A post at Cryptome explains why most people, DD included, are no good on Twitter. There are less complimentary terms for its prime movers. But it’s all about celebrity and a Darwinistic application of it. The new boss is always the same as the old boss. And those at the top get all the spoils.
As much of an online paradise as Twitter is, it’s not *completely* free of the kinds of annoying behavior we see in the real world. High on the list are the sorts of adolescent posturing that social media in general make so easy — preening, name-dropping, ass-kissing, pandering, cliquishness …
Observations include:
It sometimes seems that there’s no utterance by a Name or celebrity that’s too trivial to warrant instant retweeting by dozens or hundreds of followers. (Yes, you could make the argument that the more followers someone has the more retweets they’ll get, but it’s clear that there’s often more than mathematics at work here. I’ve seen people ignore an interesting link tweeted by a relative nobody and then retweet that same link just a few minutes later when it was tweeted by a Name …
There are Names who have Twitter accounts that they’ve never used but still have hordes of followers–like [at]beyonce, who has never tweeted once but as of this writing is followed by eight hundred thousand very patient people. The day she gets around to tweeting “Hello,” the resulting retweets will probably bring down Twitter’s entire server farm.
This was cause for the delivery of an inspirational speech, the kind used at mass corporate rallies in the US where people pay to be told, by important figures and celebrities, that the only thing standing in the way of success is their bad attitude. If we were not to run with wolves but soar like eagles, we were told, we should separate ourselves from the drag of the complainers and critics.
About a day later, the census began firing what it thought were the complainers and critics, all the non-performers.
The speech was delivered to us as the wisdom of Colin Powell. Whether it was actually all his was hard to know. What’s certain is that it was a grab-bag of quotes attributed to him.
Intelligence-insulting shit, it had nothing to do with the work of being a census enumerator, which was a solitary business.
A sample from the speech:
Never receive counsel from unproductive people.
Never discuss your problems with someone incapable of contributing to the solution, because those who never succeed themselves are always first to tell you how.
Not everyone has a right to speak into your life.
You are certain to get the worst of the bargain when you exchange ideas with the wrong person.
Don’t follow anyone who’s not going anywhere.
With some people you spend an evening: with others you invest it.
Be careful where you stop to inquire for directions along the road of life.
Wise is the person who fortifies his life with the right friendships.
If you run with wolves, you will learn how to howl. But, if you associate with eagles, you will learn how to soar to great heights.
This nationwide fetish with the idea that positive thinking leads to success in all things and conversely, that critical thinking leads only to failure, is the subject of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America,now in trade paper edition through Picador.
As most observers of the players in the economic collapse now can tell, the book could very well be renamed “How Positive Thinking Undermined America,” past tense. The culture of lickspittle and constant delusional thinking based on only positive reinforcements played its role.
Ehrenreich’s book fully examines this inspirational brainwashing, first taken from the standpoint of its role in the wellness industry. Ehrenreich writes of it from a very up close point-of-view after being diagnosed with cancer. Happy thoughts and positive thinking now being the way in which all patients are counseled or cudgeled into dealing with potentially terminal illness.
Pulling back, the book observes that the practice is used to destroy critical thinking. Or worse and even more commonly, to gin up a labor force or group of employees whose morale has been crushed by bad business and endless rounds of downsizing.
Everyone in corporate America has felt its touch — management using it as a fob for its failures, pushing responsibility off onto employees who don’t have the right positive attitude and who must now change their thinking lest they too be sent into the wilderness.
And it has been coming a good long time, as anyone who has seen scenes from the sports movies can attest. Cue those where the team, slipping on a bad patch, sits in the locker room listening to a seminar for the banishing of contagious loser-ism.
For example, Ehrenreich writes:
Over the past decade, as icebergs sank and levels of debt mounted, dissidents from the prevailing positive thinking consensus were isolated, mocked or urged to overcome their perverse attachment to thoughts. Within the United States, any talk of intractable problems could be dismissed as a denial of American greatness. Any complaints of economic violence could be derided as the whining of “self-selected” victims.
So if Colin Powell actually does believe the slogans and rubbish attributed to him, his now infamous performance before the UN is not the biggest surprise. The good general, perhaps, did not wish to be a whining self-selected victim, excluded from the victory march toward Iraq.
And it underlines how, at the highest national level, unwarranted attitude modification and culture of lickspittle had disastrous consequences.
One might almost think that the current national economic crisis must lead to a modification in attitudes toward the religion of “positive-thinking.”
This is not the case. Ehrenreich devotes time to explaining how Must Think Happy Thoughts, Inc. is a business partially built upon salesmanship into corporate management. It is there where profit lies, in the mass sale of books and speeches for delivery to the listless and despondent employees. There are, it seems, even a handful of “scientists” pushing it.
[Another reason] for the Mojo Deluxe … made-in-China harmonica is so that it can be packaged with a lot of other stuff suitable for corporate seminar in the US of A.
The author of of “Instant Blues Harmonica” writes on his very last page in the very last paragraph: “[For] the last few years I’ve been doing most of my presentations for corporate non-profit organizations. These clients range from Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream to Merck Pharmaceutical, from the Blue Cross to Red Cross, from Kraft Foods to the American Society of Forensic Laboratory Directors. My unique keynotes and workshops can help your group to work more effectively…”
The image of a roomful of managers from Kraft Foods or directors from the American Society of Forensic Laboratories learning to “blow their blues away” on Chinese harmonicas during a compulsory leadership get-together is a shattering one.
At the risk of sounding too positive, DD heartily recommends Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided.
Quote of the day from yesterday’s business section, on the kinds of employees Elon Musk will use to make his super electric cars for the wealthy and not-quite-as wealthy in Fremont, CA:
“We hire professional athletes, in a sense,” said Arnon Geshuri, Tesla’s vice president for human resources. “We want people who can do multiple things, who are good at working in teams, and collaborating. We’re looking for excellence, drive and ambition. That’s the common DNA.”
[Put out of your mind for a moment the long-standing practice, in business stories, wherein leaders from various US companies, from small to gigantic, go on repetitively about how only the most excellent are allowed on the payroll.]
Professional athletes. That means they’ll have to be good at cheating, mindless bragging, taking performance-boosting drugs, and routinely committing felony crime. That’s in the DNA, too.
The quote about the wonderfulness sought in Tesla employees is in-line with the empty culture of boasting which surrounds the company.
Elon Musk is the guy who’s the great symbol of America, a businessman propped up by US energy grants, making an electric car only celebrities can drive. And another — to be made by the ‘professional athlete-like’ workers mentioned above — about half the price, but still on the drawing board. And slated to be made in numbers that qualify the business as a boutique, a much glorified version of Fender’s Custom Shop or the place that makes $180 harmonicas in Rockford, Illinois, in the shell of the old Ingersoll plant.
In Iron Man 2, the DVD came out this week, Musk makes a cameo telling Tony Stark he wants to do “an electric jet.”
It’s supposed to be a flattering moment. I’d suggest Musk, instead of being the modern Tony Stark, is a little more like Justin Hammer than comfortable.
Related:
So-called ‘real-life’ Iron Man suit (it’s not even close, but that hasn’t stopped the arms manufacturer, Raytheon, from saying so), which has been on every tech show in creation over the last few years.
It’s the relentless China-is-wonderful gig. Reporting from Tianjin, Tom advises that Chinese are set to beat us again, this time in above-ground “green” plastic-mining.
He finds two sources, one a flack for Chinese innovation, another someone named Mike Biddle, the standard American businessman — this one rationalizing the shipping of most of his work overseas because he just can’t afford enough lobbyists to get Washington to listen to his plan to create plastic mines from discarded computer junk for him. All our fault!
This is Friedman’s brain at work. Meet a flack and a businessman at some economic meeting of the wealthy where he can undertake the job of official ass-sniffer while masquerading as someone sifting through cutting-edge brain power. Then whip out a column on the farting. wisdom emitted.
“China is changing from the factory of the world to the clean-tech laboratory of the world,??? said the flack for Tom. Tom would have said it, but since he had the p.r. person for the “Joint U.S.-China Collaboration on Clean Energy” around …
Last week, Tom told us we all needed to adopt more Confucian values because we aren’t sacrificing enough.
If you Google Tom Friedman and pie you get pages of stuff on the man being pelted with green whipped cream while onstage at Brown in 2008.
Unsurprisingly, almost everyone was rooting for the pie throwers — before and after.
The video is on Youtube in a couple spots. It’s great footage of Friedman slipping about and eventually giving up. If you were a two-time Pulitzer winner, would you have let a couple pies upset you? No! I bet you’d just have smiled, shouted some defiance at the auditorium and continued your speech.
Here’s this blog’s Tom Friedman Blooz, homemade video of the pie incident with a hodgepodge of senseless quote taken from Friedman columns (including today’s) on China. It’s set to the “China Toilet Blooz Reprise,” a Captain Beefheart-styled outro to the original I’ve been flogging.
The Biddle fellow, according to Friedman, is based in California. And he’d keep 250 whole jobs here. But we just don’t have those booming above-ground plastic mines.
Republicans, and some Democrats, argue that the fragile state of the economy makes this a poor time to raise taxes on anyone — and that increases could stifle wealthier people’s appetite for spending. — AP
Heavens! The ritzy mansion set won’t spend and we’ll all die if their tax cuts aren’t refreshed.
They’ll take all their moolah and go somewhere else to play!
And you can always count on corporate America to pitch in when times are hard:
Firms say Obama tax write-off not enough
The business community likes President Obama’s proposal to accelerate tax write-offs for companies buying equipment and other big ticket items. But it is clamoring for more — extension of all the soon-expiring Bush tax cuts.
“Far and away the most important policy item on the agenda is what to do about the expiring tax cuts.” — the Los Angeles Times
Do I have any bets on the likelihood of corporate America taking Obama’s bribes to US big business tax write-offs, pocketing the money and/or compelling the current workforce to just do more under threat of being fired?
Once it was called the New Deal. Now it’s always the Raw Deal.
A California health insurer got the green light Tuesday to raise premiums an average of 16 percent for 38,000 policy holders who buy insurance on their own … The go-ahead from the state Insurance Department comes less than two weeks after it approved double digit hikes by Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield of California. — the LA Times
Applying at Harvard easier than getting a job in retail sales in the Dickensian corporate sector
Getting hired at Raleigh’s new Container Store takes a lot more than simply going on-line and filling out an application.
The lucky few who are offered one of the store’s 55 to 60 positions will have to make it through an on-line application, a phone interview, a two-hour group interview and as many as three additional one-on-one meetings. (This for a shit job that pays $10 hour for part-time/temp/seasonal work, no benefits.) — the LA Times
What DD can’t show you is the godawful picture in the hardcopy newspaper, a shot of “recruiting manager Beth Paparhonis” leading “job applicant Keri Jackson in a role-playing exercise.”
It looks suspiciously like making the job hunter sing a happy song. Sing, sing, you must sing for your supper!
Sorry, miss, you’re happy singing was off a bit. We want only the best sales people and only those who sing most happily can pass this test. Next!
Especially poignant because the store sells miscellaneous plastic boxes and container-ware made in China. Cabbage could do the job. But the story suggests that in business America, only the best and the brightest are fit for this work now.
“Many stores and restaurants now use recruiters to find managers,” the newspaper adds.
A few years ago DD made a wry joke that soon corporate America would require every potential employee to have an agent, like the entertainment industry. I never thought people were seriously considering it.
And last, an opinion piece in the LA Times, one entitled “Making the economy work for workers,” by Thomas A. Kochan of the MIT Sloan School of Management, an essay that looks suspiciously like Ted Nugent’s anti-labor Labor Day piece in the WaTimes. Only much nicer, of course.
“Adverserial unions” = bad. “Expand job creation tax credits: “Current policy limits such credits to firms that hire the currently unemployed.”
Yes, it’s so bad to be only able to hire the unemployed for your bribe. You should be eligible for a bribe tax credit for poaching workers from other companies, too. And everyone knows the already employed worker is always better than the one who has been unemployed. It’s only common sense.
“Meanwhile, unemployed Americans stop even looking for work and allow their human capital to further depreciate,” says Kochan.
Yes, you’re allowing your human capital to depreciate!
“Labor Day is the perfect time for all Americans to call for bold actions — backed by research [mine] — like these to solve the jobs crisis,” the man proclaims.
We’re gonna pull ’em outta cars
And dip ’em in some tar — The Patriotic Class War Song
Good news, lads! Good news! They’ve made The Making of The Claw into a supermovie.
Today’s Culture of Lickspittle vignette comes from the outpour of huzzah for Danny Boyle’s latest pic, 127 Hours, a movie on Aron Claw Ralston and his amputation.
You may have forgotten the name but movie critics at all the big metropolis papers, and their features editors, will guarantee you get the full story. You’ll recall, the hiker who forgot to tell people where he was going, got trapped under a boulder, and cut off his arm with a knife to get out of it.
It was the best career move he ever made. Which we’ll get to in a minute.
First, the Cult of Lickspittle quote, from today’s LA Times Calender section:
[Danny Boyle] says that while it’s easy to look at Ralston’s story as the unimaginable demonstration of superhumanism, he believes that we are all capable of doing the same thing if the situation demanded it.
Unimaginable superhumanism.
I’m sure it seems that way to movie critics at Telluride. After all, it’s where the fancy and fine people go to gasp at the nausea provoking repackaged as inspirational.
Ralston’s story is many things. Something I’d not want to read at length or see a movie about are two of them.
It also seems to be a lesson, albeit an unfortunately cynical one.
If you happenstance yourself into a deadly misadventure and survive in a grotesque fashion, and can get it onto 60 Minutes, because of the pure titillating nature and freakishness of it, your ship just came in.
Today’s entertainment news amusement concerns the idolatry for Aron “The Claw” Ralston. Dick Destiny blog didn’t know his name, and it wagers others do not either, but it does remember him as the hiker who went into a canyon, had his hand trapped under a boulder, and a few days later cut off his forarm with a Swiss Army knife or Gerber multi-tool or something.
Of this it can be certain, he was stupid but gutsy. He didn’t tell anyone where we was going and when he would be back, a simple enough way to have avoid cutting his arm off when he got into trouble.
Anyway, the Los Angeles Times Calendar section informs Ralston is a semi-celebrity, a pitchman for beer as well as a corporate motivational speaker. One can imagine the hilarity of a Ralston-led inspirational seminar for corporate crooks.
Ralston: “Remember, if you’re really in trouble because of shitty decisions, you have the steel within you to cut off your arm and completely distract everyone from your lack of management skill or ethical lapses! I did it! You can too!”
[Crowd of dumb white men in suits, who look all alike, erupts!]
However, maybe it’s not that motivating. Ralston could say something like this: “I’m convinced that being able to cut off my arm with a pen knife was a miracle and that it was given to me to share with other people!”
From the crowd: “What, your amputated forarm? You brought it along?”
Come to think of it, Ralston did almost say that. It was in the newspaper but I juiced it a little.
Ralston is also known to friends as Captain Fun Hog for his risk-taking and after making the rounds of the newsmedia with his nub healed over, he wrote a book proposal. The title was not “Buy This Book Or I’ll Cut Off My Other Arm” but the less insouciant, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place.” The Times informed The Claw received a six-figure advance and it is now a bestseller.
The Claw also is a pitchman for Miller beer. “The guy cut off his own arm to save his life,” said a fugelman from Miller. “He knows how men need to act.” Now, Dick Destiny has always enjoyed Miller but no matter how much consumed has never been inspired to cut off a forarm with a pen knife. On the other hand, “Enough Miller and you won’t mind amputation” has an unusual zip to it. (Or, “Miller — your select choice before lifesaving self-surgery.”)
The Los Angeles Times reported that Ralston would never again repeat his hiking mistake. One reckons this is a sincere claim, as it would be tough to cut off the other forarm with only the old stump available to hold a cutting tool. It can be conceded that there is always the wild animal caught in a steel trap procedure: Gnaw it off. That would be good for another book.
It is said, Ralston has spoken to disabled veterans: “If your arm is trapped under the twisted wreckage of the Hummer. . . Oh wait, that’s not quite the same. Forget I said it.”
All the special people are Tom Friedman’s friends and mentors. And they always have a book or a lecture or a plan to fix everything. Usually after they’ve spent decades as culprits to the current mess.
Plus, there’s the other thing: Tom and all his friends do not, under any circumstance, feel any pain. That’s for everyone else. The rich and famous only advise. All others are told to STFU and eat their peas.
DD doesn’t know why he read Friedman’s column on Sunday. Was it an accidental click? An inner desire for punishment? Had I not enough inspiration to get my daily crank on?
“The Frugal Superpower: America’s Global Leadership in a Cash-Strapped Era??? is actually the title of a very timely new book by my tutor and friend Michael Mandelbaum, the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy expert. “In 2008,??? Mandelbaum notes, “all forms of government-supplied pensions and health care (including Medicaid) constituted about 4 percent of total American output.??? At present rates, and with the baby boomers soon starting to draw on Social Security and Medicare, by 2050 “they will account for a full 18 percent of everything the United States produces.???
After all, Europe is rich but wimpy. China is rich nationally but still dirt poor on a per capita basis and, therefore, will be compelled to remain focused inwardly and regionally.
Mandelbaum argues for three things: First, we need to get ourselves back on a sustainable path to economic growth and reindustrialization, with whatever sacrifices, hard work and political consensus that requires.
Yes, always with great sacrifice and hard rock work for everyone down the line. And then these guys can write another book about it.
This quote from Matt Taibbi describes the practice much better than I can:
On an ideological level, Friedman’s new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans.
It’s Ray Bradbury’s 90th birthday and so the Los Angeles Times and friends are sponsoring a well-earned extended celebration for the famous sci-fi author. Who doesn’t like being called a sci-fi author, apparently.
Used to have most of his books and was even a fan of the frankly not-so-hot Ray Bradbury Theater.
But I’d be lyin’ if I told you I’ve had any use for the guy since 1985, the year I graduated from Lehigh.
Here are all the quotes from Ray you need, published at the end of today’s piece in the LATimes:
I think our country is in need of a revolution. There is too much government today. We got to remember the government should be by the people for the people …
[We] have too many cellphones. We got too many Internets. We have too many machines now …
[Obama] should be announcing we should go back to the moon. We should never have left there. We should go to the moon and prepare to fire a rocket off to Mars and then go to Mars and colonize Mars.
Pick your favorite ending from these and let me know in the comments:
B: Cue “I’m a good ol’ ‘Merican” — sung to tune of you know what.
C: It has just been lernt that Ted Nugent will arrive as a special guest at Bradbury’s birthday bash, presenting the author with the last carton of Gonzo Meat Biltong ever made.
When not in superhero costume, these men, like Iron Man, exploit women, flaunt bling, and convey their manhood with high-powered guns.
Well — not precisely. It’s repulsors and fists. At least in the comic book that was my favorite, now decades past.
Tony Stark was a pretty good man. And Marvel gave him a drinking problem.
He was a standard good guy, fighting bad guys — many of them ludicrous — like the Mandarin.
And there was a departure into Cold War rivalry, Iron Man in an extended story battling the Titanium Man, the Soviet Union’s much bigger, stronger, clumsier and more stupid fellow in an armor suit.
Stark constantly battled tragedy in his personal and business life, like most Marvel heroes. But he was always left with hope and he always had a heart.
Robert Downey did a fairly good job, along with the movie scripts, in getting at least half the essence of that. He plays Stark as more self-centered and narcissistic than he was in the early comic book. But he still throws himself into harm’s way for his friends and people on the street without a moment of hesitation.
Worse, it is said:
Boys are told, ‘if you can’t be a superhero, you can always be a slacker.’ Slackers are funny, but slackers are not what boys should strive to be; slackers don’t like school and they shirk responsibility. We wonder if the messages boys get about saving face through glorified slacking could be affecting their performance in school.
Given what everyone sees they’re facing as a future in this country, being slack is a natural, even logical, response. We can’t all be Elon Musk. And, face it, there are already way too many Elons for the maintenance of good national mental health.
So, good heavens, don’t shirk responsibility. Be a young lickspittle now. Put your nose to the grindstone in school and march resolutely and with great vigor toward your multiple minimum wage job future. You may not even be able to afford a decent comic book.
