Junk Drawer
For all those little papers scattered across your desk
Junk DrawerFor all those little papers scattered across your desk
Here’s my reactions to a few articles from the January 2025 issue of Mother Jones magazine. The issue doesn’t look linked online yet; I read it through Apple News.
Nietfeld examines the contradictory popularity and flaws of Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. In particular, Nietfeld points out both the mischaracterization of academic research (a gentle way to say “lies”) and the shaming of survivors broken bodies which, according to the text, may be irreparable.
Nietfeld suggests alternative texts, which I want to collect here for my own future reference:
My own thoughts: trauma may (and probably does) live in the body, and CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is effective, and victims are not irreparably damaged (healing is possible).
According to Lipton’s research, meat prices are up not (only) because of inflation: Agri Stats effectively brokers data-sharing between competitors in a way that creates price-fixing without the industry leaders’ direct contact. The DoJ sued in 2023 alleging violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
The arrangement is just like the RealPage price-fixing for landlords to rig rents, which I think I first learned about from Cory Doctorow’s article on surveillance pricing.
Both Doctorow and Lipton connect the dots that centralized data sharing and price “recommendations,” combined with lax antitrust regulation due to Reagan and Milton Friedman and with conglomerate mergers (4 companies control 85% of the meat supply chain), leads inexorably to controlled cartel pricing.
Fortunately, the data sharing guidelines which permitted the old behavior were rescinded in 2023, writes Lipton: so the DoJ can go after Agri Stats, too.
You might not know that this follows a familiar cycle: the Sherman Antitrust Act dates to 1890. The Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 prohibited unfair pricing in meat-packing as a direct consequence of monopolistic behavior!
It’s time to re-enforce existing laws. Loosening them 4 decades ago led to predictable consequences.