Mitch's Blog

Digby’s Hullaballoo:

I have been distinctly uncomfortable with the whole “we must find ourselves a Joe Rogan” [—] a guy’s guy who can talk to the men who we desperately need to appease in order to win elections. [Certainly, liberals and progressives do] need to adapt themselves to a new media landscape and claim some of that territory for ourselves. This is a new world and the old so-called liberal media is dysfunctional. But the canonization of the dumbshit bro talk as the the only way to do it strikes me as wishful thinking on the part of a whole lot of lefties (you know who you are) who really relate to that stuff and think the whole “girlification” of the Democrats is a drag.

These liberals think it’s a liability that “the majority of Democrats are women… Good to know.”

There needs to be some creativity here, people. Running with stupid (or pretending to) isn’t going to get it done. Looking down on the Democratic party for not being the kind of people you want to have a beer with is well… stupid. This isn’t about your social life.

And Digby quotes Josh Marshall: “Voters often want new leaders. But things are always a bit out of joint when it’s leaders who want new voters.”

Related: On Threads yesterday, journalist Taylor Lorenz asked male podcast listeners to recommend favorite podcasts that aren’t as big as Joe Rogan yet.

“Who are some of the up and coming men in the male podcast space that bros are listening to?” she asked.

I recommended Ezra Klein, Dan Savage, Everett Rummage (Age of Napoleon), John Green, Dan Carlin (Hardcore History), Tyler Cowen, Nilay Patel and David Pierce (Vergecast), Gilbert Gottfried, Casey Newton and Kevin Roose (Hard Fork), Jonathan Goldstein (Heavyweight), PJ Vogt, Ryan Broderick, Dominick Sandbrook and Tom Holland (The Rest is History), John Gruber and Ira Glass.

I was kinda trolling Lorenz a bit — because I am not a bro. I am a fucking grown-ass man. And none of those podcasters are bros. Bros are children with car keys and liquor; I want nothing to do with them.

“Dogma” is one of Smith’s best movies. It’s surprisingly thoughtful as well as crudely funny.

Smith is Catholic, or at least was raised in the religion. He clearly respects Catholicism and is wrestling with it.

Kevin E. G. Perry at The Independent:

⁠"It’s a funny, funny flick, and it makes you think," said Smith. “You walk out of the movie and maybe you think about your own faith or your own spirituality, or maybe not, [but] at least you’ve been entertained.”

Also: “I always felt that – with her infinite patience – God had to be both a woman and Canadian.”

Good news for fans: Smith says there are plans to re-release the film in 2025. “Dogma” has been unavailable on streaming, and the last physical release was a Blu-Ray in 2008, because the rights are owned by Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob.

Anna Kodé at the New York Times:

Ms. Schiffman pointed to a photo of a white sink — surrounded by towels, dishes and a mirror — as revealing of the quotidian scenes she is hoping to document. It’s the only sink in that tenant’s apartment, said Ms. Schiffman, who also has just a single sink in her home. “You have to do everything in that sink — when we have to go to a wedding or a thing, there’s a schedule.”

Schiffman moved into her husband’s railroad-style apartment in 1997, and they’ve lived there since.

Because the apartments are rent-stabilized, landlords don’t renovate them, so the photos cross time. Many of the subjects have lived in their homes for decades. “One tenant said to the photographer, ‘I know that these are the same floorboards walked on from the time this building was built in 1898.’”

But the neighborhoods change.

One tenant who had been living in her apartment since the 1990s said to Ms. Schiffman, “At least a crack addict would say good morning to you. Now I say good morning to these young tenants and they look at me like, ‘Why are you talking to me?’”

Ian Welsh:

In the modern world there are three main ideological groupings. Broadly the right, the left, and liberals/neoliberals. These don’t appear on a line, they’re a triangle and each has something in common with the others. The left, generally speaking, is anti-war, for example, and so are parts of the right, especially paleocons. Liberals are very identity politics focused and the left has sympathy for that, but isn’t as dedicated to it. The left’s primary focus is on economic issues and relationships and the relationship to IP is more of “of course everyone should be treated equally.”

By Welsh’s definition, I’m on the left. I’m not identity-politics focused but I do strongly believe that everyone should be treated equally.

Also:

Left wingers are the opposition to capitalism. The most extreme versions want an end to it entirely, the moderate versions want it under firm control, made to contribute to mass prosperity, not turned to produce billionaires.

I’m most definitely moderate-left on capitalism. Markets are excellent servants but cruel, wicked masters. Also, capitalism is often in opposition to free markets.

Hadas Gold, CNN:

The Onion’s bid was backed by the families of eight victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting and one first responder. It also will have an exclusive advertising deal with the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety….

The purchase acquires the company’s intellectual property, including its website, customer lists and inventory and certain social media accounts, as well as the production equipment used to put Jones on the air. The amount of the bid was not announced.

“The Onion is proud to acquire Infowars, and we look forward to continuing its storied tradition of scaring the site’s users with lies until they fork over their cold, hard cash,” said The Onion CEO Ben Collins. “Or Bitcoin. We will also accept Bitcoin.”

In order to make the bid work, the families “agreed to forgo a portion of their recovery to increase the overall value of The Onion’s bid, enabling its success,” the families said in a statement.

“After surviving unimaginable loss with courage and integrity, they rejected Jones’ hollow offers for allegedly more money if they would only let him stay on the air because doing so would have put other families in harm’s way,” said Chris Mattei, attorney for the families and partner at Koskoff Koskoff & Bieder.

Jones condemned the deal and said it’s unconstitutional because in MAGAworld, the Constitution means whatever they want it to mean.

David Gilbert at Wired:

Tom Homan, the man president-elect Donald Trump has selected to serve as “border czar,” defended his family separation policy at an extremist festival last month surrounded by QAnon promoters, election conspiracists, and church leaders wearing crowns of bullets.

“Trump comes back, I come back, And I will run the biggest deportation operation this country has ever seen,” Homan told a cheering crowd at the Rod of Iron Freedom Festival, a three-day celebration in Greeley, Pennsylvania, organized by the Rod of Iron Ministries, a far-right gun sect that worships AR-15s.

Homan, who was officially appointed as “border czar” by Trump this week, was one of the main architects of the “zero tolerance” policy during Trump’s first term, forcibly separating more than 5,000 children from their parents between 2017 and 2018.

…

Homan was introduced on stage by Justin Moon, a firearms manufacturer and the son of Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church, a global religious cult whose adoring followers were known as Moonies. Homan shared the stage with far-right figures that included Pizzagate promoter Jack Posobiec and Ivan Raiklin, the self-styled “secretary of retribution” who created a “deep state target list” of Trump’s enemies who he wants rounded up and arrested. Also speaking at the event were prominent QAnon promoter Mel K, disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and Craig Sawyer, a former Navy Seal who has promoted various conspiracy theories including human trafficking and pedophilia rings.

At the festival, Homan also pushed the baseless claim that the immigrants were being allowed into the country to help Vice President Kamala Harris win the election. This was a conspiracy theory that was promoted heavily by pro-Trump election denial groups in the months leading up to the election.

All the best people.

Cory Doctorow: Xi’s 2012-2015 anti-corruption campaign routed out real and serious corruption — but only when done by Xi’s opponents. Xi’s allies were allowed to continue grifting. Look for Trump to follow that lead in prosecuting corrupt businesses, including antitrust. He’ll find real abuse but turn a blind eye to his allies' crimes.

This will create a trap for people who hate Trump but don’t pay close attention to anticorruption cases. It’s a trap that Trump sprung successfully in his first term, when he lashed out at the “intelligence community” – the brutal, corrupt, vicious, lawless American spy agencies that are the sworn enemies of working people and the struggle for justice at home and abroad – and American liberals decided that the enemy of their enemy was their friend, and energetically sold one another Robert Mueller votive candles:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Over the next four years, Trump will use antitrust and other corruption-taming regulations to selective punish crooked companies. He won’t target them because they’re crooked: he’ll target them because they aren’t sufficiently loyal to him.

If you let your hatred of Trump blind you to the crookedness of these companies, you lose and Trump wins. The reason Trump will find it easy to punish these companies is that they are all guilty. If you let yourself forget that, if you treat your enemy’s enemy as your friend, then Trump will point at his political rivals and call them apologists for corruption and sleaze – and he’ll be right.

It is possible for Trump to fight corruption corruptly. That’s exactly what he’ll do.

Hamilton Nolan:

The worst part of the week after the presidential election has been the bombardment of “What the Democrats Must Do Now” messages from people who certainly do not know the answer to that question. “Regular Folks, my Students at Yale Tell Me, Are Tired of the Elites,” by David Brooks. “Some Friendly and Helpful Suggestions to My Friends on the Left,” by Bret Stephens. “Guhhh… Woke! Buhhh” by Pamela Paul. … The zombie opinion-creation industry does not even require a reflection period to trot out an entire set of prescriptions. They just changed the date on the label on the old prescriptions.

You can divide the post-election reactions of people in power into two groups: Genuine Attempts to Grapple With Reality, and then the larger group of Soothing Rationalizations of What Just Happened Which Will Allow People in Power to Continue on in Their Nice Lives. The danger is that the first group gets seduced by the second group and as a result we get the next four years of the same people doing the same things to the same effect. (You may notice that straightforward ideas like “fire everyone in Democratic Party leadership positions automatically after a national election loss” do not appear to be on the table.) This sort of conversation, in which many participants are concerned with covering their own asses, and all theses are unverifiable, is always in peril of puttering out into a grand conclusion of “Change nothing,” despite that being the one plan that has already been proven to be bad.

The “veneer of ‘nonpartisanship’ in mainstream media … causes them to focus on horse race analytics rather than on interrogating the morality of policy questions has seeped into the mind of the general public and now causes a great deal of election analysis to be amateur message analysis rather than substantive discussions of what humans need from politicians. If you find yourself thinking, “How should we change our messaging to win the next campaign?” I suggest you hit yourself hard on the head with a hammer a few times.

…

(Not to grind old axes, but this is the “Defund the Police” problem: a good policy addressing a substantive issue that the public found themselves completely unable to discuss substantively because all anyone would talk about was the slogan itself…. )

…

What the Democrats should do substantively going forward is: Fix people’s problems. Attack the crisis of economic inequality. Tax the rich and send the money to the poor and working class and create universal public health care and child care and free education and strengthen the labor movement and restrict the power of capital and watch the nation’s deepest problems shrink, because the nation’s deepest problems stem from the fact that America allows capitalism to arrange everything for the benefit of capital, which results in an array of awful consequences for humanity.

Addressing economic unfairness will be hard because it requires Democrats to go against the interests of their wealthy donors. Much easier to hope to win over Trump voters by being more racist and “tough on the border” and join in the persecution of trans people, Nolan says. Instead, Democrats must do it all: Fight persecution of all types.

Coal miners who fought in the Battle of Blair Mountain–members of the white working class circa 1921– resisted racism and focused on going to war with evil rich people. I believe we can too.

Debra Whitman at the Wall Street Journal: Stress about growing older becomes self-fulfilling. The stress itself causes physiological health problems.

Also:

… our expectations about growing older become self-fulfilling because they affect how we behave. For example, while a positive attitude about aging doesn’t take the place of exercise and eating well, a belief that we can live long and healthy lives often encourages people to invest in their future selves by taking more walks and eating more greens.

On the flip side, when we view health problems as inevitable, we’re more likely to see healthy behaviors as futile. [And:] When older people believe that unhappiness comes with age, they are less likely to seek treatment for depression.