Mitch's Blog

Hamilton Nolan:

If billionaires are destroying our country in order to serve their own self-interest, the reasonable thing to do is not to try to quibble over a 15% or a 21% corporate tax rate. The reasonable thing to do is to eradicate the existence of billionaires. If everyone knows our health care system is a broken monstrosity, the reasonable thing to do is not to tinker around the edges. The reasonable thing to do is to advocate Medicare for All. If there is a class war–and there is–and one party is being run completely by the upper class, the reasonable thing is for the other party to operate in the interests of the other, much larger, much needier class. That is quite rational and ethical and obvious in addition to being politically wise. The failure of the Democratic Party, institutionally, to grasp the reality that it needs to be running left as hard as possible is a pathetic thing to watch. When the current situation is broken and one party is determined to break it further, the answer is not to be the party of “We Want Things to Be Broken Somewhat Less.” The answer is to be the party that wants to fucking fix it. Radicalism is only sensible, because lesser measures are not going to fix the underlying state of affairs.

And if the decline of labor unions is robbing the working class of its most powerful tool and undermining the general health of society, the reasonable thing for the labor movement to do is not to play footsie with a political party that has shown repeatedly through words and deeds that it stands against the existence of organized labor. The answer is spend every last dollar we have to organize and organize and strike and strike. Women are workers. Immigrants are workers. The poor are workers. A party that is banning abortion and violently deporting immigrants and economically assaulting the poor is not a friend to the labor movement, ever. (An opposition party that cannot rouse itself to participate on the correct side of the ongoing class war is not our friend, either–the difference is that the fascists will always try to actively destroy unions, while the Democrats will just not do enough to help us, a distinction that is important to understand.)

…

When political pundits and strategists and party operatives anchor their sense of reality in a bygone era that no longer exists, they are bound to misjudge what is happening now. They are bound to fail to recognize the reorientation of the national landscape, the tilting of the ground that requires a lean left in order to keep things stable. There is a class war, it is being won by the rich, and they are about to stage an enormous offensive for the next four years. Position yourselves accordingly. It is one thing to fight against great power and lose. That is part of fighting. That is forgivable. What is not forgivable is to see all this coming, and to choose to continue to stand in the same place and say the same things and advocate for the status quo and pretend that America just needs to “get back to normal.” “Normal” has been broken for the lifetimes of most of the people alive today. Radicalism is only getting more and more correct. Recognize it or get run over.

Schools say they’re spending the money on legal fees, added security, additional staff time and additional costs for community, school board and government relations, according to a report by Diana Lambert at the Times of San Diego. Districts are picking up the financial burden of staff turnover related to conflicts and because staff had to take time away from other duties to deal with conflict.

Half of superintendents surveyed said they’d been personally harassed at least once during the school year, 10% said they’d been threatened with violence and 11% had their proprty vandalized.

“A Pennsylvania superintendent called the emotional stress and anxiety ‘nearly crippling.'”

This article doesn’t say who’s causing all this strife, but I bet it’s the usual MAGA/Qanon/anti-vax/anti-LGBTQ/Dominionist suspects. Trans people and drag queens aren’t bothering anyone.

Chris Arnade Walks the World:

The last few months has provided two moments that emphasize how central McDonald’s is to American life, both physically and culturally. First there was the viral, and controversial, Trump campaign stop where he “worked” for an hour, and now the news that Luigi Mangione, the charged and alleged assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was caught in an Altoona franchise because he was spotted by a group of morning regulars and employees.

Those who have followed me for the last decade know that McDonald’s is also central to who I am. My first viral piece, that effectively launched my writing career, was about how McDonald’s has become America’s community centers, especially for communities where so much else has fallen apart, or disappointed people.

…

Trump’s McDonald’s photo op, which while it has been adjudicated to death, is a great illustration of what many elites still miss about his appeal.

Trump’s superpower has long been signaling to working stiffs that he’s “just like you” despite being on the surface anything like them. His love of McDonald’s, which I believe is as genuine as any politician can ever have, is one of those signals, and maybe his most effective, because it makes his critics go hyperbolic in a way that signals that they are not “just like you.”

I recently discovered Arnade as a writer and I think he’s fantastic. I prevously read his piece on how McDonald’s has become America’s community center, and loved it, but I didn’t register the byline.

Like me, Arnade is an ambler but he is far more dedicated than I.

Jonathan Rauch at The Atlantic:

We could use a new category [for adulthood], one reflecting the fact that longevity is inserting one, two, or even three decades between middle age and old age.

As it happens, such a category is available: late adulthood. Associated with such thinkers as the sociologist Phyllis Moen, the psychologist Laura Carstensen, the social entrepreneurs Chip Conley and Marc Freedman, and the activist and writer Ashton Applewhite, the notion of late adulthood captures the reality of a new stage of life, in which many people are neither fully retired nor conventionally employed — a phase when people can seek new pursuits, take “not so hard” jobs, and give back to their communities, their families, and their God.

And no, this is not a pipe dream. Copious evidence shows that most of what people think they know about life after 50 is wrong. Aging per se (as distinct from sickness or frailty) is not a process of uniform decline. It brings gains, too: greater equanimity, more emotional resilience, and what Carstensen and others have called the positivity effect, a heightened appreciation of life’s blessings. Partly for that reason, the later decades of life are, on average, not the saddest but the happiest. Contrary to popular belief, aging does not bring mental stagnation. Older people can learn and create, although their styles of learning and creativity are different than in younger years. Emotional development and maturation continue right through the end of life. And aging can bring wisdom — the ability to rise above self-centered viewpoints, master turbulent emotions, and solve life’s problems — a boon not only to the wise but to everyone around them.

Late adulthood is a time when the prospects for earning diminish but the potential for grandparenting, mentoring, and volunteering peaks. It is — or can be — a time of reorientation and relaunch, a time when zero-sum goals such as social competition and personal ambition yield to positive-sum pursuits such as building community and nurturing relationships.

… Right now, Americans are receiving more than a decade of additional time in the most satisfying and prosocial period of life. This is potentially the greatest gift any generation of humans has ever received. The question is whether we will grasp it.

I found myself nodding along to a lot of this.

… a phase when people can seek new pursuits, take “not so hard” jobs, and give back to their communities, their families, and their God.

Check. I come in to work, I work hard, I try to do great work, and when I’m done I’m done. I am no longer interested in advancing my “career” — I don’t want to be the VP of anything or grind or have a side-hustle go into founder mode or be an entrepreneur.¹ I do want to give back more to the community (I’m working on that) and family (more challenging because our families are thousands of miles away). As for God: My idea of God is that all They ask of us is we do right. (Which is asking too much a lot of the time.)

… a heightened appreciation of life’s blessings

Check. I had a very bad cold the past week, but even as I was lying in bed hacking and coughing, I was grateful to have a warm bed to lie in, and Julie to nag me to take better care of myself.

I don’t know about the need for a new category of adulthood, and a label — “late adulthood” — go go with it. Ashton Applewhite,² whose work on aging I admire enormously, uses the word “olders.” I think that type of language eventually becomes euphemisms, like the phrases “golden years” and “senior citizens” in previous generations, and the euphemisms eventually become as toxic as the original. Maybe instead we should copy the example of our queer³ friends and family, reclaim the bad word, and make it our own: “old.”

On the other hand, I have occasionally described myself as “old” to younger colleagues.⁴ “You’re not old,” they say. And I find that conversation to be a waste of time. Which is becoming more precious to me on account of my being old.⁵

Karl Bode at Techdirt:

Academics have spent generations warning about what happens when you let journalism and media consolidate in the hands of rich people and corporations. As this season’s election coverage demonstrated, the end result is usually a lazy simulacrum of journalism that looks like real reporting, but tends to reflect ownership interests and (usually) lacks the courage to challenge wealth and power.

The coverage tends to be feckless and shallow. It tends to hew toward false ideological symmetry (what NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the “view from nowhere"). It tends to give short shrift to issues like labor and consumer rights, and extra attention and credence to corporatist beliefs. It very often demonstrates sexist, classist, and racist bias. It’s generally not subtle.

When white male billionaires jump into the news business they are conditioned to see none of this. Most of the time, as we’ve seen with outlets like Politico (run by German billionaire CEO Mathias Döpfner) they’ll generally whine about “bias," but believe most of the bias in journalism is coming from “the left” end of the ideological spectrum (too much “divisive” coverage about class and race issues).