The Zero Room

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Doonesbury — by Garry Trudeau:
  
• Coronavirus may precipitate a crash but it won’t be its cause, which will be the overstressed state of the world economy — Richard Murphy: Coronavirus would not be the issue it is in economic terms if we did not have such an interconnected world, where supply lines are stretched to their limits so that many companies are at risk from the slightest disruption to their systems, which coronavirus is already creating, and which could get much worse. And nor would coronavirus be such a threat if households in many parts of the world were not already over-stretched with debt, meaning any disruption will tip many over financial limits and into serious financial risk of bankruptcy.
• Animal on the Street - Flat-Earther dies trying to prove the Earth is flat. — Phil Are Go!:
  
  More…
• Joe Biden Would Be Donald Trump's Dream Opponent — Conor Lynch in Truthdig: Biden is a lot like Clinton, but worse in almost every measurable way. On issue after issue, Biden has consistently been to the right of Clinton throughout his fifty-year political career. He has a record of advocating cuts to Social Security and Medicare; he helped write the 1994 Crime Bill that led to an explosion in mass incarceration; he played a critical role in passing the 2005 bankruptcy bill that stripped bankruptcy protection from some of the most vulnerable people. Biden also supported and championed the Iraq War. This list goes on and on. Beyond his extremely problematic record, which will make it hard for Democrats to go after Trump about, say, cutting Social Security (which Biden himself supported not too long ago), Biden has his own personal scandals that will make it very difficult for him to cast Trump as corrupt.
• Bizarro — by Wayno and Piraro:
  
• The infinite scroll — David Roth at the Columbia Journalism Review: Even on the websites of august institutions ads interrupt the text every two paragraphs; ads follow you down the sides of the page like store security; ads pop up in boxes that resist being closed, the elusive little x evading your cursor. There have always been websites like this, usually the kind that we save for private browsing: places to stream out-of-market sporting events, or download bittorrents of hard-to-find films, or browse other things that no reasonable person would admit to. Now, a great many websites are at least a little bit like this. Not all of these sites are as hard up as they appear, but all of them—the authentically desperate and the merely thirsty, the ones trying heroically to sell their way out of a downward spiral and those blithely steering into it—have made the same choice. Which is to look and feel and be more friendly to advertisers than readers.
• Sshh! He's TRYING to SLEEP! — Phil Are Go!:
  
• Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In — interviewed by Halimah Marcus in Electric Literature: While there has been plenty of fiction written about pandemics, I think the biggest difference between those scenarios and our reality is how poorly our government has handled it. If your goal is to dramatize the threat posed by an unknown virus, there’s no advantage in depicting the officials responding as incompetent, because that minimizes the threat; it leads the reader to conclude that the virus wouldn’t be dangerous if competent people were on the job. A pandemic story like that would be similar to what’s known as an “idiot plot,” a plot that would be resolved very quickly if your protagonist weren’t an idiot. What we’re living through is only partly a disaster novel; it’s also—and perhaps mostly—a grotesque political satire.
• Life in the stupidverse, part elventy-million — This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow:
  
• Solar Panels Could Be the Best Fad Ever — Clive Thompson in Wired: In a 2014 study, Yale economist Kenneth Gillingham and a colleague looked at the adoption of residential solar installations in Connecticut and found that it spread through neighborhoods in a “wave-like centrifugal pattern.” A subsequent study, by economist Stefano Carattini, then at Yale, and two colleagues, documented the same phenomenon in Switzerland. And when I dropped by the offices of Brooklyn Solarworks, the folks there showed me a map of where they'd installed panels. Sure enough, it was all epidemiological hot spots—you see empty streets with no solar at all, then blocks that are simply crammed with it, neighbors next to neighbors with arrays. […] Even language matters. In Switzerland, there are regions that speak Italian, German, French. If solar is spreading, it stops when it hits a language border. Solar virality is a matter of, quite literally, word of mouth. This points to an obvious corollary: If we want to encourage climate-saving behaviors, people need to talk more.
• Scientific Briefing — xkcd by Randall Monroe:
  
• Joe Biden Obviously Has Dementia and Should Withdraw — Ted Rall: I spent the last few years watching my mother’s decline due to dementia caused by Alzheimer’s. She had been brilliant. Years before her death, however, she was having a tough time keeping it together. I would have voted for her as president in 2012 but not 2016. It would have been wrong. No one who has been close to someone deteriorating from that disease could fail to see the same signs in Joe Biden. In online discussions Biden apologists sometimes say that a senile Biden is better than an evil Trump. Is this really where we are? Consider the 20 or so contenders for the Democratic nomination as of late last year. All of them except for one—Biden­—were mentally competent. Marianne Williamson came off as loopy and Tom Steyer was painfully awkward but both were in full command of their faculties. Congratulations, Democrats, you literally picked the worst of the bunch.
• Sutton Impact — by Ward Sutton:
  
• When it comes to sick leave, we’re not much better prepared for coronavirus than the US — Peter Whiteford and Bruce Bradbury in the Conversation: In Hobart on Sunday health authorities said a man infected with coronavirus ignored instructions to self-isolate while he waited for his test results because he didn’t want to miss his casual shifts at Hobart’s Grand Chancellor Hotel. The Bureau of Statistics Characteristics of Employment Survey shows that in 2019, 24.4% of Australian employees were casuals without any access to paid leave. Adding in the self-employed, the proportion of all Australian workers without paid sick leave would be 37%. As the chart shows, Australians without paid sick leave are over-represented in some of the sectors with the greatest degree of personal contact with members of the public. 63% of people working in the accommodation and food services sector have no paid sick leave, and 45% of sales workers and 42% of community and personal service workers.
• 2010 and 2020 — xkcd by Randall Monroe:
  
• What the Coronavirus Emergency Has to Do with Biden vs. Sanders — Norman Solomon: “It is time to ask how we got to where we are, not only our lack of preparation for the virus, but how we end up with an economy where so many people are hurting at a time of massive income and wealth inequality,” Sanders said at the close of his recent debate with Biden. “It is time to ask the question of where the power is in America. Who owns the media? Who owns the economy? Who owns the legislative process? Why do we give tax breaks to billionaires and not raise the minimum wage?” While so-called “moderate” Democrats like Biden don’t want to answer -- or even hear -- such questions, Sanders insists on continuing to ask them. Such perseverance has never been more needed than at this pivotal moment, with so many lives in the balance. “Where the power is in America” has everything to do with why the U.S. government’s response to the unfolding coronavirus catastrophe has continued to be so anemic, foreshadowing so many more deaths and so much more grief.

This month, I have been mostly not reading, except for things like this:

• Garbage Language: Why do corporations speak the way they do? — Molly Young in Vulture: Our attraction to certain words surely reflects an inner yearning. Computer metaphors appeal to us because they imply futurism and hyperefficiency, while the language of self-empowerment hides a deeper anxiety about our relationship to work — a sense that what we’re doing may actually be trivial, that the reward of “free” snacks for cultural fealty is not an exchange that benefits us, that none of this was worth going into student debt for, and that we could be fired instantly for complaining on Slack about it. When we adopt words that connect us to a larger project — that simultaneously fold us into an institutional organism and insist on that institution’s worthiness — it is easier to pretend that our jobs are more interesting than they seem. Empowerment language is a self-marketing asset as much as anything else: a way of selling our jobs back to ourselves.
• The Making of Joe Biden’s Conservative Democratic Politics — Branko Marcetic in Jacobin: It is no small irony that Joseph Robinette Biden Jr was born in the cradle of the New Deal order he would later help dismantle. Neither Biden nor the United States is unique in this respect. Look at just about any developed country’s generous postwar welfare state, and among its rich and powerful foes, you’ll find many who benefited most from its generosity, only to turn against the system that created them, convinced they had done it all on their own.
• How to Transition From a Democracy to an Autocracy — Devorah Blachor in McSweeney's Internet Tendency: Stop, breathe, and look around. What’s happening? Has your faith in democratic institutions been pulverized underneath the crushing weight of a sham trial that called zero witnesses? Was an already unhinged president just given carte blanche to do whatever he wants because he knows there won’t be any consequences? Perhaps a cadre of lawyers embroiled in various sexual assault scandals of their own have made a series of ludicrous claims to justify incontrovertibly corrupt behavior without a hint of shame or irony? Take stock of your surroundings, meet yourself wherever you are, and remember to reach out and say howdy to others who have recently made the transition from democracy to autocracy.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Precarity: a political problem — Vadim Kvachev in openDemocracy: French philosopher Jacques Rancière in his work “On the Shores of Politics” wrote that depoliticization is the oldest political art. Perhaps this notion of depoliticization is one of the most accurate descriptions of what is going on today in the social sciences. Economics imperialism – applying principles of economics to non-economics fields of knowledge – has become mainstream common sense. Economics pretends to be a universal method, the Social Science, which can solve problems in any other social field: law, culture, education, social care etc. Once the best method – a free market – is found, other issues are no longer considered to be a matter of politics, therefore they are no longer subject to democratic choice. The decisions made at this level are technocratic and seem to be not a matter of voluntary acts of power, but a ‘forced’ solution, based on the impersonal necessity of the global free market. This is what famous political theorist Wendy Brown called neoliberal rationality. The problem is not that some kind of evil capitalists or neoliberals have usurped the platforms of public discussion to impose on us this kind of propaganda, but rather that the neoliberal way of thinking has become a fundamental intellectual software, ultimate common sense.
• Autism and Behaviorism — Alfie Kohn: In 2018, I reviewed two decades of recent research for the 25th-anniversary edition of my book Punished by Rewards. These studies strongly confirm the original findings: Carrots, like sticks, are not merely ineffective over the long haul but often actively counterproductive — at work, at school, and at home — and these negative effects are found across ages, genders, and cultural settings. As a rule, the more you reward people for doing something, the more they tend to lose interest in whatever they had to do to get the reward. And they often end up being less successful at a task they’re completing than are people who weren’t offered any reward for doing it. (Even more damaging, according to the research, is an arrangement where people are offered a reward for doing something well.) In the face of such evidence, which has been accumulating for about half a century, the last refuge of behaviorists has been to claim that rewards must be used on people with special needs and challenges. Heavy-handed controlling tactics, and rewards in particular, are most pervasively applied to children who carry a label that sets them apart. They are often subjected to a relentless regimen of Skinnerian manipulation, complete with elaborate charts, point systems, and reinforcement schedules. Even teachers and clinicians who would hesitate to treat other children that way assume it’s justified, or even necessary, to do so with, well, you know, those kids.
• Corporate Crap That Doesn’t Kill Bernie Just Makes Him Stronger — Ted Rall: Many on the left, me included, have held doubts about Bernie Sanders. We worry that he isn’t far left enough, especially on foreign policy. After all, he’s OK with drone assassinations, was pretty much silent about the Israeli invasion of Gaza, praised the illegal assassination of Osama bin Laden that denied justice to 9/11 victims, and has not proposed specific numbers by which he would cut the Pentagon budget. Even on domestic issues, Sanders’ forte, he is weaker than we would like. The $15-an-hour minimum wage he is pushing for now would have been OK when he started working on it years ago, but due to inflation $20 or $25 an hour would make more sense now. By global standards, Sanders is no radical. He’s a garden-variety liberal—the Democratic Party under FDR. Fortunately for him, reactionary goons like the New York Times remind us that whatever his shortcomings Sanders is still the best game in this very right-wing town, the farthest left Democrat to have presented himself for our consideration in the last 40 years. If Hillary Clinton and CNN and MSNBC hate Bernie so much, maybe he’s all right.
• This Bird is Probably a Sinner — Phil Are Go!:
  
• FAQ: Your Visit to Flow State — Caitlin Kunkel and Erica Lies in McSweeney's Internet Tendency: For generations, creators of all stripes have searched for a location where they can be fully immersed in their creative process: a place known as Flow State. If you’re planning a visit, here’s what you need to know.
• Given how little effect you can have, is it rational to vote? — Julia Maskivker in Aeon: For far too long, the accepted wisdom among scholars of politics has been that the interests of the individual and the interests of society are not in harmony when it comes to voting. The American economist Anthony Downs, in his foundational book An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957), argued that a truly rational individual, who knows that her vote is highly unlikely to tip the outcome in favour of her preferred candidate, should not bother to cast a ballot. On this view of human rationality, an independent action that carries no instrumental value for the person who acts is essentially foolish, justifiable only by the sense of pride or communion with others that it creates in her. This is fine, perhaps even compelling, as an esoteric argument. But taken to its logical extreme, this classical account of rationality would imply that nobody should ever vote. This outcome would gut democratic governance of its central regulating mechanism. Society would be left worse off, even if each citizen were spared the apparently pointless expense of time and energy involved in a trip to the ballot box.
• Technology, Patents, and Inequality: An Explanation that Even Economists Can Understand — Dean Baker: It is popular for people, especially economist-type people, to claim that technology has been a major driver of the increase in inequality over the last four decades. This view is very convenient for those on the winning side of the inequality divide, since it implies that the growth in inequality was largely an organic process independent of government policy. Inequality might be an unfortunate outcome, but who would be opposed to the advance of technology? However convenient the technology driving inequality story might be, it falls down on even the most simple examination of its logic. To take an example that has often been used, there is a concern that displacing workers with robots will lead to a transfer of income from workers to the people who own the robots. [… However] the income from owning a robot is not the result of owning the physical robot. Robots will generally be relatively cheap to manufacture. So people will not be deriving large incomes from owning the steel and other components of the robot. The reason some people might get very rich from owning robots is because they own patents and copyrights that are needed for the making of the robots. Without these patent and copyright monopolies, robots would be cheap, like washing machines, and there would be no large-scale upward redistribution associated with them. If it is not already obvious, patent and copyright monopolies are instruments of public policy, not acts of god. We can make them stronger and longer if we want, or shorter and weaker, or not have them at all.
• Trump Is Growing Concerned About Bernie Sanders, While His Advisers Think the Vermont Senator Will Be Easy to Beat — Ryan Grim at the Intercept: Last week, the New York Times reported that some of Trump’s advisers believe that Sanders is a beatable general election candidate and have worked to elevate him, a report that former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s campaign seized on to argue that Sanders is a risky nominee. But the same article suggested that Trump himself disagrees and has been working to undermine Sanders with his public comments. “The president, his advisers say, has been in need of a clear target for months, and he believes he is actually hurting Mr. Sanders. Mr. Trump’s advisers do not necessarily share that view,” the Times reported. The divergent views among Trump and his aides lead to an amusing strategic synchronicity: Trump believes that he is hurting Sanders by attacking him, while the president’s advisers believe that he is helping Sanders with those same attacks — and so Trump attacking Sanders serves the interests (as they understand them) of both Trump and his advisers.
• Trump and Netanyahu Dictate Terms of Palestinian Surrender to Israel and Call It Peace — Robert Mackey at the Intercept: Saeb Erekat, the chief negotiator for the Palestine Liberation Organization, described the plan delivered by Kushner to Trump as “100 percent the ideas I personally heard many times from Netanyahu and his negotiators. I can assure you that the American so-called peace team have only copied and pasted Netanyahu’s and the settlers’ councils plan.” Amid accusations that his plan was largely based on concepts and details dictated by Netanyahu, Kushner cast himself as an independent expert on the conflict in an interview with Sky News Arabia on Tuesday. “I’ve been studying this now for three years,” he told Sky News Arabia, “I’ve read 25 books on the subject.” At least one of those books appears to have been written by Netanyahu, however. As Dylan Williams of the liberal, pro-Israel group J Street pointed out, Kushner’s plan appeared at one point to borrow language from one of the Israeli prime minister’s books.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Bloom County — by Berkeley Breathed:
  
• Lies, the Bethlehem Doctrine, and the Illegal Murder of Soleimani — Craig Murray: Developed by Daniel Bethlehem when Legal Adviser to first Netanyahu’s government and then Blair’s, the Bethlehem Doctrine is that states have a right of “pre-emptive self-defence” against “imminent” attack. That is something most people, and most international law experts and judges, would accept. Including me. What very few people, and almost no international lawyers, accept is the key to the Bethlehem Doctrine – that here “Imminent” – the word used so carefully by Pompeo – does not need to have its normal meanings of either “soon” or “about to happen”. An attack may be deemed “imminent”, according to the Bethlehem Doctrine, even if you know no details of it or when it might occur. So you may be assassinated by a drone or bomb strike – and the doctrine was specifically developed to justify such strikes – because of “intelligence” you are engaged in a plot, when that intelligence neither says what the plot is nor when it might occur. Or even more tenuous, because there is intelligence you have engaged in a plot before, so it is reasonable to kill you in case you do so again. […] So when Pompeo says attacks by Soleimani were “imminent” he is not using the word in the normal sense in the English language. It is no use asking him what, where or when these “imminent” attacks were planned to be. He is referencing the Bethlehem Doctrine under which you can kill people on the basis of a feeling that they may have been about to do something.
• Iran Is Not What You Think — Ted Rall: You can get an idea of how unusual our plan was from the incredulous reaction of the Afghan border policeman who greeted us after we crossed the border from Tajikistan. “Point of exit?” he asked. When we told him Iran, he laughed. “You are American! There is no way,” he replied. When he showed our Iranian visas to his colleagues, they couldn’t believe their eyes. “How did you get these?” they wanted to know. Several weeks later, we walked across the border between northwestern Afghanistan and northeastern Iran. It seemed incredibly simple. We were already stamped in and on the curb outside the customs office waiting for a taxi when three bemused agents of Iran’s feared Ettela intelligence service tapped us on our shoulders and invited us into separate interrogation rooms. They grilled us for hours. Before they released us my agent asked me: “Do you know why we questioned you so diligently?” I didn’t. “You three,” he replied, “are the first Americans to cross this border since 1979.” I don’t know if that’s true. Clearly we were rare birds.
• In Love — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith:
  
• America Escalates its “Democratic” Oil War in the Near East — Michael Hudson: The mainstream media are carefully sidestepping the method behind America’s seeming madness in assassinating Islamic Revolutionary Guard general Qassim Suleimani to start the New Year. The logic behind the assassination was a long-standing application of U.S. global policy, not just a personality quirk of Donald Trump’s impulsive action. His assassination of Iranian military leader Suleimani was indeed a unilateral act of war in violation of international law, but it was a logical step in a long-standing U.S. strategy. It was explicitly authorized by the Senate in the funding bill for the Pentagon that it passed last year. The assassination was intended to escalate America’s presence in Iraq to keep control of the region’s oil reserves, and to back Saudi Arabia’s Wahabi troops (Isis, Al Quaeda in Iraq, Al Nusra and other divisions of what are actually America’s foreign legion), to support U.S. control of Near Eastern oil as a buttress of the U.S. dollar. That remains the key to understanding this policy, and why it is in the process of escalating, not dying down.
• That old familiar melody — This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow:
  
• The productivity of bullshit jobs — Blair Fix in the Real-World Economics Review Blog: Economists’ main theory for explaining individual income is called human capital theory. According to this theory, human capital makes you more productive. This productivity then makes you earn more income. The problem […] is that economists don’t have a way of measuring productivity that is independent of income. What they do instead is resort to circular logic. They define productivity in terms of income. So when you read about labor productivity in the national accounts, this actually has nothing to do with the output of workers. It has to do with their income. Productivity is measured in terms of value added, which is effectively a form of income.
• Bizarro — by Dan Piraro: