’m far more interested in you being able to tell me “I told you so” than the other way around.  But, the fact that the guy’s not even president yet and is still able to cause this much chaos does not bode well for our chances, I fear.

Election Reflections

I was talking to a friend today, and I think he might have voted for Trump.

He wouldn’t come out and say it, and I wouldn’t ask—was too scared to, I suppose—but it seemed pretty clear from all the Trump-defending along with all the dismissing all my worries about the future.  My friend is not (so far as I know) racist or sexist, and I know him pretty well, so I feel pretty certain about that one.  I’m a bit less sure that he’s not homophobic or xenophobic, but I’m pretty confident that I would have picked up on that somewhere in the past 40+ years.  He’s absolutely not uneducated: he in fact holds an advanced degree and works in a pretty prestigious technical field.

So what gives?  Well, we needed a change, and that was the only choice.  Kamala’s refusal to say what she would do differently from Biden was foolish, in my estimation, and it apparently cost her more than I realized.  The last few years have been pretty awful, financially, and she really didn’t do a very good job articulating what she would do differently.  Of course, Trump didn’t do a very good job articulating anything, but he did have the undeniable advantage of being “the other guy.” And, to be fair, pretty much everyone in charge got kicked out this year: Tommy Vietor (of the Pod Save America guys) said that this is the first year where the leadership of every developed nation in the world was rejected at the same time, regardless of whether they were left, right, or center.  I didn’t fact check him, but certainly the ones I know about (ours, the UK’s, France’s, India’s) conform with that assessment.  This is fairly typical really: when you’re getting hit in the pocketbook, throw the bums out.  I certainly sympathize with that perspective.

But, here’s my issue: I sort of hoped that we, as a country, wouldn’t say “well, we need a change, so let’s elect the rapist.” Isn’t that going too far?  As I tried to articulate to my friend, if the choice were between whoever’s currently in charge and, say, Charlie Manson, or Jeffrey Dahmer, we wouldn’t elect the serial killer ... right?  Trump is definitely not Charles Manson, obviously, but my point is this: there is a line.  I have to continue to believe that.  I was just hoping that the racist, Hitler-loving, convicted felon rapist wouldn’t be on the near side of that line.

In our conversation, there were many defenses of Trump floated about.  Here they are, as best as I can articulate them, and here are my counterpoints:

• All this calling him fascist is over the top rhetoric. Except ... is it really?  The guy quoted Hitler—multiple times, even—and said that he wished his generals were more like Hitler’s.  Sounds kinda fascist to me.  Pointing out that he sure does know a lot about Hitler for someone who’s supposedly not a fascist doesn’t seem over the top to me.  (My friend seemed a bit exasperated about the Hitler quote thing.  “What did he actually say that quoted Hitler?” he asked, clearly expecting that it was a rhetorical question.  Too easy: immigrants are poisoning the blood of our country, and we have to fight the enemy within.  The subject was quickly changed.)

• He was President before, and he didn’t do any of that really terrible stuff you’re worried about. True.  Because, last time, a combination of incompetence and being restrained by sane people meant that he had difficulty accomplishing any of the really crazy stuff.  But are we forgetting that he actually tried to do those things?  If the arsonist can’t burn your house down because he can’t figure out to work the flamethrower, that’s good, but you still don’t let him keep the thing, right?

• He doesn’t really mean all that crazy shit he says. For instance, last time he said he would build a wall and make Mexico pay for it.  Obviously we all knew that he was never going to do that.  Okay, probably a fair assessment, but why do want to pick someone who goes around saying they’ll do things that they really won’t do?  If the only way you can justify choosing a person is by ignoring everything they say, you might be working too hard at it.

• He’s not actually running on the Project 2025 plan, so that part doesn’t matter. Wait, so we’re not supposed to believe him when he says he wants to eliminate the EPA, or to erase transgender people, but we are supposed to believe him when he says that the plan, written by people who used to work for him and commissioned by an organzation that he’s openly commended in the past, has nothing to do with him?  Sounds a bit inconsistent.  (A few hours after posting this, I watched Adam Conover’s interview with Jamelle Bouie, who put it like this: ”... he’s a blank slate to people.  The fact that he is—like, he doesn’t make any sense a lot of the times, he’s constantly bullshitting, he’s constantly lying, he’s just saying things off the cuff—I think that what that says to people is that you can’t take anything he says seriously.  And that allows people to then pick and choose what they want to believe about him.” This was such an accurate description of my conversation that it gave me the shivers.)

• Okay, but if actually tried to do any of those crazy things you just mentioned, people would stop him.  There are checks and balances. What fucking people? Elon Musk? RFK Jr? Herschel Walker? Steve Bannon? LAURA FUCKING LOOMER?  Last time, there were sane people around him (at least a few).  This time, every single one of those absolute lunatics that I just listed are specifically named by Trump’s transition team.  And, checks and balances? really?  Will it be the Republican Senate that will keep him in line? or the Republican House?  Or perhaps it will be the overtly Republican Supreme Court, who has already told him that he can do whatever he likes and never be held criminally liable.  Sure, that’s a recipe for success.

• We have too many government agencies as it is.  Getting rid of some of them would actually be a good thing. That’s one of those things that sounds good in the abstract, but sort of falls apart when you start looking into it.  If we get rid of the EPA, no one stops greedy corporations from just dumping their pollution everywhere.  If we eliminate the Department of Education, no one stops all the public school funding from being diverted to private charters that only serve the wealthy.  If we cut the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, many elderly or low-income people could literally freeze to death in the winters.  If we nuke the Strategic Climate Fund (and the rest of the Global Climate Change Initiative), then the crisis caused by climate change gets significantly worse, which may end up killing a lot more.  All those are things Trump’s team has actually proposed eliminating, by the way.

• If he screws up too badly, then he’ll lose all his support and we’ll vote him out (or, techincally speaking, vote out the Republicans) in 4 years. Well, I sincerely hope that we’ll at least partially vote out the Republicans in two years.  But how much damage can be done in that amount of time?  “It’s not like we’re going to have two years of people just going ‘woohoo!’ and dumping pollution everywhere for two years.” Um ... are you sure?  I honestly can’t see any reason why we wouldn’t.  Not to mention the two years of rounding up “illegal” immigrants, the two years of cruel laws surrounding abortions and transgender rights, the two years of brutal prices caused by tariffs and reversing the decision to disallow junk fees and allowing unchecked corporate mergers.  Yeah, maybe it won’t be as bad as all that ... but why are we risking it?

Here’s a simple example.  Our biggest household expense, outside the mortgage payment, is our grocery bill.  It’s more than double what it was four years ago, and I’m actually feeding two fewer mouths at this point.  But it still keeps going up.  And I’m not even counting what we spend on vitamins or toothpaste or paper towels or laundry soap.  Just food.  And I’m not including eating out either—that’s a whole different budget.  Just the food that we get from the grocery store, and it’s easily more than double what we pay in electricty and natural gas combined.  And I think many people have the same experience, and it’s almost certainly a big part of the reason that Trump won.  But here’s the thing: Trump is not going to make the price of groceries go down.  The biggest contributing factor to that is coporate price gouging.  Biden’s FTC chair, Lina Khan, has been fighting to keep Kroger from merging with Albertson’s for two years now, but she’s out the minute that Trump takes office.  In a year, Trader Joe’s will likely be the only grocery store not owned by the same megacorp, outside more expensive “health food” stores.  And do we really think the guy who promised the oil and gas industry record profits if they helped elect him is going to tell any big corporations that they can’t keep making shit-tons of money off our misery?  Yeah, I’m not holding my breath for that one.

So I’m fully expecting my bills to go up, not down, just on that single issue.  And the rest of his economic policies are just as bad:  Tariffs will make prices go up.  Deporting immigrants will reduce the workforce and force companies to pay more for labor, which will make prices go up.  And all those relaxed regulations and hanging unions out to dry will certainly make the billionaires much richer, but if you think the corporations are going to pass their savings onto you, the consumer, you haven’t learned anything from the last 50 years of financial evidence.  If you increase corporate profits, they spend it on stock buybacks and CEO bonuses and you get nothing in return.

If you voted for Trump, perhaps you’re feeling pretty good right now.  I encourage to hold on to that feeling for as long as possible.  I suspect that, in a year or two, you won’t be feeling all that good about it.  And, look: I hope I’m wrong about that.  I would be very pleased for you to be able to tell me “I told you so.” But past history doesn’t lead me to believe there’s much chance of that.  And, even above and beyond the financial impact, what about the human cost?  If, as I suspect, Trump’s plan to deport about twce as many people as there are illegal immigrants results in more horrific images of children in cages, will that be okay?  I mean, they’ll likely be brown children, so maybe it won’t matter to you.  But I hope you don’t actually think that way.  If I’m right that Trump tries to implement a significant chunk of Project 2025 and that results in minorities and, especially, LGBTQ people, being put at risk of prejudice, violence, and loss of healthcare, will that be okay?  I mean, maybe your church told you all those people are going to hell anyway (despite the fact that Jesus not only told you to love your neighbor, but to even love your enemies), so maybe that won’t matter to you either.  But I hope you don’t really believe that in your inner heart.  If Trump attempts to use the Comstock Act to make abortion care so difficult that it may as well be a federal ban, will that be okay?  If Clarence Thomas makes good on his threat to overturn the right to same sex marriage, will that be okay?  Maybe you think that none of that affects you.  But I’ve got children who could be impacted by nearly all of those things, so I don’t have that luxury.

Again, I want to be wrong about this.  But I can’t help but wonder why you thought voting for a racist was okay if you’re not racist.  Why you thought voting for a big fan of Hitler was okay if you don’t believe in fascism.  Why you thought voting for the man who’s bragged about single-handedly getting rid of Roe v Wade was okay if you believe in equal rights for women.  I understand the pocketbook argument, I really do.  And maybe your finances will be better off in a year or so, though I’ve outlined the reasons why I don’t actually believe they will be.  But, either way, you still voted for the racist, Hitler-loving, convicted felon rapist, and that makes me wonder if it’ll be worth it in the end.

Wake up and smell the catfood in your bank account

Hey, look: two microposts for the price of one!

What Kamala Should Have Said

I’m sure by now everyone’s seen at least clips of Kamala’s Fox “News” interview with Bret Baier.  Several excerpts have been replayed ad nauseum, but the one that interested me was this one:

Bret: If that’s the case, why is half the country supporting him?  Why is he beating you in a lot of swing states?  Why—if he’s as bad as you say—that half of this country is now supporting this person who could be the 47th president of the United States?  Why is that happening?
Kamala: This is an election for President of the United States.  It’s not supposed to be easy.
Bret: I know, but ...
Kamala: It’s not supposed to be ... it is not supposed to be a cakewalk for anyone.
Bret: So, are they misguided, the 50%? Are they stupid?  What is it?
Kamala: Oh, God, I would never say that about the American people.  And, in fact, if you listen to Donald Trump, if you watch any of his rallies, he’s the one who tends to demean, and belittle, and diminish the American people.  He is the one who talks about an enemy within: an enemy within—talking about the American people, suggesting he would turn the American military on the American people.

Now, Kamala is currently getting credit for not “falling for” that “trap” (although it was so clumsy and obvious that I can’t really believe that anyone would have fallen for it), and I understand that she had her talking points that she needed to get out, and this was a score for her in that department.  But here’s what I wish she would have said instead:

Imagine there’s a user car salesman.  And he sells a lot of cars.  But the reason he keeps selling those cars is because he keeps telling lies: he makes claims about the cars that just plain aren’t true.  And people keep believing him, because they assume that he wouldn’t be allowed to outright lie like that.  Surely, they think, surely if he were completely making shit up, someone would come along and stop him, because that would be bad.  Probabaly illegal, even.  So he keeps conning people into buying the cars.  Now, in this situation, we wouldn’t blame the victims of this con job ... we wouldn’t say that the people buying these cars are stupid.  We have to blame the conman, right?  He’s the one doing the lying and cheating.

(And we could also blame the TV station who keeps showing ads saying how great this criminal is even though they know he’s lying.  But that might be too subtle for a Fox audience.)

So that’s what I wish she’d said.  And, I know, she needed to get her point in about the Nazi quotes Trump keeps spewing (quick, who said this, Hitler or Trump? “Those nations who are still opposed to us will some day recognize the greater enemy within. Then they will join us in a combined front.”^*), and also there’s no way she could have gotten through an answer that long without Baier interrupting her.  Multiple times, even.  But, still ... that was the right answer, I think.

Beetlejuice Redux

This weekend we rewatched Beetlejuice, in preparation for watching Beetlejuice Beetlejuice next week.  Here are the the things I had to explain to my children:

• This movie is so old that the “little girl” in this movie is the mom in Stranger Things.  (And you should have heard the gasps of disbelief.)

• Who Ozzie and Harriet were.  And, looking back on it, that was an outdated reference at the time: the only reason I know anything about The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet is because of second-hand stories from my parents.  Not sure what Burton was thinking on that one.

• The sandworms look like they escaped from The Nightmare Before Christmas because of Tim Burton’s involvement in both.

• Why the concept of a “talking Marcel Marceau statue” is dumb (and therefore funny).

• That’s a Johnny Carson impression, which is totally wasted on the youth.

Despite all that, they really enjoyed it (again/still), and are now sufficiently refreshed on the story to watch the sequel.  Just in time for spooky season.

__________

* And are you willing to admit that you only knew it was Hitler because Trump isn’t that articulate?

It's Easy to Criticize (But Cut It Out)

Some months ago, I wrote a politics post, which I framed as primarily being about third parties, but I also addressed this idea that that young people might not vote for Biden (primarily because of his stance on Palestine), and the conflicting attitudes that engendered from the “experts.” And I included a long quote from Democratic lawyer Marc Elias who was doing exactly what liberal podcaster David Rees said he wouldn’t do, and what liberal commentator (and former lawyer) Elie Mystal said one shouldn’t do: scolding people (especially young people) for saying they wouldn’t vote for Biden by fuming about how Trump would definitely be worse.

Well, the race is quite different now—what a difference nine months can make!—and yet many things haven’t changed.  I still hear Elias going off on those rants (although I tend to just fast-forward through them nowadays, because I know them by heart, and also they make me a bit queasy).  Look, Elias is a brilliant (and relentless) lawyer, and he’s out there fighting for voting rights in states across the country, and I’m so glad he’s doing it.  I have a great deal of respect for him.  But that doesn’t mean I can’t also criticize him when I think he’s wrong.  And he’s kind of a jerk on this topic.

See how it’s possible to like and appreciate someone and disagree with them?  Kind of like when people say they don’t agree with Biden’s take on the Israel/Palestine conflict (which is now morphing into the Israeal/Palestine/Lebanon conflict).  Instead of responding to that with a knee-jerk “but Trump would be worse!” perhaps it’s worthwhile to consider the closing words of Mystal’s article from The Nation that I quoted last time:

The people saying they won’t vote for Biden know that Trump would be worse.  They’re saying Biden should be better.

And, while Harris isn’t Biden, she definitely inherits his policies via guilt by association if nothing else.  Of course, if you believe Trump and Vance, those policies have ceased to be Biden’s policies altogether: they’re Harris’ policies now.  This is, of course, somewhat silly ... as Trump also said, the vice-presdient “makes no difference.” Harris was probably in the room when these decisions were made, but to imagine that she had any real control over them is just dumb.  So the truth of the matter is, we don’t actually know whether Harris’ approach to the Middle East would be as controversial as Biden’s.

But that, of course, is the problem.  She’s had plenty of chances to distance herself from the pro-genocide position, but has taken none of them.  At the Democratic convention, they had the opportunity to highlight pro-Palestinian voices, to vet the speeches ahead of time, to show the world that even people who disagree with her administration’s actions would still support her in the election.  Nope.  Not a single Palestinian-American voice was allowed on the stage, being instead consigned to hold protests outside.  And I’ve heard plenty of people say that this is the right move for her: that, by picking a side, she can only make things worse.  Which, maybe, is true.  But of course if you’re taking that attitude, then you just have to accept that some people are going to take the silence as proof of being just as bad as Biden.

And, yes, I use the term “pro-genocide” advisedly.  If you pay any attention to what Netanyahu and the members of his cabinet actually say, you know very well that they are remarkably open about their goals to eliminate the Palestinian people from the Earth, and that’s kind of what “genocide” actually means.  “The deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group” says Dictionary.com, quite succinctly.  When the deputy speaker of the Knesset says “Now we all have one common goal—erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth”, or when the Heritage Minister says it would be okay to nuke the population because “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza” (this presumably includes all the children: nearly half of the Palestinian population is under 18), or when the Defense Minister says “we will eliminate everything”, or when the major general in charge of the military in Gaza says “you wanted hell, you will get hell” ... when those are the things they say out loud, I’m not sure anyone can reasonably accuse me (or anyone else) of using the phrase “genocide” in an inflammatory way.  I consider it quite matter-of-fact, actually.

And the problem with sending a country a shit-ton of bombs and then saying that you had no idea that they were going to be used for whichever atrocity-du-jour they’ve been used for is that that only works if you then stop sending them bombs.  Which, you know, we haven’t.  Saying, “well, we told them that this was unacceptable and then just gave them more bombs” is not taking an anti-genocide stance.  So you can say my language is deliberately inflammatory when I call Biden’s policies “pro-genocide” if you like, but I stand by my statement that it’s more factual than incendiary.  And now they’re bombing even more people with the bombs we’re faithfully continuing to supply them with?  It’s utter insanity, I tell you.

But I digress.  I was reminded of this whole “scolding” thing yesterday while watching Robert Reich.  Now, I really like Reich.  Possibly because, like me, he’s an old liberal—twenty years older than I, even.  Possibly because he’s a short guy, like me (5 inches shorter than I, even).  Mostly because we agree on just about everything, and he can explain things pretty well on YouTube, which is defniitely a skill.  So I was a bit surprised to hear him say this:¹

Why is this not getting through to people: why are there still so many people who are willing to say, well I’m going to go with Trump ... you know, why are they voting against their own self-interest?  ...  I mean, what why are people voting, or willing to vote, against their economic self-interest?  I really don’t quite know, except that, you know, ... for so many years, so many people have been so devastated by the economy ...

— Robert Reich, The Saturday Coffee Klatch, 9/28/24

I suppose that, one of the things I like the most about Robert Reich is that he’s a nearly 80-year-old man who doesn’t sound like a typical old man.  And I suppose that’s why I found this particular quote so disappointing: because here he does sound like the old guy shaking his head about “these kids today.” Note that, in this particular video, his regular co-host Heather Lofthouse² is out sick and he’s talking instead to Michael Lahanas-Calderón, one of their producers who happens to be a member of Gen Z (as Michael puts it earlier in the video, “the oldest of the Gen Z’s, yes”), so maybe that’s partially responsible for his falling into the trap of the rambling-old-man-speak.  Here’s another, perhaps more telling example, after discussing the recent announcement by Chapel Roan that she was not officially endorsing Harris:³

But don’t they, Michael, don’t they understand that Trump would be worse!  That is, if ... you’re making a choice here.  I mean, by not making a choice, you’re making a choice.  By not voting for Harris, you are essentially voting for Trump.  Don’t they understand this, your friends, your generation?

Ummm ... yeah, Robert.  They understand that Trump would be worse.  But, if Harris can’t inspire them to give a shit about politics, if it seems like she’s promising more of the same old horrible crap we’re already living through, they just might not bother.

The weird thing (at least to me) is that these same pundits seem to understand it perfectly when the shoe’s on the other foot.  Listen to any given batch of them talking about how the ridiculosity that is Mark Robinson could discourage Republican turnout:⁴

This is what I think you’re hoping for if you’re Kamala Harris: that there’s some category of people in North Carolina that are just like, “These guys are too crazy, I’m not gonna ... I’m just not gonna bother this year.  I’m taking this year off.”

— Tim Miller, Inside the Right, 9/22/24

This sort of perfectly describes my father, who hates Trump, but almost certainly can’t bring himself to vote for a black woman.⁵  But, when it comes to young people feeling the same about Harris, people just don’t seem to get it.

Don’t get me wrong: I will be voting for Harris, personally.  I actually think she’s been rather energizing in this race, and, far from being someone who didn’t know who she was before becoming vice-president, I’ve actually voted for her before, both when she ran for Attorney General in 2010 and when she ran for Senator in 2016.  Plus she had some great YouTube moments making Trump appointees look dumb in congressional committees.  And, while I think she won’t be as firm with Israel as I’d like, I agree with Cody Johnston (of Some More News) that she at least represents a break from the generation of Israel-is-always-right old white guys, of which Biden is hopefully the last.  So at least there’s a chance that she’ll be better than Biden, and that’s good enough for me.  But, if you’re a younger person (or even an older person) who thinks it isn’t good enough, that she damned well ought to come out and say she’s against murdering Palestinian children no matter how evil Hamas is ... well, I totally respect that position too.

People have various reasons for seemingly voting against their economic interests. In the case of my father, and many others, I’m sure, it’s simple racism.  In the case of many other working class folks, it’s just that they’ve been told all their life that capitalism is good and socialism is bad, and from that perspective voting for anyone other than a Republican seems a bit insane.  But these things are changing.  Only the oldest among us truly remember McCarthyism, and even the Cold War is a fading memory.  So the boogeyman of communism doesn’t hold the power it used to, and equating socialism with communism, when we have modern counterexamples like France and Sweden,⁶ is also falling a bit flat these days.  And, while racism is certainly still going strong in our country, it does seem to be going more and more underground.  Today’s younger generations not only have lived with diversity all their lives, but they’ve lived with the pain of late-stage capitalism and seem to instinctively understand that there must be a better way.

And some of what appears to be “voting against one’s own economic interests” is just plain evil marketing campaigns launched by rich people, who desire nothing more than to continue to be rich (and not to collect any more peers).  For decades, rich people convinced poor white people that poor black people would take their jobs, their homes, and their American dreams.  Nowadays they’ve mostly switched to convincing poor people both black and white that it’s the immigrants coming for their bounty, but it’s the same playbook.  And it might be easy to think that people that buy into these messages are dumb, but that’s oversimplifying the issue: people who are struggling will often latch onto any message, especially the ones that are slickly produced, and there’s no point in being naïve about the fact that advertising works.  Getting upset at the victims of these evil marketing campaigns is sort of missing the point.

So I’d love to see less of people railing against young people for not voting against Trump, and railing against working class people for “voting against their interests,” and more people pushing Harris to do more to try and reach these cohorts.  I think she’s doing great in many ways, but could she be doing better? Absolutely.  And the polls are too close for her not to try.

__________

1 If you want to follow along, here’s the video; jump to around 14:09.

2 Heather is also the president of Inequality Media, who produces those videos.

3 Same video, around 11:20.

4 Again, follow along in the video at about 8:26.

5 You may recall that I said recently that my father claimed he’d vote for anyone the Democrats put up, unless it was Biden.  Well, his sexist, racist ass is kind of eating those words now.

6 Yes, yes: neither France nor Sweden is technically socialist.  But then neither are any of the policies that Republicans label as socialist.  So I think it’s a fair correlation.

Enshittification Happens

Once upon a time, Cory Doctorow was known for writing books (inasmuch as he was known at all, which was probably only in very specific circles).  Nowadays, he’s more known for his opinions on modern Internet culture: opposing DRM, encouraging Creative Commons, etc.  He’s been featured in xkcd comics and in Ready Player One (the book, not the movie).  I’ve never read a Cory Doctorow novel (or short story, or graphic novel, or anything).  But I know what enshittification is.

So I was quite surprised—but pleased—to see Cory Doctorow show up in a More Perfect Union video that I was watching.  If you don’t know MPU, they do exposé-style videos, primarily focussing on how the billionaires are trying to screw you over (and mostly succeeding).  Well worth a YouTube subscribe, if you’re into that sort of thing.  And, the other night, right in the middle of learning why food delivery has gotten so ridiculously expensive, there’s Cory Doctorow, talking about enshittification.

Now, if you don’t know what that means, here’s how he phrased it when he first coined the term in a Wired article:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.  Then, they die.  I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Or, if you prefer, just check out the video I just mentioned, and hop to around 6:19.  It’ll take longer, but it’s a more gradual explanation (with examples, even), so it may work better for some people.

Now, first of all, Cory is absolutely correct about what enshittification is, how it works, and that it’s a real, observable phenomenon.  But where I will nitpick his definition is that I don’t think it’s limited to Internet platforms.  This is a pattern that we’ve seen repeated in businesses throughout the modern age.  Remember AT&T?  Once upon a time AT&T was considered considered the most reliable name in the communications business.  Then they were a customer service joke that every business had to use because what other options were there?  None that a fledgling business could take seriously!  And then they were a monopoly and the government broke them up.

Since, I’m very old, I actually remember the breakup of AT&T and the creation of the “Baby Bells.” I distinctly remember my father (the staunch Republican) repeating exactly what he’d been told: this will hurt the consumer!  Prices will go up, not down!  And, you know what?  He was right.  In the short term, the prices did actually go up, while the Baby Bells figured out how to charge and what fees to tack on where.  But, less than 10 years later, minutes of long distance became so cheap that some companies tried literally giving them away: one 90s ad screamed “you can’t beat free!” But then I suppose concentrating on short-term gains and ignoring long-term consequences is sort of the whole vibe of the Republican party.

You see this pattern in plenty of other companies’ histories: IBM (when my father was in charge of computers for a large paper mill, buying Hewlett-Packard instead of IBM was considered a risky move; nowadays IBM marketing is a literal joke: “if IBM bought KFC, they’d rename the product to ‘greasy dead chicken parts.’”), Microsoft (their OS market share went from 93% in 2009 to 27% today; in the same period, their browser market share dropped from 65% to 5%), Boeing (from the only plane some people would fly in to the butt of late-night comedians, Congressional investigations, and NTSB sanctions).  And everyone has their anecdotal evidence.  In my case, it’s Dropbox.  When I first signed up with Dropbox in 2010, they were a small, scrappy company with amazing customer service.  What led me to cancelling their service entirely was having a single ticket closed 4 times in a row without ever receiving a single answer to my actual question.  Ten years ago I could get an email from an actual tech person.  Three years ago, it was obvious people were being judged on how fast they “closed” a ticket and not at all on whether the customers actually got any help.  They had their users locked in, they had their businesses locked in, and the amount of trouble I had to go through to drop them is just not something most people will suffer through.  Personally, I would have paid ten times what a Dropbox subscription cost, as long as I wasn’t paying it to them—hell, I’m sure I actually did end up paying about that much, in the long run.  But then I’m a stubborn asshole.  Most people will just suffer in silence, resigned to their fate.  It takes longer for a company than an Internet platform, but it’s the same process.  Enshittification.

Now, one thing you might notice about Cory’s original definition that doesn’t fit my examples is this sentence: “Then, they die.” AT&T got broken up, but they didn’t actually die ... they’re currently (as of 2023) 13th in the Fortune 500.  Microsoft was eventually declared a monopoly, but no one ever did anything about it; things like Internet Explorer and the Zune and the BSOD (or “Blue Screen of Death”) became cultural punchlines, but they’re currently 14th in the Fortune 500.  As for Boeing ... well the stock has dipped, and its Fortune 500 rating is down (somewhere in the neighborhood of 52nd, I believe), but it hardly seems in danger of disappearing altogether.  Time will tell, but I shouldn’t at all be surprised to see Boeing rising from the ashes in a few years.  It’ll likely get a bit worse before it gets better, but I’m sure it’ll be fine in the long run.

Of course, the trick here is that Cory was talking about platforms ... not companies.  Facebook may well die (and it damn well should), but Meta will likely live on.  Google’s search engine’s lifespan is probably measured in units of AI advancement, but Alphabet will continue to produce gobbledygook that we simply must use.  And how about Über, whose branch Über Eats was fingered in the very video that inspired this post?  Oh, they’re riding high right now: they locked in the users by killing taxi service, they locked in the businesses (in this case, restaurants) by making individual delivery drivers economically impratical and crushing their competition (like Grubhub), and now they’re (finally) making money by charging us as much as 50% more for food than we’d pay if we’d just get off our lazy butts and go pick it up ourselves.  But there will come the inevitable crash—at some point, we just won’t be able to afford to be lazy any more—and Über Eats will probably die ... but I bet Über itself won’t.  In business parlance, this is called “pivoting”: one market is performing poorly, so you pivot to another.  A more apt analogy would be a sharecropper who wasn’t bright enough to rotate their crops and so now the soil won’t grow anything, so they just pick up and move down the road to a fresh plot of land.  Or a traveling carny saying “we’ve fleeced all the suckers we can here; time to move on to the next town.”

It’s interesting to me to watch the landscape changing.  When I was a kid, “socialist” was about the worst thing you could call a policy or an idea.  Nowadays, when anyone on TV says “that’s socialism!” you’ll find a dozen (or a hundred) videos on YouTube or TikTok responding “so what?” All the adults in my life taught me that unions were terrible: any time you saw a bunch of people standing around doing nothing, you’d blame the unions.  It never made much sense to me—the organizations that brought us the weekend, and overtime pay, and minimum wage, and sick leave, and child labor laws ... those are somehow bad?—but almost everyone I knew bought into it.  Nowadays, there are new unions popping up everywhere, and the President is appearing on picket lines to show solidarity.  In my father’s time (and still in my father’s mind) it seemed to be universally accepted that rich people must be geniuses, and that giving them more money would somehow “trickle down” to the rest of us.  Now the majority of society seems to be waking up to the wise words of Dogbert, who once said “Beware the advice of successful people: they do not seek company.”

If you think about it, this makes sense.  Anyone who goes to the trouble of amassing a billion dollars (or more) is just getting money for the sake of getting money.  At some point, you had enough money to buy anything you wanted, to pass on to your children if you felt like it ... to just live off the interest.  But still you kept getting more.  Why?  Just to show you could, I suppose.  So these people—and the companies they found, or run, or espouse—are attempting to separate us from our wallets in the most expedient way possible, and, as soon as one way stops working—or even falters just a bit, so that an easier way seems more attractive—they move on to the next.  I don’t necessarily blame those people: to me, that seems like blaming a tiger for eating you.  The tiger is just hungry, that’s all.  But when there are people in the village telling you how awesome and handsome and brilliant the tiger is for eating all your neighbors ... well, those people I can blame.  The tiger doesn’t need your help.  He’s doing just fine all on his own.  You know who needs your help?  The people building the anti-tiger defense system.  How about we all pitch in on that?  At the very least, perhaps we can slow the tide of enshittification.  Because tiger droppings are full of the corpses of the most vulnerable members of the village.  And ignoring that reality is ... kinda shitty.

Talking Is a Free Action

For some reason (most likely the reason is Nish Kumar), I’ve started watching Pod Save the UK.  I’m a bit of an Anglophile, and, while my main interest in the British is their comedians, I do find their politics a bit fascinating as well.  I’ll admit that, when I first starting getting into it many moons ago, it was primarily so I could understand more British jokes.  But I think it’s sort of morphed into a fascination with someone else’s politics.  When something in the UK is worse than it is here in the US, I can feel relieved that, as bad as it is here, at least we don’t have that problem; when something in the UK is better than here, I can bask in some envy and tell myself that here’s proof that we can do better too; when someting in the UK is about the same, I can commiserate and feel some camaraderie.  It’s a win/win/win.

As you may know, they recently held an election (which they initiated, conducted, and completed in about 3 weeks’ time), and in it the country roundly rejected the Conservative party (often still called the “Tories”), which had held sway for the past 14 years, privatizing things such as public transportation and water treatment to devastating effect, attempting to ship political refugees off to Rwanda, and (perhaps most infamously) engineering Brexit.  The election was even more of a rout for the Tories than predicted, with Labour more than doubling their number of seats, the Liberal Democrats more than sextupling their seats, the Greens quadrupling their seats (which brings them up to a whopping 4, but still), and the Tories plummeting from 372 seats to 121.  With things going so poorly in my own country’s politics, it’s nice to have a bit of vicarious joy in the politics of others.

But—and here’s the reason I bring all this up—in the run-up to their election, Pod Save the UK aired an episode on “tactical voting.” I wasn’t sure WTF this could possibly be, but it seemed quite controversial: many people were saying this was crucial for everyone to do, and others were saying it was a terrible precedent to set.  As I watched the episode, I began to realize that “tactical voting” just meant voting for the person who needs to win in order to get the outcome you want at the national level, rather than just voting for the candidate whose views most aligned with your own.  Of course, in the US, we just call that “voting.”

Hmph.

And so this whole kerfuffle about Biden really puzzles me.  It’s okay for the Democratic party to tell us to just vote for whoever they put up because they’re better than Trump, but it’s not okay for people to question whether or not Biden is the best choice to win against him?  I thought we were voting tactically here.  Perhaps it isn’t practical to replace Biden at this stage of the game, but for people to denigrate anyone who even brings up the topic is pretty ridiculous.  And there’s a lot of that going around these days.  I’m not sure I understand where they’re coming from.  But let me be clear about my viewpoint on the topic.

If you’re saying people should stop questioning Biden and just support him, you sound like those folks at the tail end of the pyramid scheme saying that everyone needs to calm down so that people continue to make their commissions.  Ignoring the problem doesn’t make it go away.  It’s not like we can just pretend that Biden isn’t old, or that people don’t have serious misgivings about his performance.  I can tell you, for instance, that my father, a staunch Republican for as long as I’ve known him (and undoubtedly long before that), has already said that he will vote for anyone the Democrats put up ... except Biden.  I’m not saying this is a sensible attitude; I’m just saying that’s what he says.  Now, perhaps my father is completely unique among disaffected Republicans.  But I bet he isn’t.

If you’re saying it’s dumb to ask whether Biden can do the difficult job of being President because he’s already doing it, you’re completely missing the point.  It’s utterly irrelvant whether he can do the job or not.  The question is, can he win against Trump?  Personally, I would vote for a turnip running with the campaign slogan “At least I’m not Trump!” ... but that doesn’t mean I want the turnip to run.  Because the turnip can’t win.  Because not everyone is me.  Because not everyone is convinced by the “at least it’s not Trump” argument.  If Biden can’t win, he never gets the chance to do the job, so it makes zero difference whether he’s capable of doing it or not.

If you’re saying that the debate performance doesn’t matter, because we’re not electing the best debater, you’re being deliberately disingenuous.  It’s not just about that one debate (though, admittedly, that was pretty bad).  The appearances since then have ranged from relatively encouraging—like the Chumbawumba speech just days after the debate: when you get knocked down, you get back up again! and then presumably have a whiskey drink, a lager drinnk, etc—to downright terrifying, like the George Stephanopoulos interview where he said that he’d only drop out if God came down and asked him to, and that if he lost he’d still feel okay that he’d done the “goodest job” he could have done.  I mean, if you lose, Joe, you get to go home with your Secret Service detail and live out the rest of your life, and ... not to be harsh, but it’s unlikely to be long enough to really feel the regrets that all the rest of us are gonna have.

Again, I’m not saying the Democrats definitely should replace Biden.  Nor am I saying they definitely should not.  But a meaningful conversation isn’t out of the question.  I dunno; I thought the last time Trump got elected it was going to be disastrous, and it turned out that the man was so incompetent and crazy that he had trouble actually accomplishing the worst things he wanted to do.  But this time we have the whole Project 2025 thing: people much smarter than him (though no less crazy) have laid out a blueprint for how to make all the things work ... even the illegal ones.  Which Trump’s Supreme Court has greased the wheels of pretty nicely by saying that the President can’t be held liable for anything he does.  And, for anyone else in the administration, the President can just issue a pardon.  Done and dusted.

So I think it’s perfectly reasonable to demand that the Democrats put up someone that can actually win against this chilling prospect.  Maybe that’s Biden.  Maybe not.  But at least we can talk about it.