the widget factory is rough

When I read Adam Smith in college, I remember my seminar focusing on whether workers in a capitalist society could live meaningful intellectual lives.

Well, I’m here to tell you right now that they can’t.  In the past year, I’ve worked so much and thought so little.  It’s been ages since I finished a book, or formulated complex thoughts.   When I come home, I only have enough mental energy to read blog posts.

I feel like the post uninteresting person, ever.

I’ll always have DQ

 

People bristle at the suggestion that they think critically about their sexual preferences, clinging tightly to the old “the heart wants what it wants” narrative, hoping to be allowed to discriminate with impunity. If it were up to me, those people would fall victim to a lifelong fuck drought as the rest of us resolve to avoid their hegemonic genitals.

And:

. . .No matter what position I am in, I follow this cardinal rule: If someone needs to be in control, it should be the person getting fucked.

As they say, read the whole thing.

but I thought ALCOHOL was the devil’s drink

This is so ridiculous, I can’t even. Also what is with this trend of people saying processed foods have no nutritional value?  Soda and french fries are “not food”?   Can we blame Michael Pollan* for creating this faux distinction?  Well, I have news:  soda has calories!  This means that when you drink  soda, you digest it and use it to fuel your brain and muscles.

*He of “only eat things your grandmother would recognize as food” fame.   So, like, potatoes, pot roasts, butter cakes, and that weird lime jello dish with pistachios? No?  Ok then.

HOW THE FUCK IS HE A NYT COLUMNIST I KNOW SO MUCH MORE THAN HE DOES GAHHH

Has Ross Douthat ever, like, read a book?  This is a serious question.

Video of the day

It’s so…disco-y.

Sylvia Plath reads The Applicant

Her accent is all kinds of amazing.  Here’s a link to the text.

Unexpected

From a remarkable collection of color photographs taken in Russia in the early 1900s.

Mad Men notes

So, in yesterday’s season premiere of Mad Men, we learn that Lucky Strike makes up about 70 % of SCDP’s salary.  We also learn that it is 1964, which happens to be the year of the first Surgeon General’s report on the health effects of smoking:

The 1964 report on smoking and health had an impact on public attitudes and policy. A Gallup Survey conducted in 1958 found that only 44 percent of Americans believed smoking caused cancer, while 78 percent believed so by 1968. In the course of a decade, it had become common knowledge that smoking damaged health, and mounting evidence of health risks gave Terry’s 1964 report public resonance. . . In 1965, Congress required all cigarette packages distributed in the United States to carry a health warning, and since 1970 this warning is made in the name of the Surgeon General. In 1969, cigarette advertising on television and radio was banned, effective September 1970.

They should get some new clients.

what, you mean I can’t consume my way out of global capitalism?

RAISED BATON: A policeman threatened a child with a baton during clashes with garment workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Wednesday. Thousands of people protested low wages and poor work conditions. Police responded with tear gas and water cannons. (Munir uz Zaman/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)

So I participated in two threads on Feministe over the past few days.  I hardly ever comment on big blogs, but this time I couldn’t help myself because everyone was arguing about something I started noticing a while ago,  namely, the upper-middle class American tendency to propose individual consumerist solutions to systemic problems.   Want to take a stand against the maltreatment of garment workers in Bangladesh?  Shop at a thrift store instead of Target.  Want to save the environment?  Buy green cleaning products.  Think the U.S. agricultural system is fucked?  Buy organic.  And so it goes.

These tactics are obviously never going to work by themselves, so why do people constantly emphasize consuming the right products instead of other forms of action?  Why is it so hard for supposed liberals to admit that corporate and government policy are responsible for these structures, and that they’ll never go away unless corporations and governments change?

The answer,  I think, lies in the fact that people are reluctant to acknowledge the problem in its entirety.  If you focus on consumer response to certain issues, like  exploitative garment factories, or destructive environmental policy, then hey, if you ride a bike everywhere and get all your clothes at Goodwill, you’re placing yourself outside the system and you get to feel all awesome about it.  Except that you, as a consumer in a developed nation, can’t escape the system in any meaningful way.   Everything you buy, from tires to computers to underwear, is produced by exploited workers in the third world.  There’s no way for individuals to extricate themselves from that.  But since this realization is kind of a downer, people like to talk about ethical consumption instead.

There’s also probably some kind of subconscious (?) notion that the act of consumption carries transformative and even salvific power.  Also, unyielding faith in the existence of a free market.