Linkage

The smug, self-righteous “moral” crusade against Trump stokes the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. It reduces a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It refuses to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. It allows Democratic politicians to blithely ignore their base -  77 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of independents support an arms embargo against Israel. The open collusion with corporate oppression and refusal to heed the desires and needs of the electorate neuters the press and Trump  critics. These corporate puppets stand for nothing, other than their own advancement. The lies they tell to working men and women, especially with programs such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), do far more damage than any of the lies uttered by Trump.

Oswald Spengler in “The Decline of the West” predicted that, as Western democracies calcified and died, a class of “monied thugs,” people such as Trump, would replace the traditional political elites. Democracy would become a sham. Hatred would be fostered and fed to the masses to encourage them to tear themselves apart.

The American dream has become an American nightmare.

The social bonds, including jobs that gave working Americans a sense of purpose and stability, that gave them meaning and hope, have been sundered. The stagnation of tens of millions of lives, the realization that it will not be better for their children, the predatory nature of our institutions, including education, health care and prisons, have engendered, along with despair, feelings of powerlessness and humiliation. It has bred loneliness, frustration, anger and a sense of worthlessness.

I have thoughts backed up, many of them, obviously. As election day approached, I found myself thinking more and more about Lakoff, in the context of the New Republicans' ability to convey a narrative about who they are and what they stand for. It's monstrous, but has a kind of coherence. By contrast the Democrats don't have anything like that. As an institution, they are a moral and civil vacuum. They are rightly seen as calculating and untrustworthy.

However I take issue with Duran and Lakoff's assertion that the Democrats were practicing identity politics. If anything they were doing quite the reverse: identity complacency. The Republicans have been wielding identity politics frighteningly effectively.

In 2024, Kamala Harris tried to move to the right to find the mythical “center.” It didn’t work. Moving to the right doesn't get you to the center – because there is no center. When a Democratic politician moves to "the right" during an election, it erodes their authenticity. In fact, such tactics might have demotivated Democratic voters who were disillusioned to see their candidate running as a Republican Lite.

[…]

Moving forward, Democrats must stop making these superficial, last-minute lurches toward Republican ideas. They must frame the case not as left or right, but for the people and the public good. Moving to the right only convinces voters that the right has better ideas. It's a desperate short-term strategy with harmful long-term consequences.

[…]

Especially helpful to Trump were large social media accounts that thrive on engagement from outraged Democrats. As in 2016, Trump’s "opponents" created a parasitic economy in which constant outrage over Trump's every utterance was the name of the game. Again, this was a massive failure – because focusing attention on Trump’s power — even his power to harm — helps Trump. (Don't expect these professional social media hounds to change their tactics. Amplifying Trump is their bread and butter.)

The attacks on Trump managed to help spread his message far and wide. If Democrats and the liberal press had spent less time reacting to Trump, they might have done a lot better job of trumpeting — and trumpeting loudly — their own candidate’s positives. 

This is just a shambles:

A key factor that the industry has been keen to not draw too much attention to for over a year is the number of 4G & 5G devices that would no longer work, or would only work on some networks, including for Emergency Calling.

The idea that a 4G or 5G phone could somehow be affected by the shutting down of older technologies like 2G & 3G is a completely foreign concept to people, and rightfully so.

[…]

Unlike with 2G & 3G, 4G & 5G are Data only standards and have no built-in calling functionality, let alone one as well standardised as the traditional Circuited Switched calling from 2G & 3G (GSM/UMTS).

This becomes a problem as to enable calling over 4G & 5G, devices need to have explicit software/firmware support, especially so for Emergency Calling.

Calling on 4G Networks is enabled through the use of VoLTE (Voice over LTE aka ‘4G Calling’), which is a software/firmware VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) calling solution for mobile phones.

The world has used VoIP Calling for decades but introducing VoIP data based calling into the mobile sector has proven very difficult.

Voice Over LTE (4G Calling) devices have been around since as early as 2013, however over years the industry has failed to ensure interoperability.

The presence of security guards in a place is arguably a good indicator of this “negative social capital.” Guards are needed because a place otherwise lacks the norms of reciprocity that are needed to assure good order and behavior. The steady increase in the number of security guards and the number of places (apartments, dormitories, public buildings) to which access is secured by guards indicates the absence of trust.

The number of security guards in the United States has increased from about 600,000 in 1980 to more than 1,000,000 in 2000 (Strom et al., 2010). These figures represent a steep increase from earlier years. In 1960, there were only about 250,000 guards, watchmen and doormen, according to the Census (which used a different occupational classification scheme than is used today). The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the number of US security guards has increased by almost 100,000 since 2010, to a total of more than 1.1 million. As a measure of how paranoid and unwelcoming we are as a nation, security guards outnumber receptionists by more than 100,000 workers nationally.

Sam Bowles and Arjun Jayadev argue that we have become “one nation under guard” and say that the growth of guard labor is symptomatic of growing inequality. The U.S. has the dubious distinction of employing a larger share of its workers as guards than other industrialized nations and there seems to be a correlation between national income inequality and guard labor.

Hilarious. Joyless monomaniacs near you are looking for love…

According to useless rag The Daily Mail, who interviewed Watson about her cool new phrenology software, the app—called L’App, like some sort of miserable French pre-dinner meal—will use “sex-recognition technology” to “ensure only biological females can sign up.” As ever, I cannot begin to guess what the fuck a “biological female is,” but maybe if we break down what the app is actually looking for we can come up with a few ideas.

When you sign up on the app, you have to let it scan your face, a decision that any dystopian science fiction film can tell you is a fantastic idea. The app will “analyze” features like “bone structure, the shape and positioning of an individual's eyes, eyebrows and nose shape or size” to determine whether or not you’re a true adult human female or just some sort of poseur.

Watson says L’App’s transgender detection is 99% accurate, an absolutely stunning number that I’m absolutely sure is correct and not made up. Considering trans people in general make up roughly one percent of the world population, my back of the napkin math suggests the app can’t actually catch any trans women at all.

[…]

Watson admitted to The Mail that she’s had some particularly amusing trouble fitting in on other dating apps.

“Any time I've joined a lesbian dating app or any other dating app myself, I get banned. To avoid trans-identified males, I will always write a little blurb, nothing disrespectful, saying my preference is for women and please respect my boundaries. And every time I do that I get banned. On one app I was asked to put down my most controversial opinion, so I wrote that J. K. Rowling was right and was banned for that. It's insane.”

Oh yes, Jenny, it’s the rest of the world that’s gone insane. You’re the only one who gets it. The rest of us are simply delusional, and that’s why other lesbians don’t want your rancid ass on their dating app. Have fun on your own app where the icky trans girls aren’t allowed. I’m sure the fact that other lesbians keep banning you from their dating apps is no indication of how successful your purity test app will be.

The notion that negative gearing leads to an increased supply of rental dwellings is flawed: 92% of
investment is used to purchase existing dwellings, displacing previous owner-occupiers or tenants to
buy or rent elsewhere, respectively, resulting in little to no net increase in the rental stock. Negative
gearing is a poor investment strategy over the long term for investors pursuing capital gain rather
than rental income as housing prices have increased by an average of 2.4% annually from 1880 to
2011 in real terms (before 1996, housing had delivered a real return of only 0.7% annually). Negative
gearing for purposes of realizing capital gain, however, becomes a viable strategy during the boom
phase of a housing cycle as capital values are substantially appreciating. Contrary to claims that
quarantining negative gearing during 1985-87 caused a surge in rental prices, rents increased in only
some capital cities while stagnating or falling in others.

[…]

It is recommended that, at a minimum, negative gearing be quarantined to the purchase of newly-
constructed dwellings, or preferably, be abolished. The Commonwealth Rent Assistance (CRA) scheme
is better targeted towards those who require help in the course of renting rather than subsidising
residential property market investors. Although the CRA could increase rents, it appears to be the
most straight-forward mechanism available to policymakers to aid tenants.

Once upon a time it was razor blades in apples; this year, it’s rainbow fentanyl in candy. But while fears of children receiving narcotic-spiked treats are unfounded, there is a very real danger that America’s children face on this most hallowed of evenings: cars.

That’s because pedestrians under the age of 18 are three times more likely to be struck and killed by a car on Halloween than any other day of the year. That risk grows to 10 times more likely for children aged 4 to 8 years old, according to a study from 2019 in JAMA Pediatrics. 

[…]

But what happens on Halloween isn’t an isolated incident. After gun injuries, motor vehicle injuries are the second leading cause of death among children in the US overall. And with pedestrian fatalities (both adult and child) at a 40-year high in the US, it’s worth asking why children roaming the streets is so inherently deadly, and what can be done about it.

“Sometimes when you talk about this issue, you get pushback from people and people say, ‘Well, of course, you have more children on the streets, of course, more children are going to die,’” Doug Gordon, a writer and podcast host who advocates for safer streets and cities, told me. “But that accepts a baseline level of danger that I think we as a society have in fact accepted on the other 364 days of the year.”

It is impossible to read anything by Mehdi Hasan without hearing it in his voice. Fact.

Consider the record of recent weeks and months:

• Israel’s prime minister, while standing on stage at the UN general assembly, denounced the body as “contemptible”, a “house of darkness” and a “swamp of antisemitic bile”.
• Israel’s outgoing ambassador to the UN shredded a copy of the UN charter with a miniature paper shredder while also standing at the podium of the general assembly, and later said the UN headquarters in New York “should be closed and wiped off the face of the Earth”.
• Israel’s foreign minister falsely accused the UN secretary general of not having condemned Iran’s attacks on Israel, declared him “persona non grata in Israel” and announced that he had “banned him from entering the country”.
• The Israeli government actively obstructed a UN-mandated commission of inquiry trying to collect evidence on the 7 October attacks.
• Israel’s parliament is in the process of designating a longstanding UN agency, Unrwa, as a “terrorist organization”.
• The Israeli military has bombed UN schools, warehouses and refugee camps in Gaza for 12 consecutive months, and killed a record 228 UN employees in the process. “By far the highest number of our personnel killed in a single conflict or natural disaster since the creation of the United Nations,” to quote the UN secretary general.
• The Israeli military is now also attacking UN peacekeepers in southern Lebanon. According to the UN, “five UN ‘Blue Helmets’ serving with UNIFIL in Lebanon have been injured as Israeli forces inflicted damage on UN positions close to the ‘Blue Line’.”

How is any of this OK? Acceptable? Legal?

Perhaps the biggest question of all: how is Israel still allowed to remain a member of the UN? Why has it not yet been expelled from an organization that it is relentlessly and shamelessly attacking and undermining? Sure, there are other human rights abusers that remain card-carrying members of the UN – Syria, Russia and North Korea, to name but a few – but none of them have killed UN employees en masse; none of them have sent tanks to invade a UN base; none of them have “refused to comply with more than two dozen UNSC resolutions”. It has been more than 60 years since any country in the world dared make the UN secretary general himself “persona non grata”.

In Australia, we do much the same by putting a cost premium on dangerous knowledge.

Florida’s public universities are purging the list of general education courses they will offer next year to fall in line with a state law pushed for by Gov. Ron DeSantis targeting “woke ideologies” in higher education.

These decisions, in many cases being driven by the university system’s Board of Governors, have the potential to affect faculty and thousands of students across the state. Hundreds of courses are slated to become electives after previously counting toward graduation requirements, which university professors and free speech advocates fear is just the first step toward those classes disappearing entirely.

The state’s involvement in a curriculum process — which has historically been left to universities — is riling academics and students who oppose how officials are using new authority to weed out courses like Anthropology of Race & Ethnicity, Sociology of Gender, and Women in Literature.

“This sort of state overreach could spell disaster for student and faculty retention, and the academic standing of Florida institutions,” said Katie Blankenship, who leads a state office for free speech advocacy group PEN America.

Yet the Board of Governors maintains that the state is merely carrying out the intent of the GOP-dominated Legislature, which in 2023 called for a wholesale review of general education offerings to ensure the courses stray from teaching “identity politics” and avoid “unproven, speculative, or exploratory” content.

This is from a few years ago, and fits with first-hand experience.

The class action comes as Coles faces legal action from the Fair Work Ombudsman (FWO) over alleged underpayment of its managers. The FWO puts the underpayment at more than $100 million between 2017 and 2020.

In a statement made after filing proceedings in the Federal Court last week, the FWO alleges one worker was underpaid $471,647 during the period.

Beneath those hard numbers are the personal stories of almost 8,000 Coles managers like Ms Macdonald, for whom the allegations represent not only underpayment but years of stress and anxiety while working for the supermarket giant.

[…] Adero Law principal Rory Markham, who is running the class action against Coles, says the company has vastly underestimated the underpayments.

"When you're paid a flat salary, as in the case of Coles managers, there's no allowance for overtime or excessive hours," he says.

He says information from the roughly 2,200 salaried staff who have signed up for the class action show they were working an average of 55 to 65 hours a week — well above their typical contracted roster of 40 hours.