I have promised to occasionally give stray musings on things in the news. Most of the time, I fail to muse. But here I muse once more.

  • Michael Bloomberg has written an op-ed explaining why he is giving gobs of money to Democratic congressional candidates this year. He says that while he “doesn’t like political parties,” and has disagreements with Democrats, Republicans “have done little to reach across the aisle to craft bipartisan solutions,” and he “believe[s] that ‘We the People’ cannot afford to elect another Congress that lacks the courage to reach across the aisle.” What’s interesting to me about Bloomberg’s op-ed is that he seems to have very few actual policies he’s particularly passionate about, other than gun control. He just believes that there ought to be some kind of balance between Democrats and Republicans, and that they ought to cooperate on things. As my colleague Luke Savage has written, those who celebrate “bipartisanship” for its own sake have a strange set of values: They often seem to desire compromise without caring what the compromises actually are. That’s in part, though, because anything both Democrats and Republicans would agree on is something that won’t threaten the interests of a billionaire like Bloomberg. Beware bipartisanship! Beware billionaire dollars, Democrats! (I have previously explained why I dislike Michael Bloomberg.)
  • BuzzFeed has an excellent report on a depressing development in the restaurant industry: a tabletop tablet called the Ziosk that allows customers to rate their servers on a 1-5 scale. The result is predictable: Servers live in fear of the thing, because when their ratings slip, their hours get cut. Managers love it because it gives them Data and allows them to Optimize Performance. A CEO of one of the companies that makes these types of tablets has a particularly telling quote: “We think there could be a server leaderboard in the back of house that ranks the servers in real time, based on guest surveys… I agree it’s going to increase stress. But it will put the emphasis more on performance.” So he knows he’s making it even more miserably stressful to be a server, “but” that is fine because the fear will create better service. My god, a leaderboard. The cult of efficiency really will destroy every single thing worth preserving in the world, sooner or later. How can it be stopped? If we had strong labor unions, they could adamantly refuse to accept this wretched thing in the workplace. This is why everyone deserves a union!
  • The New York Times recently reported that some rich San Francisco people hate homeless people so much that they are even willing to consider voting Republican. When it comes down to it, wealthy liberals will always side with their class.
  • Speaking of horrible rich people, it’s striking to me that Jeff Bezos says the “only way” he can think of to spend his Amazon billions is “space travel.” He says this as a man who employs hundreds of thousands of underpaid wage workers, many of whom are on food stamps. This seems to me good proof that billionaires will never do anything useful for society voluntarily, and will have to have their wealth taxed away from them before it can be put to a just use. After all, if it’s never even crossed his mind to distribute ownership of his company to the workers, or pay them more generously than any competitors, if literally the only thing he can think of to do with that money is to build rockets to the moon, even as Detroit continues to crumble and burn, then there is no hope for him. He can’t be persuaded, he’ll have to be fought. (That’s obvious to every class struggle leftist, I know, but I like to give the billionaires a chance to mend their ways before concluding we have to take their wealth away.)
  • Speaking of Bezos Evil: Amazon’s fight against Seattle’s anti-homelessness initiative strikes me as breathtakingly perverse. The company makes billions in profits, and pays zero federal taxes (far less than Current Affairs pays, I might add!), and yet has the audacity to threaten to leave the city of Seattle over a measly $275-per-employee annual tax on the largest 3 percent of employers designed to fight the very affordable housing crisis caused by the presence of companies like Amazon. Frankly, I think Seattle’s affordable housing advocates should respond to this behavior by doubling the proposed tax, which was far, far too low.
  • Don’t give me any bullshit about how Amazon makes its money in the “free market.” They are currently getting cash-strapped city governments to compete to write individually-tailored legal exemptions that purely favor Amazon. That’s not a competitive marketplace, it’s simple corruption.
  • The Wall Street Journal reports that jewelers are having a hard time getting millennials to buy jewelry, because they rightly think it’s pointless and overpriced. Interestingly, while the online version of this article said jewelers are trying to “reach” millennials, the print headline said something like “try to convince millennials to buy jewelry.” This strikes me as illuminating an important difference in a debate about capitalism: Do companies shape consumer taste or do they simply try to reach consumers with preexisting tastes and give them products that satisfy those tastes? To me, the jewelry example is a good illustration of how corporations manipulate people into buying things they didn’t previously want. Millennials made it clear they didn’t want jewelry, so companies are trying to find ways to make jewelry seem hip and progressive and tie it to millennial values. Of course, you could also see the example the other way: Companies are merely trying to find ways to show millennials that actually, deep down, they really wanted jewelry all along.
  • By the way, I recommend that everyone read the Wall Street Journal, if you don’t. Because it’s the paper in which the financial elite talks to itself, you get a more honest impression of the economic world than you do in the New York Times. I sometimes say it’s almost a Marxist newspaper, because it understands that money rules the world rather than culture and politics. You get plenty of stories in the WSJ that you won’t get elsewhere, especially about regulation, corporate crime, labor disputes, etc. This stuff is important to businesspeople, so they have to write about it, but it gets buried in the other newspapers. One day when the contrast is really stark I’ll show you what I mean by giving you a list of the stories that were prominent in the Wall Street Journal versus the ones from the New York Times. 
  • Be careful about saying there is a “fake news” crisis, because governments will use it as an excuse to crack down on free speech and establish state control over what is and isn’t “fake.” See, e.g., Emmanuel Macron.
  • A reader wrote in with an extremely polite critique, asking me kindly if instead of using the phrase “biological sex” I could use the more accurate and trans-friendly “chromosomal sex.” I appreciate the correction, and will use the recommended phrase. I hadn’t really thought about this before, but mulling it over, I realize that “chromosomal sex” is indeed far better. After all, “biology” covers many things. Hormones are biological. To say that trans people have the “biological sex” of their birth is not helpful, because it singles out a particular aspect of biology and ignores others. Thank you to the reader who encouraged me to think more clearly about this!
  • In Florida, developers are planning to build the largest mall in the United States. It is called, of course, the “American Dream,” because satire is dead in the Age of Trump. Malls really are so depressing. We could have real cities! Instead we have vast, hermetically-sealed chambers devoted to buying stuff. I hadn’t been in a mall for a long time until a recent trip back to my Florida hometown, and I absolutely could not get out of there fast enough. The moments I most lose faith in the ability of human beings to resolve their differences are the moments when I realize there are some people who do not find malls horrifying and depressing. (The photo for this article is of another “American Dream”-brand mall under construction in New Jersey. To me, there is nothing drearier than brightly colored blocky buildings in bleak overcast landscapes.)
  • Jordan Peterson is just too good for us, according to the American Conservative. We don’t deserve him, and we will destroy him. This article contains one of my favorite quotes about Peterson: “It doesn’t matter that Peterson has a far more nuanced understanding of the Pepe meme than the leftists who consider it equivalent to the swastika.” A nuanced understanding of the Pepe meme!!
  • A Wall Street Journal contributor says social justice identity politics is the reason nobody cares about climate change. Is there anything social justice identity politics hasn’t ruined? Of course, personally, I think the reason nobody cares about climate change is more to do with the fact that many powerful entities have a financial interest in making sure nobody cares about climate change. But hell, let’s just pin it on the Middlebury kids who attacked Charles Murray.
  • I used to truly detest Malcolm Gladwell, because his writing offended me intellectually. He has essentially admitted that he prefers telling a good story to getting the facts right, and because I think it’s extremely important to tell the truth, I am repelled by this. However, I have increasingly developed an appreciation for his incredible skill as a writer and storyteller, so now my Malcolm Gladwell opinion is divided into two halves: As a social science person, I can’t stand him, but as a writer I admire him. I will never, ever write as well as he does. He has such an eye for detail and character. Because of this, I think he’s best when he’s writing profiles, such as his articles about Ron Popeil and Nassim Taleb, and he’s at his worst when he’s coming up with theories of how the world works. (Theories that he might just think are interesting rather than necessarily true, although he also seems to insist they’re true.)
  • Here’s a forgotten quote from Ronald Reagan: “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, it is his right to do so.” Reagan is routinely voted the Greatest American of All Time, which says something about either Americans’ values or their memories.
  • In case you are interested in finding out what things are like around here, this is a picture of me at work in the Current Affairs office, impersonating a serious businessman:

  • Books we’ve just received review copies of: How Bernie Won by Jeff Weaver, The Chapo Guide to Revolution by Chapo Trap House, Bad Blood by John Carreyou. I’m particularly keen to review Bad Blood, which is about the calamity of Theranos, the Silicon Valley startup that promised to revolutionize the blood testing industry and turned out to be an enormous fraud. The Theranos story seems to me an excellent example of how easy it can be to fool rich idiots into thinking you’re brilliant. Another worthwhile demonstration of the fact that the people at the top are often shockingly oblivious.