Our Weekly Discontents: September 7, 2020

What If I Actually Like Mondays?

I actually kinda like Mondays.

This is a cheater take. It’s cheating because I, Connor Wroe Southard of A Lonely Impulse of Delight, am currently a graduate student. I only rarely have to show up anywhere particular in meatspace at a specific time. So I can wait to venture out on Monday mornings until it’s like 9:30 and the 9-5 commuters are safely deposited at work. In the Before Times, Monday morning was the best time to snag a table at a coffee shop for a few hours. Now at least I get to walk around outside and look longingly into coffee shops.

What did I used to do in those coffeeshops? I tweeted, yes, and read good sites like Deadspin and The Outline when those were a thing that existed. But mostly, I wrote. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I’ve written at least 600,000 words of fiction over last 4.5 years. That’s a fairly rigorous estimate, largely based on my count of near-total rewrites on two different novel projects. Most of what I wrote has been thrown out, and rightfully so. We should all be so lucky as to have space to let ourselves be bad at the things we care about.

[Pictured: Our Beautiful Boaters]

Thanks to my newsletter, I now get to write for an actual audience each week. This has been a revelation after years of teaching myself how to do projects that take a long time to complete and might never become available to anyone except the people telling me to slow my roll on the em dashes. But one thing hasn’t changed: I’m teaching myself how to do something difficult, and it involves a lot of failure. My failures are mercifully low-stakes. I don’t report on important things in the way many of my fellow Discontenters do; I just write about how stories work. There’s a lot of freedom in generally writing about arts and culture things you like, interspersed with the occasional rant or personal essay. You get to have fun even as you mess up. The shower curtain thing promises to live eternal in the hearts of people trying to own me on Twitter.

It’s truly a pleasure—a delight, if you will—to write A Lonely Impulse of Delight. And it’s a pleasure to be a part of the Discontents collective. I hope you’ll sign up for this newsletter, if you’re not already a subscriber. And more importantly, consider signing up for the work of all of my fellow newsletterers and podcasters. They’re all better at this than I am and have properly hung shower curtains.

Welcome to Hell World

Hell World contributor Dave Infante (who publishes Fingers a free newsletter about drinking culture and other things) reported on Surly, a major craft brewery in Minneapolis, that announced it would do large-scale layoffs to a workforce that had just a day prior announced its intent to unionize. Weird timing! Happy Labor Day to all.

A second issue of Hell World, for paid subscribers only, was about the lionization of the boy vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse, watching the film “Jacob's Ladder” for the first time in twenty years, eating McDonald's, and reading Wallace Shawn's brilliant “Fever.”

Today’s newsletter is about Elliot Smith.

“I only found out when the book came out that people didn’t know it was a photograph,” J.J. Gonson told me. We were talking about the cover photo she shot for Elliot Smith’s self-titled second solo album. A 25th anniversary edition of the beloved record along with all manner of other extras including a coffee table book of photographs she took of Smith has just released by Kill Rock Stars. 

“Apparently all along people thought it was some kind of collage. I’ve had all these comments like ‘Oh my god, I never knew. What the hell is going on here?’ If people thought it was a piece of art, then they thought it was a piece of art about people jumping off a building. That changes my entire concept of how people perceived the record. They thought he put a picture on the record of people committing suicide. That makes the record suddenly way darker.”

Wars of Future Past

Cyborg locusts are maybe the second-most ominous technology I wrote about in the latest issue of Wars of Future Past. For decades, the military has tried to make insect-sized machines by simply attaching robot parts to live insects. Here, the cyborg locusts are a kind of disposable bomb sensor, using the senses of a living creature. Should the predominant source of military injury in the United States Army remain roadside bombs over the next decade, it is possible that locusts-with-microchips will go from body-horror to tactically useful body horror. That’s the second most ominous technology.

The most ominous, by my read, is DARPA’s virtual dogfighting AI, which bested other programs and a human pilot in simulated one-on-one F-16 duels. What is worrying, really, is the breathless coverage, the assumptions that go into praising a technology demonstration as a total triumph, without asking the incredibly basic questions like “will air-to-air dogfights even be part of war in this century?” and “how do we make sure humans are directly responsible and accountable for machines that kill?” 

Positive spin on nightmare weapons is as old as weapon marketing itself. I can’t pretend to know the future of AI weapons, but I can at least look back at how the eponymous Gatling tried to sell history on his gun as a violence-lessening device.

Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future

After a long layoff due to a move and a much-needed vacation, I (Patrick Wyman) wrote a couple of pieces this week. The first was on Bidenism as a coherent political ideology focused around defense of the status quo, drawing on deep American traditions of optimism and the refusal to believe things are as bad as they actually are. The second explored an entirely different topic: what happened after the ice sheets started to recede after the Last Glacial Maximum some 20,000 years ago, and precisely how people adapted to the changing environments and climatic conditions in which they lived. At the site of Star Carr in northern England, for example, people of the Mesolithic (as this period is known) fished, hunted deer and wild cattle, and made masks from the skulls and antlers of red deer. Wild stuff.

Cruel and Usual

I don’t have a post this week, but it seems that the NYPD is still stumped as to whether or not it is a crime to plow your car into a bunch of protesters in Times Square. This surprises me less than the fact that I was listening to NPR on the radio in a moment of weakness today and the host reading the news basically said word for word what is in this Daily News tweet.

I’m stumped how you could read this out loud and think that it was, like, a neutral way of reporting the news. It MATTERS that anyone in their right mind knows that trying to plow down pedestrians with a two-ton metal object is an evil thing to do. It MATTERS that the police are ignoring it. It MATTERS that there is video showing the people in this car received a police escort right before this happened. IT FUCKING MATTERS that it’s all over the internet that far-right groups encourage people to run protesters over with cars. It’s a strategy. The police know, they are in on the game, and not making an arrest in this situation is a political decision. Reporting what the NYPD press office says about the cops “investigating” without any of this context is propaganda, it’s not news.

After NPR read out propaganda about this incident, they moved to Portland, where police apparently fired tear gas at protesters because, the police said, the protesters were throwing rocks at them. No one bothered to speak to a protester. The cops said it, must be true!

Discourse Blog

By now you know the drill: here’s a wrapup post of what you missed behind the paywall, including us bashing Joe Kennedy for fun, twice, but in a smart way that you should pay money to read. And for free, we had plenty of politics and also not politics: Sam Grasso wrote about her newfound love for cross stitching, Caitlin Schneider wrote about getting radicalized by the past four years from a complacent Clinton supporter to a ride-or-die leftist, and I wrote about, and I am truly sorry, Andrew Sullivan. Look at us! We’re a real newsroom! We publish twice a day and usually it rules. We’ve been having a blast so far, particularly in our Tuesday afternoon open threads, so smash that mfin subscribe button.

Foreign Exchanges

Hey it’s Derek again. Thanks to everybody for reading and sticking with us for another week. Please tell your friends! Or, uh, your social media acquaintances!

Normally in this space I like to share an interesting story I covered in Foreign Exchanges over the past week, but this time I hope you’ll indulge me as I share an interesting story about Foreign Exchanges. Specifically, last week I announced that Daniel Bessner, the Anne H. H. and Kenneth B. Pyle Associate Professor in American Foreign Policy at the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington, is joining FX as a regular columnist. He’ll be contributing monthly columns on a range of topics, starting with an initial six-part run dedicated to making a little sense of what US foreign policy has become and why it’s come to this.

Daniel has already written a short piece for the newsletter introducing himself and his column, which will “focus on big picture ideas” in an effort to “spur some discussion, and maybe even provide some suggestions, about how the left should think about U.S. foreign affairs.” His first full column, on the DC foreign policy establishment’s incessant need for an “enemy,” should be out a couple of hours after you get this email, so I hope you’ll all stop by and check it out!

The Insurgents

This week on The Insurgents we’re talking to journalist Eoin Higgins, who has been covering the Alex Morse race for the Intercept. You can read his campaign postmortem with Ryan Grim and Daniel Boguslaw here. We actually have not actually spoken yet — we’re doing that in a few hours — but by the time you’re reading this, if the episode still hasn’t been released, just make sure you subscribe to the show through Substack or whatever podcast app you happen to use and you’ll be able to hear it as soon as it’s done. We’ll definitely be touching on the Morse race but there’s certainly a lot of other stuff going on as well so this should be a good one.

BORDER/LINES

This week, we took a look at a new proposed federal rule that would take a baby step towards Xinjiang-like constant suspicion and surveillance for immigration applicants and their sponsors by forcing them to hand over biometric information like voice prints, iris scans, palm prints, and DNA anytime the government wanted. Biometrics have been one point of focus for Stephen Miller and his ultranationalist pals, with other recent changes making it easier to collect DNA samples from detained immigrants and asylum seekers at the border. The new proposal would apply to basically anyone applying for any immigration benefits, including temporary visas, DACA, residency, and citizenship, as well as their U.S. sponsors, including U.S. citizens. The data could be kept indefinitely by the Department of Homeland Security and shared easily within the government. We also looked at how ICE at-large arrests, i.e. those conducted out in the community, have quietly resumed in force after being paused because of the pandemic, and litigation surrounding the administration’s attempts to undermine the census count.