My Imaginary Friend Can Beat Up Your Imaginary Friend!

I've often seen variations on this theme.  This time I figured out what is wrong with it.

There may be people living on other worlds, but if there are we don't know anything about them.  Myself, I take for granted that they would have cultures and histories and fateful blind spots, just as we do. Of course, I could be wrong.  But any statements or representations of them are fictional, "fairy tales" as the village-atheist meme has it, where someone projects his or her opinions onto them and gets them back endowed with authority.  They can fairly be called "religious."  It's completely normal, but the people who invent or share such memes believe that they're enlightened, superior to the gullible masses.  On the contrary, they are part of the masses.

That's basically it.  I might explore its implications some other time, but this will do for now.

Traditional Values

So much going on, I can't keep up.  I'm too old for this!

Right-wing pundit Jonah Goldberg fell back on a long-standing talking point the other day:

The left does criticize the countries that Goldberg deplores here.  Not always, of course, and not always as consistently as I could wish.  But overall in the US it's the center (or near-right, to label it more accurately) and the right (meaning practically off the scale) that embrace them.  Trump, for example, conspicuously left Saudi Arabia out of his first-term Muslim ban, along with the other nations in Goldberg's list, but the embrace is bipartisan.  

As for China, it was the well-known leftists, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, who brought the Chinese Communist Party into the community of nations. It's usually crazy feminists and leftists who object to Islamic oppression of women, and the Right denounces them for their atheism and contempt for traditional values - until, as with George W. Bush, they decide to invade them ostensibly to protect the rights of women.  (Whatever objections Israel has to the Kingdom, they have nothing to do with its treatment of women.)

The same leftists also criticize our own country for its violations of human rights at home and abroad, and are accused of double standards about that.  Or we criticize reactionary violence against gay people, and are accused of applying corrupt Western values to traditional societies; also false, we criticized our own country first, and still keep having to do it. 

As other commentators pointed out, this question came up in the context of the New York City mayoral race.  Candidates were asked about their allegiance to Israel, which ought to be odd in a local election. Yes, New York is a major city with a sizable Jewish population, but foreign policy shouldn't be a central issue. 

The rest of Goldberg's rant is predictably disingenuous, ignoring Israel's record of violence against Palestinians and its neighbors, which is hardly in the distant past. I believe that Goldberg is also distorting Zohran Mamdani's remarks, and the question he was asked.  It wasn't about recognizing Israel diplomatically, though that is not an unfair question.  He was asked if he recognized Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state.  No country has a "right to exist," and it's not clear what "as a Jewish state" is supposed to mean.  You'd think that it's proper to criticize any country that defines itself in terms of ethnic or religious purity -- but as always, "we come up against the venerable shell-game of Jewish identity: 'Look! We’re a religion! No! a race! No! a cultural entity! Sorry–a religion!' When we tire of this game, we get suckered into another: 'anti-Zionism is antisemitism!' quickly alternates with: 'Don’t confuse Zionism with Judaism! How dare you, you antisemite!'" Again, the left, especially in the US, has a long history of rejecting the idea of race as the basis of a nation; if I reject the claim that the United States has a right to exist as a Christian nation, why wouldn't I reject Israel's right to exist as a Jewish one?  It's the right that defends, even celebrates it, and that includes Jonah Goldberg in his defense of Israel.

Wooing Him From the Dark Side to the Dark Side

NPR's Steve Inskeep struck again this morning.  I was dawdling in bed, but I bounced even before this seven-minute absurdity was over.

INSKEEP: So I want people to know we talk from time to time. I don't really ask about your personal life, and I don't want to go too far here, but have you ever had a breakup like this?

SWISHER: Not like this. Not publicly like this. It's really quite strange, actually, but it's sort of in keeping with their relationship over the last year or so as Musk became very close to Donald Trump.

That's how it began, and it didn't get any better.

SWISHER: Well, I think they've had - you know, he sort of fell in love quickly, didn't he? He sort of went crazy, jumping up and down, doing the chainsaw thing, dedicating his life, moving into Mar-a-Lago, all this stuff, and shifted rather dramatically. Because he sort of was somewhat neutral in politics, had voted for Obama, you know, had a relationship with Trump in the first term, but certainly wasn't, you know, as deeply in love with him as he - and I hate to use these terms, but it's really been quite intense, calling himself BFF or best buddy or first buddy or whatever the heck they used.

INSKEEP: Yeah.

SWISHER: And Trump reciprocated, too.

If you have time and a strong stomach, click through and listen to the audio.  Later on, Swisher says of Trump and Musk that "they're not serious people"; neither are she and Inskeep.  Remember this the next time someone calls NPR a radical-left outlet.

Also, this is weird: NPR's Scott Horsley reported that according to the Congressional Budget Office, Trump's tariffs "could cut the federal debt by $2.8 trillion" in the next decade, while the Associated Press reported that the CBO forecast that Trump's budget bill would "spike deficits by $2.4 trillion over the decade."  Horsley didn't mention the latter forecast, which seems to me a bit one-sided.  Horsley mentioned the effect of tariffs on wine prices, which inspired Inskeep to say:

INSKEEP: Hope you're able to pour yourself a glass, Scott. Thanks so much.

HORSLEY: You're welcome.

But back to the Musk-Trump clash.  Liberal and left commentators were very excited about it yesterday, and you'd have thought that the two titans were clashing in person, face-to-face, instead of remotely.  They were also excited by Musk's threat that Trump's relations with Jeffrey Epstein were going to be revealed, as if Musk weren't a recreational liar who's posted false predictions often before, and as if the Trump-Epstein connection weren't well-documented already. What happens when two habitual liars clash?  Do they cancel each other out, like matter and anti-matter?  None of this is really news anyway.  Many people had predicted that Musk would terminally piss off Trump, and vice versa; the only question was how long it would take.

Rumors are swirling like the dust from the Canadian wildfires that are making my eyes burn even as I write this.  First I read that Trump and Musk were going to meet to iron out their differences, then that the White House had denied it.  But it does seem that some highly placed Democratic centrists believe they see an opening to woo Musk to their side. May their memory be a curse.

The Farewell Symphony

The writer Edmund White died yesterday at the age of 85.  I just stumbled on the news this morning online, but so far, as of tonight, I haven't seen any mention of it in my social media.  My connections there include numerous gay media, publishers, and citizens, so I'm surprised.  I had numerous disagreements with him, but he was a fine writer, courageously chose to be openly gay before many of his contemporaries, he helped open the way for two generations of queer writers, and was very productive.  His most recent book, a memoir, appeared earlier this year; he was productive to the end.  Despite longtime poor health, his death seems to have come suddenly.  I'll miss him, despite my disagreements with him.

In particular I want to highlight a point on which I strongly agree with him:

A canon is for people who don't like to read, people who want to know the bare minimum of titles they must consume in order to be considered polished, well rounded, civilized. Any real reader seeks the names of more and more books, not fewer and fewer.

According to the Guardian, White produced more than thirty books in numerous genres, contributing his share to "more and more books." I prefer his essays and biographies to most of his novels, but it's time to go through all of them again.  It happens that I recently reread the first two, Forgetting Elena and Nocturnes for the King of Naples, so I'll go on from there.

Your Call Is Very Important to Us

 This has been getting some attention:

Musk: My frank opinion of the government is that the government is just the DMV that got big, okay, so when you say, like, let's have the government do something, you should think, do you want the DMV to do it?

My first impulse, like other people who commented on it, was to defend the DMV.  I think I remember some surly staff when I first got a learner's permit in 1967, but since then my experiences have been overwhelmingly positive.  In the past few years I've been to the BMV (as it's known in the Hoosier State) numerous times, not just for my own business but accompanying immigrant friends who needed an interpreter, and the staff have been wonderful: knowledgeable, helpful, and friendly.  The same is true of other government offices: Social Security in two different cities, the office in Chicago where I got my senior discount transit pass, and so on.  Numerous commenters under that post agreed, talking about DMV experiences around the country.

My second impulse was that what this drug-addled liar describes sounds to me not like government offices but private corporations: the impossibility of reaching a human being, being put on hold for hours, being stonewalled, being denied reasonable remedies ...  Most of the complaints I see about stagnant, inefficient, and unfriendly bureaucracy refer to the private sector.  Just try to cancel a newspaper subscription, or your cable service, or any number of other business dealings. Try to get a refund on your ticket for a canceled flight.  Try to talk to a real person without navigating complex menu trees that eventually dump you into an hour-long hold. And then there is the garden of earthly delights that is private health insurance.  These time sinks are the result of companies trying to boost profits by cutting service, which is labor-intensive: hence the menu trees, hence the call centers outsourced to poorer countries.  Next, breathing down our necks, will be AI telephone customer-service robots.  We'll hear a lot about their labor-saving, money saving superiority, but not very much about the actual costs of running and maintaining those systems.

I don't blame the phone center people, who often struggle with English & are hamstrung by the scripts they're given, but they try.  I blame the people at the top, people like Musk. 

About 30 years ago David Gordon published Fat and Mean: The Corporate Squeeze of Working Americans and the Myth of Managerial "Downsizing".  The notion of big corporations as "lean and mean" was a myth then, and I doubt things have changed.  When business-school manager-types take over non-profit institutions such as colleges, they cut professors and service staff while hiring more office drones.  I saw this happen at around the same time, the mid-90s, in the state university food service where I worked.  Kitchen workers were RIFed (for Reduction in Force, the kind of acronym these people adore) in time for the beginning of the school year, and the system was reorganized.  The result was that serving lines got longer, food quality declined, worker morale declined, but the people at the top boasted in bulletin-board memos that another manager had been hired for the central administrative office. This was supposed to make us feel good.  They also brought in counselors, to help us cope with the stress. The entire year was disastrous and the dining service didn't recover for years after that, but the guy who'd done it was kept on for another year at his six-figure salary. New hires were outsourced to a private temp company, resulting in layers of waste: time reports had to be done by in-house managers and again by the company.  Plus the company had to make a profit, so the university paid more for workers.  That debacle was abandoned after a couple of years.  I wonder how much money was wasted.

The government, especially under Biden, tried to fix some of those problems, such as unsubscribing to email lists and getting refunds from airlines, against intense panicky opposition by the big corporations.  I hold no brief for Biden overall, but as a non-rich retiree I benefited from some of his actions.  So did many others.

In a way Musk is only part of the problem, albeit an important part.  One commenter wrote that he sounds like a spoiled toddler.  I say he sounds like a spoiled toddler who was raised on "free-enterprise" propaganda by rich right-wing parents; and that's what he is. The defense of government service many commenters raised was valid, and I was pleased to see it. But I didn't note more than a couple who pointed out that Musk's line applied most accurately to private corporations.