Smell Test

A (minimally researched) view from the outside:

Something is rotten in Twitter land.  As a non-user but frequent lurker on Twitter I've been watching the drama of the "Twitter files" with some consternation.  Aside from blog posting and the occasional "liking" of a YouTube video, lurking in search of material to think, write or just feel about is what I tend to do on the internet. I don't need to participate, but I do need to consume and the pace and volume of new tweets makes Twitter one of those sites that rewards checking.  Are there other Twitter lurkers out there?  Do they feel the same sense of bemusement about the drama of the past several months?  

Lurking on Twitter was originally rather uncomplicated.   I could scroll up and down the page at will, able to click on any tweet in order to follow the thread of the commentary. Once upon a time I could actually even see who liked any tweet I happened to come across-- all without logging in.  Although the ability to see who liked what was taken away without my noticing it, for years I remained able to scroll at will and click to pursue the contents of a thread as I wished.  At some point in the past year, however-- prior to the sale of Twitter to Elon Musk-- that ability changed unceremoniously as I discovered to my dismay on a day that was otherwise like any other.  Scrolling down a list of tweets, I suddenly got thwarted after only a handful  by a page-commandeering message to the effect that if I wanted to see more I was going to have to log in.  No way around it.  My screen froze.  Was it some glitch or fluke?  No, it happened every time I refreshed the page. Curses!  Foiled again!  By trial and error I learned an evasive technique: the secret was pre-scrolling beyond the magic error triggering number of tweets before they loaded and the page was able to lock.  Performed correctly, the move would free me up in only one direction-- avoiding the blockade I could go backward in time down the page from the blockade at least until I hit the next show-stopping blockade another several dozen tweets or so in the history.  I could not however click on a tweet to follow the context it was posted in-- that move got the page-freezing stop message-- which made more than a few tweets completely mysterious in their meaning.  However, with Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter (with the help of some gullible Saudi investors), that joy-killing behavior of the site was mercifully removed and my ability to scroll and pursue any tweet was once again restored.  From a lurking perspective, then, who was I to complain?

Of course I'd love to see Elon Musk fall flat on his fat face-- in spite of the impossibility of that given his obscenely golden ticket.  But when Musk solicited a number of willing reporters including Matt Taibbi* and Bari Weiss to sift through communications his people had uncovered in the Twitter vaults between government officials and Musk's predecessors in the executive suites at Twitter, to use Twitter as their platform to document unsavory influence in the suppression and removal of tweets not of the government officials' liking, it was rather difficult to care both about what Musk and his journalistic minions supposedly revealed about our power Elite's access to the black hole of Twitter's dominion over speech on its very influential platform, but also frankly about the import of Musk, Taibbi and Weiss's tacky and crude posturing as would-be Snowden's about diddly squat.  So Biden and his team did what they could to muscle Twitter executives into removing embarrassing tweets about Biden's embarrassing son from the platform and succeeded.  <yawn>  So Musk revealed himself to be a petty little turd about the Twitter executives and former pains in his ass he succeeded and Weiss and Taibbi -- perhaps merely innocently seizing an opportunity gifted to them by the world's richest man to cling to cultural relevance -- were his good little puppy dogs.  What else is new?   They have all already amply demonstrated who they are repeatedly. For this Twitter passive spectator, the stunt neither enhanced nor further tarnished already pretty soiled specimens of their fields.  If you were enlightened by any of it, welcome to the twenty first century.

Some members of Congress did not appreciate the lopsidedness of the reportage out of the Twitter files.  Only Democrats were given the Taibbi treatment after all.  Biden was still a private citizen at the time of his apparent improprieties.  What about incidents involving standing members of the Trump administration who were actually government officials at the time of their confabs with Twitter over the removal of unfavorable tweets?  Under grilling by Florida Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Taibbi tripped over his tongue trying to explain away the oversight.  

Elsewhere, apparently the day he was testifying before Congress, an IRS agent paid a house call to Taibbi's residence to see what could be done about a filing problem Taibbi had had with the agency with one of his returns. The ubiquity of the incident in the headlines of right-spectrum news sites and its dearth of a presence (or shrugging off) in more Democratically leaning spaces is what motivated this post. 

When Elon Musk is commissioning the exposé of the exerted influence of political campaigns, agencies and individuals of the government on speech on the ubiquitous platform he has just purchased; when left wing media is urging us not to care that Twitter executives acted as if they knew Russiagate was not a fraud; when Debbie Wasserman Schultz is the one exposing the selectivity of Taibbi's revelations with the Twitter files; when the IRS thoughtfully picks the occasion of his testimony before congress to darken Taibbi's doorway, is there anyone to root for? 

~~~

* Am I the only one to notice that 9 times out of 10 the most frequent offenders of horseshoe anti-woke journalism, commentary and pointless mischief  are the wild children of  famous, wealthy or powerfully privileged families?  I don't draw any conclusions from this.  I'm just raising questions.

Hitting Snooze

Tulsi Gabbard in her new "anti-woke" persona at the Palmetto Family Council Summit in South Carolina demonstrating how easy it is to score for the dark side:

We just celebrated International Women's Day last week.  I was scrolling through social media seeing, you know, what are people saying about it?  And you saw a lot of nice flowery words coming from a lot of people in Washington, celebrating women and all that women have accomplished over the years, and all these great inspiring examples of women leaders throughout our time. We know the hypocrisy there. You ask them, what is a woman? and they can't answer the question. And one of the people they chose to honor in the White House on International Women's Day was not a woman at all.  It was a biological male.  There are two major points here. Number one is, There is no greater expression of hatred and hostility towards women than to try to erase our existence as a category of people and to minimize us to being a construct of anyone's imagination. And the second thing that doesn't get talked about often enough as we are looking at this insanity is that by rejecting the objective truth that there is such a thing as a woman, they are rejecting the existence of objective truth as a whole. And when we remove those boundaries of what is actually true and false, not my truth or your truth or their truth or whatever it is, that there is such a thing as objective truth, then we remove all the boundaries of our society and we end up in a position what we're seeing right now where what is declared as true is based on whatever those in power say that it is.

Gabbard's last point is frighteningly being made (although opposite from the way she is attempting to intimate) across the country as state legislature after state legislature in the red hinterlands is rushing in a mad dash to seize the reactionary moment (as if nothing else of import were going on in the country) to try to legislate trans and non-binary persons out of existence.  The "biological male" that Gabbard is referring to without identifying or explaining herself is Alba Rueda, who as President Alberto Ferndandez's Undersecretary of Diversity Policies within the Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity was Argentina's first transgender senior government official.  She was among the 12 women from around the world receiving awards at a White House ceremony March 8 honoring "International Women of Courage" a celebration now in its 17th year.  There's no question that by selecting a transgender woman for the award the State Department is ahead of the curve of cis-mainstream thought.  And I'm not immune to some irritation at the symbolic and relatively low-stakes cultural battles that our neoliberal power elite assiduously attend to while they can be counted on to neglect and obstruct progress with the issues of the most critical global import that are actually in their purview.  Democratic diversity posturing is the twisted mirror image of Republican diversity repression.  

Does this bold affirmation on the part of an agency of the federal government do anything to protect the rights, health and safety of actual trans women and their trans brothers and others across the country as they face a barrage of reactionary hostile anti trans and "anti-woke" legislation?  Probably not.  Does it hurt? As a toothless provocation to the forces of repression, it arguably might-- as Tulsi Gabbard's cynically obtuse perversion of the significance of the symbolism attempts to demonstrate.  Does this mean we shouldn't include trans people in symbolic gestures in the meantime?  Absolutely not, but maybe we should strive to put teeth into these provocations in the future and in the meantime, perhaps some more muscular words if not action on the part of the executive would be helpful against the current onslaught of anti trans hysteria.

I'm going to come flat out and say I don't know anything at all about the lives, issues, rights of transgender people other than that, contrary to Gabbard’s counter-factual assertion about objective truth,  they exist in the space time coordinate that I find myself in.   What is it about humans that practically guarantees that the existence of a group among us is not sufficient for its acceptance and grounds for the recognition of its full human rights?  Trans people exist among us.  That's all I need to know.  Everything else I say that does not acknowledge that reality is on me.  I also know that the issue is complicated enough and personal and visceral enough that more is required from me than from transgender people in the affirmation of their right to be.  Our trans brothers and sisters just are.  If trans-self-affirmation were all that was necessary to end the current crisis, there would be no issue for the rest of us other than a struggle to not stand in the way of trans self-affirmation (and this is still a concern -- the least any of us can do is do what we can to not hinder trans self-affirmation).  But important as that is, it's not enough, and the rash of anti-trans legislation being introduced across the country is proof positive of this.    Anything I do that stands in the way of affirming the right of trans people just to be-- including anything from aggressive rejection of entreaties to accommodate my language, to passive acceptance of legislative hysteria-- is nasty stinginess on my part.  

I'm an old sheltered person but I can attest to a sea change having happened since my childhood in the recognition of the simple right of persons of all gender identities and experiences merely to exist-- let alone to exist without insulting hindrances to their freedoms.  As eager as a class as they now are to demonstrate their wokeness, liberals of the ruling classes in the 1960's were not yet prepared to acknowledge that gayness might not be a disease. That growth was still to come in their consciousness.  At the time, they were still struggling to accept the notion that equality and the full rights of citizenship could no longer be postponed for people on the basis of their blackness.  Few who sat like lumps on a log in the way of justice for blacks in apartheid America will now readily admit how malignantly lame they were-- how late to the game-- when it really counted.*  

The long, ongoing struggle especially of the descendants of American slaves to overcome a history of oppression does not bode well for the trans struggle but if our current dark era of repression and reaction and denial is a nightmare from which we will one day awaken, perhaps one day we will re-emerge from this hellscape together. Will Tulsi Gabbard be around to have to live down her grandstanding against trans people for political points at the worst of times?

At 2.65% of the US population, the number of adults 18 and above whose identity is other than their birth gender is 6,841,541-- a number greater than the population of Indiana, the 17th most populous state.  If legislation to abrogate the rights of people on the basis that they were from Indiana were to suddenly start sweeping the country- would that not be nuts?  And also, what for? (Answer: Bigotry)

~~~~~

* We don't talk about it now.  We don't remind them that they were on the wrong side.  We should, Joe Biden.

Cheer up

Ub Iwerk's Old Mother Hubbard (1935) with a Carl Stalling score.  

And if that doesn't cheer you up:

Delusions of Grandeur

In case I am ever called upon to contemplate a military solution to a perceived crisis in an executive capacity, I have made some notes to myself on reading David Halberstam's The Best and The Brightest about the men who made the decisions that got the US into Vietnam: 

In a war between anti-communism and anti-imperialism, side with anti-imperialism.

Take doubt seriously.  If the decision is important enough that people will lose lives over it, give skepticism an honest hearing.  Skepticism is probably right.

When it comes to war, Military expertise should not be consulted before the decision to go to war has been made. The man with a hammer sees everything as a nail.  A General is a man with a hammer.

Might does not make right; right is sometimes sufficient to defeat might.

Serious does not mean what you think it means in Washington.  In Washington serious means brave enough to be cowardly.  Brave means willing to favor risking other people's lives and stakes to the extent that your career is not harmed.  In Washington, this kind of serious and brave means your career is never harmed.  Actual bravery, actual seriousness is career death in Washington.  On the other hand, Washington bravery and Washington serious is actual death to people not in Washington.

Higher education at our most elite institutions is no inoculation against bad faith, conventional thinking and intellectual and moral cowardice.  On the contrary, it is all too often a predictor of it.  And what is worse: it cloaks bad faith, conventional thinking  and intellectual and moral cowardice  in fancy, pretty packages of self-justification.

Political grandstanding whims-- such as the uncharacteristically clever notion that Joseph McCarthy got into his head at just the right moment that his career would be abetted by reckless brandishing of the cudgel of  accusations of softness on communism against convenient targets in the government and in the opposition-- can have corrosive long-lasting effects on the course of history.  The deadly effectiveness of McCarthyism as a tool of intimidation and domination could in fact arguably be blamed even years after its inevitable coming apart for creating an atmosphere in which adventurism in Vietnam made political sense in a counterbalancing way to progressively minded Democrats.

The Bay of Pigs, which Kennedy elected in bad faith to pursue as a demonstration of his administration's competence, was a disaster that was the seed for Vietnam which was itself similarly elected in bad faith in hopes of redeeming his administration's competence. 

If you see something, say something.  Practiced by the same elite class of people as the political class, journalism becomes the curation of the status quo.  If you do journalism, you have a duty to humanity to sound the alarm on mistakes waiting to happen.

Nearly 50 years since the American evacuation of Vietnam we have failed every opportunity to demonstrate that we have learned from the well-documented, the exposed history of Vietnam.  Each circumstance "different this time", yet all of them tragically the same in the same essential sin.  And now, Ukraine. 

Knoxville: Summer of 1915

Samuel Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915, written in 1947, performed here by Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra with Maria Valdes, soprano recorded in Santa Monica in November 2016.

 The words are adapted from a deliberately improvisational reminiscence by James Agee, an impressionistic remembrance of his life the summer before the death of his father in an automobile accident when he was six.

The tragicomedy of eating

Tom and Greg have a meal of ortolans on HBO's Succession.

Food.  It's what's for dinner.    

Sitting at my desk the other day engrossed in one of the many intractable problems put before me all day by my fellow sequestered colleagues, I became conscious of the unmistakeable cling-clang-crunch-crunch-crunch-crunch-crunch of our dog, Argos, at his food dish in the kitchen.  The way in which the domestic now dwells within the workaday is one of the most salient aspects of this new life of remote work for me.  I could get used to being reminded throughout the day that life goes on beyond the glow of my laptop.  But nothing more poignantly breaks the work bubble for me than the sound effects of an animal eating.  The image formed in my mind was of him lowering his neck like a crane to get his face in the mixture of a paste of chicken parts and crunchy nuggets of which he clamps as much in his mouth as he can, then the retraction, and my favorite part of it, the scoping of the room as he pulverizes the mélange into a swallowable mush with his choppers.  The surroundings that he scans are his cereal box-- something to do with himself while his mouth is straightforwardly engaged in his survival.  If I'm in the surroundings, it's me he's vacantly reading.  If he could speak, I'm pretty sure what he'd say would be, "Ehhhh, what's up, Doc?"  

I can't seem to forget the utter dependence he has on me for food.  When I am hungry I get to browse the cupboards for a suitable snack.  When he is hungry, he has to wait for me to catch on.  I feel guilty about the imbalance, and confess I spoil him and his kitty brother and sister as well more than society deems proper.  But perhaps I am confusing empathy toward the survival plight of the domesticated critter with the projection of my own hangups about eating onto my pets' interest in food.

Pursuit of sustenance and the avoidance of famine is a perpetual human condition-- a driver of human technology and conquest-- but there is something perverse about it in American culture.  In a land of plenty, people still starve.  The wealthiest starve themselves on purpose as a demonstration of their fitness for their position on top.  Concern about food seems to be part of the American psyche.  As prevalent as asceticism is, it is no match for its counterpart -- indulgence. 

When George Carlin was good no one was better.  Because of this, there's a tendency of many to treat his words as oracular.  But as close as he comes to infallibility, it's not out of keeping with his talent for cutting through the shit of what passes as sacred that when he was bad, he was Sebastian Maniscalco bad.  He was never worse than when riffing about how fat and stupid Americans are (although he comes close with his dismissal of environmentalism on the basis of how obnoxious some environmentalists can be).  On the topic of obesity, it is evident: Americans are fat.  I am an example of it.  It is surely a sign of something about the American condition.  Carlin equates it with American greed and laziness and the hollowness of American mall culture.  For someone as sharply observant about the pathologies that truly make America exceptional, it's disappointing that Carlin milks easy laughs out of the topic by blaming fatness on the fat.  

I am fat ladies and gentlemen for the same reason that George Carlin was stoned so much of the time.  To dull the pain.  It's not just the pain of our culture's hostility to poverty and to the suffering of others.  There is genuine pain to be found in the slow torturous drip of American relentless intolerance of the unhomogenized.  It's the pressure to homogenize that screams at you in a monotone from your TV and out the windows of your car as you drive American streets. Many Americans succumb to it.  But I am convinced that the same drive that fills our grocery shelves with fattening junk and compels so many of us, wittingly or not, to obligingly pursue the comfort of the greasy, nutty, chocolaty, cheesy, spicy, velvety goodness of a mouthful of non-nutritious processed taste is on some level a reaction to the oppressive blandness that is required of American lifestyles in order to avoid hassle and shame and blame for the effect that your own slice of the massive American inequality will have on your psyche.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not exonerating anyone for the compulsion to choose little sips of delight over the austerity of good, lean health as if selective self-denial were a prerequisite for vacuous prosperity.  But who can blame us?      

February Miscellany

National Transportation Safety Board 

 

I have the February blahs folks.  My problem, not yours.  But it's a short month, so I hear, which does mean that in order to feed the beast of public clamor for my words, I must heed any and every inkling of inspiration that graces my attention span.  Ergo, the ensuing listicle of items.

1) I've seen a couple of videos recently rebutting this fellow, Rick Beato, a musician by education and avocation and a YouTuber of some renown, on his speculation about the threat that Gen Z poses to the future of music and his critique of the use of autotune as a musical flavoring.  Rick Beato is years younger than me chronologically according to wikipedia, but let's just say, in terms of musical preferences, he's my elder.   The heroes of the music he adulates -- rock, jazz, country-- were already long in the tooth when he came of age in the 80s.   He had the misfortune I had of coming up between revolutions. I enjoyed a few of his takes on specific songs when I first came across his channel not long ago, but  when I saw the title of the Gen Z video I got strong uh-oh feelings.  I didn't watch the video and cooled on the rest of his offerings because of it, but sight unseen, I still preferred to give a musical expert the benefit of the doubt that he would probably offer a bit more than crotchetiness in considering the music of the succeeding generation in spite of the click bait title.  Apparently my gut instinct was more correct than my generosity of spirit.  It's really nothing special that old people don't care for their grandkid's music.  Rick Beato's grandparents hated his progressive rock collection too.  Musical snobbery in my long experience is a declaration of the limits of one's taste, appetite and imagination-- I don't care how many degrees you have in it.  It's old, buddy.  And kind of sad.

2) Another YouTube experience that excited my synapses concerned Rebecca Watson's studiously antiseptic take on insinuations of underreporting about the  derailment of  50 cars on a 141 car train near East Palestine, Ohio, releasing a cloud of a growing list of toxins-- including vinyl chloride, "butyl acrylate, ethylhexyl acrylate, ethylene glycol monobutyl ether, isobutylene, combustible liquids, and benzene residue"--  that are causing health issues in the area.  In spite of an otherwise reasoned account, Watson minimized reported damage, failing to mention documented deaths of pets, fish and frogs in the affected area. Watson  also minimized the heavy-handed arrest of a reporter at Gov Mike DeWine's news conference on  the crisis.  She also dismissed concern that the topic was being shut out by the ongoing China balloon saga, the latest mass shooting, Russia's latest aggressions in Ukraine, the latest lies of George Santos, frankly cherry picking a reddit critic to mock the source of the criticism.  Watson in general can be counted on to do stellar work on the topics she covers,  and in spite of the pressure of her thumb on the scale to disappear any hint of impropriety on the part of the mainstream media or Ohio officials as a way of refuting sensational accusations of conspiracy from alternative media critics and skeptics, this video was no exception.  Yet-- while she acknowledged the obvious advantage that the freight company, Norfolk Southern, is likely to take from their vast financial resources to downplay the tragedy and kill every threat of consequence they are apt to face for the role of their negligence in causing the incident (to say nothing of the negligence of the Biden administration in not restoring regulations removed by the Trump administration that permit trains of toxic chemicals of extreme length as a cost and labor saving measure on the part of these companies), and she did touch upon one of the most egregious examples of it in the company's exploitation of its employees to a lethal extent--  in her dispassionate appeal against passion, why could I not shake a desire to issue a warning -- "Don't turn into Steven Pinker!"  

3) In retrospect, ladies and gentlemen, in my zeal to own up to my own lameness as a revolutionary, I was remiss in my discussion of Revolutionary Blackout Network's takedown of Nina Turner and David Sirota last month in neglecting to defend them from attack.  A commenter to the video encouraged the hosts to "keep punching up" which I readily personalized as referring to my direction.  While I am certain I'm on nowhere near the same plane as Nina Turner and David Sirota and while no one is theoretically above reproach, it does occur to me, that someone who thinks that Turner and Sirota are up is really misdirecting their punch.  If you think the two Bernie Sanders warriors are up, you are not punching nearly up enough.  In fact, what is wrong with you?  I accept without reservation that as miserable as I am because of the same forces that oppress and immiserate the hosts and listeners of Revolutionary Blackout Network, I could personally always use some smacking upside the head-- I have it coming.  Nina Turner and David Sirota on the other hand-- famous and yes, even more comfortable than I am-- are fighting for your ass, motherfuckers.  What are you doing?  Focus your anger and your righteousness where it really belongs and you'll find so many more people with you.  Including me.  And we need people.  You need people, people. Come on!