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- Whatever You Think It Is, It’s Worse
Musicology Duck was “briefly kidnapped” yesterday in what knowledgeable observers are calling a pretty on-the-nose allegory, even for these extremely stupid times.
Please do yourself a favor and read the thread.
M. Duck narrated the experience on Blue Sky in real time, with updates like “[the bus driver is] refusing to talk to anyone while he’s driving and is now just driving really fast,” “The company told him to take us to Union station and he screamed that he doesn’t get paid enough and is refusing,” and “woman behind me is now screaming at the bus company on the phone… the company wasn’t being super helpful so she goes ‘just so you know we just reported to the police that we’re being kidnapped’.” Eventually the driver did stop the bus and let everyone get off. The police never showed up, of course.
I also cant stop thinking about this
Surely someone is going to do something about all the rest of this soon too, right? Yesterday The Wall St. Journal’s James Mackintosh surveyed financial markets’ subdued response to Donald Trump threatening to start a trade war and/or a shooting-people war with Europe if Denmark doesn’t give him Greenland and a Nobel Peace Prize. “It’s hard to imagine a new world order,” wrote Mackintosh, “and it’s plausible that investors find it so hard to price in this prospect that they just ignore it. Something like this happened when Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914.” Oh? Here I’ve been blithely wondering whether it was 1933 or 1938, it never occurred to me it might only be 1914.
But “whatever you think it is, it’s worse,” as Brandi Reilly told Marisa Kabas. Reilly filmed with her phone on Sunday as secret police thugs abducted one of her neighbors in St. Paul, an elderly man dressed only in boxers and crocs, and dragged him out into the freezing Minnesota snow. In The Verge, Minneapolis resident Scott Meslow wrote that he has…
…received a steady string of messages from increasingly concerned friends across the country. They all start the same way: Uh… is this really as bad as it looks from the outside?
My answer to that question is easy: no, it’s worse.
Meslow closes with some advice: “Wherever you are, get organized now.” CrimethInc recently published a guide to the rapid response networks that Minneapolis residents have formed to resist the ongoing violent federal occupation. The resistance is incredibly organized and granular, and has already shifted and evolved significantly as ICE tactics have changed in response to it.
The people of the Twin Cities have paid close attention to their opponents. They know how ICE agents deploy, where ICE agents stage, how ICE agents dress, drive, and react. They live in a relatively small and densely populated urban area, walkable in many parts, gridded for easy navigation by car. People are connected to their neighbors, building on the connections that remain from past movements and uprisings… Those embedded in the model are committed to agility and adaptability as conditions change.
Luke O'Neil also has a roundup of Minneapolis related news today. On the lighter side, Matt Novak helpfully collected “The Best Videos of ICE Agents Eating Shit in the Brutal Minneapolis Winter,” because while they are evil they’re also ridiculous, and we shouldn’t forget to laugh at them.
Also Today in Ridiculous: Bari Weiss, the Hannah Horvath of Leni Riefenstahls, got a full Clare Malone #longread in The New Yorker. There’s nothing really new in it, unfortunately, and all the sassy quotes are anonymous because no one who still has an actual job in media is going to risk open criticism until they’re sure she’s off that glass cliff for good. Meanwhile the 60 Minutes CECOT story Weiss held up in December finally aired on Sunday without any substantive changes, as Bari was unable to get any of her good friends in the Trump administration on camera to chat about sending hundreds of immigrants and refugees to a Salvadoran torture camp. Malice vs. incompetence: the struggle continues.
A University of Fairbanks student was arrested for making real art out of AI “art.” Linguistics has a “phrases can just be words” moment. Wired says it’s the Chinese century, and who can disagree when Chinese women can already get texts without even fucking the text man. AI is the future of managing labels on Github issues. Garbage Ryan tried to vibe code and it didn’t go great. Meanwhile the Gas Town guy is pumping crypto now. “It is, from first principles, stupid” observed Matt Levine, but “It works. It doesn’t have to make sense! It works!” The 365 buttons of venture finance.
Good News: Back in March, Ernie Smith wrote about the pop culture of Greenland, which seems increasingly relevant.
And if you’d like to read one thing today that’s both true and not insanely depressing, it should be this blog post by Kevin Kelly on learning to expect, and accept, unearned kindness. (via Casey Johnston)
I believe the generous gifts of strangers are actually summoned by a deliberate willingness to be helped. You start by surrendering to your human need for help. That we cannot be helped until we embrace our need for help is another law of the universe. Receiving help on the road is a spiritual event triggered by a traveler who surrenders his or her fate to the eternal Good. It’s a move away from whether we will be helped, to how: how will the miracle unfold today? In what novel manner will Good reveal itself? Who will the universe send today to carry away my gift of trust and helplessness?
When the miracle flows, it flows both ways. When an offered gift is accepted, then the threads of love are knotted, snaring both the stranger who is kind, and the stranger who is kinded. Every time a gift is tossed it lands differently – but knowing that it will arrive in some colorful, unexpected way is one of the certainties of life.
I learned the same lesson hiking the Appalachian Trail, which no one can do without an enormous amount of completely unearned generosity from strangers. I needed some kind of help almost every day, and every time I needed it, there it was.
And Finally: Cow tools.
Today’s Song: Nuuk Posse, “Kaataq”
The whole album is on Bandcamp. It only Tuesday.
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