Sleeping With The Enemy in the Anthropocene

"By the entrance to the building, there’s a model of an elderly Neanderthal leaning on a stick. He is smiling benignantly and resembles an unkempt Yogi Berra," Elizabeth Kolbert 

"It’s only fully modern humans who start this thing of venturing out on the ocean where you don’t see land. Part of that is technology, of course; you have to have ships to do it. But there is also, I like to think or say, some madness there. You know? How many people must have sailed out and vanished on the Pacific before you found Easter Island? I mean, it’s ridiculous. And why do you do that? Is it for the glory? For immortality? For curiosity? And now we go to Mars. We never stop,” [says evolutionary geneticist Svante Paabo]. If the defining characteristic of modern humans is this sort of Faustian restlessness, then, by Pääbo’s account, there must be some sort of Faustian gene. Several times, he told me that he thought it should be possible to identify the basis for this “madness” by comparing Neanderthal and human DNA." 

Yeah, this crazy wired ambition and unfortunate tendency to driving other hominids and animals to extinction. Like Neanderthals. Obliteration. Or absorption. Humans! 

I liked Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction. It's a grim subject, sure. Are we in or on the cusp of a sixth mass extinction event and this one caused by humans. A debate that devolves at times into obscure disputes about statistical significance of species loss in various global locations and cases. But Kolbert somehow manages to turn the science into interesting questions about human impacts on the natural world and eases her way into heartening humanizing portraits of scientists in the field studying species loss, trying to stop it, understand its causes, and they're all just well-meaning worker bees, albeit very important ones, trying to help out, increase understanding through science, which is exactly who we ought to want on the job trying to understand and head off extinction threats, or the way I figure. It was a winning popular science book about species extinction. Neat trick. 

"Where the kids routinely outscored the apes was in tasks that involved reading social cues. When the children were given a hint about where to find a reward—someone pointing to or looking at the right container—they took it. The apes either didn’t understand that they were being offered help or couldn’t follow the cue. Similarly, when the children were shown how to obtain a reward, by, say, ripping open a box, they had no trouble grasping the point and imitating the behavior. The apes, once again, were flummoxed. Admittedly, the kids had a big advantage in the social realm, since the experimenters belonged to their own species. But, in general, apes seem to lack the impulse toward collective problem-solving that’s so central to human society."

Sorry, but the "collective problem-solving" skill is not looking good these days but maybe, again, hopeful that scientists are still finding some evidence of these human social skills for cooperation before it has been beat out of them. Although, I should note I saw way more of it in high school students classroom teaching in this century than I ever felt as a high school student in the last one, for sure, but no one to blame there but me. Keep hope alive! 

I've read references to Goethe for ages (and still not sure how to pronounce his name correctly) but I don't think I've read more than quotes and only know second-hand the Faust story. A pact with the devil met at a crossroads promises unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures. Faustian means sacrificing spiritual values for power, knowledge, or selfish material gain until you grow sick of your ceaseless drives and pursuits. Faustian speaks of the tragedy of burning out on ambition. 

Paleogenetics appears to be blowing away the single migration out of Africa theory asserted by genetics as recently as 2002, The Journey of Man, Spencer Wells, which I taught many times and, absolutely, because for one reason I liked Well's united colors of Benetton multicultural angle, but now in evolutionary archaeology they're adding multiple waves of migration, branching off in central Eurasia, some shooting off on their own and some doubling back and reconnecting with Neanderthals until modern humans are finally the last hominids standing. So still empirically multicultural but also evidently very hostile towards others, to put it mildly.  

Humans are incredibly creative and productive and, Kolbert keeps reminding us, astonishingly destructive. These characteristics got us here but also might be pushing us toward extinction. Anyway, I like Kolbert on the case.  

ElizabethKolbert @ The NY-er (Sorry, behind paywall. I've been giving up my mainstream subs, spitefully, frustrated by my vague sense they are all complicit in this disaster, but NY-er remains my favorite long-form journalism, and I know lots of people who don't have the patience for the long-form part. I don't keep up with but a fraction of it but always finding gold. Like Kolbert.) 

"Masculinity Is Good, DEI Is Cancer, And The Military Should Kill All Dems: So ... your average modern conservative?"

“The income inequality in this country and cost-of-living is outrageous,” he [Matthew Livelsberger, Vegas Cybertruck Exploder] added, clearly unaware of who supports policies designed to combat those things. “The number of homeless on our street is embarrassing and disgusting. Have some pride and take care of this.”

I’m pretty sure the solution to this plan, as per those he would like to rally around, would be something along the lines of throwing them in prisons or bringing back workhouses.

“Stop obsessing over diversity,” he wrote, getting back on message. “We are all diverse and DEI is a cancer. Thankfully we rejected the DEI candidate and will have a real President instead of Weekend at Bernie’s.”

Well gee. Maybe we wouldn’t need things like DEI if people like this guy didn’t believe, despite all the easily available evidence to the contrary, that a white guy must be more qualified than a woman of color.

This guy is wacky, but he’s exemplary of something I’ve been saying for a long time now — and no, not just that the people who pull this kind of shit usually turn out to really hate women. It’s that there are so many people out there who have the economic policies of Republicans and Democrats completely switched around in their heads. Or maybe not that, exactly. It’s almost more that these people have convinced themselves that Republicans stand for everything they want and like, even when they are out here actively proposing the complete opposite."

Robyn Pennacchia @ Wonkette

Several steps removed from the 24/7 news avalanche by design, having to ration my intake for mental health reasons like most everybody else I know, even I noted how all the talk about Livelsberger, another untreated PTSD veteran turned violent berserker, went silent as soon as his communications and so real motivations surfaced. I'm assuming his "Weekend at Bernie's" reference refers to Biden but the rest of the same sentence clearly refers to Harris. So, yeah, the cybertruck guy was mixed up. I saw an election campaign sign in my affluent neighborhood (I live on the poor side of town, down by the railroad tracks, by the way) that read: "RFK- Make America Healthy Again." There is a gobsmacking upside-downland quality to our current social hysteria that is unnerving, to say the least. You could say such violent wingnuts as Livelsberger have always been part of America. True. But has there ever been so many of them and whatever their problems have they ever been so pervasive? Pennacchia's take rings true with me with this slight tweak: they, angry white men bent on deaths of despair, in the main identify with Grump Republicans as their party of angry white men and then fit everything else (any actual grievances or proposed solutions) to fit that identification. 

George Santos Praises Facebook’s Decision to Eliminate Fact-checking

 NEW YORK (The Borowitz Report)—The decision by Facebook’s parent company Meta to eliminate fact-checking was “long overdue,” the former congressman George Santos said on Wednesday.

“For far too long, Facebook has been a haven for people hell-bent on spreading facts,” said Santos, who said he was making his statement from the International Space Station.

“I commend Facebook’s decision, and I know that my fellow Beatles agree with me,” he added.

Praising Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg for “freeing Facebook from the tyranny of accuracy,” he declared, “I say this as a citizen, a patriot, and the NHL’s all-time scoring leader.”

"If there is anything that says social media, it’s chatting with people who do not actually exist" and Anti-DEI idiocy

"The demand that Costco abandon DEI came from some conservative “think tank” called the National Center for Public Policy Research, an anodyne name for a group that spends its time trying to get companies to pretend problems such as climate change and bigotry don’t actually exist. Which is about the level of intellectual robustness we would expect from an organization that puts a hack like Peter Schweizer, the nativist who wrote Clinton Cash and has worked on documentaries with Steve Bannon, on its board.

Costco’s board, to its credit, did not cave into this swill the way other companies have done in a never-ending quest to satisfy the perpetually unsatisfied dipshits of the Right. It’s worth quoting at length:

Our success at Costco Wholesale has been built on service to our critical stakeholders: employees, members, and suppliers. Our efforts around diversity, equity and inclusion follow our code of ethics:

For our employees, these efforts are built around inclusion – having all of our employees feel valued and respected. Our efforts at diversity, equity and inclusion remind and reinforce with everyone at our Company the importance of creating opportunities for all. We believe that these efforts enhance our capacity to attract and retain employees who will help our business succeed. This capacity is critical because we owe our success to our now over 300,000 employees around the globe.

God, yes. It is crazy how some anodyne corporate gobbledygook about respect and diversity can actually serve as an emotional release of sorts. But restating basic values of human dignity and respect is something so few people in power do anymore, and won’t happen very often in our emerging tech broligarchy."

Gary Legum @ Wonkette

Not that Clinton Cash or the Clinton Foundation aren't relatives of the massive shakedown operation Grump runs out of his role as POTUS. They are. But at least the Clinton's didn't mix their grift with white supremacy and fascist violence. It is an obvious and crucial difference. 

Cheney Responds to Attacks

"Today, Trump attacked Cheney and others who investigated the events of January 6, 2021, as 'dishonest Thugs.'

Cheney responded: 'Donald, this is not the Soviet Union. You can’t change the truth and you cannot silence us. Remember all your lies about the voting machines, the election workers, your countless allegations of fraud that never happened? Many of your lawyers have been sanctioned, disciplined or disbarred, the courts ruled against you, and dozens of your own White House, administration, and campaign aides testified against you. Remember how you sent a mob to our Capitol and then watched the violence on television and refused for hours to instruct the mob to leave? Remember how your former Vice President prevented you from overturning our Republic? We remember. And now, as you take office again, the American people need to reject your latest malicious falsehoods and stand as the guardrails of our Constitutional Republic—to protect the America we love from you.'"

Letters from an American Historian

The Donald! What a turn of events. Liz was one of the bad guys a short time ago. Her dad is an unapologizing public enemy in the republican party's slide into torture and unaccountable police violence  and hostility to common sense gun controls over the last quarter century. And now Liz is one of the most direct and forceful voices of resistance to the kind of pol, above the law, targets his enemies with violent threats, her dad helped make possible. Not that I'm complaining. We need Never Trumpers, former republicans, rich people, anybody with some common sense and human compassion that will speak out against the lies and corruption. Diehard republicans might wish to counter that there's always lies and corruption in politics. Sure, but if you can't tell the difference you're not paying attention, or worse willing on the tyranny over truth. Dark speculation for the day: If looking back this period marks a significant turn away from democracy and public faith in the rule of law and legal justice the crucial date will be the SCOTUS decision last summer to "pardon" Grump for Jan 6. The miscarriage of justice in that decision is obvious already but we'll learn over the next four years how bad a miscalculation it was.  

Political Violence and the Great Disinhibition

"Political violence is a curious and seductive thing. People routinely see aspects of intention and even valor in political violence notionally aimed at values they agree with, even when they don’t condone the violence itself. We can see this in the fanboying (and girling) around Luigi Mangione. And we can see it around the Jan 6th instigators. (No, I don’t think they’re comparable. You don’t see prominent elected officials cheering on Mangione.) My point here isn’t one of trying to figure out whose violence might be more justifiable. It’s that in cases of violence in the service of goals we might feel broadly aligned with we generally tend to see the violence in more linear and literal terms. The culprit believed very deeply in X or Y and was finally driven to violence because traditional means didn’t work. But it’s not necessarily like that. The train of causation and ideation can run in the opposite direction. You’re motivated toward violence and then you find an ideological framework to fit your hunger for violence into.

It’s this more general disinhibition that seems most relevant, a greater social hunger for violence that is worth taking stock of prior to the point it actualizes itself through one political narrative or another."

Josh Marshall @ TPM

Yeah, worth taking stock of the obvious "general disinhibition" towards violence promoted by Grump before electing him again. Anyway, been thinking something along these lines for awhile now. Civil war 2.0, or our national drift in that direction, will be less a territorial dispute, or regional bastions and frontlines, and more random violence and mass murders, where ideological or partisan motivation is an afterthought or twisted together in weird shapes. 

And this isn't to suggest that the urban vs rural/exurban conflict in America today isn't real. Coming from the burbs and then the sticks the divide has never appeared greater to me. But cities need rural agriculture and rural agriculture needs cities; cities are in fact the signal achievement of agricultural civilization. There's a realpolitiks in that that cannot easily be dismissed or broken up. 

Still think, though, Josh underplays in this post the way Grump has activated or accelerated the "general disinhibition" towards violence, or how much that violence skews towards conservative crackpots. There's lots of political violence in American history, sure, KKK, presidential assassinations, but is there any precedent for all the violent threats against public health officials, judges, election workers, and school board members we've seen since 2016, almost all of it republican leaning violent reaction? 

Certainly bigot hostility towards immigrants in US history is hardly new. There was a Red Scare after WWI. McCarthyism in the 1950s. All ugly episodes in American history with more than a whiff of political violence about them. But I'm not sure any of these fit the current situation very well. Today we live in a deeply polarized culture of ambient fascism where deep wells of anger seek outlets for pent up violence. "Because something is happening here and you don't know what it is/Do you Mr. Jones?" Only now Mr. Jones has reached a breaking point. Everything is out of whack. 

And along with fears of civil war people are often puzzling over whether the causes of the current crisis are cultural or economic, cultural divisions or economic inequality. How about it goes like this: the pursuit of economic inequality, Billionaires, monopoly, and generally and relentlessly financializing the economy, otherwise known today as corporate rule or the neoliberal order, has exacerbated cultural divisions, poverty, homelessness, and the othering of victims of the onslaught to a breaking point? And voters just elected a Frankenstein of this historical onslaught to double down on the violent pressures in society. Forgive me if I don't think this is going to go well. 

And, again, Keynes, one of my current intellectual touchstones, was comically imperious and overly ambitious and maybe quite naive about colonialism and definitely an overly complicated theoretician (there really is no "general theory," for instance) but he did call all this out a hundred years ago: i.e., the violence and social conflict that results from the predatory impacts of unfettered capitalism without the necessary stabilizing agency of government. 

 

How the Republicans and American Business Exploit the "Migrant Crisis"

"Employers and even neighbors extract free labor or other favors of all sorts from undocumented immigrants in the United States, using the threat of deportation and the violence of ICE as a cudgel. Undocumented immigrants working here end up afraid to call the police when they’re the victims of, or witnesses to crimes.

Everybody loses except the employers, who have a cheap, pliable, easily-threatened source of labor that is afraid to talk back or report abuses.

It got this way in 1986, when Ronald Reagan decided to stop enforcing the laws against wealthy white employers hiring undocumented people, and directed the government’s enforcement activities instead toward the least powerful and able to defend themselves: brown-skinned immigrants.

The result has been a labor market in the US that’s been distorted by undocumented workers creating a black-market for low-wage labor that many of America’s largest corporations enthusiastically support.

For example, prior to the Reagan administration two of the most heavily unionized industries in America were construction and meatpacking. These were tough jobs, but in both cases provided people who just had a high school education with a solid entry card into the American Dream. They were well-paid jobs that allowed construction and meatpacking workers to buy a home, take vacations, raise their kids and live a good, middle-class life with a pension for retirement.

Reagan and his Republican allies, with healthy campaign donations from both industries, wrote the 1986 Immigration Reform Act to make it harder to prosecute employers who invited undocumented workers into their workplaces.

As Brad Plumer noted in The Washington Post:

“[T]he bill’s sponsors ended up watering down the sanctions on employers to attract support from the business community, explains Wayne Cornelius of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at U.C. San Diego. ‘The end result was that they essentially gutted the employer sanctions,’ he says.”

So Reagan stopped enforcing our labor and immigration laws with respect to wealthy white employers, and the next 20 years saw a collapse of American citizens working in both the meatpacking and construction industries, among others."

The Hartmann Report 

Cannot be stressed enough. Employers claim Americans won't work whatever jobs, conveniently leaving out that they won't work these jobs at the shit wages employers want to pay. And dollars to donuts something like this goes on with H-1B immigrants as well, if under less austere conditions. Student interest in technology, math/science, and computer engineering swelled during the 2000s and hasn't let up since in the high school where I worked. I have a hard time believing we aren't turning out enough skilled computer engineers. More likely, H-1B tech workers are cheaper and easier to control.