These six things doth the LORD hate, yea, seven are an abomination unto Him:
I am telling you once more how zealously I look forward to and actively hurry down the day when all this echthroic crypto-Christofascist lot are left face down, rhetorically speaking, in their metaphorically burnt-out bunkers and political ditches, and a whole generation and yet another after them shame-facedly insists they never meant for anything like that, even as they pointedly refuse to name any of their children Donald, or Chaya, or Ryan, or Oklahoma State Senator Tom Woods, R-Westville, hateful bigot.
Which side you are on.
So this piece has rather deservedly become an instant classic, up there in the pantheon of speaking truth to bullshit with God’s grief-stricken press conference, or the only country where this regularly happens, but there’s nonetheless a moment’s hesitation before you recommend it, or there ought to be: in inhabiting that hateful rhetoric so completely as to so convincingly ape it with which whatever purity of motive is to risk reifying precisely that horrible hate—satire cannot be failed; it can only fail. —No, some things are so vilely hateful, some contexts are so overwhelmingly unbalanced, even the slightest chance of failure can’t be risked. Sometimes what you absolutely need is the cold clear righteously vicious opposite. —To the barricades, motherfuckers. You will lose.
& yet—
Mean-spirited cracks at the Former Guy hit different now that every mention of his name really ought to be preceded by the words “genocidal stooge.” —He’s not doing anything, of course, just scampering up to the front of a bunch of people already sort of headed in that general direction, but that’s much, much more terrifying. I want so much for us all to skip straight to the bit where the folks at the head of that bunch are all face down in their respective ditches or burned-out bunkers, and a whole generation shame-facedly insists they never meant for anything like that as they quietly fail to name their children Donald, or Ronald, or Tucker, or Chaya—but without all the immiseration and deprivation and violence and death, and all of us here today can just get back to living our lives as we are, you know?
Even the bull puts in some effort.
This piece—pleasant, but slight, ending just as it feels like it’s run through the pre-flight check for a much longer trip—does, at least (as it two-steps from of all things Paper Moon to the 48 Laws of Power), manage to articulate an essential, implacable truth of the Age in Which We’ve Found Ourselves Deposited: how on earth is it possible to speak as we so often do of Donald J. Trump as a grifter, when he can’t even be bothered to begin to pretend to try?
Power in power is power in power.
Money in politics is speech. Speech about money in politics is not speech.
The cause is you, Mr. and Mrs. Yesterday, you, with your forked tongues.
I really gotta stop eavesdropping on the hellsite. If I did, I’d never have to deal with the tsuris stirred up by this centrist jackass, who’s anyways never not on his bullshit:
And oh, he goes ahead and walks it all back with another tweet, oh, I don’t mean denying climate change, or going antivax, or denying the results of any elections, or standing up for antisemitism, or believing anyone in Hollywood is a pedophilic monster, no no, and we can all agree that these are all the basic benchmarks of being a basically decent human being, and Lord knows we’d all like to get older without losing our decency. But of course what this centrist jackass neglects to mention is his shining example of why it’s okay didn’t only hobnob with Reagan when things got to the point that they got, but also with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and Jim Bakker and but also John Birch Society conspiracy-monger Wllard Cleon Skousen, which is exactly and precisely how you fucking get to antivax and antisemitism and denying elections and terminating the fucking Constitution and believing Comet Ping Pong has a goddamn fucking basement. —But we don’t even have to do that much barely minimal research: this centrist jackass’s okay point that he wants to fucking normalize is betraying everything you ever said you stood for to support Ronald God damn Reagan, the singular fucking Jonbar hinge that swung us all of us, every one, from everything we could’ve maybe might’ve had to what we’re fucking stuck with now.
Ronald fucking Reagan.
It’s a poisonously seductive notion, that we must become more conservative as we age, that as we acquire things, stuff, stability, position, power, privilege, we must necessarily crouch and grasp to hold, maintain, conserve. Because we can, we might, we should also acquire knowledge, perspective, empathy, experience, possibility, as we get older, all of which, each of which, militates against conservatism qua fucking Ronald fucking Reagan fucking conservatism.
So, I mean, basically, fuck this centrist jackass, is my point.
If the basilisk sees its reflection within 30 ft. of it in bright light, it mistakes itself for a rival and targets itself with its gaze.
Mike Hoye wrote a charming takedown of the implications of and actual use cases for “effective altruism,” soi-so-very-disingenuously-disant, and I call it to your attention for that, but also for his description of the more abstruse theology behind the ideology:
It’s what you’d end up with if you started with Scientology and replaced “thetans” with “dollars.”
I expect you all to be doing your part to immortalize it.
As to that theology: it’s as grubby and grasping as you’d expect, a premillennialism that dispenses with any need to give an inconvenient shit about the here and now in favor of the serenely happy could-be maybes of literally trillions of one-day someday others—an imaginary euphoria so massively vast that a billionth of a percentage point of the chance that it might come to pass outweighs whatever petty sun-dried raisins might float in the head of whomever’s life is spent in the grindingly horrible labor necessary to build the device that calculates it. The whole affair’s suffused with an overwhelming, overweening aroma of three-in-the-morning dorm-room debate, and it took me a moment to realize the déjà I kept vuing as I read along:
Effective altruism is nothing more than Roko’s basilisk.
Oh, some of the rough edges have been smoothed away, some of the bullshit wiped off: we’ve lost the time-travel and the tortured clones and the games of Prisoner’s Dilemma you’re supposedly playing with yourself; we’ve traded a bizarrely psychotic omnipotent future-AI supremely concerned with what we are doing here and now to bring it someday about for a future of trillions of happy intelligences happily skipping about endless holodecks of fun and adventure that can only someday be brought about by what we’re doing here and now—but that’s just the sort of renovation you’d do to weaponize the notion into a nostrum you could sell to tech-addled billionaires. One can’t help but be (disgusted, but) impressed.
I mean, Jiminy flippin’ Cricket: the post in which Roko first introduced the damned thing is titled Solutions to the Altruist’s Burden: the Quantum Billionaire Trick.
—It’s a cold comfort (most of our comforts are chilly, these days), but it’s worth noting that the basilisk is one of the dumber monsters in the D&D bestiary, with an Intelligence of 2. It helps to explain why Zuckerberg’s burning Facebook to the ground for a metaverse nobody wants, here and now: someday, maybe, trillions of legless avatars might blissfully revere his name.
Every billionaire is a policy failure. Every billionaire is a weapon of mass destruction. Every billionaire is history’s greatest monster. Every billionaire is an injury to the world. Every billionaire is an affront to God. Every billionaire must be taxed out of existence.
Good citizens are the riches of a city.
That’s what’s engraved at the base of Skidmore Fountain, at the direction of C.E.S. Wood, who had the fountain designed by his good friend Olin Warner, and it’s unclear to me if that’s something he (Wood) was known for having said, and chose to memorialize, or merely an epigram composed for the purpose; it doesn’t so much matter. The saying’s firmly fixed, to him, to the city, to history, to the fountain, to us, so much so that when it came time for me to stage a political debate in the epic, in the storied civic temple of the City Club of Portland, I made sure to build the victor’s rebuttal around that very motto:
(Said fictional debate, and I mention this, I indulge in this detail, because it will turn out to have been somewhat germane, is between the candidates for mayor, the one of them our smoothly corporate cipher, the challenger, who’s not so much based on as representing the place and role in the political firmament of former mayor Sam Adams, and Sam Adams is the label of a once microbrewery gone successfully corporate, and so the challenger’s named Killian, since Killian’s is the label of another microbrewery, ditto; his opponent, the older skool incumbent, rather more directly based on also-former mayor Vera Katz, is, of course, named Beagle, and so.)
—Anyway. So much for the riches of a city.
City Council Passes $27 Million Budget Package to Fund Homeless Encampment Plan
Portland City Council voted 3 – 0 Wednesday morning to approve a controversial budget package that lays the groundwork for a plan to criminalize street camping and build mass encampments to hold unhoused Portlanders by 2024. Both city commissioners Carmen Rubio and Jo Ann Hardesty were absent for the morning’s vote. (According to council staff, Hardesty is on a planned vacation and Rubio is out sick.)
The details of the “mass encampments” the plan speaks of are somewhat in flux: ranging from holding a thousand people each (that version would’ve been maintained by National Guard “security specialists”) to maybe a hundred each, at the start, let’s see; the most generous reading of the plan in its current state would be enough to hold 750 people, total.
The most recent point-in-time count of those experiencing homelessness in the TriMet area? 6,633 people, on the night of January 26, 2022.
I suppose providing some “official” place to camp for ten percent of the people affected counts as just about the equivalent of a Band-aid® in dealing with a homelessness problem?
—Of course, the mass encampments aren’t really there to provide official places to put anyone. The camps are there to provide a fig leaf to allow for the most important provision of the plan: the criminalization of unsanctioned street camping. —In 2019, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of Martin v. Boise, in which the Ninth Circuit found it was a violation of the Eight Amendment to jail, fine, or cite individuals for doing what they could not otherwise avoid doing: if a city does not provide places for those without homes to sleep, it cannot persecute them for sleeping without a home.
But hey, the City of Portland can now say. We’ve got these camps, or will, soon enough. You have legally sanctioned options you’re electing not to exercise; we may now criminalize your behavior. So! GO—MOVE—SHIFT—
This ghastly disaster was yeeted from the public sphere back in February, when it was originally trial-ballooned in a blue-sky memo by none other than said former mayor Sam Adams, now a top aide to our current mayor, Ted Wheeler: “a plan to end the need for unsanctioned camping,” he said, but also, “This is not a proposal, this isn’t even a plan,” and “This is Sam Adams putting concepts out there, looking for discussion.”
“That idea would never fly with us,” said City Commissioner Carmen Rubio at the time, “and if true, I hope that would be a nonstarter for the mayor.” And City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty said, “Based on what has been reported, this half-baked plan is a nonstarter.”
Welp, elections have consequences, and so it would appear does a national pre-election campaign of screaming fearmongering as regards CRIME and the need for LAW AND ORDER; that which was roundly shouted down in February is officially if hastily proposed in October and approved, with preliminary funding, by a 3 – 0 vote of our five-member council, in November. “These resolutions do not criminalize homelessness,” insisted City Commissioner Dan Ryan, who, along with Commissioner Mingus Mapps and Mayor Ted Wheeler, voted for the plan, and of course, he’s right; they merely criminalize homelessness anywhere he’d otherwise have to see it.
But that 27 million dollars has to come from somewhere. The budget as approved cuts (among other line items) 8 million dollars from the city’s allotment to the Joint Office of Homeless Services, and threatens to cut another 7 million more. Gutting the JOHS threatens shelters that currently provide a couple-hundred beds and rent-assistance programs that support another fourteen hundred or so people not currently experiencing homelessness.
Oh, well. Guess we’re going to need a bigger mass encampment.
Yes, Portland has an issue with homelessness. Not unlike every other city in the country. Yes, one might even refer to it as chronic. The solution is simplicity itself: you give people homes. An answer so self-evident should not require proof, but it has been proven, over and over again, from Houston to Finland: housing comes first. But our good citizens, or at least the ones currently in office, are criminally stunted in their political imaginations; our riches in that regard are, sadly, depleted. Salt & Straw is threatening to leave downtown, for God’s sake! We must be seen to be doing something. Once it’s swept away, out of sight, and business has returned to what we might remember as having been normal, then we can turn our meagre attentions to the longer term. You’ll see.
But. Until then—
How it started / How it’s going;
or, The ratchet.
You might recall that Andy Ngo, fascist provocateur and inspiration to multiple mass shooters, fancies himself (when he isn’t gleefully ordering the suspension of leftist accounts on Twitter) as something of a journalist: why, he’s even written himself a book! —Here’s how Powell’s wrote it up in their online catalog just a couple short years ago, when it was first released:
Unmasked by Andy Ngo came to us through an automatic data feed via one of our long-term and respected publishers, Hachette Book Group. We list the majority of their catalogue automatically, as do many other independent and larger retailers. We have a similar arrangement with other publishers.
This book will not be on our store shelves, and we will not promote it. That said, it will remain in our online catalogue. We carry books that we find anywhere from simply distasteful or badly written, to execrable, as well as those that we treasure. We believe it is the work of bookselling to do so.
And, well, here’s how Powell’s now writes up the revised edition, with its brand new afterword from the author:
In this #1 national bestseller, a journalist who’s been attacked by Antifa writes a deeply researched and reported account of the group’s history and tactics.
When Andy Ngo was attacked in the streets by Antifa in the summer of 2019, most people assumed it was an isolated incident. But those who’d been following Ngo’s reporting in outlets like the New York Post and Quillette knew that the attack was only the latest in a long line of crimes perpetrated by Antifa.
In Unmasked, Andy Ngo tells the story of this violent extremist movement from the very beginning. He includes interviews with former followers of the group, people who’ve been attacked by them, and incorporates stories from his own life. This book contains a trove of documents obtained by the author, published for the first time ever.
In conclusion, fuck Powell’s.
Meanwhile, in fascist Twitter.
The reason they’re going so openly, distressingly hard (beyond what savagely infantile joy there is to be taken in the mere fact that they can) is because they are shook: they have come just this close to losing an ounce of ill-gotten privilege, and that fact alone has their mouths parched and their palms clammy and their guts in knots, their instincts rattled to the point they forget the thing to do in polite company is to hide who they truly are. They are terrified. —It’s a mean, cold comfort, perhaps, but take what of it you might; we have a long and ugly fight ahead.
GO—MOVE—SHIFT
Telling as all get-the-fuck-out that in the headline “Portland neighbors beg for help as homeless camp takes root” the NEIGHBORS doing the BEGGING aren’t the ones without a roof.
Pontypool variations.
All due respect to Barry, the cartoonist, but his analysis I think leaves out a wide middle swath: there are Republicans, who are tools, who believe ridiculous lies; there are Republicans, who believe in the power of ridiculous lies; and then there are Republicans, who know, deep down, the lie isn’t true, but pretend to believe with all their heart, no matter how ridiculous, because it gives them the excuse they need to do what they want to do anyway. It’s this last set that are the most dangerous, but also our only hope: if the cost of pretending to believe the lie’s too great, they’ll stop—because they can. —It’s just the cost is so damn cheap these days, is the thing.
Smothered.
Why on earth would anyone watch the nightly fascist divagations of Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson? —It’s not just the monotonously sour, pinch-faced homiletics of a Haw-Haw aspirant desperately trying to keep up with the Facebooked racism of his lessors, but also, apparently, every commercial break you’re gonna have to sit through a couple-three spots for those slipperily awful pillows, over and over and over and over again. Who does that to themselves?
Abaugurate.
“When I left there Wednesday, I was real happy and proud of our team,” said Kevin Grooms, who works in the Paint Shop. The white paint on the inaugural stands was completely finished, and they had made it through nearly three-quarters of the blue detail work. “We worked until probably twelve o’clock Wednesday. And the blue paint that was on the deck was actually still wet.”
“We came back on Thursday morning, and I mean, it was completely destroyed,” he said. “It was just totally demolished. The blue wet paint, they tracked it all over.”
There was also trash and debris covering the stands. “Besides the stands having a lot of debris on them, there was a lot of broken glass. And there was a significant amount of residue from the tear gas. It was very difficult cleaning up that area,” said Serock, who noted that the US Capitol Police provided important guidance on how to safely handle these items.
“It was a real mess, it was unbelievable. You just can’t imagine,” said Grooms. “We’re still in shock over it.” But his team worked through the weekend, “When I left there Sunday afternoon, that deck looked like it did Wednesday. Now, it’s pretty much down to touch-ups.”
—via the staff of the Architect of the Capitol
Early yesterday morning, a knot of curious spectators stood on a corner of Connecticut Avenue, craning their necks over a procession of black SUVs and police cars to try to catch a glimpse of Biden. I asked one of the DC reporters standing there if she knew the best path through the cordon of checkpoints surrounding downtown. She glanced down at my unadorned neck and then said, in the manner that you would speak to the Official Rube Correspondent of the Hicksville Gazette, “Um, I think you need a credential to get down there.”
Because I try to avoid wearing press credentials out of both a philosophical belief that the experience of a journalist should mirror that of the general public and the fact that I often work at publications not considered fancy enough to be approved for press credentials, I was determined to navigate DC as any other citizen. It was true that you needed a credential to get anywhere close to the Capitol or even the National Mall, where you might be able to see or hear the actual ceremony. The series of scary-looking metal fences and concrete barriers that began all the way up at K Street, though, could be passed through, although the United States government did not seem to want anyone to be aware of that fact.
At every opening in the security fence, there stood a line of soldiers, with M‑16s, surrounded by a motley assortment of Secret Service and metro cops and FBI agents and Park Police. Concrete slabs were erected to funnel you down this imposing gauntlet of the security state. There was not a single sign saying, for example, “This Way to Inauguration,” or “Entrance Here,” or “Public Access,” or anything else. There was only the military checkpoint, the armed men in sunglasses, and the mostly empty streets. Even I, a basic white man, had to gather a fair amount of courage to approach the stone-faced soldier behind the nearest metal fence and ask if there was a way to get through.
“Oh yeah, you can walk right in here,” he said, gesturing to the terrifying prison-esque checkpoint. “These are open.”
The greatest trick the devil ever pulled
was convincing Democrats that “political capital” is a fungible, depletable resource.
A frozen peach of Serendip.
In searching for something more from William Empson on Edmund Spenser, I happened upon a listing for Radical Spenser, which, I mean, you know, okay, I’m in, but I didn’t want to give Bezos any more money, so I went poking about the Powell’s catalog, and as it turns out they don’t have it at all (recently cutting bonds with the river might maybe have something to do with it; that’s me, always with the edge cases), but: but. —There, between Cold Service Spenser [sic] and Jane Mayer’s Dark Money was, well, this striking bit of in-house marketing copy:
At Powell’s, a lot of our inventory is hand-selected, and hand-promoted. And a lot of our inventory is not. With several million titles available online at any given moment, complete hand-curation is not possible. Unmasked by Andy Ngo came to us through an automatic data feed via one of our long-term and respected publishers, Hachette Book Group. We list the majority of their catalogue automatically, as do many other independent and larger retailers. We have a similar arrangement with other publishers.
This book will not be on our store shelves, and we will not promote it. That said, it will remain in our online catalogue. We carry books that we find anywhere from simply distasteful or badly written, to execrable, as well as those that we treasure. We believe it is the work of bookselling to do so.
And this is how it works, in an interconnected age: when one orders books from let’s say Powell’s, one does not order a book Powell’s currently has on their shelves, or stacked on pallets in their warehouse; just-in-time inventory management allows Powell’s to take your order, pass it along to a distributor, receive from them a copy of the book you want, and pass it back to you, taking a slice along the way, and all so quick you’re usually none the wiser. (Trust me: I’d know if Powell’s actually had 20 copies of one of my books a-waitin’ in a warehouse.) —The downside, of course, is the very lack of those hands, selecting, promoting, curating, which also funnily enough is why YouTube’s such a cesspool, and Twitter a hellsite, and Facebook the destroyer of all we might hold dear. Such a common tragedy.
It should also be noted that said long-term and respected publisher, Hachette Book Group, one of what used to be the Big Five (not counting Bezos), launders its profits through various imprints, so that the money from the street doesn’t get its stink on their name—unless someone like Powell’s goes and gives up the game, most folks would just see that milkshake boy’s first book was published by Center Street, home to such other distinguished authors as Jeanine Pirro, Newt Gingrich, and Donald Trump, Jr. —Undoubtedly, much like those distinguished others, this doxxing grifter will likewise benefit from the conservative book club bulk buy two-step—so, hey, congratulations?
Still: you’d think such cut-outs would make it easier, not harder, for an incomplete hand to still curate its inventory by saying no, not those, not the ones with that label. There being so many, and so carefully calibrated and all. —Funny, that.
All Cops Are Bigoted/Bootlicking/Bastards.
Portland police have used force—in the form of rubber bullets, baton strikes, tear gas volleys, and other acts—more than 6,000 times against Portlanders protesting police violence and racism this year.
This information comes from two newly-updated reports from the Portland Police Bureau (PPB), documenting officer use of force data for the second and third quarters of 2020, a period spanning April 1 and September 30. On Friday, the Mercury shared data from the second quarter report, which found that, in the first 32 days of Portland’s protests—which began on May 29—PPB officers used force against protesters 2,378 times. The release of the third quarter’s data offers a more comprehensive look at the damage inflicted on Portlanders by police this year through what PPB calls “crowd control.” Combined, PPB used force at least 6,249 times against members of the public during 2020’s second and third quarters.
The PPB reports note that this number is likely an underestimation, as some officers did not record every time they used force on a protester.
In comparison, PPB used force against protesters 64 times in 2019, 205 times in 2018, and 162 times in 2017.
I spoke with Jake Angeli, the QAnon guy who got inside the Senate chamber. He said police eventually gave up trying to stop him and other Trump supporters, and let them in. After a while, he said police politely asked him to leave and let him go without arrest.
