Jacob Bacharach's Blog, page 20

For Users Identified in the Chat Below

“Why is the government using its vast power to identify these obnoxious asshats, and not the other tens of thousands who plague the internet?”

–Ken White

First we’ll mulch the judges; then we’ll bake

the ground-up prosecutors into pies;

we’ll pluck-out every congresscreature’s eyes;

for every cop, a guillotine and stake.

We mean it, pigs. Make no fucking mistake:

if not tomorrow or next week—surprise!—

some day we’ll figure how to anonymize

and route actual murder so as to make

hyperbolic rhetoric into

a magic incantation, thus commission

via mere intention, criminal

and violent retribution of the sort we spew

quite fecklessly, an Internet tradition:

untruth made true, if quite subliminal.

The Tool of Athens

“Nothing matters if we aren’t safe.”

-Marco Rubio

Nothing matters if we aren’t safe; our lives

are emptied by the scent of risk; our passions,

proximate to chance, all strictly rationed;

it cannot be enough merely to thrive,

to love our families, like our work, survive;

it’s insufficient that our God has fashioned

us to perish. Ours will be the Athens

of the modern world, a reborn state derived

from the demos, although I find democracies,

even within strict limits are a bit

too chancy. Nothing ventured? Nothing lost.

Elect me! I will be your Pericles,

though rarely modest and without the wit,

without the chance of gain, but without cost.

An Accident

That is no excuse. I am extremely disappointed. You need to figure out where your priorities are. We’re changing the world and changing history, and you either commit or you don’t.

-Elon Musk

You can’t invent it; you can only co-

incide with its arriving, further be

confounded by its arrival’s constancy:

it can’t retreat, nor rush ahead, nor slow

itself; the subdivided moments go

careening, literally history;

the past is actual; the future’s only

concept and tense: it’s all verb and no

noun. A paradox of will is that

the will confuses being for becoming;

well, we presume that we can shape the next

from now’s conditions, the laboratory rat

assuming the food caused the maze, the numbing

shock. The food’s removed. The rat’s perplexed.

Like Uber, but for Stock Scams

A breathless Times piece reported that a recent round of fundraising by Uber points toward a $50 billion valuation, which is worth a giggle or two, and is probably not accurate.

@jakebackpack TBF headline valuations for non publicly traded cos are pretty misleading. http://t.co/Tbuhhxg2c1

— Enrique Diaz-Alvarez (@EnriqueDiazAlva) May 9, 2015

This gleeful silliness isn’t really the Times’ fault. The paper is just reporting what someone told it. Our supposedly adversarial and skeptical press has always and in actuality been generously credulous. Lawyers presume everyone is lying to them, their clients most of all. Reporters, on the other hand, “trust their sources.” Anyway, the Times proceeds to double down on its friendly presumption that sources say is a holy writ worth adopting verbatim, and describes Uber thusly:

So far, the company has raised more than $4 billion as it moves into new markets globally, disrupting established taxi and other transportation industries by letting people request rides through their smartphones.

I thought this was a gas—yuck yuck—as well, and I said as much, which led to the following exchange with my buddy Jim Henley:

@UOJim Also gotta love that the article reports that Uber is “disrupting” as a straight up fact.

— Jacob PaperBacharach (@jakebackpack) May 9, 2015

@UOJim I think mistaking ordinary competition for revolution is a serious category error afflicting business and finance today.

— Jacob PaperBacharach (@jakebackpack) May 9, 2015

Well, I thought I might briefly elaborate.

Every new product or venture these days is proposed to be a “disruption”—that is to say, a sort of definitive break, a paradigm shift, to use a largely discarded neologism that described more or less the same thing. Frankly, I’m unconvinced that any result of the human genius has qualified since the advent of agriculture, but even by the laxer standards of our sorry business press, the idea that Uber has disrupted anything is wrong.

Uber is a car service. From the perspective of someone like me, who lives in a city with a historically lousy—nearly non-existent—taxi industry, Uber is very nice. (Let us, like proper MBAs, leave aside the ethical questions.) From the perspective of a former taxi near-monopoly with lousy—nearly non-existent—customer service obligations, Uber is not very nice. But it is, at the end of the day, objectively described, still just a taxi service, albeit a service with a good scheduling/hailing feature, generally good (for the customer) pricing, and real ease of payment.

It is competition for existing firms, but it isn’t a new paradigm. It hasn’t changed the fundamental nature of getting a cab. You hail a ride. It picks you up. You pay for it. It isn’t teleportation. It isn’t the steam engine. A neat analogue is something like Japanese cars outcompeting Detroit in the 70s/80s.

Viewed this way, Uber is an interesting investment opportunity, but it ain’t worth tens of billions of bucks yet. A taxi company with (let’s be optimistic) good pricing and good customer service features and (let’s be realistic) looming increases in personnel and regulatory compliance and fleet management costs is never going to be anything other than a pretty low margin business. Well that’s fine—it can still be very profitable if it’s well managed! What it can’t do is pump future stock prices insanely high by managing the expectations of the rubes who’ll buy into an IPO, etc., in order to let the early investors cash out with a fat fortune. “Sir, have you got fifty seconds for me to tell you about this amazing investment opportunity? Get in on the ground floor!” There’s another term for disruption. It’s called a boiler room.

Acknowledgments

“He is not in a relationship with Anne Snyder.”

If not for her, then I could not have written

a book about man’s moral sentiments

with such precision or such elegance;

It was all her. I was merely smitten

with the fine turn of her prose; once bitten

by the sharp turn of her thoughts, evident

on my mind like a sting on skin, and delicate

and irresistible as a little kitten,

I—I’m not ashamed to say—became

a nobler man, a better author, bigger

than my critics, certainly humbler in my own life.

Can a muse be another half of the same

person? She is the sole source of the vigor

of my prose. I also thank my wife.

Middlebrow March

Fairly regularly, the online commentariat will erupt with frustration at the truism that you can’t get fired from the Op-Ed page for being wrong. If anything, a record of incompetence burnishes a career. Someone takes to Twitter and thunders that Newspaper Columnist is the only profession with real lifetime tenure. Well, that and Justice of the Supreme Court, another venerated institution that proves the truer truism: people rise to the level of their incompetence. There is, of course, an odd, often unvoiced conviction underlying these complaints: that in the Wild-Western private sector, people get bunged out for being incompetent all the time. This is part of a broad myth about corporate efficacy that anyone who’s ever actually met the C-suite occupants and corporate board placeholders of many a major corporation—or, frankly, just worked in any office anywhere—knows to be completely untrue. The smartest people in business do frequently get fired, yes, but it’s when the latest round of right-sizing cans the smart toilers on the lower end of the pay scale. The cream rises, yes. What that really means is that fat floats. David Brooks doesn’t get an endowed chair at Sulzberger University in spite of his mediocrity. All of the institutional incentives are designed to reward it. It is the curricula of his vita.

Brooks has lately invented himself as a kind of genteel moralist, and you can imagine him cast by George Eliot as a gently satiric country priest whose bit of Greek impresses the parish but makes him an object of fun at the manor. To be fair, few of us are really willing to pursue our moral sentiments to their most rigorous ends, and the elision of coherence and consistency in our criticisms of other people’s politics and philosophies is its own kind of error. Nevertheless, there is something not just comical, but slightly sinister, in a man who corrals his timid approval of “cop cams” with a dozen caveats about the value, and virtue, of privacy. Eleven months ago, he made “vast data sweeps” a pillar of privacy! Now he’s worried that some patrolman’s Go-Pro video of a domestic will wind up on YouTube.

“Cop-cams strike a blow for truth, but they strike a blow against relationships.” I won’t be the first to observe that Brooks’s turn to moralism coincided with a divorce. Maybe it’s unkind to psychoanalyze, but, after all, the man is very publicly lying on the couch several times a week. I think you find, in Brooks’s soft authoritarianism, his Matryoshka society of nested obligations, one overriding conviction, which is that too much truth kills a relationship, and wouldn’t it be better for everyone if we all just drank our cocktails at five and pretended nothing was wrong? His “zone [of] half-formed thoughts and delicate emotions can grow and evolve” sounds an awful lot like the moment the brain requires to tell the wife that yes, of course she looks lovely in that dress or, oh, dear, I’m going to be working late tonight, so don’t wait up. And in fact, I agree with him in broad principle; we are all due some space to be furtive little shits, only not when that secrecy possesses, and uses, a gun.

Religious Me-dom

“Religious freedom” laws are, broadly speaking, efforts to circumvent the broad drift of a society toward varieties of sexual and reproductive autonomy and freedom that social conservatives dislike. Recognizing that they are increasingly in a moral minority, they seek to provide an opt-out mechanism through which they can decline to participate in whatever unspeakably licentious —generally speaking, same-sex attractions of all types—activity they perceive in the culture writ large. Leaving aside, if we must, the pejorative penumbra of the word “discrimination”, discrimination is precisely what these laws are designed to permit. As something of a cultural relativist, I’m not entirely unsympathetic with these desires, even if I find them personally reprehensible, immoral, and based on religious hocus-pocus whose historicity and divinity I find questionable at best. The truth is that I am not sure how a society as large as ours can be properly morally regulated; perhaps it can’t. Even as a gay man who has very greatly benefited from a great flowering of (God, how I hate this word) tolerance, I am not convinced of the Progressive case, which is really a mirror of the most conservative cultural argument, which presumes a singular and universal morality at the Kingdom end of a teleology of human, well, progress. At the possible expense of my own self-benefit, I have my doubts about a moral monoculture.

I mention this, because you now have hugely influential corporate governors like Apple’s Tim Cook taking to the pages of major newspapers to denounce Indiana’s rather stupid new religious freedom law on the rather tendentious ground that “Men and women have fought and died fighting to protect our country’s founding principles of freedom and equality,” which is a fairly silly reading of our invasion of the Phillipines or the theft of California or the war in Vietnam, but I suppose we did help the Ruskies lick Hitler, and that’s a pretty decent trump card. The idea that the martial history of America is testimony for the value of inclusivity is patently bogus, but cheers to Cook for saying forthrightly that “Regardless of what the law might allow in Indiana or Arkansas, we will never tolerate discrimination.”

But isn’t this sort of interstate, interest-specific legal arbitrage precisely the sort of thing that, expanded to the international forum, has permitted companies like Apple to become almost immeasurably profitable and valuable and men like Tim Cook to become ungodly rich? Isn’t it precisely the differing legal standards of the largely Asian nations where Apple manufactures most of its gadgets that permits it to violate, directly or through its contractors, all sorts of standards of labor decency and occupational safety—practices that we would consider not only illegal if they were to be deployed here in the US, but deeply immoral and unjust? Isn’t this effectively a vast, global, legal opt-out. And what if we expand our inquiry to include the people who labor even farther downstream extracting the raw materials necessary for the production of products like Apple’s, who work in even sorrier conditions hardly a step removed, if removed at all, from slavery?

So you see, people like Tim Cook are selective in their moral universalism; morality, it turns out, is universal only insofar as extends to the particular desires of a Western bourgeoisie; deny a gay couple a wedding bouquet that they could get at the florist down the street anyway, and that is a cause for outrage and concern; extract minerals using indentured Congolese servants, well, look, we’ve got marginal cost to consider! The moral argument, it turns out, curdles when exposed to the profit motive, and the universality of justice actually does end at certain borders, one way or another.

Intimations of Immorality

“Time is terribly short, but a strike can still succeed.” -John R. Bolton

Tucked in the Times, admonishments to war.

A general misquoted Clausewitz and

departed for a speaking gig at RAND.

A football game was paused mid-broadcast for

a tribute to Our Heroes; we adore

parading halftime troops for the drunken fans,

assume the boozehounds neither care nor understand

those boys are fighting mostly to assure

some psychotic man-shaped worm another

paid-for shouting match on CNN;

every bomb thus has the odd distinction

of killing and enriching one more mother

fucker with a moustache and a pen.

Sometimes I think the only hope’s extinction.

Thee, N-Word

I’m as skeptical of safe spaces and trigger warnings as the next asshole, and I’m on the record comparing them to “the crystal vibrations of homeopathy and hypnotherapy,” but in that same post, and by the same token, I believe that while most of the proponents of this sort of thing suffer at worst from a naively misplaced trust in institutions to do right in the hands of the proper government and an overabundance of sincerity, it’s their loud public detractors who frequently suffer from a cancerous form of intellectual hypocrisy. So it was this past Sunday when, emerging from the palace to denounce the worries of the gardeners, Judith Shulevitz, a prominent critic and author frequently published in the most prominent and widely circulated publications in America, rang the alarm on the most worrying trend in the universities today. No, it is not the necessity of entering a lifetime of debt servitude to graduate from even our lousier state schools, nor the declining practical value of general education outside of a few faddish and vocational majors, nor the fact that war criminals and state security charlatans occupy positions of prominence in our best universities, nor even something as banally scandalous as the criminal extortion cartel that is the NCAA. No, indeed, it is the tremendous trauma inflicted upon poor administrators, and society as a whole, when, for example:

Last fall, the president of Smith College, Kathleen McCartney, apologized for causing students and faculty to be “hurt” when she failed to object to a racial epithet uttered by a fellow panel member at an alumnae event in New York. The offender was the free­speech advocate Wendy Kaminer, who had been arguing against the use of the euphemism “the n­-word” when teaching American history or “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” In the uproar that followed, the Student Government Association wrote a letter declaring that “if Smith is unsafe for one student, it is unsafe for all students.”

“It’s amazing to me that they can’t distinguish between racist speech and speech about racist speech, between racism and discussions of racism,” Ms. Kaminer said in an email.

Now, I actually agree with this sentiment; I think the notion that we may be harmed, or traumatized, or “re-traumatized” by the mere utterance of unpleasant or offensive or troubling words and ideas, especially in the service of exploring and criticizing those words and ideas, ranks high on the list of the most bogus notions ever dreamed up by our species. And, I mean, what is the Anthropocene if not one grotty epoch of our species’ inexhaustible supply of bogus ideas? But here is the rub, and the hypocrisy. Judith Shulevitz is making this argument, lighting these lamps in the Old North Church, in America’s premier organ of news and opinion, which, Oh By The Way, does not permit the use of the word nigger in its pages, not even “when teaching American history or ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.’”

Here, for instance, from last month, is Dwight Garner’s review of the widely praised new novel, The Sellout:

So much happens in “The Sellout” that describing it is like trying to shove a lemon tree into a shot glass. It’s also hard to describe without quoting the nimble ways Mr. Beatty deals out the N­-word. This novel’s best lines, the ones that either puncture or tattoo your heart, are mostly not quotable here.

I should mention that Garner is also required to “[work] around a perfectly detonated vulgarity,” lest the mere appearance of such traumatizing and re-traumatizing language should besmirch the Average Reader’s tender eyes and brain.

This is a minor point; we could all very easily find thoughts and expressions and whole political ideologies which would never pass the gates of the unofficial but powerful censors of mainstream discourse in America. But I happen to believe that its smallness makes it all the more pertinent, because what, after all, is the complaint about safe spaces and trigger warnings if not that they are small, petty, and un-serious; that they are the ill-considered attempts at prior restraint by what amount to a novel class of intellectual prudes, whose contempt for freewheeling debate is at last a kind of puritanism? Well, so what if it is? Where is the greater threat to freedom, in the seminar room, or in the nation’s most important paper? Censor, censor thyself.

A Prayer for the Tsar

“Despite all of this, we will not witness a mass exodus anytime soon.” –Jeffrey Goldberg

The author didn’t find much evidence

with which to support his deeply dire thesis.

Journalism’s artless non-mimesis:

subjunctive mood, and yet the future tense.

It’s not just that the piece is rather dense-

ly peopled with mere anecdote; its weakness

is a sort of fallacy of psychokinesis:

motion as concentration’s consequence.

As Jews, we do ourselves no special favor

by making ourselves the shonda proxies for

the various think-tank nuts and politicians

who, regardless circumstances, labor

to pull, out of a hat, another war:

Jews are just the rabbits. They’re magicians.