Clusters

I’ve been listening to a lot of two different podcasts with Michael Hobbes as a co-host: If Books Could Kill and Maintenance Phase. Over the course of listening to these podcasts — and largely because the hosts really make this point explicit over and over and over again — the absolutely _non randomness_ of the Awful has become quite clear to me.

I was not ignorant of the non-randomness of the Awful. I mean, I’ve had a series of systems over the years designed to help me remember the Awful, so that when the Awful I know about already shows up endorsing a new flavor of Awful, I know enough to go, Ruh Roh. I used to have a list of romance authors who, if they endorsed another romance author, would completely put me off even trying that author. They had some other traits in common, including a notable one that gave me a warning about what to expect from the Twilight series even before I knew anything else about it. I kept a book — I’ve forgotten the name of it now, it has been a couple decades — about the diet industry around purely because its index of Awful was so comprehensive that whenever someone showed up with some new shocking take on something diet / nutrition related, I could reliably check them in the index and go, yep, knew they were rotten. I had a Common Courage Press book that I bought a couple dozen copies of and gave to all my friends one year, because it was such a useful expose on the connections between a bunch of brands of conservative political awful that were not at the time super obvious.

So when I was over at WaPo today and saw an opinion piece about how people shouldn’t be fired because they are jerks — which honestly, why not. I mean, a lot of the economy is “at will” employment. Firing people for being jerks seems utterly reasonable to me. I know that “jerk” used to have some socioeconomic nuance to it that make it a pretty elitist insult, but those nuances died off before half the population of our country was even born. Now, we just mean, awful person, difficult to be around, makes you feel miserable, hard to coordinate work with. Why _wouldn’t_ you fire someone for being a jerk? I get that the article suggests But It Was Being Awful in His Personal Life That Got Him Fired, but it wasn’t really in his personal life, now was it, if it was on Twitter and attached to the same account he uses in the course of his job. And honestly, it’s not super hard to find plenty of evidence going back years that the person who was fired definitely prides himself on his cantankerousness.

The article hit the usual high points: the open letter against cancel culture type of thing. But when I looked up the author of the piece, the rest of the cluster sprang clearly into focus: libertarians, transphobes, people who push the lab-leak theory and generally platform misinformation from the usual suspects.

It’s completely fine to fire jerks. And if you are a jerk who gets fired, and you have a defender at the WaPo like this, definitely rethink your life choices.

I don’t think anyone needs to hate on the WaPo for publishing this — I’m reasonably certain that they put it up there as a little heads up to the readership: Don’t Ever Trust This Person Or Anyone They Like or Any of Their Preferred Venues for Publishing Thinkpieces. At least, that’s how I read it. However, I’ll be keeping an eye out, because there is some grey area. It’s good to make your readers aware that there’s some nutballery out there. It’s a whole other thing to fucking platform it.

If despite all this vague, you are sitting around thinking, but sometimes I’m a jerk at work, well, I definitely was too. I routinely expected to get fired for it, and I would have apologized on my way out the door if I ever _was_ fired for it. If you are sitting around thinking, man, I am sometimes a jerk at work, then you are more likely to be in the normal envelope of people trying to get along and occasionally failing, than in that rarefied territory of People Arguing in Court and/or the Newspaper about whether you should be fired for being a jerk.

I did poke around a bit at that case with the police officer who got an ADA judgment for being fired and having ADHD, which was overturned on appeal. I feel it’s important to at least acknowledge here that people in charge of creating an environment for people to work together to accomplish goals are constantly having to balance understanding that sometimes people really fucking lose their shit and people should not be subjected to a hostile work environment. _I am actually super aware of all this_, because I’ve got two children with IEPs and also, I am me. I know that at times, I can be, all by myself, super traumatizing to the people around me.

But again: I routinely expected to be fired. And honestly, I’ve been dumped and been more or less civilized about the process. If my family decided I was just too difficult to be around, _I would respect that_. Firing people for being jerks, divorcing or dumping people for being jerks, reducing or cutting social or familial ties with people for being jerks — all totally, absolutely, and completely fine.

Trying to simultaneously be a libertarian _and_ stop people from doing any of these things is a weird take.

WaPo about Silicon Valley right wing donors and their feelings

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/11/12/silicon-valley-billionaire-donors-presidential-candidates/

This is kind of an amazing article in a variety of ways, but I’m posting so I don’t forget this quote and its context:

““There’s such a massive disconnect right now between caucus-goers and primary voters and the people who write the big super PAC checks,” said a political adviser to major Silicon Valley donors on the right. “We don’t care about [transgender] kids going to bathrooms. We care about dismantling the regulatory state.””

It’s not weird for there to be a money and votes disconnect. On the D side, there was a really long, bad disconnect between labor unions (money) and identity related groups (votes). It was especially bad from Reagan on, because so many union members were voting R while the union money was going to D and that is no way to win elections.

But in this case, the unnamed “political adviser” is describing “major Silicon Valley donors on the right” as being the impetus to “dismantling the regulatory state”. They are _really_ _really_ close to accomplishing this goal via SCOTUS, and it continues to be nearly invisible to most citizens. If they get rulings at SCOTUS to go the way they want, we’ll all be dealing with the aftermath and honestly, that aftermath will be Dobbsian, in that it wreaks all kinds of horrifying havoc while creating an political climate for the R side of aisle that is not at all what they are currently imagining.

I had honestly been wondering where the push to “dismantle the regulatory state” was coming from. It absolutely sounds like a Sequoia / Thiel / etc. initiative. So the next time you’re thinking someone is too smart to do something that stupid, remember this moment.

Later in the article, there is a mention of “The Boyd Institute”, which right now is a substack shell with a list of initiatives and nothing else (the initiatives are hilarious: AUKUS, asteroid mining and cleaning up space debris, along with something about “natural resources intelligence”, which I’m a little unsure what that means). Meanwhile, there are other groups with Boyd as part of their name that are very much Not The Boyd Institute. The WaPo piece ends by mentioning this thing and quotes the founder:

““Right now, the GOP is all clickbait,” Giesea said. “On one level, these guys are anti-woke. But there’s a recognition starting that you can choke on anti-woke — that it’s a distraction from solving real problems.””

I sincerely doubt that Giesea thinks that the “real problems” are space debris and asteroid mining. Or even AUKUS (can’t speak to the “natural resources intelligence”). I’ll probably be searching my blog years from now because I half remember something mentioned in a dark money scandal involving a “non-partisan” thinktank.