Rad Geek People's Daily

Here’s the one where some of the world’s largest billionaire grant-writing foundations put tens of millions of dollars into research grants and institutions to study the problems of global capitalism:

There are some respects in which the present system of political economy is pretty bad. I have for some time maintained the view that it ought to be replaced, and the political systems that uphold it ought to be altered or abolished. That said — it is of course passing strange to describe anything about this enterprise as if it were looking into a question like What Can Replace Free Markets? For something to be replaced, you have to have it first, and the contention that modern global capitalism has them all over the place is transparently, fundamentally absurd.

Modern global capitalism has markets, to be sure. Just not that kind. Markets under modern global capitalism are highly regulated, cartelized and concentrated, border-ridden, copyrighted, trashed by large-scale programs of moralistic prohibition, juiced by trillion-dollar subsidies, insulated by trillion-dollar bailouts, policed by a trillion-dollar worldwide military-industrial complex and on the whole thoroughly fettered, leashed and trained to government demands. You could always argue that that is the way things ought to be — certainly, that’s what most normal people who write about the global economy do argue. But then it is precious, if not petulant and mendacious, to go around fobbing off the evils of the present system as the sad consequences of some ubiquitous, hegemonic Free Markets. As if they were all around us! Research that begins from the notion that the problems of neoliberalism are best ascribed to the defects or the contextual limitations of free markets will have to offer some kind of argument to show that this is not simply fantasy or imagineering about distant possible worlds; certainly, the claim, whether true or false, cannot be grounded in anything remotely resembling empirical real-world examples.

After 24 long years of struggle, the FDA has finally agreed to relax the strict standardization rules that have — in the interest of protecting the helpless and vulnerable consumer from fraud and adulteration — banned any variation or experimentation in the ingredients for salad dressings labeled as French dressing.

The headline here is somewhat more pessimistic than the content of the article justifies. The FDA’s decision to remove restrictions on mail-order medical abortion drugs is an unambiguously positive development, especially for women in states in the South with bad, overly restrictive abortion regulation regimes. The problem for Texas specifically is the recently-enacted Texas SB 4, a repressive and stupid law that Greg Abbot believes to make it so that Mail-order abortion drugs are now prohibited in Texas. Really it is not obvious that this prohibitionist strategy will succeed, even on its own terms — the law does not make it illegal for anyone in Texas to take a mail-order abortifacient, and what the article states (more or less accurately) is that there are thorny legal questions involved in Texas’s ability to enforce Texas state laws (so-called) on out-of-state doctors or pharmacies who ship mail-order abortifacients from outside of Texas. It’s possible that Texas SB 4 effectively limits the availability of abortifacients; it’s also possible it gets struck down as overreach, or simply violated openly or covertly by providers who are willing to take the risk for the sake of their clients. But in either case, like all drug prohibitions, Texas SB 4 is tyrannical, as stupid as it is impudent, and ought to be ignored wherever possible, evaded wherever feasible, resisted wherever necessary, and repealed immediately, completely, and forever.

Stop the War on Drugs. Abortion on demand, and without apology.

This episode of Reply All is really an insightful and deeply humane effort to understand what is going on within a fairly wild and hostile political scene that is nevertheless full of real human beings.

EMMANUEL: Darius told me that the surefire way to know if an account is a bot or not is to just DM the account. So I DMed good ol’ DeepThroat, asked them, Are you a bot? And they got back me, told me they were real. . . . I was feeling a little bit like an idiot. But Darius said it totally made sense that really anyone — me, the people in Florida, you — might think accounts like DeepThroat’s were bots.

Maybe it’s even easier for us to think that.

Like we’ve all been hearing for years about how our elections have been impacted by foreign interference, about how disinformation is spreading like wildfire on the internet and ensnaring seemingly reasonable people, and to Darius, that’s exactly why bots have become the perfect boogieman.

DARIUS: I mean, I think it’s a classic moral panic. Just like people think that there’s a massive increase in crime all the time, even when you look at the numbers and the crime numbers have been going down in many places. It’s an easy out. It’s an easy way to point at some nefarious Other, like the bot makers and like, oh–they’re the reason democracy is failing.

EMMANUEL: Obviously, I can’t definitively rule out whether Christina is using bots. But the more I looked into Christina Pushaw herself, the more I became convinced that bots don’t explain her effectiveness in Florida. . . . Here’s my theory — I think Christina is someone with a very specific skill, a skill that any natural politician has. She has this knack for noticing people who otherwise are invisible to the rest of us on Twitter. . . .

— Ep. 182, State of Panic
Reply All, 16 December 2021.