TakeDump LinkStorm! Run away!
As of this very moment, I have 47 browser tabs open on my laptop browser and another 78 tabs open on my phone’s browser. Most of these are probably articles I’ve already read, a bunch are articles I intend to read, maybe there’s a recipe or two in there I might want to make someday—the only thing that’s certain is that that’s way too many tabs. I will now see how many of these I can comment on and clear from my poor devices’ memories in the next hour or so. It’s the TakeDump LinkStorm—find shelter!
(1) WaPo’s Max Boot: The dirty little secret of the ‘Trump Doctrine’: There isn’t one
…McMaster showed he was no Trumpkin by praising international organizations such as NATO and the United Nations, describing Russia as a threat, and even including a coded call for nation-building. Not surprisingly, his strategy was DOA. McMaster’s successor, John Bolton, told the Atlantic the strategy is “filed away . . . and consulted by no one.”
(…)
This is a president who is capable of changing his mind between the beginning and end of a single sentence. His foreign policy defies sense or reason. The Trump Doctrine is simply: Trump does whatever the hell he wants. His pet intellectuals only discredit themselves by crediting Trump with a compelling and comprehensive worldview.
Boot’s basically got it right, but it misses something that I’ve heard expressed well somewhere else, but I don’t care to open another tab and track it down for attribution right now. Trump’s “foreign policy” isn’t a foreign policy, it’s a domestic policy. There is no interest in something that would resemble a traditional executive doctrine in terms of organizing relations between nations—rather, everything comes down to how it makes Trump look to his base at home.
(2) More of WaPo’s Goddamn Max Boot: It’s time for us to have an unapologetic atheist in the Oval Office
The outsize political role of pastors in U.S. politics has sometimes been good and sometimes bad; both segregationists and civil rights activists cited the Bible. Today, the consequences are often simply perverse. Some evangelicals condemn Pete Buttigieg, a Christian combat veteran, for being gay, yet insist that God selected Donald Trump — a thrice-married adulterer and serial liar whose life has been devoted to the pursuit of mammon — as president.
I doubt that the American people will elect an avowed atheist to the presidency in the next twenty or thirty years. We are a deeply stupid people in this way. If (3) 40% of voters admit that atheism is disqualifying for candidates that they otherwise share a party and an ideology with, imagine how high that number would climb in a nasty campaign, rather than in the clinical setting of answering a poll question.
Speaking of atheists, did you know there are still (4) eight state constitutions that include restrictions on what functions non-believers can serve in public life? A deeply, deeply stupid people.
(5) CNBC: The company that makes a literal goddamn billion dollars a year on the Pokemon Go! app is set to launch their next big augmented reality game, based in the Harry Potter universe. There will be nerds running all over the place casting spells and shit with their phones soon!
Instead of staying glued to screens, the global mystery game — which will launch in 19 languages — will let players explore real-world surroundings, cast spells, and encounter fantastic beasts and iconic characters from the Harry Potter films along the way. It is an idea Niantic CEO John Hanke refers to as “real-world social.”
I.e. “old-world” social.
“We want to get people out and about and find out more about their world through exploration and discovery,” said Niantic’s chief marketing officer, Mike Quigley.
He said that every Niantic project is built on three ideas: exploration, exercise, and real-world social: “Get together in the world and have real human interaction.”
Real human interaction?! You think that’s what I’m after when I bury my face in this thing, you dopes? Unless the Aveda Kedavra spell works on real-world mosquitoes and maybe the occasional door-knocking weirdo, I think I’ll pass.
(6) Liz Warren wants to turn the military green.
The Pentagon itself recognizes the threat. Our military’s top priority is readiness — ensuring that our service members are prepared to perform their mission. (…) But captured by Big Oil and its money, Washington continues to deny the threat and stand in the way of meaningful action to address it.
Nibbling around the edges of the problem is no longer enough — the urgency of the moment demands more. That’s why today I am introducing my Defense Climate Resiliency and Readiness Act to harden the U.S. military against the threat posed by climate change, and to leverage its huge energy footprint as part of our climate solution.
It starts with an ambitious goal: consistent with the objectives of the Green New Deal, the Pentagon should achieve net zero carbon emissions for all its non-combat bases and infrastructure by 2030.
Liz is probably the second-most unabashedly progressive candidate with a reasonable shot at the nomination behind Bernie, right? And her big plan for the military isn’t to take on the military industrial complex, but to make it more sustainable. I guess when Barack Obama is derided as a SOCIALIST for a decade, it really does change the parameters of what “leftist” means in this country.
(7) NatGeo: There’s hot ice somewhere down in the core of Uranus, and probably elsewhere in the universe, but also in Uranus.
Now, researchers have snapped x-ray images of what might be the newest entrant to ice’s diversity: a highly electrically conductive material known as superionic ice. As the team reports today in the journal Nature, this ice exists at pressures between one and four million times that at sea level and temperatures half as hot as the surface of the sun.
(…)
While normally unachievable on Earth, such conditions should be present deep inside the watery giants Uranus and Neptune, potentially helping to explain how these distant planets work, including the origins of their unusual magnetic fields.
I’m regularly absolutely astonished by the crazy shit we figure out about the universe while having basically no idea how or why we figured it out. I’m glad there are people out there doing it, though. Superionic Ice XVIII—the NFL has probably already sent a cease and desist letter to these scientists for the use of “super” and roman numerals.
Also from National Geographic, (8) scientists think tectonic activity might be “about” to shrink the Atlantic Ocean.
If confirmed, the new work would be the first time an oceanic plate has been caught in the act of peeling—and it may mark one of the earliest stages of the Atlantic Ocean shrinking, sending Europe inching toward Canada as predicted by some models of tectonic activity.
As best I can tell, these shifting tectonic plates will not open a hole in the ocean floor through which the Atlantic will drain, which is the picture that sprang to mind as I read the headline. That’s probably good.
Closed without bothering to attempt to read again, because I am not the masochist I thought I was when I first clicked on this link some number of weeks ago: (9) a review of David Brooks’ new book.
I keep meaning to make the twenty minute drive to where this (10) massive confederate flag is waving by the highway so I can blog about it, but I just haven’t made it happen. A while back I blarghed about this profoundly stupid Virginia law that makes it impossible for local authorities to dismantle once-approved war memorials, and the dopes who put up this giant flag are claiming protection under that law.
At some point after the erection of the flag, the Flaggers argued that the pole and flag are a monument to the Civil War and Proffitt, pointing to a portion of the state code currently preventing the removal of the two Confederate statues in downtown Charlottesville.
Robinson said the monument claim was also not presented in the petition of appeal.
The issue has not been ruled on in court yet.
Look, I know that the word “faggot” is widely out of fashion, and certainly highly PROBLEMATIC these days, and that’s all well and good. But I propose that all of these Confederate flag humpers should be hereafter referred to as flaggots. We can have the glorious mouthfeel of the word back, and it is directed at an undeniably worthy target. All I have to do is convince the AP Style Guide, or at least the Urban Dictionary. Who’s with me?! Anyone? No?
WaPo: (11) Claiming two years of his presidency were ‘stolen,’ Trump suggests he’s owed overtime
He retweeted a proposal offered by Jerry Falwell Jr., the president of Liberty University, that he be granted another two years in office as recompense for time lost to the Russia investigation. Half of his first term, Trump wrote in a Twitter dispatch of his own, had been “stolen.”
(…)
The argument was perhaps tongue-in-cheek, leading some legal experts to dismiss the comments as bravado. Others, however, saw the president’s apparent longing to overstay his four-year term in office as an assault on the rule of law. That it was raised playfully, they said, was small comfort, especially given Trump’s playful refusal, in the fall of 2016, to say that he would accept the outcome of an election that polling suggested he was destined to lose.
(…)
In a pair of tweets — re-posted Sunday night to correct a spelling error in his earlier pronouncement — the president said two years of his presidency had been squandered by the “Collusion Delusion.”
This fucking moron spent all his time focusing on and shouting about an ongoing investigation by his own Justice department that was never going to indict a sitting president, whose legitimacy he rejects even as he claims it totally exonerates him, all while he had Republican control of both houses of Congress, and somehow it’s the other guys that were squandering time. The dumbest possible shithead is the President of the United States, and I find myself somehow still frequently surprised by how stupid and awful he is. His capacity to astonish with stupidity and awfulness are perhaps his greatest superpowers.
Snopes: (12) No, Sonic is not going to be transgender in his upcoming film in order to satisfy the 2019 SJW crowd, you morons. Get a load of this meme. It showed up on my FB feed, because of course it did.
None of that is a thing. Not any layer of it is a thing. It’s so dumb, so willfully dumb, at every level one can imagine trying to engage with it, that my brain ceases to function. I can feel it locking up even now, my brain now just two slabs of unlubricated metal slammed against each other, moving in opposite directions, never to come unstuck again.
The Atlantic: (13) Experts are very, very bad at forecasting the future, and often tend to double down on their bad predictions when confronted with being wrong.
Yet both [extremely wrong] men dug in. Each declared his faith in science and the undisputed primacy of facts. And each continued to miss the value of the other’s ideas. Ehrlich was wrong about the apocalypse, but right on aspects of environmental degradation. Simon was right about the influence of human ingenuity on food and energy supplies, but wrong in claiming that improvements in air and water quality validated his theories. Ironically, those improvements were bolstered through regulations pressed by Ehrlich and others.
Ideally, intellectual sparring partners “hone each other’s arguments so that they are sharper and better,” the Yale historian Paul Sabin wrote in The Bet. “The opposite happened with Paul Ehrlich and Julian Simon.” As each man amassed more information for his own view, each became more dogmatic, and the inadequacies in his model of the world grew ever more stark.
The piece is more optimistic than I’m making it out to be here, pointing as it does to two types of forecasters, including one type that is better about learning from their mistakes. But goddamn:
Some made authoritative predictions that turned out to be wildly wrong—then updated their theories in the wrong direction. They became even more convinced of the original beliefs that had led them astray.
If that doesn’t explain an awful lot about the world, experts and otherwise!
Without getting into the larger ethical or moral questions (14) here: Georgia just criminalized abortion. I know abortion is something the religious right, and Republicans in general, have been trying to get in front of a friendly Supreme Court for forty years now, but what they’re doing in Georgia and Alabama and Missouri and elsewhere is really, really going to backfire in 2020. Public opinion polls on abortion have been among the most consistent of any “social” issue you can come up with, but this is the sort of legislation that really animates otherwise relatively apathetic voters, I think.
The New Yorker (15) brings us a bunch of pretty photos of life in rural America.
The distance between my world, in 1990, and the world shown in the pictures of their 1990 probably cannot be overstated. This, despite the fact that I know exactly how that chair felt to sit in, and what the plastic paint felt and looked like as I flaked it off with my thumb and forefinger. This, despite the fact that I was about those kids age at the time. This, despite the fact that I know exactly what that fan in the window sounds like, and how it felt blowing right in my face. Despite the similarities, I feel more confronted by how they’re living their life than I feel I recognize it. I’m not sure what that means.
I don’t know who Eddie Scarry is, exactly, but I know he’s a disingenuous fuckin’ toadie. (16) The Washington Examiner ran this opinion piece shortly after the Times’ latest Trump tax investigation, in which Scarry claims that none of what the Times reported matters because Trump admitted he was in a lot of debt in the 90s when he was on The Apprentice. This is what people are reduced to when they find themselves having to defend the indefensible.
Harpers (17) has an absolutely bonkers story about the second and third lives of American junk. Sometimes, our secondhand shit, sourced from flea markets or trash bins, ends up just piled in a heap on a barge to Haiti, where our old wet mattresses and disused washing machines are sold all over again.
The unloading began at around 8 a.m. on a Sunday. The charter operator, a hulking man with a shaved head named Hanson Rémy—Big’s uncle—had flown down early with several members of his staff to assemble a team of stevedores. Mattresses, stacked ten feet high and tied down with enormous tarps over the cars and trucks that covered most of the Magestic’s deck, were the first cargo to come ashore.
In the courtyard, a half dozen customers waited in the shade of a lone palm tree to catch a glimpse of their merchandise. It can be a week or more before a particular consignment emerges from the bowels of the ship, but the consensus is clear: if you don’t come to the dock to keep track, you’ll never get your stuff. Jean Claude Exantus’s wife and business partner, Acela, a cheerful woman twenty-one years his junior, was there to watch as the first mattresses were heaved three stories down and piled onto wooden dinghies waiting in the harbor.
As the unloading progressed throughout the week, well over a hundred people milled about the dock, drinking beer and making deals on stoves and refrigerators the moment the cargo reached Haitian soil. An agent from Haiti’s National Port Authority sat in a corner filling a small notebook with tick marks for every door and mattress that went past. Several customs officials and a half dozen police officers monitored the unloading, but they seemed to take an easygoing approach to security. As Big remarked, watching his uncle’s operation from the dock: “The chaos is the money.”
A life even those kids in the picture of 1990 Kentucky up there wouldn’t recognize!
The Atlantic (18) isn’t sure Trump knows what he’s talking about with all this trade and tariffs stuff.
In Trump’s mind, tariffs are a potent, unilateral weapon, and protectionism is a potent, necessary economic philosophy. He argues that his tariffs are a direct tax on Beijing—a way of sapping Chinese manufacturers, raising American revenue, aiding domestic businesses, and giving Washington leverage in trade negotiations. “Tariffs are NOW being paid to the United States by China of 25% on 250 Billion Dollars worth of goods & products,” he said on Twitter. “These massive payments go directly to the Treasury of the U.S.”
This is not at all how it works; the Chinese government is no more apt to fork over billions of yuan for Trump’s tariffs than Mexico’s government is to pay for a border wall. Rather, tariffs fall on the American importers of Chinese goods, who often pass those cost increases onto American consumers.
“This is not at all how it works” could show up in virtually any serious news article written about Trump in the last three years.
In his mercantilist, protectionist understanding of the world, trade wars are good, tariffs are a way of hitting the bad guy, and whatever the United States is doing on trade, it is winning. Alas, here in the real world, Trump’s trade war means that consumer goods are about to get more expensive and certain exporting businesses are about to face a much tougher climate, all thanks to the White House.
Sigh.
There were a whole bunch of tabs open on the recent Trump administration belchings about Iran. Without getting into any of it, really, something that strikes me as very different from the run up to the Iraq war in 2003 is that if we really are on the brink of open, direct military conflict with Iran, the administration is making absolutely not effort to actually convince anyone that it would be good or necessary to do so, like they did before Iraq. It’s like they know nothing they say will have credibility with a massive subset of the population anyway, so why bother?
I just closed at least half a dozen tabs about that Theranos HBO documentary, which I had planned on writing about but never did.
The consistency with which this country or culture (or whatever it is that does it) elevates people to the highest of heights simply because they’re willing to unabashedly tell absurd lies very emphatically and authoritatively is reliably disconcerting. All it takes to succeed is an absolute devotion to the lie. People are mostly too polite to tell you to fuck off, whatever the lie is. This is also mostly how people who are “good in the sales business” are good at what they do—most people simply aren’t comfortable telling persistent, smiling people to fuck right off. We should work on that, together.
Seemingly a full quarter of the tabs on my phone are about the latest goddamn vaccinations uproar. I have a big “Heavier Metals” column coming someday soon about belief and the sticky power of ideas and stories, and I’ll address most of that there, but I can sum it up in a sentence or two, here. For all the “follow the facts and the science” talk that the pro-vaccine crowd engages in, I think they’re (19) eliding the fact that it’s a much more belief-based, philosophical position they’re staking out than they’d care to admit. If I’m being honest, it wasn’t a purely scientific or rational decision I made when I chose to vaccinate my kids, because I have only at best a casual, layman’s understanding of the science, no matter how much of my own research I engage in. I chose morally and psychologically and emotionally, too, because of the values of my belief system, and to deny that, while warding REASON and SCIENCE over the heads of the anti-vaccine types, is dishonest and unfair.
I am thoroughly fascinated by this (20) Slate Star Codex blog post, and I will not close it tonight, because I intend to read it again. It is a very (perhaps unnecessarily) long exploration of the perils of trying to be Meaningfully Online at all, and how this one dude is trying to make it all work for himself and the community of commenters that he has built through the years. A taste:
The fact is, it’s very easy to moderate comment sections. It’s very easy to remove spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse. I do it single-handedly on this blog’s 2000+ weekly comments. r/slatestarcodex’s volunteer team of six moderators did it every day on the CW Thread, and you can scroll through week after week of multiple-thousand-post culture war thread and see how thorough a job they did.
But once you remove all those things, you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all.
Some people think society should tolerate pedophilia, are obsessed with this, and can rattle off a laundry list of studies that they say justify their opinion. Some people think police officers are enforcers of oppression and this makes them valid targets for violence. Some people think immigrants are destroying the cultural cohesion necessary for a free and prosperous country. Some people think transwomen are a tool of the patriarchy trying to appropriate female spaces. Some people think Charles Murray and The Bell Curve were right about everything. Some people think Islam represents an existential threat to the West. Some people think women are biologically less likely to be good at or interested in technology. Some people think men are biologically more violent and dangerous to children. Some people just really worry a lot about the Freemasons.
Each of these views has adherents who are, no offense, smarter than you are. Each of these views has, at times, won over entire cultures so completely that disagreeing with them then was as unthinkable as agreeing with them is today. I disagree with most of them but don’t want to be too harsh on any of them. Reasoning correctly about these things is excruciatingly hard, trusting consensus opinion would have led you horrifyingly wrong throughout most of the past, and other options, if they exist, are obscure and full of pitfalls. I tend to go with philosophers from Voltaire to Mill to Popper who say the only solution is to let everybody have their say and then try to figure it out in the marketplace of ideas.
But none of those luminaries had to deal with online comment sections.
Finally, here’s this Atlantic piece (21) about the low-key war Putin’s Russia is waging on the US in an attempt to undermine us without provoking a military response.
All the uncertainty is part of Vladimir Putin’s plan. America’s confusion is both a product and a principal goal of a qualitatively new kind of warfare that the Kremlin is waging—a campaign that systematically targets a democratic but politically divided society whose economy, media environment, and voting systems all depend on vulnerable electronic technologies. The essence of this strategy is to attack U.S. interests just below the threshold that would prompt a military response and then, over time, to stretch that threshold further and further. The purpose of this shadow war is simple: to create what Russian General Valery Gerasimov has called “a permanent front through the entire territory of the enemy state.”
What’s most amusing about fretting about this sort of “shadow war”—which, of course, every single powerful nation engages in to some degree against every single other powerful nation virtually all the time—is that simply giving it a name, and talking about it at all, givens Putin a “victory” on this front. The real mission is to exaggerate, in the minds of a vastly more powerful enemy, Russia’s own power and influence. Mission accomplished!
By no means did I list every tab that I closed, because I do not hate myself nearly that much. Two and a half hours later, I am down to a total of 24 open tabs between my laptop and my phone browsers. It is with a great sense of personal accomplishment and spiritual fulfillment that I publish this post. Tune in next time, when I go plowing through my thousands of unread emails.
I should really consider just (22) chucking my phone into something hard next time. That’ll clear those tabs, right?
