Ice-cycle.

 

This morning, at dawn.

By its own account, "Cubik is 'a deeply human organization' that 'seeks personalities before skills" — "you don’t just work at Cubik, you 'Be Cubik.'"

"An online quiz prompts you to discover your Cubik profile: Reflection, Action, or Relation. 'Cubik’s V.I.P. drinks have hardly begun and you’ve already talked to all the guests,' the description for the last category reads. 'You now know at which sport Jean-Yves is unbeatable, where Joëlle will spend her vacations, and that Antoine has planned to cross Slovenia on a tandem bicycle.' Whew. Jean-Yves, Joëlle, and Antoine might be having the time of their lives. Or they might be frantically texting the babysitter or wishing they were at yoga class. Cubik boasts, 'Because we are proud of our culture, we have many rituals for getting together.' These include an annual corporate retreat just before the summer holidays, 'to celebrate the past season and take a step back from working.'"

From "The Right Not to Be Fun at Work/In a win for workplace dignity, a French high court recently decreed that businesses cannot force their employees to participate in supposedly enjoyable activities" (The New Yorker).

Can the capacity to have fun be made one of your professional responsibilities? It's one thing to be allowed to have fun or even encouraged to have fun or rewarded for bringing your delightful spirit of fun to the workplace. But it's quite another to fire you because you're no fun. But what is this "fun"? An employer's idea of fun can be distorted and burdensome. Isn't that what the TV show "The Office" is about? I don't know, I don't watch it, because I can't stand that sort of thing even vicariously.

The woods in early afternoon.

Spokescandies — one more item for my list of things I'd never heard of until I heard they were going away.

A message from M&M'S. pic.twitter.com/EMucEBTd9o

— M&M'S (@mmschocolate) January 23, 2023

What did they do wrong? I feel uneasy, because these imaginary beings embody only rejection. Rejection by whom and for what reason? It's free-floating anxiety in candy form. Yeah, the M&Ms company is "tricking" me into doing viral marketing for them.

According to The Daily Beast, Tucker Carlson is responsible for the polarization over the candy's shoes. See for yourself:

"[T]he rapid liberation of women and the labor-market shift toward brains and away from brawn have left men bereft of... 'ontological security.'..."

"Things have become so bad, so quickly, that emergency social repairs are needed. 'It is like the needles on a magnetic compass reversing their polarity,' [writes Richard V. Reeves, a British American scholar of inequality and social mobility]. 'Suddenly, working for gender equality means focusing on boys rather than girls.'... 'As far as I can tell, nobody predicted that women would overtake men so rapidly, so comprehensively, or so consistently around the world,' Reeves writes.... Reeves offers a wide menu of policies designed to foster a 'prosocial masculinity for a postfeminist world.' He would encourage more men to become nurses and teachers, expand paid leave, and create a thousand more vocational high schools. His signature idea, though, is to 'redshirt' boys and give them all, by default, an extra year of kindergarten."

From "What’s the Matter with Men? They’re floundering at school and in the workplace. Some conservatives blame a crisis of masculinity, but the problems—and their solutions—are far more complex" by Idrees Kahloon (The New Yorker).

"It’s estimated that some fifty million new things get classified each year, and the more than two million people with security clearances, military and civilian, can potentially add to the pile..."

"... by one route or another. Presidents do not have the power to declassify documents psychically, as Trump has suggested, but their power to do so in other ways is surprisingly broad and ill-defined, governed largely by executive orders and precedent. That reality had complicated the legal case against Trump even before Biden’s lawyers found the first documents. The President has not yet said for sure if he will run again in 2024. The affair of the documents may prove something of a stress test. Republicans would no doubt like to see all these story lines—the documents, Hunter, the Corvette, Communists—merge into a lurid fog that obscures the real line between Trump’s case and Biden’s. They are not the same, and that is something worth emphasizing. But the fact that these two very different men, for different reasons, both had classified documents in their homes should be cause for reflection about our system of secrecy, too."

 
From "The Biden-Documents Mess House Republicans are ramping up conspiracy theories, but one thing seems clear: the government’s documents system has an overclassification addiction" by Amy Davidson Sorkin (The New Yorker).

"I just feel like there must’ve been a time when the world had more, you know? Like mystery or something."

"And now you come somewhere like this, and it’s beautiful, and you take a picture, and then you realize that everybody’s taking that exact same picture from that exact same spot and you’ve just made some redundant content for stupid Instagram."

Said my favorite "White Lotus/Season 2" character, Portia, quoted in "How to Redeem Social Media in One Easy Step" by Margaret Renkl (NYT). 

Renkl bemoans the bane of social-media-driven photography:

My son and daughter-in-law, who are frequent campers, have seen people queued up at least 50 deep to take phone selfies at popular national park waterfalls and rock formations.... 

"Sam Smith has expressed their disappointment that women have been snubbed from the gender-neutral category at the BRITs this year."

"No women are nominated for Artist of the Year at next month's ceremony, which has sparked fury among music fans. The BRITs changed their format last year to remove the gendered awards, which Adele issued a jibe at as she picked up its first ever non-gendered gong. While Sam welcomed the axing of the gendered awards - which came some years after they came out as non-binary - the Gloria hitmaker has branded the lack of female talent celebrated in the category 'frustrating.'"

The Mirror reports.

If Adele won last year, what's the problem? Why should music be divided into male and female?

Here's Sam Smith singing "Gloria" on "Saturday Night Live" 2 days ago: 

 

Somehow, somebody decided they needed a woman's body sprawled out in the foreground while Smith sang, and somehow that body ended up being Sharon Stone.

The hell? What's progressive? It's totally retrograde.

Sunrise — 7:33.

"One of the biggest problems with TikTok is knowing what the biggest problem with TikTok is."

"Most TikTok hawks have focused on the surveillance of user activity that the app could conduct and the user data the company can access, or what could be called information collection.... Many experts believe that information manipulation, including censorship of user posts as well as the dissemination of propaganda and disinformation, is actually the greater threat TikTok poses.... The right way to approach TikTok is the right way to approach all foreign investment: assess a company’s susceptibility to undue influence from an adversary; gauge the likelihood that susceptibility will lead to a specific harm; and determine whether the government can reduce that likelihood through measures short of an all-out ban. The same goes for global trade generally. The United States should promote the dynamism and prosperity that result from international exchange, curtailing it only in cases of glaring need."

 
From "Don’t ban TikTok. Make it safer for the country" by the Editorial Board of The Washington Post.

I felt honored to make the first footprints in the new snow.

It was sunrise time...

 

... and I walked/ran 1.6 miles — out to the vantage point and back to the gate...

... before I encountered another human being. It was beautiful seeing — and making an imprint on — all that fresh snow.

I did see the occasional Year-of-the-Rabbit rabbit tracks along the way.

"It’s politically weird to be a very liberal Democrat and find yourself shoved in bed with, like, the governor of Texas. Am I supposed to listen to Tucker Carlson?"

Said one parent, quoted in "When Students Change Gender Identity, and Parents Don’t Know/Educators are facing wrenching new tensions over whether they should tell parents when students socially transition at school" (NYT).

[D]ozens of parents whose children have socially transitioned at school told The Times they felt villainized by educators who seemed to think that they — not the parents — knew what was best for their children.... Although some didn’t want their children to transition at all, others said they were open to it, but felt schools forced the process to move too quickly, and that they couldn’t raise concerns without being cut out completely or having their home labeled “unsafe.”... 

One mother in California shared messages that her teenager’s teacher had sent through the school’s web portal encouraging the student to obtain medical care, housing and legal advice without the parents’ knowledge. A lawsuit filed against a school district in Wisconsin included a photo of a teacher’s flyer posted at school that stated: “If your parents aren’t accepting of your identity, I’m your mom now.”

The top-rated comment over there — from someone called "It’s Wrong" — is:

I teach at a middle school in Bergen County, NJ. This year, the teachers in my school were specifically instructed not to tell parents if their kids start using a new name or ask to be referred to with non-sex-based pronouns or use the opposite-sex bathroom. After 15 years of never having a trans-identified kid in my classroom, I’ve had several just in the last couple of years. All were girls and all had serious mental health issues. 

I have a background in psychology. I can read and understand scientific literature. So my opinions on this issue are informed by data, not politics. I am certain that these girls’ mental health issues are the cause of their trans identities, not the effect. The number of trans-identifying kids has exploded. If trans people were simply coming out in greater numbers now because it’s now safer, we’d see kids of both sexes coming out, not mainly girls. And we’d see people of all ages coming out, not mainly teens and pre-teens. Social contagion of psychological symptoms among adolescent girls is a real phenomenon — DID and Tourette’s on TikTok today, bulimia and anorexia in the 80s and 90s, Beatlemania-style fainting in the 1960s, “hysterical” disorders of the early 20th century— all the way back to the supposed possession of the Salem witch trials.

We teachers are hiding important information about kids’ mental health from their parents. That’s wrong. Parents have a right to know. 

Second highest rated, from "Reasonable Person":

I’ve been a teacher for quite a while. Teaching has always been loosely aligned with liberal values, but I never felt like I was part of an explicit political organization until the last few years. The zeal with which school systems have pursued and advocated for left-wing identity politics no longer feels like being “supportive,” it feels like we’re being persuasive: join us, children, as we dismantle the evil systems (systemic racism! the patriarchy! the gender binary!) that your parents have wrought.

It’s frankly a little bit creepy and cultish at times, and it needs to stop.

They made a movie out of that New Yorker story "Cat Person" — you know, the story everyone was talking about...

... the last time everyone was talking about a short story.

Remember? It was December 2017, and my first post on the subject was: "I was drawn in by the creepy close-up and started reading before 'Cat Person' became an internet phenomenon." Ha ha. I didn't want you to think I'd just follow a trend. I said:

It's getting harder and harder to speak news alerts out loud these days.

My grandfather — Pop — used to read the front section of the evening newspaper and — upon finding something interesting — would read the headline to the rest of us who were either waiting to get our hands on the front section or didn't really care about reading the news at all.

And nowadays, I still participate in spoken news alerts. Here at Meadhouse, we're both often reading the web miscellaneously, and we each like the keep the other up to date on the latest items of interest. 

But lately we're calling out nonsense like this:

"TikTok and ByteDance employees regularly engage in 'heating,' a manual push that ensures specific videos 'achieve a certain number of video views'..."

"... according to six sources and documents reviewed by Forbes," says Forbes, in "TikTok’s Secret ‘Heating’ Button Can Make Anyone Go Viral."

For years, TikTok has described its powerful For You Page as a personalized feed ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behavior in the app. But that’s not the full story....

I'll have to give some more thought to how nefarious this is. 

Cory Doctorow seems to think it exemplifies the awfulness of all sorts of things: "Tiktok's enshittification."

"Could the governor who is battling to turn a progressive state college into a 'Hillsdale of the South' really be a tedious Establishment Republican who wants to cut the Social Security checks of righteous churchgoing Republican retirees?"

Asks Ed Kilgore in "Could Trump Run to DeSantis’s Left in 2024?" (New York Magazine).

He's reacting to the Rolling Stone article "Trump Is Plotting How to Kick DeSantis ‘In the Nuts.’ Here’s His Playbook, So Far/Team Trump is preparing to paint the Florida governor as an establishment hawk who'll put Social Security on the chopping block." Excerpt:

On a host of issues, Trump and his lieutenants are itching to portray DeSantis as the “establishment” figure — the one who is preferred by the supposedly squishy party bigwigs like Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. One of Trump’s biggest impacts on the GOP was largely shelving the budget-slashing austerity economics of former Speaker Ryan and ushering in a free-spending, debt-ballooning era that combined tax cuts for the rich, with a rhetorical cease-fire on threats to the bennies of the masses — ranging from Social Security to Medicare.

I'm interested in that phrase "bennies of the masses." It's like "opium of the masses." That's got to be intentional — using "bennies" to mean benefits when "bennies" has been slang for benzedrine — i.e., amphetamine — since the 1950s.

From Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" (1957): "There’s another photo of Joan simpering over a cookpot; her hair is long and unkempt; she’s high on benny and God knows what she’s saying as the camera is snapped…'Don’t point that nasty old thing at me.'"

"Opium of the people" — also translated as "opium of the masses" — has its own Wikipedia article:

The full sentence from Marx translates (including italics) as: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people."... 

In [Marx's] view, religion... reduced people's immediate suffering and provided them with pleasant illusions which gave them the strength to carry on.... [B]y focusing on the eternal rather than the temporal, religion turns the attention of the oppressed away from the exploitation and class structure that encompasses their everyday lives.... In Marx’s view, once workers finally overthrow capitalism, unequal social relations will no longer need legitimating and people’s alienation will dissolve, along with any need for religion. 

Assuming Rolling Stone intended to refer to Marx's analogy of religion to opium, we're prodded to think about whether government benefits are like amphetamine. Do things like Social Security and Medicare give us "euphoria, change in desire for sex, increased wakefulness, and improved cognitive control"? If we get too much, do we experience "psychosis (e.g., delusions and paranoia)"?

If they cut our "bennies," what do we do? Without "opium," in Marx's view, we'd have more clarity and energy, and maybe we'd revolt, but without "bennies," we have less energy and are less excited about crazy things.

In which case, what? What would we do in that newly dulled, enervated condition? Choose DeSantis over Trump?