Dispatches from the Empire

Currently reading: Existential Physics by Sabine Hossenfelder 📚

If you hear “holism,” I hear “bullshit.”

Resurveying the West

Every year the New York-based photographer Victoria Sambunaris takes extended road trips across America with a large-format 5×7 view camera. Although by now she has photographed nearly every part of the country, she devotes special attention to the West, focusing not only on the easy natural splendors but also on resource extraction and the vast infrastructure and transit networks that have enabled restless national expansion. In the portfolios that result, an image of an enormous strip mine might be followed by a spectacular view of a light-filled canyon and then a panorama of a truck yard filled with multi-colored shipping containers. The photographs evoke a sense of wonder at the scale of the landscape and an ambivalent awe at the scope of our presence in it.

Victoria Sambunaris is one of the few photographers that seems to share my love of the American West.

Not the capital-B Beautiful parts of it — the Yosemites, the Yellowstones, the Redwoods — but the "flyover" West. Interstitial Wyoming, middling Montana, eastern Oregon. The scale and scope of the American West is unlike anything else, if only for our species' ability to imprint itself onto land at sheer scale. Strip mines, earthen dams, river diversions, nuclear testing facilities, irrigation canals.

Leave behind the cities and you begin to see another side of human nature laid bare. It's deeply unsettling, but it's honest.

VP Kamala Harris Is Not “Veep” Selina Meyer

This election will have real consequences, but reality is in danger of being squeezed off the agenda in favor of a heightened performance piece that calls itself the election but is actually a multimedia event, cut up and memed across social platforms, re-edited, rolled in conspiracy theory and baked under oodles of manipulated footage, ready to pop up on your last remaining sane aunt’s media feed.

Who is behind Kamala Harris?

Biden’s cabinet is carefully mixed, for better or worse, with progressive and conservative-leaning Democrats — a balance that reflects the President’s preferences as a leader. But Harris is less of a known quality. Faced with this reality, we can only look to her inner circle. There, with its deep ties to Silicon Valley and the business wing of the Democratic Party, the real vision of Harris 2024 starts to emerge.

The moral bankruptcy of Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz

The podcast itself is an extraordinary performance. At one point, Andreessen concedes that their major problems with President Joe Biden — the ones that led them to support Trump — are what most voters would consider “subsidiary” issues. “It doesn’t have anything to do with the big issues that people care about,” he says. If we take this podcast at face value, we are to believe that these subsidiary issues are the only reason they’ve chosen to endorse and donate to Trump.

These subsidiary issues take precedence for Andreessen and Horowitz over, say, mass deportations and Project 2025’s attempt to end no-fault divorce. We are looking at a simple trade against personal liberty — abortion, the rights of gay and trans people, and possibly democracy itself — in favor of crypto, AI, and a tax policy they like better.

Kamala Harris the Prosecutor Has the Edge

In 2019, Ms. Harris was competing on progressive bona fides with the likes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. She was running at a time when progressive voters were uniquely focused on criminal-justice reform and suspicious of law enforcement, which was a problem for Ms. Harris, who had built her political career as a prosecutor. Hemmed in by these dynamics, Ms. Harris struggled to define her brand.

She faces a different moment today. Less than four months from the general election, she would be competing not for progressive points but to keep the felon Donald Trump out of office. She would be doing so at a time when many voters are concerned about crime and public safety, and when prosecutors have assumed heroic status in the fight to prosecute Mr. Trump and his cronies.

Based on personal conversations, there are (at least) three prevailing sentiments on the Left:

The first is the “Never Cop” Left, which is adamant that they do not want a former cop in the White House. This is largely the “Defund the Police” crowd, a stance I personally think is deranged to the point of unreason. Policing is a necessary component to our (or any) culture, though reforms to the criminal justice system are absolutely necessary.

The second is a feminist angle. They argue that at this point, any vote against Kamala is simply because she’s a woman, and thus this “entrenched misogyny” will get Trump re-elected. This is a little confounding, though it largely comes from the same folks that argued that the only reason people voted for Bernie Sanders in 2016 was because they hated Hillary…because she was a woman. This crowd seems unwilling to confront Hillary’s many flaws — flaws that had nothing to do with her being a woman, but rather her being an establishment figure that represented continued corporate control of the Democratic Party and politics in general. In other words, Clinton was a status quo that many people found intolerable.

The third group is uneasy with the process by which she was anointed as the presumptive nominee. Remember, she won no primaries. There has not been an open contest. And while she’s won enough delegates to secure the nomination (though it won’t be official until the convention), the voters did not have a say. Though I am no longer a member of the Democratic Party, I count myself in this camp.

For the last three-plus years, Kamala has been kept on the sidelines by Biden’s team, never having been given a chance to shine. Quite the opposite: she was tasked with dealing with immigration, and that has largely been a disaster during Biden’s term. She hasn’t been given the opportunity to show off her personality, to show that she’s a competent, intelligent, capable person. When I go back and listen to many of her speeches, she has clearly been told to play to the far Left, and as such her speeches come off sounding, um, let’s say…detached. (A close friend called them “word salad.”) Is this fair? No. Is this messaging and media distorting reality? Sure. But let’s be honest: a candidate is only as electable as people think she/he is. That’s the whole damn game.

As such, Kamala has been hamstrung by the Biden Administration for much of Biden’s term as president. And now, that has come back to bite the Democrats.

Which is why I think this article articulates exactly the right tack. Highlight her record as prosecutor. Highlight her tough-against-crime elements. Yes, I’m aware that crime has fallen across much of the country in the last three years (with some very notable exceptions, often in Democrat-controlled cities). But that’s just not how people feel.

Believe me, no one gets as heated by the differences between perception and reality, but if they are going to defeat Trump, the Democrats have to quit telling voters their feelings are wrong and instead meet them where they are.

That’s politics, baby.

It strikes me as somewhat unbelievable that I should have such interesting, kind, intelligent, thoughtful friends.

If life were a lottery, I somehow hit the jackpot, and despite my numerous anxieties and gripes and fears about the future, I'm a remarkably lucky human being.

We owe President Biden our gratitude, not just for his service as president, but for the wisdom to recognize ego for what it is. He was right to drop out of the race.

The Democrats still have the spirit of democracy in them yet, and I’m rooting for them. Let’s hope they pick a candidate that inspires us, not one that’s merely a cynical response to Trump.

While I’m heartened by the events of the day, I can’t shake the feeling that the last few weeks have laid bare some problems that run deeper than I had initially thought. I watched good people from my own end of the political spectrum endorse, explicitly or otherwise, the assassination of a presidential candidate. I’ve watched many of those same people cling to a candidate so obviously unelectable and insist that I had lost my mind for saying as much. The Left, my political home, has succumbed to the pressures put upon it by years of Trumpist populism, and they are not better off for it. Trump, and more pointedly the fear of Trump, stole a little of their souls, and that breaks my heart.

I don’t know where we now sit. I hope the Democratic Party can rise to the occasion, and I am holding my breath.

There’s still hope, but only if we on the Left remember that after the election, regardless of who wins, we have work to do. We have to push back on corporations and the money they pump into our elections, swaying the outcome. We must go to places that make us uncomfortable and be with people that challenge us. We’ve got to convince Trump supporters that we care about them, and that we don’t think them all to be ignorant racists. We have to meet people where they are, without judgment — or rather we should be as transparent and honest and humble about our judgments as we are able.

I fear that this country places too much stock in the office of the president, and whoever wins in November, we will largely be placated into another round of political somnambulism. We must resist this.

Stay curious, be kind, and get outside your comfort zone.

The DOJ’s Assault on Apple Will Harm Consumers

What makes Apple products so unique is their ease of use and consistency over time. While no product will ever be perfect, Apple's goal is to deliver a seamless, integrated experience that users can rely on time after time without giving it a second thought. How does Apple do this? By carefully exercising the very control that the DOJ is trying to punish. As economist Alex Tabarrok explains in Marginal Revolution: "Apple's promise to iPhone users is that it will be a gatekeeper. Gatekeeping is what allows Apple to promise greater security, privacy, usability and reliability. Gatekeeping is Apple's brand promise. Gatekeeping is what the consumer's are buying."

This control is not a sign of anticompetitive conduct, quite the opposite. It is Apple's unique approach to third-party integration that differentiates it from other smartphone providers. As the Northern District of California found in the Epic Games v. Apple case, Apple's approach "ultimately increases consumer choice by allowing users who value open distribution to purchase Android devices, while those who value security and the protection of a 'walled garden' to purchase iOS devices."

How Americans Justify Political Violence

If the acceptance of political violence in America has been with us since the beginning, its contours have changed, in important and alarming ways. Since the 1990s, as Americans have sorted themselves into sharply diverging ideological and cultural camps along partisan lines, citizens on opposite sides of this divide have come to think of each other in decreasingly human terms. In 2017, Kalmoe and Mason found that 60 percent of Republicans and Democrats believed that the other party was a “threat”; 40 percent believed it was “evil”; 20 percent believed its members were “not human.” All three figures rose over Trump’s presidency — more for Republicans than Democrats, but not by much.

The result is a climate of what Kalmoe and Mason call “moral disengagement.” It is not violence, but an essential precursor, and it has reshaped the language of political violence in this country — and its targets. Rhetoric that two or three decades ago might have been directed at the federal government is now directed at other partisans, too.

I was surprised by how many people expressed the sentiment "too bad it missed" after the assassination attempt last weekend. People I know to be well-meaning.

But why am I surprised?

In my twenties, I was in a conflict resolution masters program, a program I was inspired to enroll in after I was the victim a physical assault (in which I was beaten because I was gay). In classes, each a deluge of nonviolent rhetoric, I was often the sole advocate for the effectiveness of violence. (I was not an advocate for violence itself, but for the fact that it is indeed effective at making change. To ignore that empirical fact is dangerous, as inconvenient as it might be.)

I don't regret that stance, and I largely still feel the same as I did then. Violence, often perpetrated by the state, is indeed effective, and it might very well be the only way we are able to resolve some of the intractable issues we face.

But the implications of it are terrifying. I'm shocked those aforementioned well-meaning people don't grasp is what would've happened had Trump been killed. This country would be on the brink of a civil war. We're already teetering a little too close to that edge, but Trump's murder would put us right over that cliff.

Violence (and the effectiveness of it) in theory and in study is one thing, but when faced with the reality, it's quite another.

Hackers Steal Text and Call Records of ‘Nearly All’ AT&T Customers

Hackers broke into a cloud platform used by AT&T and downloaded call and text records of “nearly all” of AT&T’s cellular customers across a several month period, AT&T announced early on Friday.

The worst telcom hack in history. (That we know of.)

Currently reading: Existential Physics by Sabine Hossenfelder 📚

Free will or not, we are here, and therefore we matter. But whether ours will be a happy story or a sad story, whether our civilization will flourish or wither, whether we will be remembered or forgotten—we don’t yet know. Instead of thinking of ourselves as selecting possible futures, I suggest we remain curious about what’s to come and strive to learn more about ourselves and the universe we inhabit.

I have found that abandoning the idea of free will has changed the way I think about my own thinking. I have begun paying more attention to what we know about the shortcomings of human cognition, logical fallacies, and biases. Realizing that in the end I am just working away on the input I collect, I have become more selective and careful with what I read and listen to.

After Trump Assassination Attempt, Voters Fear What Could Happen Next

In Wisconsin, Dan McNeil, 71, a Democratic school board member in the farming town of Barron, called the situation “scary.” “You walk into a place in town, and it is, like, ‘Whose side are you on? Are you a liberal Democrat or a Trumper?”

An hour away in St. Croix County, Scott Miller, 42, who said he is a member of the local Republican Party, wondered if it was already too late: “These corporations are putting out millions and trillions in profits, donating unlimited amounts to politicians,” he said. “How can the average person compete?”

“Americans in the middle have been acting like spectators at a train wreck, but we’re all on the same train,” he said. “And if the train goes over a cliff, we’ll all go with it.”

The Shooting of Trump

That’s why liberals are so fascinated and horrified by Trump: to avoid the class topic. Hegel’s motto “evil resides in the gaze which sees evil everywhere” fully applies here: the very liberal gaze which demonizes Trump is also evil because it ignores how its own failures opened up the space for Trump’s type of patriotic populism.

Slavoj with the clearest distillation of our current politic.

The Left’s obsession with Trump — something I’ve only recently recognized as such — is a strange phenomenon. I should first say (because I feel obligated to do so, lest I be cast out of polite society) that Trump is a grave threat to democracy. I’m in no way diminishing that opinion.

But the Left does indeed fetishize him. I’m guilty of this as well. During his first term, I was a ball of nerves much of the time. I hated Trump, and that hate began to spill over onto his supporters. I excised Trumpets from my life and felt no shame in doing so.

At least not for a while. In the first year of Biden’s presidency, something in me changed. Perhaps it was living in a small, rural, conservative town that helped me to realize most Trump supporters are not monsters. They’re not fascists, nor do they hate me or people like me. Many people support Trump for purely economic reasons, regardless if I think those reasons are sound. (Do I think many of those people are ignorant of the implications of his re-election on democracy? Yes, but you can't hate someone for their ignorance. Or so I'm told.) 

But I have so many friends that hate Trump, yet refuse to reckon with why he's so popular. They insist that his supporters must be racist, stupid, or Christian Nationalists. And while some are, they're not the majority. The Left has to reckon with the underlying causes of his popularity, and those causes are clear as day from where I sit: class issues. This is all about class.

Not race, class.

Economic inequality, wealth inequality, wage inequality, housing insecurity...

I'm astonished by how Liberals are so unwilling or unable to acknowledge this. It's been nearly a decade and they keep insisting that if we could just get rid of Trump, things'll get better. There is zero reckoning with their role in neoliberalism or with just how profoundly the Democratic Party is controlled by corporations and their money, just as the Republican Party is.

To add insult to injury, the populist Right is largely correct when they say "coastal elites" are calling the shots, looking down on the common people, etc. Highly educated people, myself part of this crowd, do judge the hell out of conservatives and of rural people. I see this all the time. The Left's hatred of Trump and their treatment of his “basket of deplorables” is proof.

The Assassination Attempt — and America’s Choice

That we feel repulsed by the alternative to our constitutional democracy, having seen it up close, is a very good sign. In this sense, hypocrisy plays an important part in the moral formation of us fallen creatures. Pretending to be a better person than you are is a pretty good way to become a better person than you are. So let’s allow each other the space to do that. Let’s take one another’s embrace of the boundaries of our politics seriously, even if the people you oppose aren’t about to confess all their past sins. 

The kidnapping I can’t escape

…I was about to start writing my second novel. It was about a wealthy family on Long Island who lose their money, the leakage of my frustrations at watching the middle class disappear and at the moneylessness of my own youth. (Let’s all agree, for the sake of this story, that relative moneylessness isn’t a dollar amount but a state of mind and stomach born of your own particular circumstance.) I was grappling with a question I had, which was this: Who was better off, people who were born with money and never had to worry about their survival, or people (like me) who didn’t feel they had the financial stability and who had to learn to be survivors on their own? Did having money doom you in a way?

I wanted to see the Teiches because I was embarrassed to report that, though the fictional family in my unfinished novel bore only rudimentary biographical resemblance to them, a kidnapping kept finding its way into the plot. There was something I couldn’t resist thematically about it, because it elucidated one of the many paradoxes of money: that money can put you in a kind of danger even as it brings you safety, too.

People (especially those who don’t read) so often assume that a writer is in control of a story, when it’s always the other way around.

I’ve long struggled with talking about my own writing, about the craft of it. I rarely-if-ever talk about it with non-writers, as they simply can’t understand. But I try at times to elucidate the process both here and elsewhere on the internet in hopes of discovering, well, what exactly?

As the adage goes, writers write what we know, and thus writing is extraordinarily revealing. We cannot hide who we are, not convincingly. And while something inside compels me to write “my truth” (groan), I’ve read enough Greek and Roman mythology to know a relentless pursuit of truth tends to become a lonely endeavor. Honesty tends not to win you friends or lovers.

So then how do I balance vulnerability and honesty? Where do I find the courage to reveal the ugly, anxious, embarrassing parts of my self in my work? How do I trust that I’ll be met with some measure of grace when I struggle mightily to give it to others?

As of late, understanding that a story writes itself is table stakes for any meaningful connection. Ideas come to us, they are not of us, and this is the foundation of every relationship, every personal interaction, every bit of writing in my life.

Perhaps because of this, I often feel alone and a bit adrift, looking out on the world with earnest curiosity.

Welcome to the Political Era of the Paranoid Delusion

If I had to choose between these two tendencies I would obviously have to choose the blue MAGA over the red. Doing so would protect abortion and environmental regulations and the NLRB, among many other things. It’s not a contest, for me. But of course I’d prefer to choose neither. Blue MAGA is very, very real; the paranoid style has spread like a coronavirus from Republicans to Democrats. Put “The New York Times” into the Twitter search bar on any given day and you’ll find relentless, enraged invective coming from Democratic loyalists who insist that the paper of record is on a mission to reelect Donald Trump. They used to laugh at Republicans when they groused about “skewed polls,” but now they do the exact same thing - any poll that emerges that suggests Biden is losing is a conservative op, run by a firm with a well-known Republican bias.

This, it seems, is where we are: two warring political tribes who share the foundational principle that anything that goes wrong for them is the product of a rigged system. Two angry players, too busy working the refs to concentrate on the game, looking for some higher authority to declare that the other side broke the rules. This isn’t fair. They’re breaking the rules. I’m telling the teacher. They’re denying us what we’re owed. Today the parties are united only in their belief that, on a neutral field and playing a clean game, they cannot lose. If a single voter endorses the opposition, their opponents must be cheating. How could it be otherwise? Surely only conspiracy could defeat us. Surely only The Man could pull the wool over the eyes of millions. This was much more of a Republican thing, and I know that people hate any argument that sounds like “both sides.” But both sides, in fact, are now operating this way. The notion that Democrats cannot fail in a clean election, cannot stumble but through illegitimate outside force, is now fully enculturated into the party. They hate Trump so much they’ve adopted his signature contribution to American politics. And I don’t know how you get out of this without violence, at this point. I really don’t.

The speed with which the paranoid insanity — the same that took hold on the Right a generation or two ago — has consumed the Left is alarming. I can’t quite make sense of how many people refuse to acknowledge Biden’s disaster of a debate performance simply because they’re terrified of Trump.

Trump or no, Biden is unfit for the office.

As a friend put it, “how is it possible we have a choice between two emperors, both of whom insist they’re wearing clothes?”

RFK Wants Democratic Nomination

For fuck’s sake, just give the man a chance and watch the interview.

Currently reading: War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges 📚

Sometimes I think my lifetime was front-loaded with goodness; that so much of life until now has been good, and at some point, this can’t possibly hold. The excess and craven want of my culture will finally crest and begin to devour itself. In doing so, we find a truth we’ve worked for so long to avoid.

We’re out of balance, and imbalance doesn’t last.

Honestly, what makes me more depressed: that a course correction sure feels as though it’s on the horizon? Or that it might not be?

What SCOTUS just did to broadband, the right to repair, the environment, and more

This, not the debate, should be the focus of our day. The ramifications of these decisions will reach every corner of our society.

Andrew Sullivan on last night's debate performance:

…watching him barely capable of finishing a sentence, staring vacantly into the middle distance, unable to deliver a single coherent message even when handed an ideal question, incapable of any serious rebuttals to Trump’s increasingly deranged lies … well, the first thing I felt was intense sadness. This was elder abuse — inflicted, in part, by his wife. 

The second thing I felt was rage. His own people chose to do this. That alone reveals a campaign so divorced from reality, so devoid of a rationale or a message, so strategically incompetent, it too has no chance of winning. It is an insult to all of us that a mature political party would offer someone in this physical and mental state as president for the next four years. And it has always been an insult. That the Democrats would offer him as the only alternative to what they regard as the end of liberal democracy under Trump is proof that they are either lying about what they claim are the stakes or are utterly delusional. If Trump is that dangerous, why on earth are you putting forward a man clearly in the early stages of dementia against him? Have you decided to let Trump win by default because you’re too scared to tell an elderly man the truth?