The second decade of the 21st century is truly a bounteous time. My backyard has produced a bumper crop of an invasive species of mosquito that is genuinely innovative: rather than confining itself to biting in the dusk and dawn golden hours, these stinging clouds of flying vampires bite at every hour that God sends:
Here in the twilight of capitalism’s planet-devouring, half-century orgy of wanton destruction, there’s more news every day than I can possibly write a full blog post about every day, and as with many weeks, I have arrived at Saturday with a substantial backlog of links that didn’t fit into the week’s “Hey look at this” linkdumps.
Thus, the eighth installment in my ongoing, semiregular series of Saturday linkdumps:
This week, the miscellany begins with the first hesitant signs of an emerging, post-neoliberal order. The FTC, under direction of the force-of-nature that is Lina Khan, has brought its long-awaited case antitrust case against Amazon. I am
very excited about this. Disoriented, even.
When was the last time you greeted every day with a warm feeling because high officials in the US government were working for the betterment of every person in the land? It’s enough to make one giddy. Plus, the
New York Times let me call Amazon “the apex predator of our platform era”! Now that it’s in the “paper of record,” it’s official:
Now, lefties have been predicting capitalism’s imminent demise since
The Communist Manifesto, but any fule kno that the capitalist word for “crisis” also translates as “opportunity.” Like the bedbugs that mutated to thrive in clouds of post-war DDT, capitalism has adapted to each crisis, emerging in a new, more virulent form:
But “anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop” (Stein’s Law). Perhaps our mistake was in waiting for capitalism to give way to socialism, rather than serving as a transitional phase between feudalism and…feudalism.
ALT
