The Democrats Take California's Fratricidal AB5 National

California Democrats are nothing if not persistent in their virtue-signaling nonsense. California's AB5, an existential threat to the gig economy when it passed, was ostensibly aimed at Uber and Lyft, two companies the left has suddenly started hating (except when they use those services). Author Lorena S. Gonzalez has been in explaining-the-benefits-to-people-she-screwed-over mode for a while now, as shown by this exchange back in December:

They shouldn’t fucking have to. And until you or anyone else that wants to bitch about AB5 puts out cognizant policy proposals to curb this chaos, you can keep your criticism anonymous. Good God.

— Lorena (@LorenaSGonzalez) December 19, 2019

Because Gonzalez is smarter than the people who want side hustles and must save them from themselves, or something. This experiment has gone so well that the truckers have managed to get the courts to delay enforcement of AB5 (sadly, only for truckers), but freelance writers continue to get the shaft. (That group includes Vox Media writers, many of whom were just terminated.) Gonzalez is absolutely certain of her moral rectitude though, and doesn't approve of freelance writers, like, at all:

These were never good jobs. No one has ever suggested that, even freelancers. We will continue to work on this next year.

— Lorena (@LorenaSGonzalez) December 12, 2019

One gets the sense, reading such exchanges, that Gonzalez is pretty solidly in somebody's pocket to deflect the daily hectoring implied by the #AB5 hashtag. In fact, you would be right: about half of Gonzalez' war chest came from public employee and trade unions. It really makes you wonder about the calculations that went on behind the scenes:

First Democratic Operative: We really need to do something to reconnect with the working class, do something that really benefits them.

Second Democratic Operative: I know! We'll help private sector unionization! Unions always love the Dems, so it'll be a win-win!

FDO: We'll start with the "gig economy". It keeps people low-paid, and prevents them from becoming real employees with benefits. You know, like Uber and Lyft. <writes AB5>

SDO: Hey, cool, this covers everyone.

FDO: Even freelancers? Cool. Margarita time!

Not content to stop at California's borders, Team Blue is now expanding this disastrous nonsense nationally. Daily Kos has a good story on the matter, which explains that apparently the AFL-CIO wrote AB5 (though the evidence is pretty thin on that subject). At issue is an obsolete test for who should be classified as an employee:

It’s enraging that Democrats are taking this career-killing stance from sea to shining sea, given that Tom Perez himself, the current head of the Democratic National Committee, already showed America’s lawmakers how to attack the worker misclassification problem during his tenure as Labor Secretary under President Obama—and did so without the draconian language that’s in these state and federal bills.

Perez achieved that goal by using the existing Internal Revenue Service test to determine who is, and is not, an independent contractor. That approach worked just fine. If every state adopted the IRS test, too, then the states and federal government would be in alignment. A bad-actor company caught misclassifying workers anywhere would automatically be breaking the rules everywhere, and could be fined everywhere, too, as it should be. At the same time, people like me, who prefer to work as independent contractors, could continue to do so, because we can pass the IRS test.

Instead, what’s happening now is an attempt to eliminate the existence of independent contractors, including those of us who are operating lawfully under the IRS test. At the core of each of these bills is an overly tough test to determine who can, or cannot, legally be defined as an independent contractor. This test is known as the ABC test, and was written back in the 1930s to reflect the workforce of the Great Depression. It is different from the test that the IRS now uses, and it makes it impossible for many lawful, happy, thriving independent contractors to remain that way in the economy of 2020, when the world looks a lot different than it did back when Americans still listened to Jack Benny on the radio for entertainment.

It really appears that H.R. 2474 is suicidal for Democrats, who are more beholden to labor than they should be as a constituency, given that only 14.7 million private sector workers belong to unions. It's hard to see how Uber and Lyft will change this, nor how terminating freelance writers would improve union membership. Gonzalez's stubbornness is understandable given her backing. National Democrats' press to extend this incredible blunder is not.

Update: H.R. 2474 apparently would repeal Taft-Hartley, meaning states could no longer choose to be right-to-work states; all states would have to provide for closed shops.

The Twitters Turned A Mean, Dumb Comic Into A Lesson About Empathy

So, this cartoonist made a cartoon that was supposed to show the dorkiness of having empathy for another person:

This was probably not the wisest thing to do, but then, she seems unwise anyway, when she isn't being a self-centered jerk:

But wait! Somebody flipped it! The disposable #NewGuy suddenly becomes the hero we deserve, teaching us about empathy even for people we might not instantly feel relatable?

There's already a #NewGuy Twitter feed. Cast this moment in amber, kids. It doesn't happen every day.

Vox Fires Workers Supposedly Helped By Legislation It Supported

They will never learn.

It's almost as though Government forcing private business to pay employees a certain amount only results in less employees, not better paid employees.

Way to stay progressive, Vox. pic.twitter.com/IneehAfU6P

— Liberal, Not Lefty (@liberalnotlefty) December 17, 2019

Source at Vox, and blowback at CNBC.

Review: The Two Popes

At the opening of The Two Popes, things are going badly for Cardinal Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce), so it comes as something of a surprise when Pope Benedict XVI (Anthony Hopkins) summons him to Rome. They are opposites, Bergoglio a reformer, Benedict a conservative, but what unites them is something we discover over the course of the first half of the movie: both wish to resign their posts, but only one can. Benedict, we learn, has run out of options, no longer able to hear God, and so he has invited his harshest critic to take over the Holy See from him. Bergoglio won't have it at first, and so much of the balance of the movie is about Benedict convincing the future Pope Francis to step in.

Another large part of it is finding Bergoglio's catastrophic failure to protect his priests in the aftermath of a 1976 military junta in Argentina. The euphemistically named "National Reorganization Process" murdered and tortured tens of thousands, rounding up anyone who might have even been near a Peronist or uttered a socialist thought. Joe Morgenstern's review in the Wall Street Journal notices that virtually all of the film (or its most important parts, anyway) are "mostly the luscious fruit of [screenwriter Anthony McCarten's] imagination", so it's not to be taken too literally. But it's a visual feast, and a fantastic character study by two actors at the top of their craft.

Is Feminism or Racism The More Profitable Grievance? Jezebel vs. The Root

I have been somewhat curious for a long while to determine which of the grievance studies disciplines are the more profitable in the private sector. While there's no good, simple way to determine this, it seemed likely that the commercial websites in this space might serve as a decent proxy for broader data. Particularly, it occurred to me after I wrote my analysis of TechCrunch's diversity problems that there might be other profitable avenues to explore among the grievance studies candidates in the private sector.

Sure enough, Jezebel and The Root have some interesting numbers once you dig down to the About pages. Particularly, among writers and editors listed as either active or emeritus (ignoring video editors, who won't get written bylines very often, and will serve to drag down the totals in both cases):

• Jezebel: 31,178 bylines over 12 (now nearly 13) years, written by 21 individuals, with an average of 1,484 bylines per writer. The most prolific: Kelly Faircloth, writing since November 21, 2013, with 3,460 bylines.
• The Root: 13,918 bylines over about 10 years, written by 14 writers, with an average of 994 bylines per writer. The most prolific: Stephen A. Crockett, Jr., with 2,020 bylines (the last in August, 2019).

So there you have it: Jezebel has 50% more writers (21% more if you remove emeritus staff), has been active two and a half years longer, and sports more than double the bylines. Presumably all of them are compensated, which strongly suggests that feminism wins hands down in the battle of the clicks. Supporting source material may be found here.

Review: Harriet

The hazards with Harriet are many, and start with the casting; Julia Roberts at one time was suggested as Tubman (rilly?). This having caused a stir and subsequently rejected, the film eventually got made on what passes for a shoestring budget in Hollywood these days ($17M), quickly earning that back and more (currently at $33M).

The more obvious hazard is that of any telling the story of any larger-than-life figure, and that is the temptations of hagiography. Tubman is in some ways a Joan of Arc figure in that she represented a woman embodying the virtue of action who also had a strong religious component to her motivations. Having grown up on a farm in slave-holding Maryland with the nickname Minty, she learns she is about to be sold further south, never to see her family again. With help from a preacher, her father, and an abolitionist, she eventually reaches safety in Philadelphia (though not before narrowly escaping her former master, and almost drowning along the way).

In Philadelphia, she sheds her given name of Araminta Ross, and takes her free name from which we know her today, Harriet Tubman. After a year, she goes back to fetch her husband (who refuses to follow her, having given her up for dead and remarried), and ultimately, 70 slaves, losing none along the way, as one of the most prolific conductors on the Underground Railroad in its history.

The scenes of slavery and its consequences are horrifying, the movie an unstinting witness to the terrors slaves lived under every day: the beatings, the family dismemberments, the hundred petty cruelties. Where it really falls down — and this seems a common theme among detractors — is that it is so afraid of doing anything wrong it doesn't ever take any big risks. (As Adam Graham in Detroit News wrote, "Harriet often feels in awe of its subject, like it's staring at her through museum glass.") The film slips too often into Joan of Arc mode, with Tubman drifting into religious delirium as a (confusing) way to advance the plot. She's not made out as a plaster saint, thank God, but neither is she fully formed in this telling. Still, I never once felt the urge to check my watch, and as history lessons go, this one's a keeper.

More Link Dumping

• Annie Wilkes, Part 1: Ford vs. Ferrari: now the subject of one of those Annie Wilkes reviews. "Best left dead", sheesh.
• The best thing The Federalist has published all year: "Climate Worship Is Nothing More Than Rebranded Paganism". Excerpt:

  The reality is, of course, completely different. Much less than destroying the planet, climate change isn’t even a settled science. Conservatives don’t disagree that climate is changing. That is a straw man. Conservatives, however, are opposed to hysteria, have skepticism about the rate of the climate change, and would like to see an actual cost-benefit analysis of the radical changes being demanded.
  
  More important than that, conservatives understand that climate change is cynically used by a certain section of people to justify their political goals of steering the West away from its way of life, a way they perceive to be evil and harmful, hetero-patriarchal, and capitalist. How? Appealing to the faith-based part of human brains, the need for subservience, and propping up children as human shields.

• California de facto bans fracking by making all new wells subject to a "scientific" (read: captive of the greens) panel. 
• Annie Wilkes, Part 2: Annie Blames The Audience:  No, really, Elizabeth Blanks has preemptively blamed men if her Charlie's Angels reboot fails.
  

  She stated, “Look, people have to buy tickets to this movie, too. This movie has to make money.” She added, “If this movie doesn’t make money it reinforces a stereotype in Hollywood that men don’t go see women do action movies.”

  This is an odd place to go given recent successes with Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel, and Mad Max: Fury Road. The 2000 reboot took in $125M at the domestic box office, so maybe it's just you, Liz?
• Annie Wilkes, Part 3, Corncob Edition:

  Wow. Nearly 3000 replies because one woman voices her opinion that we shouldn’t be at a point anymore where we just accept media that normalizes patriarchy. Cool cool cool. Everyone’s having a normal one I see. pic.twitter.com/N8vMHJZ09e

  — Anita Sarkeesian (@anitasarkeesian) November 21, 2019

• I am glad to see our courts beavering away at the important question of whether women can consent to a threesome. And to think, this poor man almost had his freedom snatched away from him.
• Elizabeth Warren fires the opening shot in banning cars:

  Traffic violence kills thousands and injures even more Americans every year. On World Day of Remembrance for Traffic Crash Victims, I'm sending my love to the families and friends of those who have lost loved ones. It's time to #EndTrafficViolence.

  — Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) November 17, 2019

• Sully gets it right again on the intersectional left's long-term political goals:

  Every now and again, it’s worth thinking about what the intersectional left’s ultimate endgame really is — and here it strikes me as both useful and fair to extrapolate from Kendi’s project. They seem not to genuinely believe in liberalism, liberal democracy, or persuasion. They have no clear foundational devotion to individual rights or freedom of speech. Rather, the ultimate aim seems to be running the entire country by fiat to purge it of racism (and every other intersectional “-ism” and “phobia”, while they’re at it). And they demand “disciplinary tools” by unelected bodies to enforce “a radical reorientation of our consciousness.” There is a word for this kind of politics and this kind of theory when it is fully and completely realized, and it is totalitarian.

  Also, homosexuals are now under attack by — wait for it — the woke left, for the crime of not hewing to the trans lobby's worldview:

  Of course, anyone can and should like whatever they like and do whatever they want to do. But if a gay man doesn’t want to have sex with someone who has a vagina and a lesbian doesn’t want to have sex with someone who has a dick, they are not being transphobic. They’re being — how shall I put this? — gay. When Rich suggests that “it’s not just possible but observable and prevalent to have ‘preferences’ that dog-whistle bigotry,” and he includes in the category of “preferences” not liking the other sex’s genitals, he’s casting a moral pall over gayness itself. Suddenly we’re not just being told homosexuality is “problematic” by the religious right, we’re being told it by the woke left.

• I Am Shocked, Shocked That Mothers Want To Be With Their Children, but this apparently is huge news to the New York Times. A study of California, which in 2004 instituted mandatory paid maternity leave, found women worked fewer hours and earned less a decade later, results that are consistent with the results in Sweden, where the labor pool is the most sex-segregated in the OECD.