California Fires and Bat Shit Crazy Stuff
Five For Friday, January 10, 2025
I round up my half-baked and/or frivolous thoughts for the week on Friday mornings. Occasionally, if items on my list continue to irk me over the weekend, I’ll turn those thoughts into an essay for Monday or Tuesday.
Today, a lot is irking me. I’m full of irks. But today, I’ll confine myself to short rants about my many irks.
California Fires and Politics
Like almost everyone in the country, I’m very sad for the residents of Los Angeles who have lost their homes and the few who lost their lives. I’m an East Coast person, so I can’t say anything useful about the particulars of the situation. However, I do have opinions about the insane politics that are unfolding around this issue.
A few voices on social media are pointing out that the homes that burned down were multi-million dollar homes. These are rich people, they say, who can afford to rebuild without a problem. They question why someone living in a $150,000 house outside of Cleveland should pay taxes or see a hike in their insurance premium to cover the costs of rebuilding the homes of Hollywood stars.
The blame game is just starting. Did “progressive/woke/DEI politics” put a bunch of incompetent fools in charge of the Los Angeles government? Did they make bad decisions that led to this devastating fire? I saw this debate unfold a couple of days ago on CNN (worth a watch here).
City governments across our country are notoriously corrupt. It’s been that way since my ancestors took over city governments in the late 1800s. Cronyism — giving jobs to your friends — has always been a part of urban government. It’s a bad practice, of course, that shouldn’t be camouflaged by DEI slogans. At the same time, we shouldn’t automatically assume that the mayor, the fire chief, Gavin Newsom, the Sierra Club, and other right-wing boogiemen were at fault. Let’s see how things play out.
Bat Shit Crazy
Many people left X for other social media platforms, but I stayed. I would rather chat in a crowded bar than in an empty classroom.
It does require stepping over some massive turds as I skim through X every day. Since so many reliable people left X, my feed mostly consists of tweets generated by the X algorithms. Some of them are good. I shared a cat video with Steve this morning after I woke him up with my laughter. (I can’t find the cat video now, but here’s another good one.)
Other information on X is bat shit crazy. My feed is full of clips of a recent interview with Mel Gibson on the Joe Rogan show. He talked about how the Catholic church is protected by pedophiles, how the blue fabric dye cures cancer, and how evolution is wrong. His $14.5m Malibu mansion burned down this week, so we’re sorry about that. But he’s still crazy.
The Post Truth World, The Age of Un-Enlightenment
Meta made a huge announcement this week. They decided to disband their department that fact-checked social media information and said they would rely on a community verification system, similar to the system used by X.
On X, my Atlantic friend, Derek Thompson wrote:
In politics, there's the concept of thermostatic opinion. Elect Democrats, country moves right. Elect Republicans, country moves left. Point is, history isn't linear. It's a story of triumph, overreach, reaction, and cyclicality.
I wonder if the same is true for information regimes.
We tried empowering the disinformation police, and widespread perception of progressive overreach led to the triumphant return of the say-anything brigade. (I think the story was more complicated than one sentence can summarize, but there's my best one-sentence summary.)
Now we're celebrating the end of the guardrails and the gatekeepers and marching proudly into the era of epistemic de-policing. Maybe it goes great. But, well, history isn't linear. It's still a story of triumph followed by overreach followed by reaction. Let's see what happens next.
There’s no question that people stopped believing in traditional media sources. During COVID, the mainstream press ignored counter voices and presented information in a good guy/bad guy dichotomy. For example, I was frustrated by the lack of concern for American children during the school shutdowns and the refusal to publish information that went counter to that story.
The mainstream press is under financial pressure. Massive layoffs and cost-cutting measures make it harder to do good work. Risk-averse owners interfere with editorial content. Opinion writers don’t want to deal with the toxic environment of these newsrooms, so they leave and start up Substacks. (Welcome, all!)
A random note on X written by some guy who lives in his mom’s basement cannot replace the research teamwork and ethics that goes into every article in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. I get that we should all question authority, but do not listen to Mel Gibson on the Joe Rogan Show. Please.
British Rape Story
Elon Musk brought the UK Grooming Scandal back into the spotlight. It’s an old story, but it became news again when Musk broadcast the story to his 212 million followers (nearly 3 percent of the world population) stoking anti-immigrant vibes.
Between 1997 and 2013, at least 1,400 children, some as young as 11, in Northern England were groomed by gangs of Pakistani men, while the local authorities looked the other way for years. The girls were treated horribly— gang raped, tortured, disfigured, and more. Because the girls were from low-income, troubled families, they were not protected by police and social services.
Musk’s tweets resulted in a reexamination of the issue by the mainstream press. Check out the BCC archives to see how Musk helped bring this topic back to the front page. Every major paper, magazine, and news show talked about it. BTW, Elon Musk is running the world.
Look, Musk isn’t wrong. Bad stuff happened to some vulnerable girls in England. I hope we establish stronger protections for girls in England and the United States. I hope we talk about this story for a year until we set up better systems for young girls like those in this story. I don’t care about the politics at all.
Personal
I’ve been working on a book for months. Finally, I had written enough to pause and put together a pitch package for book agents — a lengthy process with research on audience and marketing. I had to rewrite the Introduction, which I hadn’t looked at in six months. The process stretched into weekends and evenings, so I haven’t had a chance to do anything exciting.
I’m trying to dial back the five pounds I gained over the holidays. I’m on a no-flour, no-sugar diet this week, which means that everyone is annoying me. I think my family is ready to shove a brownie down my throat.
I’m thinking about making some Goop Detox Recipes.
My autistic kid is going to his autism college in two weeks. Yay. Full-time, four classes, living in a dorm. He’s ready for it.
How did I gain five pounds? Did I show you pictures of our Christmas Eve — Feast of Fishes Dinner?
Watching: Shetland, Black Doves, Ordeal of Innocence, Murder is Easy
Other stuff I wrote:
About the idea that it's all rich people who are losing their homes: I get that this is the nature of the political discourse, but it's dead wrong. Pacific Palisades is an upscale area, yes. Lots of movie stars and whatnot, yes, though there are smaller homes and apartments, too. But Altadena is another matter. People moved there when they got priced out of the Westside. It has an awful lot of middle class and working class residents. I'm hearing so many horror stories about film crew members losing everything, and many of them simply do not have the money to cushion the blow. Especially not with the way the entertainment industry in LA has been hit in recent years. It's a massive body blow and I suspect it's going to have dire repercussions to the city as a whole. I could go on with examples and Go Fund Me links, but you get the point. Politicizing it like some are is wrong on every level.
3 of those things are basically prioritizing junk that Elon promotes on X. 1 is reporting junk that Zuckerberg is doing to erode Meta. Interesting to see who is commanding your attention and interest.