Civil Commotion

The New York Times publishes today a lengthy profile of Pete Buttigieg’s struggle with accepting that he is gay, and his eventual “coming out:”

Mr. Buttigieg, now the mayor of South Bend, Ind., struggled for a decade after leaving Harvard to overcome the fear that being gay was “a career death sentence,” as he put it in his memoir.

Mr. Buttigieg spent those years trying to reconcile his private life with his aspirations for a high-profile career in public service.

Attitudes toward gay rights changed immensely during that period, though he acknowledges that he was not always able or willing to see what broader social and legal shifts meant for him personally.

“Because I was wrestling with this, I’m not sure I fully processed the idea that it related to me,” he said in an interview.

More than most people his age — even more than most of the ambitious young men and women he competed against at Harvard — he possessed a remarkably strong drive for perfection. He went on to become a Rhodes scholar, work on a presidential campaign, join the military and be elected mayor all before he turned 30. After being deployed with the Navy to Afghanistan in 2014, he said he realized he could die having never been in love, and he resolved to change that. He finally came out in 2015, when he was 33.

I use scare-quotes around ‘coming out’ because I believe everybody’s sex life belongs in the closet. I wouldn’t presume to ask the (presumably) straight couple next door if they’re into bondage/latex/threesomes/whatever, and I don’t think that what the gentlemen bachelors down the street get up to is any of my business, either.

I do think it’s a good thing that a prominent figure like Buttigieg is willing to speak frankly about the difficulty of not being a standard-issue male; it’s a hard row to hoe, and it’s good that young men wrestling with those difficulties have before them the example of an accomplished man living openly and successfully on the other side of those hard decisions. One hopes the day is coming — and sooner, rather than later — when nobody pays attention.

Friedrich Nietzsche once made a memorable complaint about the ubiquity of clergy:

What happened? Simply this: the priest had formulated, once and for all time and with the strictest meticulousness, what tithes were to be paid to him, from the largest to the smallest (–not forgetting the most appetizing cuts of meat, for the priest is a great consumer of beefsteaks); in brief, he let it be known just what he wanted, what “the will of God” was…. From this time forward things were so arranged that the priest became indispensable everywhere; at all the great natural events of life, at birth, at marriage, in sickness, at death, not to say at the “sacrifice” (that is, at meal-times), the holy parasite put in his appearance, and proceeded to denaturize it — in his own phrase, to “sanctify” it…. For this should be noted: that every natural habit, every natural institution (the state, the administration of justice, marriage, the care of the sick and of the poor), everything demanded by the life-instinct, in short, everything that has any value in itself, is reduced to absolute worthlessness and even made the reverse of valuable by the parasitism of priests. [emphases in original]

The Antichrist, §26

I was reminded of that passage by this story, which I consider a healthy development.

Bovarnick and Convery, who live in the District, opted for what is known as a “self-uniting marriage”: a ceremony in which one member of the couple getting married acts as the officiant. In their case, it was Bovarnick, meaning he signed the light-blue piece of paper provided by D.C. Superior Court. (He has “a much better signature,” Convery explained.)

This kind of wedding is legal in a handful of states, including Colorado and Pennsylvania, and the marriages are legally recognized everywhere.

The District began allowing self-uniting marriages in 2014. Although the D.C. Marriage Bureau said it does not track the number of self-uniting marriages performed in the District, wedding planner Starlene Joyner Burns said they have risen in popularity.

Good. Clergy contribute nothing to marriage but their insistence that marriage is about growing their ridiculous club, which is why evangelicals have the highest divorce rate in society.

Another hot summer weekend is underway.

Nothing like a hot and muggy July in Detroit.

The most epic moment of Pelosi’s oversight abdication was, of course, her response to the Mueller Report. She was completely outfoxed by Bill Barr’s shameless misdirection at first, and once his sleight of hand became obvious, she seemed to have no strategy to hold Trump to account in any way. She was presented with striking evidence that President Trump repeatedly abused the power of his office to obstruct justice — the charge that brought down Nixon, and was one charge that forced even Bill Clinton into a Senate trial — and was all but invited by Mueller to move the ball forward through impeachment: “If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.” Pelosi immediately, reflexively, punted.

Andrew Sullivan

Pelosi is no shrinking violet; I suspect she wants to let the Mueller report and Trump’s serial indecencies simmer for awhile. That would have made sense, ohhhh, 10-years ago — but memories are short in the modern media era. And with FOX News commanding roughly one-third of the American appetite for news, I am sure that many Americans don’t know yet that the report doesn’t come close to giving Trump a pass. It may be that the only way to focus public attention on Trump’s corruption and incompetence is to start impeachment hearings just to force news coverage.

Apparently, Amazon thinks that a lot of the workforce it is about to displace with robots can be taught to program those robots.

As automation technology has leapt ahead, workers increasingly worry about losing their jobs to robots and algorithms. Economists dismiss those concerns, by and large, arguing that workers can grab higher-skilled jobs with better wages.

Amazon may soon find out who is right.

The e-commerce giant said Thursday that it planned to spend $700 million to retrain about a third of its American workers to do more high-tech tasks, an acknowledgment that advances in technology are remaking jobs in nearly every industry — and that workers will need to adapt or risk being left behind.

There are doubtless some bright college kids schlepping boxes around Amazon warehouses and, yes, some of them are probably studying subjects that are transferable to the way Amazon does business. For most of those warehouse employees, however — the two-thirds who aren’t going to get retraining — displacement by a robot is going to mean a step-down in their lifestyle.

There will always be boutique jobs, and there will always be trades not susceptible of automation — crawling under my house to repair a plumbing leak, for instance — but the combination of automation and AI means that some people are going to be put out of the workforce for keeps. We need to be thinking about what is going to become of those people today.