Monthly Archive: October 2016

Slate EVISCERATES Keith Olbermann and Our Vogue for Snide Political Monologues in an EPIC RANT

A couple of headlines, just from the past few weeks: “Elizabeth Warren Eviscerate ‘Gutless’ Wells Fargo CEO,” “Trevor Noah Eviscerates Matt Lauer’s Presidential Forum Performance,” “Soledad O’Brien Eviscerates CNN,” “This Celebrity-Packed Political Ad Eviscerates Donald Trump.” The only other arena that sees nearly as much evisceration is sports, but it’s not even close: Politics has become incredibly dangerous. There must be some kind of brutal revolt in progress, an insurrection in which nobody is so secure and powerful that he might not find his guts suddenly sliding out of a gashed-open belly; the halls of government are blood-flecked and stink of human garum, and politicians wade to work through the dug-out viscera of their fallen colleagues. An incredible massacre, surely.

So where are all the bodies?

Every week brings news of gruesome tortures, but the next day the victims are still there, guts still wobbling happily inside their skin, and still pumping out the same old shit. Wells Fargo is still printing money; CNN is still seeping blather; Donald Trump might still stomp his way to a big, beautiful nuclear arsenal. Nothing is tamer, nothing is more toothless, more flaccid, more uselessly limp and passive and sterile than the click-mediated evisceration. In a recent column, the New York Times’ Ross Douthat writes that various liberal monologists have built a new political consensus, “an echo chamber from which the imagination struggles to escape”—which probably says far more about the powers of Ross Douthat’s imagination than it does about the state of the discourse. Political invective is weak, far weaker now than it’s ever been. Look at the gleeful pornographic slanders of ancient Rome or revolutionary France, Marx tearing into Louis-Napoléon, or Malcolm X declaiming the sins of white America, and try to find even an echo of that caustic fury in a talk-show host raising his eyebrows. It’s not just that these things are ineffective (after all, what have you or I ever actually done to stop the banking system? What could we do?), they’re not even polemical. Instead of exposing the evils of the world, our ranters have resigned themselves to laughing at stupid people. Real polemic surges up from below; these people look down and sneer. The left—and these eviscerations are always almost from something that, at the very least, calls itself the left—has lost something important. It still likes to see itself as an agent of merciless justice, cutting through the stomachs of its enemies, but it’s had a bad turn; it can no longer stand the sight of blood.

From: Slate EVISCERATES Keith Olbermann and Our Vogue for Snide Political Monologues in an EPIC RANT

Kevin Williamson: A Lesson in Cooperative Capitalism

In theory, this kind of cooperation should not exist. If every utility executive were in fact a rational specimen of Homo economicus, he would gleefully greet hurricanes that put his competitors at a disadvantage and imposed large losses on them. (Utilities may not often compete directly with one another for customers, but they do compete for capital.) The difference of a few tenths of a percentage point in the dividend could be the difference between a large institutional investor putting its money into Jones Power instead of Smith Power, with billions of dollars potentially at stake. And, yet, Jones Power does not revel in Smith Power’s troubles — instead, it sends its own workers into Smith’s market to help out Smith’s customers.

No doubt you could construct a plausible economic narrative in which this can all be explained in terms of each firm seeking to secure its own self-interest very broadly defined — utilities maximizing utility.

But that misses the point.

NRO: After the Storm: In Florida and Beyond, a Lesson in Cooperative Capitalism

Bunch: Blue Apron and the Tensions Within The Liberal Coalition

There’s a reason businesses screen for criminal backgrounds when they’re trying to decide who to hire: Past behavior is a pretty solid predictor for future behavior, and people with a tendency to commit violent crimes are, all things being equal, going to be more difficult employees than those with no such history. Whether it’s an aversion to taking orders from management or a difficulty in working with others, problems pop up.

And this is why campaigns like “ban the box,” an effort to eliminate questions about criminal backgrounds on job applications, have emerged: Having been convicted of a crime is a scarlet letter on an application. As such, advocates for the formerly imprisoned are trying to relieve employers of that information altogether, a move generally applauded on the left. But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t advocate for those convicted of violent crimes to face no stigma upon release and then also be surprised when businesses that hire such people suffer from more difficult work environments and more frequent interactions with the police.

Robots and drones could keep an eye out for oil workers.
There’s something Utopian in this desire to have it both ways. I’m reminded of Freddie deBoer’s essay on Nate Parker and the controversy surrounding “The Birth of a Nation”: you can’t claim to be in favor of restorative justice while condemning in perpetuity a man acquitted of a crime. Or Alyssa’s essay earlier this week on the Elena Ferrante contretemps: you can’t claim to oppose cultural appropriation and be upset when an appropriator is exposed, hiding behind irrelevant arguments against Internet harassment and “doxxing.”

From: Blue Apron and the Tensions Within The Liberal Coalition