Some quick thoughts on some articles worth reading from the last couple of days.

Masha Gessen: Trump is collapsing the language of reality

I’ve been reading Masha Gessen for years now, but she has proven especially indispensable throughout the Trumppening, interpreting the propagandist, totalitarian impulses of the administration through her understanding of Putin’s Russia. She writes here of attending a public talk in which the current director of policy planning at the State Department was interviewed by the person who she succeeded in that job.

[The familiar-enough policy jargon] … was hollow now, like the words meant nothing. Not literally nothing, of course—words always convey some meaning, and the meaning inevitably changes depending on the speaker and the context—but here the chasm between what the words might have meant to one interlocutor and what they meant when spoken by the other was so vast that it was as though the words were no longer part of a recognizable language.

(…)

“[Trump] … has forced the foreign-policy establishment to revisit “first principles,” Skinner said—most importantly, to debate the meaning of national sovereignty. She did not elaborate on the substance of the debate, and one got the impression that the debate was rather an exercise in translating the slogan “America first” into the language of bureaucracy. It was like saying that someone who has carpet-bombed your city has turned your fellow-citizens into builders again: technically it’s true, but morally and intellectually it is a lie.

(…)

I have heard talk like this before, in Russia. A government official once told me that he “carried out emanations”: not policies, laws, or even orders but signals akin to what Skinner called “hunches and instincts.” It’s what officials do in countries that are led by a combination of ignorance and corruption. 

She concludes by remarking on just how politely the audience responded to the government official who described her job at the Department of State in terms of figuring out ways to massage the president’s vague, xenophobic sloganeering into a coherent foreign policy. How does a country get from here to there? By a bunch of polite people just doing their job, and a bunch of other polite people acting like that’s perfectly normal.

Amazon wants to scare the living shit out of you

Amazon is one of the biggest companies in the world. They have sold over 100 million listening and recording devices to which they have remote access pretty much whenever they want it, most of them audio-only, plenty of them with video. They sell web-accessible home security camera systems, and last year they bought Ring, the doorbell company that’s actually a home surveillance outfit. And now they want to use all those Ring doorbells to help report crime news.

Ring wants to be “covering local crime” everywhere, down to the house and neighborhood level. So one managing editor, plus however many other people are on this team, is supposed to be creating a thoughtful, nonexploitative editorial product that is sending journalistically sound “breaking news crime alerts,” in real time, all across the country. Are they really delivering news or just regular pulses of fear in push-notification form? If that’s the job, it is literally impossible to do responsibly.

I have a long-simmering but still nowhere near ready dystopian sci-fi idea about the future of surveillance and privacy, and it has to do with the idea that we will all be co-opted into the business of spying on each other. The sheer amount of data produced by the oncoming total surveillance state, and the ineffectiveness of THE ALGORITHMS to deal with it all, will necessitate a diffuse network of individuals with general intelligence to put their eyes to a screen and sort through the noise—you know, all of us. Each individual will be assigned a handful of anonymized-ish subjects, whose activity and behavior will be captured by their devices and the devices all around them, and then turned into a daily digest that will be reviewed by the watcher. Watchers will be able to report suspicious or outright criminal behavior, and otherwise make decisions regarding their subjects’ Civic Credit Rating. We will all be watchers, we will all be subjects of other watchers. Most people aren’t concerned about true privacy, anyway—”privacy” seems to mostly be about controlling the story you tell the world about yourself.

Anyway, don’t put Amazon cameras in your goddamn house, and don’t get your news from doorbell security camera companies, you weirdos.

This will be the thing that finally takes him down!

The president is a craven scam artist, lifelong shady huckster, and his entire life is built on a series of tax cheating corrupt frauds, and we think maybe the Constitutional issue that will finally trip him up will be that he’s collecting HOA fees from foreign tenants? I’m not saying I think he hasn’t unconstitutionally materially benefited from the presidency, I’m saying that trying to take down Trump on emoluments is like trying to take down Galactic Emperor Palpatine on OSHA violations, except that OSHA violations were Palpatine’s calling card, subtle campaign promise, and the exact thing everybody who wanted him to take over expected him to do.

And he’s got the Justice Department saying that an emolument isn’t an emolument, only an outright bribe is an emolument, because Trump knows that concepts like justice are only as real as we believe them to be.

Just more transparent grift

At some point later that evening, a group repaired to Mar-a-Lago’s Library Bar, a wood-paneled study with a portrait of Trump in tennis whites (titled “The Visionary”) hanging nearby. The group asked the bartender to leave the room so it “could speak confidentially,” according to an email written by Mar-a-Lago’s catering director, Brooke Watson.

The Secret Service guarded the door, according to the email. The bartender wasn’t allowed to return. And members of the group began pouring themselves drinks. No one paid.

Six days later, on April 13, Mar-a-Lago created a bill for those drinks, tallying $838 worth of alcohol plus a 20% service charge. It covered 54 drinks (making for an average price of $18.62 each) of premium liquor: Chopin vodka, Patron and Don Julio Blanco tequilas and Woodford Reserve bourbon. Watson’s email did not specify how many people consumed the alcohol or who the participants were.

Leave it to the president who is the living embodiment of the Ugly American cliche to engage in such small, almost petty grift. Trump is a kid who walks up to the unguarded bowl of “Take One, Please” candy on Halloween, dumps it all into his already-full pillowcase, and then, heading back to the street, brags to the kids walking up the driveway that the people at this house are total suckers. And half the kids admire him for it.

The state of Virginia has kept a likely innocent man in prison for more than thirty years

Jens Soering falsely confessed to the double murder of his girlfriend’s parents in a bid to keep her from being executed, and has spent his entire adult life in prison as a result. DNA evidence has all-but cleared him, and it seems likely Soering would have already been pardoned if Terry McAuliffe hadn’t been harboring presidential ambitions when he left the Governor’s mansion. WaPo did a feature about the whole thing a couple of years ago, and there’s also a documentary, because of course there is. One more reason why the death penalty is ineffective and monstrous and something no civilized people should condone.

Fighting the InfoWar on Alex Jones’ Home Field

Facebook banned Alex Jones and a handful of others from its platforms this week, choosing to breathe life into the central claim that Jones has been making for his entire career—namely, that THEY don’t want you to know the TRUTH, and they’ll do anything to cover it up. I won’t pretend to know what, exactly, “we” are supposed to do about people and organizations like Jones and InfoWars, but banning them from what has become the public square just doesn’t seem like the right answer to me. The weird fact that Jones has embraced Trump and his hardcore institutionalist-defenders like Bill Barr as American heroes, and as a result wrapped himself up in what has become the Republican base more than could have been imagined ten years ago, means that this move will believably scan as “bias against conservatives” to their mutual supporters. Trump’s late political life got its start with his birtherism promotion, after all—something I first heard espoused by erstwhile Jones pal Jerome Corsi long before Trump ever started in on it. The (relative) mainstreaming of Jones-ian galaxy-brain conspiracy absurdity like QAnon means that this attempt to drive InfoWars and any posts from that domain from these platforms will only result in reinforcing Jones’ central claim in the minds of more people than he could possibly hope to convince on his own.

Bill Barr should absolutely be impeached

Every week, there are a thousand different, terrifying examples of the way our shared, common, accepted objective reality represents an ever-shrinking slice of the whole. The divergent takes on Bill Barr’s performance as Attorney General are just one more.

The Wall Street Journal, like Trump and his surrogates, believes Trump finally has “a real Attorney General.”

He was supposed to be [the Democrats'] fast-track to impeachment. Now they’re left trying to gin up an obstruction tale, but the probe wasn’t obstructed and there was no underlying crime. So they’re shouting and pounding the table against Bill Barr for acting like a real Attorney General.

I don’t know how you can watch Bill Barr’s appearance before the Senate and see him as anything other than a weaselly personal attorney for the President, more interested in being lawyerly technically-not-perjuring than in any notions of real honesty and candor. I could get into it all over again, but these professionals do the job, too:

Bouie: Bill Barr’s Perverse Theory of Justice

Whether out of sycophantic loyalty or a deep-seated belief in executive impunity, Barr has used his position to insulate the president from legal scrutiny. He has done everything in his power to downplay the impact of the special counsel’s investigation.

He did not hesitate, for example, to frame Robert Mueller’s findings as an exoneration of the president, despite a report that said otherwise. By itself, this gave Trump the appearance of vindication, as major media outlets declared him innocent of “collusion.”

Glasser: Trump, Wrecker of Reputations

For his part, Barr, once again, acted more as the President’s defense lawyer than as his Attorney General. Taking a maximalist position on Presidential power, Barr argued that Trump would be well within his rights to shut down any investigation of himself if he believed it to be unfair. Surely, that statement will go down as one of the most extraordinary claims of executive authority since Richard Nixon said that “when the President does it, that means it’s not illegal.” Throughout his appearance, Barr continued to assert that Trump had been cleared of all wrongdoing by the Mueller investigation, while admitting, under questioning by Senator Kamala Harris, that he and his deputy had not actually looked at the underlying evidence of Presidential obstruction assembled by Mueller before determining that it was not sufficient to warrant charges.

Wittes: The Catastrophic Performance of Bill Barr

This one is quite thorough—please read it, it’s a good piece, and thorough—with the bulk of it laying out step-by-step how Barr’s mischaracterizations and omissions have built on one another to allow him to paint an entirely dishonest picture of the Mueller Report and Trump’s behavior without actually telling any identifiable factual untruths.

Not in my memory has a sitting attorney general more diminished the credibility of his department on any subject. It is a kind of trope of political opposition in every administration that the attorney general—whoever he or she is—is politicizing the Justice Department and acting as a defense lawyer for the president. In this case it is true.

Barr has consistently sought to spin his department’s work in a highly political fashion, and he has done so to cast the president’s conduct in the most favorable possible light. Trump serially complained that Jeff Sessions didn’t act to “protect” him. Matthew Whitaker never had the stature or internal clout to do so effectively. In Barr, Trump has found his man.

(…)

Barr did not lie in any of these statements. He did not, as some people insist, commit perjury. I haven’t found a sentence he has written or said that cannot be defended as truthful on its own terms, if only in some literal sense. But it is possible to mislead without lying. One can be dishonest before Congress without perjury. And one can convey sweeping untruths without substantial factual misstatement. This is what Barr has been doing since that first letter. And it is utterly beneath the United States Department of Justice.

(…)

What if Barr actually believes it all? That is, what if he has sufficiently become a creature of the factual ecosystem of Trump’s support that he truly believes that the real problem here was not a president who accepted (noncriminally, of course) assistance from a hostile foreign power during his campaign, lied serially about it, and tried repeatedly to frustrate investigation of his conduct? What if Barr actually believes that closing a criminal case on these matters is the end of the historical conversation, as well as the end of the criminal conversation? What if he is actually untroubled by the substance of what Mueller reported and, like Rudy Giuliani, believes it’s okay for presidential candidates to take “dirt” from foreign governments on their rivals and okay for presidents to call up investigations of those rivals? What if he really believes that the true problem here was the investigators?

Yes, what if? What if there’s a total fracture in our common experience of the world, something fundamentally broken about the platform of reality such that we cannot agree about the things that are happening right in front of our faces? The only solution, obviously, is a system of total and constant surveillance. We’ll all be watched, and we’ll all be watchers, privacy guaranteed by anonymizing (more or less) our total revealed nakedness, our personal narratives challenged only by the score next to our name. Of course, it will be opt-in, and you can check out whenever you like. But can you, really? Is there anywhere else for respectable people to go, to be heard? What are you trying to hide?