Hello, friends and enemies. I’ve had a bit of a rough time the last couple weeks thanks to the arthritis and it’s been hard to do much. Two weeks ago, my knee started hurting a lot more than it had been and it even hurt to walk. I haven’t been doing anything high impact or especially strenuous, so I’m not sure what brought it on other than the ongoing degeneration of my crappy knee joint. The good news is I was already scheduled to get my first round of gel injections, also known as hyaluronic acid, the same stuff those Olympic ski jumpers have been injecting into their nether regions to try to get a little extra fabric in their suits, operating on the same physical principle as a flying squirrel. I’m getting three injections of what I’m now exclusively calling “dick acid” over the course of three weeks. The stuff takes a little time to work, but I am very much hoping it will do something for me because this pain is making it difficult for me to go about my business. I don’t want to get too optimistic but I think I’m starting to feel a little better. Thank you, dick acid.
Current Events
I think we need to start taking seriously the possibility that elections are not going to count for much in the future. Let’s start with the SAVE Act, which I was yelling about this time last year. This bill, which has already passed the House, would require “individuals to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections.” This means you would need to show a birth certificate, passport, or similar to register to vote. Most people do not have these documents handy, or if they do have their birth certificate, it might not match their current name, especially for married women or transgender people. For something practical you can do right now, I suggest getting or renewing your passport (or consider getting a divorce and changing your name back!). You can now apply for passports online and it’s very easy; I just renewed mine last week. They seem to be moving quickly at the passport office right now, so I do recommend that women, in particular, take advantage of that.
Still, even if everyone has a passport and the documents to prove citizenship, this is a pointless and cruel piece of legislation. Voter fraud, which this legislation ostensibly aims to eliminate, is vanishingly rare. It’s not happening at scale. There is no voter fraud conspiracy. Immigrants are not working the system to find some kind of illegal voting loophole. One report found that “most reported incidents of voter fraud are actually traceable to other sources, such as clerical errors or bad data matching practices.” That’s it. It’s just people at work making mistakes sometimes.
Keeping people from voting seems to be one of the key developing projects of this administration. Last month, amid the chaos ICE has been visiting on Minneapolis, Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded that Minnesota turn over their voter rolls to the federal government. As The Guardian reports, “What do voter rolls have to do with ICE? Nothing. But they have a lot to do with the administration’s ongoing efforts to meddle in elections,” Wendy Weiser, vice-president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, a thinktank, posted on X. “The administration may not threaten ICE deployment to pressure states to cooperate with its improper efforts to interfere in elections.” We also recently saw the FBI raiding the Fulton County election offices in Georgia. Despite being an obvious tantrum about Trump losing to Biden in 2020, this could have real consequences.
The Trump administration is obsessed with elections because of Trump’s vanity, among other things. Trump lost elections when his main opponent was a man and only won against women. Accusations of Russian interference in elections have followed him for ten years. He is so unpopular that Gallup is going to stop tracking presidential approval ratings. Per the article, “Trump’s second-term approval rating fell to 36% in December, which is among the lowest ever recorded by the company. The US president started his second term with an approval rating of 47%.” Trump only wants to play when he knows he can win. He wants to be putting up dictator numbers so he can say he won 90 percent or more of the vote. I’m desperately hoping he dies before his term ends so we don’t have to find out how serious he is about trying to run for a third term in 2028 (yes, I know this is illegal but I don’t think Trump cares. He’s already a convicted felon and yet he is the president).
ICE now has a budget that is almost equal to that of Canada’s military, and it would be the 17th largest military in the world based on funding. Why are we funding a military-sized force for something that is only directed at our own citizens? In Arizona, the state senate is currently reviewing a proposal to have ICE stationed at polling places. Very few people are going to turn up to vote when they could be kidnapped by ICE agents. California has introduced a bill to do exactly the opposite, banning ICE from polling sites, which is great for us but there are 49 other states to worry about. Still, Trump was out in public saying that we should “nationalize the voting.” I don’t think it’s unreasonable that his underlings may carry out this idea using ICE agents as enforcement.
I wish I had something optimistic to add or something we could all go out and do about this, but there are no longer any easy suggestions and I’m just here chronicling the madness because I feel compelled to do so. The way people are fighting back in Minnesota is probably what we will all need to start doing. Perhaps we also need to take a cue from this local hero.
Books and Other Words
I can’t believe it took me so long to read David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs: A Theory! This is exactly the book I needed in my life. I already have a lot of opinions on the nature and utility of many forms of work, but Bullshit Jobs added a lot of clarity and nuance for me.
Graeber begins with defining a bullshit job as:
“A form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”
He goes on to categorize bullshit jobs into five types: flunkies, box tickers, duct tapers, goons, and taskmasters, explaining their origins and how their different roles suggest that most of the “bullshitization” of jobs comes from political motivations, not economic ones. There are plenty of non-bullshit jobs out there, but because our we are “a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself,” we have created a whole class of jobs that don’t really serve any purpose except keeping people employed. This isn’t unlike the USSR’s “millions of dummy proletarian jobs” but we have “dummy white-collar jobs instead.” Graeber cites a survey that found that “37 to 40 percent of workers in rich countries already feel their jobs are pointless.” That’s huge! More than one-third of workers admit to thinking that their job accomplishes nothing. This is a huge drain on all of us; working 40 hours “regardless of what there is to do … def[ies] all common sense.” It’s delivering huge psychic damage to us all.
Graeber also addresses the idea that people who have bullshit jobs should just be glad of their circumstances. They don’t have to do anything but they get paid! Unfortunately, most people find that pretending to work all day is a huge drain on one’s creative energies. After a long day of putting energy into something pointless, most people don’t have energy left for much beyond watching TV and spending money on random shit, which Graeber terms “compensatory capitalism.” Yet, some people are able to find a kind of “guerrilla purpose” to combat the “spiritual warfare” of bullshit jobs and find ways to do useful things during work, although that seems to be a minority.
Ending the scourge of bullshit jobs is not going to be easy, in large part because Graeber writes that this is a political problem rather than an economic one. Creating lots of bullshit jobs is effectively a new form of feudalism in which corporations distribute resources and managers get to feel important by employing many underlings. There is also the issue of how people would be able to afford to live without bullshit jobs propping up so many people. Instead of corporate patronage, one solution would be something like Universal Basic Income, where every single person gets enough money to live regardless of their circumstances. Graber suggests that part of the reason we don’t have universal healthcare in the United States is that these dummy jobs are acting like a form of welfare. He mentions an interview in which President Obama explained that he couldn’t push for something like Medicare for All because too many health insurance employees would be out of a job. Bleak!
Another issue is that many people in bullshit jobs seem to envy people in jobs that benefit society—nurses, teachers, sewage plant inspectors—so we end up with a perverse logic like “of course teachers shouldn’t be paid much, they’re already doing a job that is important! The rest of us need to be paid a lot for the psychic torture of doing a bullshit job!” How do we get people to realize that instead of everyone suffering together, we could do something else? Literally anything else? We all want our lives to have meaning, but these fake white-collar jobs are not the way to to it. People love to argue that we’d get “bored” or do nothing at all without work, but we almost always see rich people who don’t have to work making art in one form or another. People want to take care of each other and make art! That’s the whole human experience!
This book also reminded me of some of the things I took away from Can’t Pay Won’t Pay by the Debt Collective, which, of course, did cite Graeber’s work (notably Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which I have yet to read). The Debt Collective and Graeber both discuss care work as something that could be considered the basis of the economy rather than making and selling things. Graeber talks about this as a form of “maintenance” work, in contrast to our typical image of a working class person, who works in a factory and maybe makes cars. But, as Graeber points out, you make a cup once and wash it 1,000 times, so why isn’t our economy centered around taking care of people and things? This in turn made me think of How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World which describes caring for infrastructure as a form of maintenance that is disincentivized in favor of making new things, even though we have lots of energy available on this earth to maintain things and relatively few resources with which to produce new objects. Pivoting our economy away from having upwards half of the population doing jobs where they feel they contribute nothing to society would have huge benefits for the climate and the culture. The first step is convincing people that life could be different.
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- Governor Newsom proclaims Ronald Reagan Day via the California Governor’s website. I swear to god, if you chucklefucks elect this man as our next president, I will scream. My current theory is that he’s going to announce he’s running as a Republican to save the soul of the GOP from Trump and fend of the worst excesses of the Democrats.
- Meet the Gorgeous Winner of Japan’s Capybara Bath Contest via Tokyo Weekender. The zoos in Japan have a contest to see which capybara can spend the most time in a bath. I can only say that I hope I get reincarnated as a capybara in a Japanese zoo.
Computer World
I am proud to say that I’ve had two friends this week ask me about installing Linux. I’m certainly not an expert but the fact that I’ve done it at all makes me a minor authority, so that is cool. I learned that the Linux Foundation website has free courses available to learn about Linux and I think I’m going to take the Introduction to Linux course. I want to know how the computer works! It would also be nice to be able to help more friends escape the Windows ecosystem especially now that we know Bill Gates himself is allegedly a disgusting sex pest.
The other computer thing I learned is that my favorite ad blocking program, AdGuard, now has an option on Linux. You do have to pay for this one but it prevents ads and trackers from downloading at all, and you can install it on all kinds of devices. I did have to be brave and use the terminal to install it, but their site had instructions and it all worked fine!
Icelandic
I am currently digging into a new Wikipedia category for my Icelandic studies (and I thought I mentioned this before but couldn’t find it, so forgive me if I am repeating myself). I’m working on translating articles about Icelandic women into English and I’ve started with the “Icelandic women by century” categories, which currently has me writing about a bunch of rich ladies and abbesses (sometimes both at once!) from the 15th century. Some of them are badass, like Ólöf Loftsdóttir who got kidnapped by Scottish pirates, had her ransom paid by the Danish king, then went back to Iceland to help keep the English off its shores! Solveig Þorleifsdóttir got excommunicated from the Catholic church. The reasons are not totally clear to me but it seems like she was being loud and stubborn (relatable). The only bummer about working on these subjects is that a lot of what we know about these women is who their husband(s) and children were, and who inherited their money. It’s been a little difficult to purposely ignore articles about the men who intersect with these women because I do really like to complete a set and it feels like I’m leaving holes in the story. However, Wikipedia has way more content about men (according to a 2023 study, only about 20 percent of biographical articles were about women), so I have to remind myself that I am simply prioritizing women at the moment. The men can be someone else’s problem.
Doing Stuff
Last weekend we saw Sacramento Ballet’s performance of Sleeping Beauty. I went into it having seen the Disney movie maybe once and not knowing much else, but it’s fairly thin on plot: the princess is born and everyone dances about it, she turns 16 and we dance some more, she gets cursed to sleep (sad dancing), then the prince wakes her and everyone dances in honor of their nuptials. I was surprised to find that I was familiar with a number of pieces from this ballet because my ballet teacher uses it for her students all the time! So that was a fun little surprise. I really liked how they used the costumes in the performance to show how time had passed; the first act has big 17th-century outfits, but after Aurora’s 100-year nap, the dancers appear in Rococo fashions.
Kitchen Witchery
I’ve been keeping it fairly basic lately. I tried this recipe for chicken arroz rojo, which I am calling “Mexican inspired” and not strictly Mexican food (this is a NYT recipe after all). I added a lot more seasoning and served it with corn cake and some roasted acorn squash. It was good and it was easy. I tried a new soup recipe: curried coconut and red lentil, which we liked. I made some beet couscous with feta (recipe from Ruffage). I liked it but didn’t love it, but the point was to eat an extra vegetable so mission accomplished. Finally, I made a meal of tri-tip, mashed potatoes, asparagus, and rolls (the roll recipe is from The Bread Bible but the rest is just freestyle), which Kirk said was visually impressive (and also delicious), so I am sharing so you can all be stunned by my craftswomanship.
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Kirk bought some catnip bubbles thinking Fritz would be delighted and leaping around after them. Alas, Fritz is afraid of the bubbles.
