Author: Lorraine Lee

I’ve been unable to watch TV news for at least 20 years. It’s simply too painful, on many levels. The most painful thing is seeing what journalism has allowed itself to become, and how dumbed down the product has become, and how low the signal-to-noise ratio has become…subtract out the fluff stories, promo pieces, B-roll, celebrinews, inspiration corn, persistence corn, struggle corn, and entrepreneurship corn, and you have about 5 minutes of news per hour of airtime, at best.

The way they word things on TV news is one of my pet peeves. All the broadcasters seem to have an editorial policy of avoiding copular verbs, such as “is” or “was”, and this results in the news being read as a sequence of sentence fragments instead of sentences. My autistic mind is probably of the hyperlexic type, as I mentally transcribe practically every spoken word I hear, and I tend to proofread as I go, so the weird sentence structure used in TV news forces me to insert the word [was] in square brackets into almost every sentence. And sometimes [is]. In raw form, verb forms only appear in the “-ing” inflection, which could be a participle or a gerund, and what really drives me crazy is that whether it’s a participle or a gerund is itself often ambiguous. Usually, I could make it a correct sentence by inserting [was] or [is] before the -ing verb, or alternatively by transcribing it as a run-on sentence which is basically a chain of gerund phrases separated by commas. My mind usually goes with the latter, because I want to minimize edits more than I want to minimize run-on sentences, but I always feel tension because of the ambiguity.

I also find the level of sensory overload physically painful, especially on local TV news, everything from their overuse of the breaking news klaxon to the practice of “flashing the screen” for emphasis, or even as a visual punctuation, as I’ve noticed they almost always occur where the period would be if the sentence fragments were converted to sentences with the insertion of [was] or [is].

Then there’s the fact that the local news on all the channels in the Detroit market are almost single-handedly sponsored by Gardner-White, a regional chain of furniture stores. Their commercials are orgies of sensory overload, from turning my TV into a strobe light, to multitudes of fast cuts, to the most exaggerated vocal inflection imaginable (think “carnival barker” times ten). At least two per commercial break, every local news broadcast, every channel.

I’m losing interest in the Medicare For All “branding,” largely because “Medicare” “Advantage” at this point has successfully sold its shit to a majority of Medicare recipients, and their PR people are absolutely gloating with their “Medicare Advantage Majority” website.

I’m deeply worried that at some point our demands for Medicare For All will suddenly find their way into the Overton Window, but the catch will be that it results in “Medicare” “Advantage” for all. Single Payer, I think, is much better branding than Medicare For All, and even Socialized Medicine is starting to seem like better messaging than Medicare For All (even though one of my biggest pet peeves in the world of political messaging is equating socialism with the public sector). I think the rallying cry I most want to hear at this point is “Get The Private Sector The Fuck Out Of Health Insurance!”

Bryan Creely, as a promotion for his job seeker consultancy, has posted an interesting video on YouTube, titled If Your Job Interviewer Asks You THIS, BEWARE!. The thing that jumped out at me is that virtually all the question types he enumerated is a question I would describe as “infantilizing.” Here’s a news bulletin, if you apply for a low status job, say a job in retail, the entire process is infantilization all the way down. I’m from working class stock and although I managed to graduate from college, I never succeeded at deciphering the college-level job market. I suspect that the American economy has been for some time producing college graduates at a much faster pace than it’s been creating “college-level” jobs, but I find myself scratching my head trying to figure out how one might rigorously test that hypothesis.

Global warming is pretty existential as threats go. We can probably survive the loss of the spotted owl, the continuation of a fossil-fueled economy, not so much. I think it’s very likely that the worldwide surge of nationalist ideology is a side effect of climate chaos. Drill-baby-drill as an unadvertised feature of Bidenism is hard to forgive. I chalk it up to global warming response probably being a literally unsolvable coordination problem. That runs the risk of falling into doomerism, but the alternative runs the risk of becoming the kind of leftist who helps fascists by attacking Democrats. Honestly, the entirety of my adult life has been nearly 100% of choices, whether personal or political, being of the “cutting our losses” category; choosing the lowest magnitude of the negative utilities on offer.

Looks like blogosphere trends and the like are back!
h/t Jan-Lukas Else
Here’s the standard list:

📨 Mail Client: 💻 Thunderbird / 📱 K9-Mail
📮 Mail Server: (not serving)
📝 Notes: Xournal++
🟦 Photo Management: (not managing, just shoeboxing)
📆 Calendar: Baïkal with DAVx⁵
📁 Cloud File Storage: nexcess.net
📖 RSS: Thunderbird
🙍🏻‍♂️ Contacts: Baïkal with DAVx⁵
🌐 Browser: Firefox
💬 Chat: IRC in Thunderbird
🔖 Bookmarks: Firefox
📑 Read It Later: (?)
📜 Word Processing: Vim
📈 Spreadsheets: Gnumeric
📊 Presentations: Beamer
🛒 Shopping Lists: astoundingteam.com/shoplist
💰 Personal Finance: GnuCash
📰 News: Mostly MSN
🎵 Music: Radio Free Fedi
🎤 Podcasts: raw audio downloads
🔐 Password Management: Firefox

And here are some additions:

🧑‍💻 IDE and Code Editor: Vim
🔑 VPN: Does TOR count?
👥 Social Media: Mastodon, Friendica
🌦️ Weather: weather.gov
💪 Fitness: (I do work out, but no training diary)

Tim H.

From my (Working class) perspective much of what drives authoritarianism is a desire to not accept criticism from people they don’t respect*, to me, this implies willful ignorance, with a splash of tolerating sociopathy. Not that I expect sociopathy in the service of economic advantage to entirely go away, but its practitioners need to own it. Not be like omnivores who refuse to acknowledge that they’ve consumed parts of creatures who once saw small slices of this world.

Allen Green

Person with capital protects you from the risks of not having capital by charging you money so they can have more capital.

Tim H.

The southern evangelical churches coming to this was set in motion long ago, when their preachers figured out that self-censorship in which scriptures they quoted in sermons led to fewer painful and sometimes lethal visits from enforcers from the local “Important” people. In truth, God & Mammon have always had an uncomfortable coexistence in the hearts of believers, it’s just a bit more obvious with the Southern variety.

segremores

Red Flag #1: If a disease is ever listed as having symptoms that include “being a member of the LGBT” and “Autism,” it is not a real disease.

satyasyasatyasya5746

I honestly think some critical mass will need to be reached where enough of society is SO lost, SO wrong, SO delusional, SO dangerous and SO damaging, that society will have to collapse somehow to snap them out of it. Some epistemological reset because all I see around me is layers and layers of madness which can’t ever be peeled away; it must all be discarded.

I often play around with a thought experiment in which I imagine a big box store such as a Meijer store, but with the merchandise rearranged according to an attraction/repulsion schema in which complementary goods mutually attract and competing goods mutually repel (mathematically a very difficult problem, hence a thought experiment, rather than something more ambitious like a simulation). The Meijer store contains books, which includes cookbooks. So I imagine a cookbook sold by Meijer as having x and y (and z) coordinates within the store. The cookbook contains some number of recipes. I think of each of these recipes as having x,y,z coordinates, even though the recipes are virtual rather than physical objects. The recipes are “attracted” to the cookbook in which they reside, but they are also “attracted” to the ingredients they call for (in grocery) and the kitchen equipment they call for (in cookware, appliances, etc.). The prepared recipes (in the initial state anyway) are, like the written recipes, virtual objects which nevertheless can be assigned locations for the purposes of modeling. These objects in turn would attract to tableware, which would in turn attract to tables (but also to cupboards…and dishwashers…each object has a life cycle!) So dishwashers “attract” dishes and “repel” other dishwashers. Plates attract spoons but repel other plates. Repulsion between like objects serves to distribute them more evenly. The TV sitcom Last Man on Earth explored the idea of someone living a seemingly comfortable lifestyle for some period of time on the merchandise in an abandoned big box store, in a post-apocalyptic setting. In a non-post-apocalyptic setting (hopefully with reasonably functional supply chains) an “efficient” arrangement of things and virtual things, and ultimately people, in the interior space of a big box store (or perhaps even better, a mall) could I imagine house (and support much of the economic activity of) a few hundred people, in some comfort.

Originally appeared as a comment on Reddit.

Another organization name seemingly pulled out of a hat. Web search found nothing about “Blue Collar Dollar Institute” that’s not by “Blue Collar Dollar Institute,” so probably a recently-created astroturf. Tenuous link, but one of their contributing authors is Michael Berghaus, who is or was Director of Economic Researcher & Strategy for Charles L. Shor Foundation For Epilepsy Research Inc., which in turn is a donor to the Conservative Partnership Institute. Certainly BCDI’s published articles have a definitively nationalist tone. My best guess is that this astroturf supports the Trump faction of the American right wing.

From WZZM TV:

West Michigan in a ‘shallow recession,’ GVSU economist says

How shallow it might be is of course wild guesswork, but such is the tightrope walked by financial journalism given the realities of mass psychology. I for one accept that it is in the nature of economies (capitalist and otherwise) to behave cyclically, and that there will never be a last recession. What I can’t forgive is an economic policy framework that insists on reacting to economic conditions instead of planning for them, for example, with countercyclical policies. We allow ourselves a few (but too few) countercyclical tools for financial markets, such as floater bonds, but what we really need badly is some countercyclical tools for labor markets. I would suggest a “floater pool” of civil service employees. Maybe these would be assigned to make-work tasks, and I really don’t care, but dog knows there’s plenty work actually needed by society, that is destined to be undersupplied by the market b/c merit goods or what have you. The floater pool would hire massively during recessions, and (frankly) do mass layoffs during rare times of “labor shortage” such as the (present?/recent past?).

Whether late stage capitalism is something one could wish for is a good question, since there seems to be no non-traumatic way out of it. In my young adult years (let’s say late 1980s, early 1990s), I was a little (but only a little) inclined toward what would today be called “accelerationism.” I hadn’t yet heard the gospel of MMT, so I believed that some generation, sooner or later, would suffer the consequences of profligate state spending and public debt. In spite of my ignorance of MMT, I somehow sensed that an aggressive campaign to shrink public spending would almost certainly trigger a recession, but that not addressing the “problem” would somehow be worse. My thinking was, I’m young, at least somewhat “strong,” why not rip the bandage off all at once, get it over with, and if we’re exceptionally lucky, maybe come out of it with the political left not totally obliterated.

I take a decidedly dim view of cyclical models of history. My thinking on that is somewhat informed by David Brin’s excellent blog. David is fiercely critical of the Strauss and Howe “Fourth Turning” worldview, for example. The “soft men make for hard times” etc. meme that get flung around so much by the reactionary elements of the larger public, has what to me look like deeply fascist implications.

Granted, the “cycles” mentioned by The Arthurian concern a much longer arc of history, perhaps a whole millennium if he’s saying (as seems the case) that the end of capitalism will be the beginning of another Dark Ages. My sense of historical ebb and flow is admittedly more on the scale of one (or maybe two) human lifetimes, so the so-called post-war era (except of course for the extreme racism and sexism of that time) was sort of a golden age, and 1980-present (the post-Reagan era, as I call it) has been sort of a dark age, one that I may have referred to in jest a few times as late capitalism, but I’m not entirely convinced that late stage capitalism is something that will happen or maybe even can happen. As indicated, I believe (sincerely believe) that capitalism is a hardy weed, although unlike most people who proclaim that, I don’t see that as a good thing. As I see it, the post-Reagan era has been an era characterized by aggressive restructuring of the labor market (at least in the so-called first world) to replace gainful employment with contingent employment. When my age cohort (the largely invisible “generation X”) reached working age, Management’s agenda was drawing The Firm’s labor inputs as much as possible from either temp agency workers or part-time employees. By now, social expectations have eroded all the way to piecework pay scams (gig “economy”, “sharing” “economy,” whatever one would wish to call it.)

Since I believe capitalism to be a hardy weed, I’m not really a socialist in the strictest sense (well, my heart is, but my head isn’t, but that’s too long a discussion for here). I approve of social democracy, as I see it as a mirror image of Gorbachevism. If it can be achieved, it would be a sort of “capitalism with a friendly face,” and if nothing else a shred of dignity that the American public is so hungry for.

The cyclical history buffs referred to in the article see the upward arc of capitalism as an earlier, competitive form, followed by a decadent, monopolistic form. Is there a possibility of forestalling late capitalism and the subsequent Dark Age by getting aggressive on antitrust legislation or adjudication? As we speak, Kroger’s is going to acquire Albertson’s. In theory, it isn’t a done deal, but just as when it was T-Mobile and Sprint, we all know mergers are only ever a question not of if, but of when. Should we believe that if, by some miracle, the American System rediscovered antitrust, that capitalism could have a new lease on life? Or is late capitalism, the end of capitalism, and the start of the next Dark Age, like all proposed mergers under late capitalism, a matter of not if, but when?

While I’m opposed in principle to grand cycle narratives of history, I’m tempted to believe at least in a sort of “pendulum swing” model. 1932 to 1980 was 48 years. I want to believe that by 2028, perhaps Red America will get bitch slapped hard by majority public opinion, and America Herself will proceed to dismantle the House That Reagan Built, the deregulation, the union busting, the regressive taxation, the whole stinking mess, and rebuild the New Deal, hopefully minus the redlining and other compromises that had to be made with fundamentally evil people in the name of political feasibility.