Mitch's Blog

Harrison’s administration had been “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever seen,” one businessmen’s club declared, and losing that administration would be a calamity, especially since, according to Republicans, Democrats were socialists and anarchists who wanted to destroy America. The Chicago Tribune told readers that a lower tariff would destroy industries and throw people out of work, but it seemed fine with the prospect: “The working classes of the country need such a lesson.

— Letters From an American

Not mentioned by Richardson in this article: An immigrant named Frederick Trump made a fortune during the Gold Rush running a restaurant and brothel for miners. His grandson is, of course, the President today.

Derek Thompson interviews Agnes Callard, the University of Chicago professor, about her new theory called “the uni-context.":

A context is a set of circumstances that tell you how you should act. For most of human history, contexts were local and multiple. If you wanted to know how you should act, you would look around. Am I in a field? Am I inside my home? Am I in the church? Am I in a bar? You would immediately get guidance by looking both at your physical environment and at the people around you and how they were acting.

The uni-context is a scenario in which the ways you should act become the same across all different contexts. There’s just one set of norms you should follow all times, irrespective of context.

G.P.S. has also led us to outsource existential skills: locating yourself in space, parsing out your surroundings, staying calm when you don’t know where you are. Do we lose something when we no longer get lost?

— Shayla Love at The New Yorker

I use GPS to get to places within ten miles of my house that I have been to dozens of times.

“Oh, she’s running,” writes Tressie McMillan Cottom at The New York Times. ⁠"Americans love to turn to women when the house is burning down. Social scientists call it the glass cliff – the phenomenon in which women are recruited to lead failing companies.⁠⁠"

I first read this as Cottom saying the United States is failing, and I said to myself, no, not even close. We’re certainly declining but we are still strong in many ways, and the decline is reversible.

However, the Democratic Party is certainly in decline, with chickenshit leadership motivated by protecting billionaires and propping up institutions they cannot see are rotten.

The Republican Party is, of course, primarily concerned with protecting pedophiles and insurrectionists, avoiding Trump’s wrath, as well as bribery and ethnic cleansing. The Democratic Party must be reformed, but the Republican Party is beyond redemption.

I’m frustrated by the way the fediverse seems to be floundering because I prefer it to Bluesky as technology. And yet Bluesky is more and more where the interesting people are. Which is not to say there are no interesting people on Masto — but they are fewer.

I like Reddit for reading, finding memes and historical photos and illustrations, and occasionally leaving comments. I rarely post anymore. Redditors suffer deeply from Stockholm syndrome.

Posting on Reddit is too hard. Moderators are playing a massive homeowner association roleplaying game.

kottke.org: Jamelle Bouie “chastises American political & cultural pundits for their lack of moral seriousness w/r/t their focus on ‘wokeness’ instead of the real harms being done by the authoritarian Trump regime.”

MAGA is building concentration camps, purging Blacks from high levels of the military, taking billions of dollars in bribes, murdering protesters, protecting pedophiles, committing violent insurrection and protecting those insurrectionists, “imprisoning dissidents, dismantling public education and eroding democracy.

Meanwhile, pundits are concerned about pronouns.

Corporate Power Approaches Escape Velocity. Hamilton Nolan: A failed Tesla strike in Sweden is a flashing warning light.

An example of this phenomenon, showing it’s not limited to young people: I recently re-read “Fer de Lance,” the first Nero Wolfe detective novel, published in 1934. Two of the characters are wealthy heirs, young men, who have become infatuated with flying. One has a private airfield, owns his own plane and employs a full-time mechanic, the other is studying flying with the first young man and plans to found an airline.

The first time I read the novel, when I was in my 20s, I did not make the connection that the Wright Brothers had first flown 30 years earlier. This was new technology then. These two young men were the equivalent of today’s billionaires investing in AI.

Zoomers don’t know what Usenet is.

Allegra Rosenberg has a good explanation, and she continues with a meditation on misconceptions that Generation Z have about life in the 90s and 2000s.

This misunderstanding is not unique to GenZ; I think it’s a phenomenon of being in one’s 20s. I remember reading Dickens...

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