On Celery

 A few years back now, I wrote a post 'On Housing' where I declared my hypothesis (probably actually just a notion, lacking the rigor of a testable hypothesis) that the average Australian knew nothing about housing. This is a post where I explore the notion that the average Australian knows nothing about celery.

This is hyperbolic of course, I'm not referring to the subsets of knowledge like: it's a vegetable, country of origin, calories per 100g, soluble vs insoluble fibre ratio, how to make ants-on-a-log. etc. 

I'm talking mainly about how celery functions in our economy. That is where I suspect the average person knows almost nothing, by way of saying the average person has at best a functional knowledge of celery in the economy (money can be exchanged for goods and services) and perhaps an intuitive understanding at best. 

I have somewhat arbitrarily picked celery to make a point about the implicit assumptions of our economic paradigm, and it's all to the point I hope to affect that a bad system can persist (or even a reasonably good system can persist in not improving) due to the immense complexity standing in the way of reform. I hope what I say here can be abstracted out into asking the deeper question of 'what the fuck is it all for?' and it could be regarded as a preamble or supplementary material for a forthcoming post of mine 'It's Not The Economy...stupid'

So let's get into celery.

The cheapest way to get celery I presume is to plant some seeds in soil. Now forgive my ignorance but I'm not much of a gardener, certainly have never cultivated a vegie patch or anything, but packets of seeds for varieties of celery are around $1.25 for 45-300 seeds. Because I'm so ignorant, I am assuming that a pack of 200 seeds would yield somewhat less than 200 celery plants (stalk, root and all) as some seeds will fail to germinate, competition for space between sprouts etc. Something like 1 in 5 to 1 in 10 maybe.

A quick google search says that seeding-harvest is between 130-140 days. I would guess someone with access to soil would have limited space to grow celery, maybe a max of 6 stalks and if they are like me probably consume less than a whole stalk of celery (per person) a year.

So 200 seeds might last a single person with access to a community garden, or a backyard with a veggie patch or planter box somewhere between 20 and 200 years for $1.25 in today's money, and given the forecast that interest rates and inflation are going to stay low or close to 0, today's money is about as good as tomorrows money - meaning there's not much opportunity cost between spending $1.25 today and earning interest on it in a savings account. This is a digression, but I suspect inflation is actually closer to negative (particularly in regards to food) meaning that the primary incentive for saving is that a dollar will buy more stuff in the future, rather than compounding interest... compounding deflation?

Opportunity cost for growing celery is enormously complicated, so I'll just allude to it. A quick google of the median price of a square meter of land in Melbourne has at Nov. 14th 2019, $1,892 per square meter. Celery is a pretty big plant so the land used to grow it carries an opportunity cost of $1,892. That cost is paid by someone, nominally the landlord, I don't know about a community garden. Often a landlord in Melbourne has a negatively geared property, meaning they pay more in their mortgage than they can obtain through rental income, which in Australia is considered an investment strategy so wise and valuable that the difference (losses) can be deducted from the landlord's taxable income exempting them partially or possibly totally from contributing to the upkeep of healthcare, education, law enforcement, the judicial system, infrastructure, public utilities, pensions, unemployment benefits, the NDIS, foreign aid, the arts etc.

Owner occupiers it's all imputed, in that effectively the landlord is the tenant and they are paying rent to themselves to contribute towards paying off the mortgage, but there's no transaction so it doesn't show up, meaning they are neither negatively geared (getting tax deductions under current law) or positively geared (having to report taxable income) because for owner occupiers it needs to be regarded as a saving on the rent they would be paying elsewhere.

Just picking an example suburb Coburg in North Melbourne has a median buying price for a 3 bedroom home of $1.03 million, which translates according to the government moneysmart website to $1,086 per week in Mortgage repayments, compared to the Median rent in the suburb for a 3 bedroom home of $560 per week. So setting aside capital gains from property speculation which is the main incentive for property 'investment' a person would save $526 per week to rent a whole 3 bedroom house in Coburg rather than buy and occupy that same house, for the period of 25 years until the mortgage is paid off. So with owner occupiers, the opportunity cost of growing celery on a square meter of land is born by them, whereas a landlord with sufficient other taxable income to transfer the losses to the community via negative gearing tax exemptions, the opportunity cost is born by the community.

All of which is to say, there are very complicated things going on behind the scenes of your vege patch, and as of Nov. 2019 the landlord/community is paying an opportunity cost of $1,869 to grow celery, that price per square meter is based an assumption of the best value use of that land. This is probably going to be subdividing the property to build apartments, which stimulates construction, where all the expenditure on the apartment construction generates income and revenue via wages, purchases, legal fees, compliance costs etc.

In brief, your landlord could sell that land to a developer instead of letting you grow celery and it would probably be to their financial benefit to do so, to the tune of $1,869.

Bringing us in to the domain of most urban people's experience of celery - grow it on much cheaper land, namely a farm or greenhouse and ship it in. 

From the perspective of Gross National Product/Gross Domestic Product (GNP/GDP) when you buy a packet of celery seeds for $1.25 and use it to fulfill your celery demands for 20 years that shows up as GNP once when you purchase the seeds for $1.25 plus shipping. It also deprives the economy of the GNP of using that land for construction of high-end apartments and everything that comes with it - GST on everything, Stamp Duty, increased land tax where the basis of determining rates is Capital Improved Value (a lot with an apartment complex on it pays more in land tax than the same lot with the apartment complex demolished) banking services, banking profits etc.

Where, if you buy celery from the supermarket at a rate of 1 stalk per year for 20 years that shows up in GDP growth 20 times for the going rate as of writing of $3.50 per stalk.

So here is the crux, a major point about the economic project we are all engaged in, a large part of why we vote in and out our leaders. A way to achieve significant GDP growth is to get people to stop growing their own celery, and buy it from a supermarket instead.

Buying celery from a supermarket boosts the construction industry, government revenues etc. by generating more transactions and higher value transactions. Arguably it is your patriotic duty and responsibility to your fellow man to not grow your own vegetables and have somebody else grow it for you. Next time your friend tells you excitedly about their new vegie patch, you should spit in their fucken face for what they are doing to GDP.

But, it's not as simple as that. Celery is my grocery nemesis. I use celery mostly in what the Italians call 'sofrito' the French call 'Mirepoix' but the only French dish I cook is French style Lasagna with Béchamel sauce...that and steak, but I don't use celery in steak.

Celery is such a pain in the arse for me to buy for cooking because my options are 'way more than necessary' or 'more than necessary' for my purposes 1 to 2 stalks, roughly the equal volume of a decent carrot is all I actually need in a dish I cook at most once a week, and currently less than once every two months.

So lets start with buying a whole stalk. the same applies for growing your own celery which will come at as a stalk, possibly with a celeriac bulb attached as the root of the plant. I'm going to guess that a whole stalk of celery weighs something like 600g, of which I need about 60g. So 1/10th of $1.25/50 seeds in the case of growing my own in the backyard, or 1/10th of $3.50 as the going price from a retailer. 

This is tremendously good for GDP, because I only need 35c of goods (or a conservative 0.0025c if I grow my own - excluding opportunity cost to the landlord) but I've generated $3.50 for the economy. Bringing us into spoilage.

Waste is fantastic for GDP, because it measures consumption, so if you consume more the economy grows. Furthermore, food waste is a big contributor to Greenhouse Gas Emissions, which currently is what Economists would call an 'externality' meaning someone else has to pick up the bill of climate change (communities effected by climate change, future generations etc.) so economically speaking in the duristiction of Australia, my buying a whole celery stalk, using one tenth of it and throwing the rest out to rot is simply fantastic.

However, on the subject of how I waste it, there's different options still - if I'm to compost it in my back yard then I am circumventing the whole waste management sector of the economy, I am taking away from the demand for things like landfill, collection, etc. the less waste I generate the more I hurt the economy, even from the perspective of paying council rates anyway so I may as well chuck my celery leftovers in the bin and not the garden, over time my reduced demand for waste services is going to effect the rates at which the waste management industry expands. Less land for landfill, less collection runs, less staff employed, slower increases in council rates, wage rises etc.

It's incredibly selfish of me and to the detriment of GDP and subsequently the happiness of all, to simply compost my waste.

Likewise, if I were instead to chop up the stalk into pieces and use what I need in the immediate recipe and then put the rest in a plastic container to preserve it, chuck that in the fridge, I am hurting the economy. It is much better for GDP if I were to buy 10x the amount of celery I desire each and every time I want to put 60g of celery in my pasta sauce, then throw it in the bin.

Now, let's look at the impact of household size on GDP, before circling back to celery waste. If 4 people live in separate disparate apartments, they are more likely to buy a celery stalk each, generate more waste. If they lived together though, a person could buy celery and in an incredibly anti-social move (from the perspective of GDP) let their housemates use the celery they don't need, fulfilling 4 people's demand for celery with only one transaction.

Let's make it worse (for GDP) and imagine someone in a sharehouse with a backyard has grown a stalk of celery, where they use the leaves and base (normally offcuts thrown away) to make a soup or stock, they divide up the stalks in pieces between them feeding more people with more meals, and refrigerate or freeze the rest.

I can hear you saying, wow, it's all so simple and straight forward. But you may recall earlier that I mentioned two options 'way too much' and 'too much'. Buying a celery stalk is way too much for my needs, and I'm one of these selfish horrible people that resents my patriotic duty to pay $3.50 for something that I only need 35c worth of. Fortunately, I can buy 300g of pre-cut, packaged stalks from the same supermarket for only $4.50. 

Now it might seem strange to you, on an intuitive level, that even excluding the parts of the celery stalk we are supposed to waste like the base and the leaves, that it is more expensive to buy less, almost half the amount of the product.

We could look at it as a kind of philosophical tax on shortchanging GDP. Most likely we think of this as economies of scale, though usually in economies of scale things get cheaper the more we consume of it. For example if a candy bar is $2 or 2 for $3. This is not (and a lot of people miss this because statistical intuitions are generally bad) the equivalent 25% off, while it may seem the same in both cases each bar is $1.50, with the bulk buy special you have to buy 2 candy bars to get the savings where a straight discount means you save money just purchasing one. It's hard to put into prose, but it's the difference between 1 candy bar for $1.50 and 2 candy bars for $2 and $1 respectively.

That's economy of scales in the usual practice. I hear you 'tohm, tohm, everything up to this point was so clear and coherent and easy to follow, but we were talking about celery and now you are talking about candy bars? How do you expect me to follow when you jump around like this!'

It's all to say, that usually economies of scale is 1 for $2 or 2 for $3, not 1 for $2 or 2 for $1. Where the buyer is effectively paying you to sell less. Now there are situations in the economy where one may actually pay for less of something or to avoid a service. I recall being stuck behind a pedestrian on Swanston st who was offering to freestyle rap for a gold coin donation, and fighting down the temptation to say 'you got your business model all wrong homie, you need to ask for a gold coin donation to not freestyle rap.' but I in turn didn't want to get my face punched in. Skip hop is terrible.

But celery is a good not a bad. Why pay a premium for less? From my perspective, I'd rather pay more and waste less. Now I'm sure that no matter how much celery you buy, you are paying as a consumer for waste. Some accountant will have done the sums to figure out how to make the required profit on celery if they only sell x amount of a total n celery purchased, and a bunch of celery winds up in the skip out the back. So the waste gets built into the price of the celery that does get purchased, and if there's a sudden celery craze (say because Kim Kardashian declares it her favorite snack, or Donald Trump says he's hearing from many smart people that it cures Covid) then the supermarket just makes inordinate profits if their wasted celery stock is reduced.

But they are making profits in the normal times when half the celery they purchase doesn't get sold on to end consumers. The point is, I know in my heart of hearts that when I purchase a 300g pack of celery for $4.50 over a whole stalk for $3.50 though I am reducing my household celery waste, part of the premium I'm paying is for a Coles employee to throw the celery stalk I didn't purchase into the supermarket dumpster. You're welcome freegans.

But the price premium is probably more explained by value-added. Or convenience. You may have noticed the same pricing behavior with Coca-Cola where 600ml from 7-Eleven costs substantially more than 1.25l from the Supermarket. The price in part is consistent with the great economic project, not only am I aiding GDP by spending $4.50 instead of $3.50 (and even better for society than growing my own celery than purchasing my own stalk) I'm paying for the low density polymer that wraps the top of the also petrolium based tray, or the low density polymer sealed plastic bag aka the packaging. That's a whole other industry, an extra shipping stop, extra logistics, extra wages fueling extra income. I'm paying more truck drivers and more factory workers, enabling them too to consume more celery and produce more waste.

And the fact that I have spared myself something like 5-10 minutes of knife work, by having the stalk pre-cut into pieces for me is another crucial point about GDP. A major point. Doing things for yourself is bad for GDP. With one important caveat, that I will flag now but come to at check out (hint hint).

Even better than a punnet of celery sticks wrapped in plastic is a plastic cup of diced celery. Why they might even be able to charge me $5.50 for 150g of diced celery, over $4.50 for 300g of sticks of celery.

I know in some places, specifically a supermarket Chef John of Foodwishes went to in San Francisco USA he could purchase a sealed cup of diced celery, onion and carrot. Now that is convenience, and the fundamental underpinning of why GDP is used as a proxy for consumption and a proxy for wellbeing. The richer we get, the less tears we have to shed over onions. We can pay someone else to chop our onions for us, and isn't that what happiness is all about?

Let's go further, because I am being incredibly anti-social by walking to the shops and buying the goods. I am effectively paying myself to be a grocery delivery boy. It is so much better for the economy if somebody gets paid a wage to deliver the groceries to me. If you care about the economy, a better way to volunteer would be to stand on the footpath of supermarkets with billy-clubs and tell anyone who tries to walk into the store to go home and order online.

Walking is the worst (from GDP perspective) driving is better, you are consuming petrol, also depreciation, insurance, registration etc. Even better than that is having someone else drive to the shops and back to get your groceries, because it's all of the above + paying them a wage...

I need to put a pin in that thought, because stupid, stupid, stupid. Why are you cooking for yourself at all? We are all much better off (from GDP perspective) if we get our meals from restaurants. Why am I making bolognese? Where do I get the FUCKING nerve, to not buy an instant Bolognese or Lasagna packed meal for $4.00 for 300g. I mean the price says it all, I could spend $4.50 to buy 300g of celery, $7 for 500g of mince, 50c for a carrot, same for an onion, $1 for a garlic bulb, $3 for tomato paste, $1 for tinned tomatoes, $2 for a pack of spaghetti... when I could buy a frozen meal and cook it in my microwave for $4.

Of course, with all the separate ingredients I could feed four people or myself 4 portions, so it's like $20 worth of ingredients vs $16 for 4 meals. It's still like the economy is trying to tell me, somehow incentivise me to not cook for myself.

And indeed, cooking for myself is wrong, what you may not expect is that buying pre-prepared meals from the supermarket is also wrong. We should be buying our meals from restaurants, that is our patriotic duty to bolster GDP.

Before I go to restaurants though, I just want to finish off the outstanding business of the extra people I employ by buying a packet of celery sticks over a whole stalk. You may have seen petitions to stop the 'excessive' packaging of vegetables at Coles and Woolworths (the two major players in Australia).

What this fails to consider is that without single use plastic, there would a) be less plastic consumed which hurts the plastics manufacturing industry, the oil industry etc. and b) without plastic in the ocean then we wouldn't have all the GDP consumption of the clean up process, extraction etc. which would also hurt GDP if there was no pollution to clean up. You might remember Gary Oldman's speech from 'The Fifth Element' where for some reason, he is portrayed as a bad guy.

A third c) that the petition fails to consider is... who get's the income. The income generated by consumption of celery and it's packaging. In recent years Supermarkets in Australia have implemented self-serve checkouts. Now I don't have access to the numbers on these, but here we see an apparent contradicition - if GDP doesn't want us doing things for ourselves, why are we checking out our own groceries?

Well because it saves on what were known sexistly and colloquially in Australia as 'checkout chicks' one employee paid say... $20 serving one customer every 5 minutes is less productive and profitable than one employee standing in the self-serve bay serving 8 customers every 5 minutes. Time is literally money, and one thing that gums up the works, is people dithering and dicking around trying to look up fresh produce codes. It could generate a situation where one person at a traditional checkout who has memorized most of the codes of fresh produce could be 10x faster than an octogenerian at a touch screen trying to figure out if shallots are under 'O' for Onions or 'S' for Shallots. But you can solve this by wrapping the vegetable in plastic and sticking a bar code on it. 

When I look up a piece of fruit and weigh it at a self serve check in, as opposed to scanning the bar-code on the tiny sticker, I'm slowing down the throughput of check out, customers behind me are waiting longer, increasing the temptation that they might opt for non-self serve and driving up the cost of labor on a per-hourly basis by having to roster on more staff to cope with peak traffic.

But surely that's good for GDP? Isn't that job creation? Well to throw a spanner in the works, our law is unambiguous. There are more than one kind of income, depending on the factor of production. Labor earns wages through salary, (not to be confused with celery, I'm sorry) Capital from dividends, and Land from rents. 

What we need to keep in mind is that income = consumption. Now two sources of income are in opposition, the staff at the supermarket and the investors who own the supermarket. The law is unambiguous, companies are to be run in the interests of the owners, not the staff. The Supermarket is legally obliged to maximize profits for it's shareholders or face serious penalties. If it can save $20 an hour by increasing staff productivity and reducing total staff then that saving can be passed onto either - the consumers through price cuts, that they may consume more and produce more waste, or to the shareholders, the owners who can use it to buy their own pre-packed celery.

So just as a recap, better than growing your own celery and using it all in multiple meals to feed multiple people that you prepared yourself without paying a wage to yourself, is to go to the shops and buy celery for multiple meals for multiple people without paying a wage to yourself, better than that is to buy celery from the shops for a single person for multiple meals < (less than/not as good as) single person, single meal < to get celery delivered for single meal, single person < to get packaged celery delivered for single person, single meal < get a pre-prepaired instant meal in package delivered for single person, single meal <  get a restaurant meal delivered for a single person for a single meal.

The curve ball I've thrown is that income going to Capital is legally enshrined as better than income going to workers. So incorporating this better than having a family restaurant with a Nonna in the kitchen consuming celery in the preperation of the Ragu that will feed me and 100 other bachelors when put in a plastic sealed container and handed to an uber driver or deliveroo cyclist to bring to my door is a meal I purchase at the same price prepared by a robot and delivered by a drone. Similarly, better if my celery is diced up by a machine in a plant than by a person on a line. This is the great project of the economy and the bright future of celery should all be working towards if we wish to be happy.

And to think, there are arseholes out there who grow their own wild celery in their backyard and use it from root to tip to feed themselves and family and neighbors multiple meals and are so fucking deluded that they feel good about that...

This is a disaster for the great project of Economic growth. Australia's bright and shining future where we are all happier thanks to increased consumption, requires us to live in expensive apartments by ourselves, throwing out as much celery as possible.

I hope by now, I've pushed your brain to saturation and now let me place the final straw on the camels back. (or stick of celery).

The reason we want to save on wages and maximize profits in return for Capital is because the asset owning class are more likely to invest their income not in mere consumption but in more assets that grow the economy.

I'm just guessing here as to what the big picture is, but say I save $10,000 a year in growing my own food and preparing it myself, that saving is non consumption of goods and services that become income for others. I'm unlikely to do anything but sit on that $10,000. Worse, and this is where I'm a truly horrible person, I might use my savings to buy a foreign currency and live for a year in Mexico because I can consume more there than I can here, betraying my nation by contributing to the GDP of Mexico and not the GDP of Australia.

I might tell myself that when I purchase Mexican Pesos with Australian dollars I put upward pressure on Mexican Pesos and downward pressure on AUDs, which helps the celery farmers of Australia compete with the celery farmers of Mexico in exporting celery... and after all if the celery is imported from overseas then that's better for GDP because the transport costs of exporting internationally are greater than those of domestic consumption...

But the shareholders of Coles, or the owners of Restaurants, what they would do with the $10,000 if I spent it on getting robot prepared and delivered meals shipped to my door is leverage it. They would go to the bank and say 'I have $100,010,000 in cash assets, how much money can I borrow?' and the banks would probably say 'A bajillion dollars at 0% interest! what are you going to do with it?'

And they would say 'I'm going to buy up the land currently used for vegie patches and community gardens and build studio apartment blocks that I will sell off the plan.'

To which the banker would say 'Wow, not only will that fuel consumption and borrowing in the construction industry, build consumer confidence, increase consumer debt, put upward pressure on housing and rents, increase the cleanup costs of climate change thus increasing GDP growth into the future... but it will increase celery consumption... it's beautiful. You sir, are a great Australian, yes I will lend you a bajillion dollars at 0% on the basis that you have so much money you could just spend without borrowing anything kind of like Apple and Google in the US who have vast stockpiles of cash they don't know how to invest but borrow money at 0% from the Federal Reserve and purchase their own stocks, because everyone will be happier if they would just waste more celery and have less job security.'

Now the camels back is broken, let's keep piling on some more celery.

The uber driver delivering your uber eats might be under the impression that they are making money, because they haven't factored in the depreciation costs of their vehicle, the insurance costs, rego, etc. they may be classed as a private contractor rather than an employee, even though as their own business they have no right to refuse business etc. and subsequently are not provisioning for tax, leave or superannuation. They may, depending on prices be going financially backwards, robbing Peter to pay Paul so to speak. Earning $200 from their pet Elephant who eats $400 worth of celery. The driver delivering your meals may be paying you for the privilege of delivering your spag bol. Which again is still fantastic for consumption, it's just a complexity about how the income derived from celery might be distributed.

 Also on income, there's dicing your own celery versus having someone else, or a robot do it. On this point I myself must confess I am confused, and this is my point of confusion. Say I earn $20,000 per year, and someone else earns $200,000 a year. Their time, is at market rates worth 10x mine. So in a workplace, like a restaurant, I the kitchen hand should absolutely be dicing the celery whereas the accountant should absolutely be balancing the books or whatever. George Calombaris' restaurant business didn't go under because of celery dicing, it went under because of book-keeping. So that's why at work the accountants get the big bucks and the kitchen hands get the small potatoes (another vegetable I'm sorry, I swear that's the last one).

Where I'm confused is when you aren't at work. As I was taught, labor markets particularly participation is constrained by a tradeoff between income and leisure. So in theory this says that you might be able to work 38 hours a week for $20 an hour, because that leaves you enough leisure time to feel happy and balanced, but to work 50 hours a week, you would need to be paid far more than the additional $20 for each of the additional 12 hours. In theory it might require some kind of 'penalty' rate to work that 'overtime' like 1.5 times the hourly wage, because leisure time gets more valuable the less of it there is. 

To quote the great Yogi Berra 'In theory, theory works in practice, in practice, it doesn't.'

It is well documented for example that people in salaried positions work a lot of voluntary overtime. Also in my experience, people in casual positions are rarely able to be like 'I'm only going to work 16 hours this week, 17 hours next week, I'll do a 3 hour shift today and a 4 hour shift tomorrow, and maybe 2 hours the day after that.' Which is to say, people in Australia at least are rarely in a position to do this calculus of a tradeoff between an hours leisure or an hours work. People rarely can set their own hours, and thanks to things like having rent and mortgages and living expenses that exceed the social security payments they could receive if unemployed, workers tend to have really weak bargaining positions such that employers can say 'we need you to work a minimum of 20 hours a week or forget about it.' or 'you have to do at least one mandatory 8 hour weekend shift.' etc. 

So given that very few people have a choice between work and leisure by the hour so much as employment or unemployment, I'm genuinely unsure if an accountant's leisure time is worth more than a kitchen hands leisure time since the option may not exist to actually convert that into wages. Nobody will pay the accountant an extra $200 because his salary is his salary, to stay behind at work an extra hour, and order a meal delivered and the shift simply isn't available for the kitchen hand to work an extra hour for an extra $20.

Presumably one of the reasons for employing robots instead of people, is that robots don't want to play videogames and watch pornography instead of dicing celery. So the living expenses of our leisure time are probably priced into the wages market. 

At either rate, I don't know if a poor person needs to feel less bad about cutting up their own celery. The opportunity cost is smaller compared to a rich person. What is undeniable is that rich people consume more and thus are better for GDP. That's why we should give them more free stuff, tax exemptions, lower interest rates, subsidies, perks and benefits so they'll be even richer to consume even more and thus make us all happier because income = spending = consumption = happiness under the GDP paradigm.

So I've hit my limit, I'm exhausted. I'm sure I haven't fully explored the economic complexities of celery. The point is not to point out how little you know about celery, but probably how little you know about GDP, and why GDP growth is good, and why we should get angry that the economy is hurting, or vote out politicians. 

I could have written a much simpler post about how it's great if a bushfire destroys your house and all the memories contained, because it's better for GDP to build two houses than one. Curiously though, our regulators don't encourage us to build the most expensive, least durable, most flamable houses to improve our wellbeing via greater consumption of housing.

Almost like, GDP growth is, if not an outright terrible proxy for wellbeing, at the very least a woefully inadequate one.

On Melbourne's Waves

I'm going to take Ghandi's advice and be the change I'd like to see in the world, specifically: I'm going to make clear from the outset that I'm speculating on limited data that I have. This is speculation. Opinion. I do not know for a fact whether this is the case, and that should shape your confidence in accepting my interpretation. 

I feel that is important to make clear, because everyday I awake to greater clarity that we are living in an age where people hold incredibly consequential beliefs having never bothered to investigate those beliefs. I also had the tremendous privelege to work on a nationwide longitudinal survey for some 8 years speaking to thousands of Australians during the Julia Gillard years where I was able to observe for myself, that the press is incredibly influential in shaping people's opinions. There are an alarming number of people who outsource their opinion forming wholesale to the Editorial staff of their local tabloid paper.

There's a line in 2014's 'Pride' said by Bill Nighy in his role as Cliff:

I don’t believe what they say about

us, Lee. Why should I listen to

what they say about them?

Which I feel confident, is a statement of incredibly uncommon sense. It defies confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. These I suspect is actually how news is scrutinized - what we want to believe. 

Thus I am simply attempting to form my own opinion by making sense of the data, I received, which was all publicly available. 2020 has not impressed me as to the role and function of journalism, appearing to me as a kind of middle man that actually diminishes value. This is probably how I would satire the function of the press as current:

1. source appears in live public press conference. Source: 'I disagree with my opponents position because of X'

2. Journalist at press conference asks question of source. Journalist: 'If you had a million dollars to give every person in this city, when could we expect it?'

3. Source answers question. [no matter how irrelevant or transparently motivated the journalists question, the content of the source's answer is almost always irrelevant no mater how rational, reasonable or data backed.]

4. Front page headline/leading news story of headline's publication/channel: '[Source] SAYS YOU'RE A CUNT WANTS TO RUIN YOUR LIFE!' 

Chomsky is known for his concept of 'manufacturing consent' I these days am feeling much 'manufactured dissent' and it reminds me of the Gillard years. The press is impressing upon me some kind of industrial scale Iago to the general public's Othello. Things didn't work out for Othello. (The Iago I'm referring to is not the parrot from Aladdin.)

So with all that, I'm doing the same thing as much of the press that I read. Constructing a narrative. I am not an epidemiologist, I do have a bachelors degree in Economics, I don't have privileged access to the data.

I was prompted somewhat to write this because of a talk I listened to by Nicole Gurren on the very separate subject of Housing Affordability. It's a good example of narratives being constructed with no reference to any data, no factual basis and dominating the conversation - specifically housing affordability is best solved by > increasing the housing supply by > slashing the project approval red-tape. We tend to accept things, because we've heard them. I'm sure I could lose consciousness before I ran out of examples of this phenomenon.

The First Wave

Australia's first wave was worst in NSW, next worst in Victoria, where Victoria whose capital city Melbourne, has a population greater than that of the nation of New Zealand, and statistically on a per capita basis Victoria outperformed NZ up until the Cedar Meats outbreak which for my speculation is an important data point.

That's skipping to the end of the story of the first wave. My father was working in Mongolia in a climate-disastrous fly-in-fly-out arrangement, when Covid-19 was just an epidemic in Wuhan China. He flew back to Australia on a flight via Beijing where everyone was wearing face masks on the plane but took them off to eat their in flight meals. He flew back to Mongolia a fortnight later, Wuhan was locked down, Beijing was being locked down. By the time he was due to fly back to Australia, he could no longer travel via Beijing, he had to take a route from Mongolia to South Korea, transfer from one Airport to another in Seoul, then fly home.

My mother reported to me that their dinner group of friends from Shepparton one of Victoria's regional centers were unwilling to come to the dinner party my parents were due to host, owing to my father's travelling from Asia. My mother and I were of a consensus that they were being paranoid hypochondriacs. My attitude for the next week or so was 'Don't people remember SARS? Swine Flu?' 

Then South Korea had it's outbreak, and the WHO declared a pandemic. We discovered for the most part, most conuntries had no real plans in place. It all felt very reactive. To the credit of the leadership at every level of government in Australia, it appeared our leaders got briefed up very quickly. This was the bizarre week were time compressed, and we began to go into lock-down. Each day, the risks we were taking the day before seemed callous and stupid to me, so I should say the risks I'd been taking.

I had no idea if I was already Covid-19 positive, that was the main thing. I could have been asymptomatic, it was already here. I could be inadvertantly killing grannies just by breathing air. 

This was for me, the story of the first wave. We knew almost nothing, some seized on this to go into upbeat denial, or defiant denial, conspiracy theories. Those people are still around, though I assume there's an increased chance in my state, that some of them may now have caught Covid-19, and may have been confronted for the first time in their lives, that an objective reality exists.

There was a contingent I knew of that were overcautious. They didn't leave the house, they washed everything they touched, they disinfected their bananas before peeling them. They left as little as possible to chance, these are the people so desperate to survive, you wouldn't want to wake up in one of Jigsaw's games chained to them.

I feel that the first wave is largely forgotten, or that we have not yet found the time to reflect upon it. The first wave in Victoria was the rich man's wave, the middle class wave, the upper-middle-bogan wave. It was waves of people being disgorged from planes returning from ski trips on Italian slopes, Aspen-Colorado slopes. People returning from destination weddings and cruises. Holidaymakers. International holiday makers. Taking long haul flights across the Pacific Ocean, the South-East Asian Island Chains, the Indian Ocean, breathing recycled air and then walking straight through customs and out into the community.

I recall looking at the Department of Health's daily Covid updates during the first wave, once I had actually learned the nature of the situation, seen what was happening in Italy and New York and subsequently accepted the counter-intuitive seriousness of a tentative 2% mortality rate aerosol spread respiratory disease. The best represented demographic for case numbers nationally was females 20-29. Something like 7% above males 20-29 and 30% bigger than the third largest age-cohort.

My prejudice instantly kicked in, and I was all like 'it's those fucking hipster-bali tourists getting their cheap flights to Osaka and Tokyo via Jetstar. Those incredibly venal twenty-something women that think they are broadening themselves...' Unlike the WHO who transparently archive their situation reports it's a bit harder with the Australian website but here's one from late May that is the statistical picture I referred to and am referring to. You can see in the bar graph bottom middle the demographic breakdown. Anyway, I noticed my own prejudice kicking in, no doubt agitated by tourism Japan's add campaign specifically targeting young women to come live their Samurai experiences in 'authentic' Japan, oh how it bugs me... and caught myself. 

The most probably explanation for this demographic phenomena was that women, particularly young women are most at risk of community transmission because they are no doubt over-represented in jobs like Nursing, Waiting, Receptionist... proud of myself at having arrested my tertiary educated, Murakami reading specific misogyny and gotten to what was no doubt the truth, my rationalization soon deflated. 

That narrative doesn't square with the data being presented, in the first wave there was little to no reports of healthcare workers contracting it. The great success of the first wave if anything was that our healthcare system avoided becoming the hotbed of transmission and fatalities like Northern Italy and New York. Indeed, I can recall things I thought about in the first wave - one of which was during the panic buying epidemic, I actually thought about the prospect of people invading my home for toilet paper in a supply shock driven breakdown of society. Another was my being drafted into a medical career I never wanted simply because the doctors and nurses were dying off and I eventually would be forced into a medical school basic training draft, much like my Grandfather was called off to fight Germans and Japanese interrupting his dreams of being a con-man or doing a dentistry apprenticeship or something.

There was also a complete lack of news coverage of restaurant outbreaks, or hospitality industry outbreaks, or event outbreaks. To date, I don't think there's been any community transmission that has taken place in a Supermarket. 

Thus, I conclude the Victorian, and Australian wave stories are stories of demographics. The first wave was the international holiday demographic. People who can demonstrably take time off work to go overseas for a couple of weeks.

I distinctly remember as Victoria's first wave was winding down, and there was (what I considered then) irrational agitation and public pressure for the restrictions to be released even as the Cedar meats cluster was ballooning, I was riding along a trail feeling constantly frustrated by the demonstrable lack of public understanding of 1.5m physical distancing that I the very concrete sentiment formed in my head 'If we have beat this thing, it is not owing to Victorian public.'

The first wave was manageable because it was among a demographic of people that are largely retired and wealthy, who have no income to lose that isn't rent from property they own, or dividends from shares. Or they were young people, who may feel like battlers, but lockdown for them meant they could no longer go on Tinder dates, a demographic that has some 80% of their social contact invested in the 3 people they take their break with at their casual jobs while they go through Uni. A demographic that sublets the room in their sharehouse for 6 weeks while they go to Japan, New York or Berlin to get authentic food for their Instagram stories, and cheap good quality cocaine to tell their friends about in the break room.

This is a demographic that Jobkeeper and Jobseeker are sufficient to secure. I suspect there's a high correlations between taking month long cruises and being retired, and possibly a high correlation between taking international trips over the (Australian) summer and having a job that can be tele-commuted, or school or University course. I suspect there's a correlation between taking international trips, having a salaried office job with paid annual leave and being able to telecommute that job.

The carriers of the First wave might visit their family once a month, or once every two months, or their family live scattered across the world, where they have taken various roles as social media monitors for firms in different cultural hubs. It's the wealthy, in other words, who on aggregate don't spend much time in their community as they are time poor cash rich. The elderly retirees go travelling to alleviate boredom and 'spend the kids inheritance' where their children were/are preoccupied with their self-diagnoses of 'social anxiety' as an excuse to only interact regularly and in close proximity with 1-5 friends. The demographic that sees pre-drinks as mandatory prior to a party, but showing up to the party that necessitates the pre-drinks is not mandatory.

The state and federal government shut down the key contact point for this internationally jetsetting demographic - school and work, and with that, their social lives and communities naturally shift online. They put up the welfare payments to prevent civil unrest (for the most part) and we rode out that first wave. Bringing us to...

The Second Wave

I have opinions about the second wave that I would acknowledge upfront, mainly to get them out of the way. I feel, quite strongly that they are wrong to fixate on. Specifically:

• Almost certainly the state government (The Andrews Government) made the wrong decision, aka a mistake in allowing our quarantine hotels to use private security firms to maintain the quarantine, when the Australian Defense Force (ADF) had been pledged as available to oversee this task by the Federal Government.
• The initial reaction to the outbreak of community transmission that would become our second wave, of locking down specific postcodes was doomed to failure (emphasis in my opinion) because the outbreak had been traced back using genetic sequencing and through positive Covid tests to the Quarantine Hotels, a set of data that told me, that if people who literally 'had one job' couldn't be trusted to contain the virus, then some 100,000 people in a set of suburbs with incredibly porous, arbitrary and conditional (eg. 'essential' workers could leave the locked down suburb) boundaries - if this was page one in the 'suppression strategy' playbook that whole playbook can be thrown away.
• The lockdown of the public housing residential towers was a fucking nightmare for all involved.

I believe it wrong to fixate on these, because the quarantine hotels using private security worked perfectly right up until it didn't, this is the kind of mistake leadership has to be able to make if we aren't to live in a 'demeritocracy' (quoting myself there) ie. we ostracize anybody who isn't perfect despite having nothing but imperfect alternatives. 

It also, creates a problem of hypocrisy for people agitating for early or immediate reopenings on the grounds of damage to the economy. Because that would be the exact line of reasoning to use private security firms instead of ADF personal. The ADF are government sector spending, spending that I assume goes on whether they are training on a military base way out Woop-Woop somewhere or guarding the corridor of a Hotel. 

Whereas, the Hotel's repurposed for quarantine are private sector extracting government funds to offset the lost tourist trade owing to the lockdowns, I would be amazed if part of the decision the Andrews government made wasn't informed by an essentially identical but specific argument about the need to protect the economy by not using ADF personal and instead paying the Hotels to hire private security, Hotel managers that in part or accross the board stuck to the old economic paradigm of maximizing profit by having marginal costs = marginal revenue. In layman's terms, to cut every corner possible without losing the government contract to keep international arrivals in 14 day quarantines.

As to the 10 postcode lockdown, my harshest criticism would be my usual suspect of making a decision that disregards ordinary human psychology. Particularly the propensity for people to feel it is unfair, like if the news said their were 40 active cases yesterday, and you were one of 10,000 people living in a suburb that was now locked down and you shared a supermarket with a suburb that is not locked down, most people aren't going to adopt the 'take one for the team' mentality but gravitate towards the 'why me? it isn't fair. I didn't do anything wrong' mentality. 

In my experience most people lack the cognitive empathy abilities to overcome prisoners dilemmas, tragedies of the commons. When they are thinking 'I'll escape to my beach-house/cousin's house/visit my mum interstate.' I doubt any sufficient number pause and think 'I probably don't have Covid, but this is exactly what someone with Covid is thinking right now in this suburb, and they are going to flee the lockdown and that's exactly how this will spread...' 

So while it was doomed to fail though, I don't think it was pointless. Governments everywhere are observing governments everywhere trying to figure out a) what the best approach is and b) the best approach they can afford logistically and politically.

The suffering under lockdown, is somewhat mitigated by the knowledge we now have that locking down postcodes doesn't work. From now, anybody who tries this in the event of an outbreak, is 100% liable for escalating the situation, because they had every opportunity to learn from the Victorian example.

Getting to the Residential Towers. I've had the fortune to have friends that lived in towers like the ones that were placed in the most severe lockdown nationwide. They have been described as vertical cruise ships. Having an outbreak in one of these towers is just a fucking nightmare. Locking them down in quarantine is a fucking nightmare. It was the right call. I saw the people demanding on humanitarian grounds that they be released, and though I'm sure they are well intended, non of these demands gave me the impression the people advocating had any fucking idea what they were talking about. 

Which brings me to what I interpret to be, the real story of Melbourne's second wave, again a story of demographics. Because the question is: Prior to the introduction of mandatory quarantine in designated hotels for international arrivals, planes were just disgorging carriers out into our community, we had a prominent news story of a Doctor that flew back in late Feb/early March feeling sick with flu-like symptoms that saw some 60 patients at his clinic before he bothered to get tested and test positive. Including two patients at a nursing home in Malvern. Why didn't this complete lack of quarantine and self-isolation protocol result in the kind of numbers we saw in the Melbourne second wave?

The crucial thing, by my synthesis is the demographics of who got infected. About a week ago, it was confirmed that a quarantine security guard that was infected, infected her housemate an aged care nurse this only explains 2 cases at one facility, which is unsurprising because it's very direct.

What came out in the wash, in dribs and drabs over the past 6 or so weeks are the headlines that get buried in the dumpster fire that is the media coverage of the daily press briefings. Things like the hotel security being hired via Whatsapp and paid $18 an hour (the current national minimum wage is $19.49 per hour, or $740.80 per 38 hour week, which x2 is $1480 where the current unemployed benefits stand at $1124 per fortnight) so guess who's taking that job? People who really have to.

It also trickles out, that people were getting tested after one shift at one work sight (where in Australia you are instructed to self-isolate until you get your test results) and then doing some uber-eats runs after the test, then going to work at a different job sight.

I was fortunate enough to have a friend testify to her direct experience of working as a nurse, having to pick up rosters at quarantine hotels and then hospital wards and working across multiple sites. The media and government appears to have uncovered this also in their inquiries.

The ADF were brought in to door knock and make sure people who had tested positive were self-isolating, apparently 1 in 4 people weren't at home when they had tested positive and been instructed to self-isolate for 14 days. I suspect the natural response when hearing a statistic like this is moral outrage.

Let's try and exercise cognitive empathy though. The above screenshot is from the aforementioned in the pre-ramble talk about Housing Policy Red-Tape. The slide appears thus far into Nicole's talk if you can't read the screenshot it says 'Healthcare workers living in group households 2016 - source ABS...'

from the transcript: 'This is just a map of our low-paid healthcare and social assistance workers who are living in share group households in 2016. I hope they’re not still living in share houses now, but work also by my lab shows that the informal rental market is alive and well right now in the middle of the pandemic, similar to the remarks that Emily made at the start of this evening’s talk. Much of that stock, unfortunately, is overcrowded and some of it is downright dangerous.'

So the second wave, the crucial, to me, characteristic is that we basically got the first wave spreaders under control, because they were wealthy people who can telecommute their office jobs, have leave entitlements, have relatively secure housing etc. I described it all above. We got them under control through hotel quarentine, then we introduced them to a different demography...

A demographic that works in essential services - nursing and security, for near minimum wage, with little job security, no housing security etc. People who can't afford to take sick days, people who needs so badly to earn $365 above the Jobseeker payment a fortnight, that they will work full time standing in a corridor telling people to get back in their rooms for 38 hours a week over the next best option of doing whatever the fuck you want all day for $1,124 just $365 less.

It also appears to turn out, that the kind of person that takes this job has a large family, a large family that might have religious observances and large family gatherings, possibly language barriers, almost certainly a greater sense of felt filial piety. This low income, low job security, low housing security demographic appears to be the crucial difference in the second wave, they stand in stark contrast to the demographic of the first wave.

Just going by the 10 postcode lockdown, and the public housing tower lockdowns, the second wave was very much a North and Western suburbs wave, whereas in our first wave, the 'hot-spot' was squarely in the South and East, particularly the Mornington Peninsula. For those unfamiliar with Melbourne, the South and East are the well-to-do suburbs, the North and West are the working class.

Would you be willing to bet the farm, that a similar analysis of ABS census data for Melbourne won't show that the Hotspod, super-spreader suburbs aren't characterized by Low-income aged care and security workers correlating with low home ownership rates, in informal share-houses, room share etc? That it will turn out that the people that lift your Nan in and out of bed and change her diapers, are incredibly well paid homeowners from small families with tertiary educations and are just incredibly selfish pricks?

This is what the data screams to me, and it frankly, must be ignored. Because nobody likes to discuss why it is that we pay a Fund Manager $120,000 a year plus bonuses to underperform an index fund as they allocate Superannuation, or a Social Media 'Expert' for a Boutique Interior Design business is paid $50,000 per year with 20 days annual leave and 8 days sick leave benefits, but someone, who if they fuck up cost the economy $6 billion a week, is paid $18 an hour and can't legitimately get their name on a lease.

We know plenty of fund managers are well compensated to lose money. We know plenty of social media experts are well paid to... well it's hard to tell whether they are doing anything at all. And we know, that if someone does quarantine security right, they can save us $6 Billion dollars over... 8 weeks and counting. We know an aged care worker, if they turn up to work sick can kill any and all of their residents.

That's the market, and the economy we are supposed to be in a rush to reopen. I'd also suggest, that because there's likely to be a high correlation between working an actually hard but essential job for minimal compensation and being a first or second generation immigrant, that many people don't wish to discuss this narrative because of the inevitable racist vitriol that will be directed at the people willing to work harder than us at work worth doing for people unwilling to pay them a cent more than they are obligated to.

To be clear, I'm not anti-immigrant. I'm anti-slum lords, I'm anti-corner cutting old economic paradigms of how to profit off government tenders. As I infer from the fact that the quarantine hotels appeared to in many cases shirk their obligations to clean and feed the tenants. 

If somebody screws up their one job, when they are hired at $18 an hour via Whatsapp and provided no training, I'm not angry at them. I'm angry at the recruiters and the management.

Certainly, certainly the decision to not use the ADF and to instead use private security was a catastrophic fuckup. Was it however an error of commission or omission? It appears, and it makes sense to me, to simply be an oversight. An act of commission would require evidence, including testimony surfacing where somebody advocated for private security - I'm agnostic, waiting for such evidence to appear.

An act of omission, an oversight squares up with other facts - like it was fine for the first wave, the Government appears to have learned 'as it goes' that people were testing positive and still going to work/refusing to self isolate because of economic pressures, and they made adjustments like offering payments and getting the test result turnaround time down. 

Think if you will, of Covid like fire, and the South and East suburbs, for Socio-economic reasons are like wet green foliage, tertiary educated, home-owning, white collar workers with declining birth rates. The North and West are dry tinder stacked on oily rags swept up against old newspaper collections, job insecure, housing insecure first and second generation migrants with large intersecting families, religious observances and community events with high birthrates and multiple siblings. Suppression might work out East, down South. 

Not West and North though, once the fire was there it went up in flames quickly, and we failed in our obligation to protect the vulnerable. Even if ultimately absolved of responsibility, these essential workers are going to have to live with 'to make rent I wound up killing 2 people/6 people/12 people.' for the rest of their lives.

These people aren't thought of victims though if you pick up a paper. The victims are cafe owners, gym owners, restaurant owners, landlords both residential and commercial, event coordinaters, footy fans etc. The real victim is the Economy.

The too oft escaped algebra of Covid however is that transmission rates increase quickly, it's non-linear, and it takes a relative age to bring them back down. It takes 15 minutes of exposure to aerosol droplets of Covid-19 to catch it, about 4 days for symptoms to show up, and 2 to 3 weeks to recover, and some 2% of people don't recover.

Now this suggests, that the way to handle outbreaks is to lock down movement and contact fast, and release these measures gradually. Fast in, slow out. This runs counter to public sentiment, the situation needs to escalate to scarily close to out of control before lockdowns are acceptable, then as soon as numbers appear to taper or start decreasing, the public demands to know when restrictions will be eased.

If you think of this behavior as an individual, it would be like a person testing positive refusing to isolate until they have given it to at least two other people, and then demanding to leave isolation the moment their fever reduces rather than after they are deemed non-contagious and recovered. Given that in a community, there will be many people who never contract the disease, perhaps the better analogy to the body would be the hands and knees agitating for release, because all the symptoms are in the lungs, head and toes.

I actually know the 3 degrees of separation between myself and George W Bush, it's possibly just 2 degrees of separation with a middle man that could be cut out. Given that he's (as of writing) a living President and all the living Presidents know each other, I have 4 degrees of separation which is to say, I know a guy who knows a guy who's dad knows George W who knows Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Donald Trump who certainly knows Mitch McConnel and Nancy Pelosi and I have 0 influence over any of them. I have little enough influence over people I know directly, it's a lot of effort to get them to turn up to one of my exhibitions or even respond to an email.

I have little enough influence over myself, when it comes to procrastination, eating right, exercising etc. I often don't follow my own advice.

Except that san travel bans and movement restrictions, it's possible that a virus I have could infect past and present leaders of the free world. Through collective incompetence I could play a role in the death of Jimmy Carter. Some resident of Wuhan whether they were a floor mopper in a Wet Market selling Bat soup or a lab technician that fucked up protocols (we'll probably never know who patient 0 was) hospitalized UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and infected Brazil's President Bolsanaro. 

This is a virus, that can get into clubs I never could. Yet, I live a lifestyle to-date more secure against Covid than the Prime Minister of England, The White House and President Bolsanaro. 

I also feel, now that the curve is flattening in Melbourne's second wave, that the public does not consider the position of the state Premier and the respective position of the press, particularly tabloid newspapers like the Herald Sun. 

The newspaper can and has agitated and riled up the public for quicker easing of restrictions, they've been heavily critical of the Premier's Roadmap out of lockdown. Now I imagine that if the Premier capitulated and released lockdown measures so people in Metropolitan Melbourne could have dinner parties of 5 people, and travel across town and stay at their beach house etc. and cases were stable for a whole week before, hypothetically, spiking again into a new outbreak of triple figure daily cases, and the stage 4 restrictions were put back in place...

I don't see the Herald Sun running a front page apology 'We were wrong, Gov was right.' I don't think they'd take any responsibility for their editorials. I think they wouldn't even blink before they blamed the premier for backflipping on his roadmap and coming out of lockdown too early. I can't imagine them saying 'well after criticizing him for not being conservative enough to post the ADF on the quarantine hotels, then urging him to be optimistic about releasing restrictions, it seems we don't know what we are talking about and have failed to inform the public and serve the public interest.'

That's my interpretation of the data available. The First Wave could be referred to as the 'First Class' wave and the Second Wave the Second Class. It's a story of demographics and vulnerabilities, one that echoes around the world on multiple scales.

Aziz and Louis

Though there are certainly more pressing and topical topics to talk about, in the spirit of recreational speculation, I want to talk about the intertwined tales of Louis CK and Aziz Ansari. Two high profile personalities that got #metoo-ed. I feel it worthy of talking about, because in my experience I'm surprised to find how few people are sympathetic to my take on both cases.

So as to not rehash the cases, I'll just link to Aziz' and Louis' if you need to familiarize yourself. In short my position is: Too harsh on Louis, too soft on Aziz. Speaking of course about the court that has had the highest jurisdiction throughout the #metoo era, which I tentatively assume has run its course, adaptations have been made and society returns to a status quo.

What prompts me to revisit this so 2017 of subjects was quite an incidental prompt. I guess during my local lock down I had binge-watched the US adaptation of the Office, and then followed the showrunner's into their next production 'Parks and Recreation' which stars Aziz Ansari who gets second billing after Amy Poehler. Louis CK guest stars in a recurring role in that series as a police officer and love interest to Amy's character, having some scenes with Aziz Ansari. All serving to remind me of the parallels and contrasts of the two men's cases. (perhaps more consequentially, that Amy, Aziz and Louis have their agent, Dave Becky in common).

The second coincidental prompt was receiving an unexpected message from a friend, informing me that they had had to block a mutual friend of ours, and was letting me know on the off chance they attempted to reach them via me. I actually don't know the details or background or context there, I know almost nothing at all, beyond what was asked of me which I shall respect, and wasn't asked of me which I also respect. For example, it left me in a position where while I find the scenario in the abstract quite plausible I have to extend a presumption of innocence. This was somebody communicating to me their personal boundaries, not calling for me to doff my shining armor and ride out on a crusade with them.

But for me, left with the context I have, it functioned as somewhat of a vindication of a social phenomena I observe, but don't see commented on that much: In brief, hypocrisy. With a little more detail, people who say all the right things in public, but who's private conduct contradicts their professed values. It's wide spread, and well established, for what to my nearest guess has been at least a century, been referred to as 'lip service' and the behavior I'm confident is documented in texts at least as old as Machiavelli's 'The Prince' probably the writings of earlier Romans and Greeks, and I would not be surprised if it gets addressed in old testament scriptures and the earlier Hindu texts, Hammurabi's code, and there's some Sumerian cuneiform tablet somewhere in a museum or yet to be excavated from Iraq bitching about sycophants, though I personally am not going to bother to check.

Contemporary to when I'm writing this behavior is referred to as 'virtue signalling' and the linked article does I feel justice to the merits and pitfalls of its use, I tend to think of virtue signalling as analogous to mansplaining - both are definitely a thing, but owing to a general incompetence at diagnosing the phenomena as and when they occur, it is more often used as an Ad Hominem to shut down a speaker, virtue signalling from the right/mansplaining from the left.

While not innocent of virtue signalling, Louis is more often guilty of 'vice signalling' and there is a particularly well argued podcast (actually as this podcast is published in 2019, David McRaney may have removed Louis CK as an example) that makes the case his career is based on exploiting the psychological phenomena of pluralistic ignorance.

Here is an excerpt from podcaster David McRaney's book: 'You Can Beat Your Brain' which may be an alternate title from where I most likely heard it in his book 'You Are Now Less Dumb':

When the comedian Louis CK reveals to his audience that he sometimes thinks his children are assholes, that they are not exempt from the normal frustrations he feels towards adults, he mass-produces an epiphanous sigh night after night. His audiences suffering from pluralistic ignorance, realize in later conversation that their private thoughts about their own children are in fact the majority opinion. It is simply taboo to say it out loud.

That's pluralistic ignorance and how you can make a comedy career out of vice-signalling. So for every time Louis portrayed himself as particularly wise and a particularly excellent parent in his show 'Louis' there are 15 examples of him conveying himself as variously a creep, a pervert, superficial, with sexual hang-ups, stupid, irresponsible and a fuck-up. Louis was famous for talking publicly about his personal practices of masturbation. Less so, but it's there, for actively engaging in lies and deception etc.

Now by comparison, what, if anything has Aziz Ansari built his career out of? That's where I was finding it interesting to consider how intertwined the two men's careers ended up being. Prior to watching Park's and Recreation in full, I had kind of noticed that Aziz' show 'Master of None' was heavily inspired by, if not a rip-off of Louis' show Louis. (Again given Dave Becky is both men's agents and gets producer credits on both shows this is hardly surprising)

Setting that aside for a moment, the characters Aziz Ansari plays are in essence, just caricatures of himself in most cases - Tommy Haverford, the superficial government employee preoccupied with what other people think of him, swag, social media, being baller, clubs, ebonics... basically trying to be relevant and with it, while also feeling entitled and possessive of beautiful women. A character who is bad at stuff, but after shit goes wrong will turn up and say the right things.

Or Randy Springs in the movie 'Funny People' the hack comedian that is clueless about women, misogynistic to boot. Now while this role probably made no impression on nobody as near-nobody saw the film, I single it out because in one of Aziz Ansari's taped comedy specials, his whole final act is 'what would a special look like if I actually was Randy Springs?' and he does like 20~30 minutes in character as Randy. When not in character as Randy, Aziz Ansari's material is generally commentary on: R. Kelly, Kanye West, Social Media, Food trends and Pornography. Personally where Aziz shines the most is actually drawing on material from his chubby cousin - roughly analogous to the Ricky Gervais Show's podcast drawing most of its material and legs from Karl Pilkington.

Much as I might resist it, it is rare for me to write a blog post and not think of Nassim Nicholas Taleb in some way, on this occasion it's his aphorism 'The opposite of success isn't failure, it's name dropping.' and it's amazing how much and nearly how uniquely Aziz drops the names of his celebrity friends into his shows - or maybe it's just Kanye West... the only comparison I can think of is Eddie Murphy in his special Raw dropping the name of Bill Cosby who called him up to tell him what comedy was all about, and then dropping the name of Richard Pryor whom he called after getting off the phone with Cosby to tell him Cosby had told him what comedy was all about.

Then there's 'Master of None', where Aziz plays what... a fictitious version of himself 'Dev Shah, a 30-year-old actor, mostly following his romantic, professional, and personal experiences.' who is obsessed with food and food trends (In one scene he meticulously researches where the best taco truck is) struggles with race and racism (He and fellow ethnic-Indian comedian both read for a sitcom and ask the question why they can't have two Indian cast members in a sitcom) who is somewhat emotionally immature (leading to jealousy and a breakup that catalyzes the second season's opening in Italy) but constantly virtue signals, particularly about how millenials need to appreciate their elders, like the episode that shows the backstories of his father and his friend's father respectively, or the episode in which he helps his girlfriends Grandma bust out of her nursing home and go to a red-sauce Italian restaurant where Aziz again learns to appreciate his elders and a revivalist food trend.

The only vice signalling Aziz does in his career is act like a petulant child when he doesn't get his way. The rest is all about him realizing how hard it is for POCs, how hard it is for women, how we take the elderly for granted, name dropping and how all over the social media game he is.

Louis CK by contrast generally plays a guy who is awkward with, and lacks confidence around women, often crossing definitive lines like locking up his romantic rival in Parks & Recreation in order to try and win back his ex Leslie Knope. Having an extramarital affair in Blue Jasmine without letting his mistress know she is a mistress. Even when playing himself in Louis, it's mostly him fucking things up, being unpopular, alienating himself... and there's a scene where he is depicted as having a habit of asking out all the attractive young wait staff at the comedy club on dates until he is told to stop. Then he reluctantly goes on a date with a fat waitress who gives him a serve about why he won't date her just because she's overweight.

Louis tends to depict himself in unflattering ways, or having things explained to him by characters wiser than himself, where Aziz falls back constantly on 'you know I've learned something today...'

So if you haven't guessed, prior to the respective #metoo incidents going down, I held Louis and Aziz in very different esteem. With Louis being a very honest creep, world-class possibly generation defining comic, a talented director and editor, an innovator, writer and actor of some promise. By contrast my views of Aziz Ansari haven't changed much, Aziz feels like somebody I've known since adolescence, in my high-school I would have disparaged him as a 'try-hard' someone desperate for relevance, consumed with what the right shoes are, what hair cut is in, what bands to be listening to, what parties are going on and what drugs the other kids are taking.

I regard him as a competent hack, easily caricatured into a Kenny Bania archetype, his success is undeniable but he's tapping into a market I don't personally identify with and speaking to a life experience I don't share... you know one that gives a shit what Kanye and the Kardashians are doing, and consults Yelp reviews to decide where to eat.

Probably in my opinion, Aziz' best work would be his book 'Modern Love' which I actually thoroughly enjoyed, and kudos to him for stumbling across something in the zeitgeist worth addressing. However, even there, like my friend said of Bradd Pitt in any role, it's actually easy to imagine numerous candidates that would have been better handling the subject - Alain De Botton, Helen Fisher, Esther Perel, Brene Brown, Malcolm Gladwell, Michael Lewis... they didn't, he did, so kudos to capitalism. Aziz' personal interests still detracted from the book, like discussing his need to sample Ramen places when he visited Japan to research his book, he can't seem to resist reminding me constantly how cloyingly desperate he is to be accepted, to be esteemed by youth culture.

Aziz and I probably only have an inborn suspicion of guys who wear fedoras in common. A trend that has probably passed us by now, as fedora fans became self-aware of the fedora meme and have now abandoned this reliable warning sign to not get entangled with them.

But then there's the similarities between Louis and Aziz - they both tend to play caricatures of themselves, Louis overlooks the questionable conduct of Woody Allen and pays homage to him in his work/arguably flagrantly ripping him off, Aziz overlooks the questionable conduct of Louis CK and pays homage to him in his work/arguably flagrantly ripping him off. Both men you can dredge up clips of them making articulate arguments in support of feminist positions, Louis is far more candid about his hypocrisy generally, owning it, and then both men manifest to varying degrees conduct amounting to prioritizing their personal gratification over the comfort of women and objectifying women.

The similarities though diminish once you look at the respective behaviors from professional and legal frameworks, in which context Louis' conduct is objectively worse. Aziz' conduct is in the context of a date between consenting adults and he pleaded quite plausibly, incompetence. It was a date where he was horny, and assertive to the point of being pushy and dismissive of the wishes of his sexual partner. Louis asked female colleagues, including subordinates to watch him masturbate, and called them while masturbating. It's been a while since I reviewed what is established fact and what is alleged, but he also in conjunction with his manager appears to have tried to cover up his misconduct or particularly apply pressure to Tig Notaro to drop the subject... Louis also relatively quickly offered a mea culpa, utilizing his intelligence to apologize competently, it is also alleged that he sought out a number of his victims years earlier than the 2017 expose piece in the New York Times and apologized to them for his conduct.

So generally what I come across in the commentary on these two cases is that most commentators state unequivocally that what Louis did, in terms of his sexual misconduct is wrong. And the consensus around Aziz was that what he did, amounts to a bad date.

I would extend a benefit of the doubt to both men, since it can't really be proven that they genuinely failed to consider or were oblivious to their ability to apply pressure/stress to the women in order to obtain their consent. Which is to say, incompetence not malice.

It is harder to extend this charity to Louis, because it is hard to imagine the community context in which an individual would think 'here's what is a nice gesture, ask women to watch or listen to or otherwise witness you masturbate.' it doesn't convene with any of my experiences of being a heterosexual man. This isn't a fantasy expressed and validated in locker rooms or boys dorms on school camps. It stretches credulity that someone would assume that conduct is okay, or within normality. But then again, the internet is a large place with many forums available.

Here though, I want to detwine the two individuals and essentially get Louis out of the way.

Louis' Case

I feel my main point of contention with my perception of how most people view Louis CK is the para-legality of it. I don't have any answers, I suspect there aren't any answers. I'm aware we cannot even say that the legal system in any jurisdiction I'm aware of, is consistent.

What often gets lost with Louis CK I suspect, is the timeline, or a clear understanding of his timeline. The most recent cited allegation in the article that had effectively earned Louis' conviction in the court of public opinion prior to it being published in 2017 was from 2005. His 5 accusers all testified to sexual misconduct occuring between 2002-05. Louis gets divorced in 2008, he is a guest star on Parks and Rec. in 2009, and has his breakout comedy special that year. He first came to my attention with a 'who the fuck is that guy' in 2011-12 when I saw him appear alongside Chris Rock, Jerry Seinfeld and Ricky Gervais in 'Talking Funny' on HBO.

The article detailing the allegations against him cites that he actually privately contacted two of his victims some years later and expressed his remorse and apologies. Keeping in mind, there's no disparity here between public offense/private apology, it was private-private.

Now all of this could be revised through further allegations indicating Louis' misconduct was ongoing right up until or beyond the article's publication in 2017. But there's as of writing no evidence this was the case.

What I suspect is at play in Louis CK's case is an offense against the 'Just-World Hypothesis' the intuition that bad things happen to bad people and good people are rewarded. That in a situation where there is a largely unknown male comedian and an unknown female comedian, and locks the door takes off his clothes and masturbates in front of the female, it is not supposed to be the male comedian that goes onto to have the breakout career and the female to remain in obscurity. The fairy tale goes that the innocent victim rallys through adversity and becomes the funniest comic in the world and the male perpetrator winds up selling fruit barefoot on the side of a road.

It may also insult the common intuition of the halo-effect. Most commonly expressed as our inability to see beautiful people as stupid, in Louis case, revelations about his sexual misconduct stress our ability to understand how it could be completely independent of his artistic abilities. It at the very least appears to certainly be the case that many people can't find a bit about air-plane travel funny anymore because Louis likes to take all his clothes off and masturbate to completion in front of women. I've also heard reports of people unable to enjoy Billy-Jean when it comes on the radio anymore because Michael likes to lick the butt holes of young boys while their parents sleep down the hall. I've experienced this conflation somewhat myself, I used to love Pate as a kid, until I found out Pate is goose liver paste, these days though, I mostly don't eat it because it went out of fashion, it's never put out at parties. I suspect, that I no longer care and if someone served me Pate, which increasingly, is likely to be home made, I would eat it.

In short, people like Tig Notaro, learned something distasteful about Louis CK that changed their opinion of him. Then everyone reacted.

I do believe there is a 'there' there. There is something like Louis stole his career by obfuscating facts about himself that may have changed things. I don't know what you do about that though.

Consider, as a hypothetical, that you are CEO of a company, and one day your HR manager approaches you and informs you that your 54 year old CFO Cheryl apparently used to steal cars for joyrides as a teenager, even crashing one into a pole. She never got busted though, and doesn't have a criminal record. Do you summon her to your office and revoke her access to the office parking, for concern for the other employees cars?

I feel probably not, unless there's some compelling reason to believe Cheryl still steals cars and goes on joyrides, and I'm not sure there's a compelling reason to believe Louis CK would resume asking women if he can jack off in front of them 12 years after the last time he is known to have done so. There are reasonable grounds to suspect he wont, like the lack of any recent victims willing to join the 5 named in the article, the fact that he got divorced, and that as his misconduct disappears his career takes off, indicating that he may have gotten his life and mental health somewhat together.

There's also an absence of professional assessment, even professional speculation as to what could have been going on with Louis and others who exhibit this kind of behavior. Is it about domination or humiliation? Is it a rationalization of avoiding an extra-marital affair through some self perceived loop-hole?

Most critically, is society in any further danger? The implicit answer has to be no. Because unlike Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein and Ron Jeremy no criminal charges were brought against Louis CK.

Bringing us to the problem of the barbarity of going paralegal - they misconduct appears to have stopped over a decade ago, so how does Louis demonstrate he has learned it is wrong, if he learned it was wrong and stopped way before the public found out? He offered an apology and took a big and immediate hit, but he wasn't handed a sentence, or parole period. A bunch of people basically disassociated themselves from him.

I don't know what the basis is for the concept of a 'statute of limitations' probably simply to make the legal system feasible, more practical than ethical, but I'd argue that one potential basis for a statute of limitations would be the pointlesslessness of incarcerating or otherwise impeding someone for behavior or conduct they have already demonstrably ceased. This argument may be captured in the 'Litigation of a long-dormant claim may result in more cruelty than justice.'

All that really was outstanding at the time of the article's publication, was that Louis CK did not disclose his misconduct himself. He didn't speak to them when Roseanne Barr raised them in the public domain, he didn't speak to them when Tig Notaro found out and took issue with him.

I would fault him for this, and I would fault him for the sexual misconduct, but to find out ten years+ after the misconduct has ceased, I'm not sure what to do. The obvious thing seems to be to pay damages to the victims, which can be worked out privately. The injustice of that is that for a woman who is sexually assaulted by her shift manager at Burger King, her assailant can't pay them between $200k~3 million like Louis CK can. But that's the risk Louis took in a situation entirely of his own making, women don't get to choose their offenders.

In terms of addressing systemic sexism, misogeny and sexual misconduct including men's violence against women, that won't be resolved through the public shaming and black-listing of individuals like Louis, but the people that employ him like FX (Disney) and his agent Dave Becky etc. Tig acquits herself well in that regard because as soon as she heard she sought clarification in order to immediately dissociate herself, whereas throughout the #metoo wave and through the Brian Epstein saga, my impression overwhelmingly was that most entities only dissociate when public opinion renders the association untenable commercially.

What I find cruel, is that Louis basically can't undo what he did. At the time that his conduct became general knowledge, I'm not sure what he could do apart from pay some damages with interest, I perhaps unfairly adopt the perspective of a sentencing Judge, that just doesn't see the point of sending this person to Jail as they appear to already be rehabilitated and that materially the incidental fact that they went on to exponentially increase their net worth, again assuming private settlements are to be made was unwittingly in part working for them.

Tig's concerns appear to be that she was used in a kind of 'feminist washing' pr campaign by Louis CK. I can understand the concern, it's even plausible, I just suspect it isn't provable and particularly when you consider it in conjunction with the evidence that Louis CK promoted other comic talents he liked through his vehicles like Todd Barry who gets featured in segments of 'Louis'. It is plausible that Louis, a decade on from when whatever motivated him to jerk off while women watched, was just a fan of Tig's work and wanted her to succeed. At this stage it's probably safe to say, that Tig successfully avoided being used in the way she feared Louis intended.

Then there's comedians like Hannah Gadsby, that appear to represent the camp that never is the appropriate time for Louis to start working again and he should basically be banned for life. There's probably some harsh conservative deterrent argument to be made, but I personally cannot by into the theory, nor the epistemic constructivism to get behind it. I suspect that like is observed in the parts of the world where thieves get their hands cut off, that thieves keep cropping up, and in the states where murderers and mentally handicapped people get executed that people keep killing and the day after Louis CK's 'I love you daddy' film got its distribution cancelled and Louis' voice over work got recast that Steve still thought it was a good idea to follow Jenny into the supply room and block her exit while he jacked off.

It's possible that Louis' actions cost the world another Hannah Gadsby, Michelle Wolf, Nicki Glaser, Mindy Kaling, Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman, Roseann Barr, Tig Notaro, Ali Wong etc. but it would still overwhelmingly be indirect. As in, it would be a hard burden of proof to reach that Louis' conduct was motivated by seeing his victims as competition and choosing to destroy them psychologically in order to eradicate the competition. It appears far more simple to interpret that Louis was motivated by egocentric sexual and personal hang-ups, and viewed his victims as objects not as competition.

Attention is ultimately scarce, in that way Louis' capacity to continue to perform draws on a limited resource. But there's no real substitutes in comedy. Dennis Leary is no real substitute of Bill Hicks, Joe Rogan is not a substitute for Bill Burr, Sandi Toksvig is not a substitute for Stephen Fry, Hannah Gadsby is not a substitute for Louis CK and in every case vice versa. I can understand theatres not wanting to book Louis CK, or streaming platforms not wanting to carry his content, but these are all individual choices, that people can be free to disagree with.

I recognize that under certain ideologies, the idea that Louis CK could 'come back' and even out earn Hannah Gadsby in a year or two could pose an existential threat. It's even likely that Hannah Gadsby will never earn in her lifetime as much money as Louis CK lost.

That zero-redemption policy leaves us in a place however where neurotic guys who struggle with their own sexuality are expected to do their best to cease to exist, they can't rehabilitate and they shouldn't be allowed to perform in their competency what society most values about them.

I guess what I'd be saying, is that I completely understand an individual like Hannah Gadsby arriving at the conclusion that art cannot be separated from artist and that she never wants to see Louis CK perform again, but she nor any interest group should be deciding that for anyone else.

It's taken legal systems a long time to learn to be humane and civilized, and it's only just getting there like now, as in now, now, some parts of the world have cracked the case and have more humane justice systems that also coincidentally produce better results. I personally do not need my pound of flesh to gratify my blood lust, or personal indignation.

I actually suspect, that I don't need the legal system of my country to intervene on my behalf to prevent me from having people that offend me, drawn and quartered in the public square. I get why we moved beyond that, but I am often left with the impression that most of my neighbors do need that intervention, they aren't sure why we can't just burn witches at the stake if a child dreamed they were copulating with Satan.

Bringing us back to...

Aziz' case

Everything with Aziz is in the context of:

"In 2014 he self-identified as a feminist, saying his girlfriend has helped influence him. Ansari also incorporated an episode about feminism titled "Ladies and Gentlemen" in Master of None. In an interview in 2015, he spoke about the episode's meaningfulness to him saying "I thought it was interesting that this is happening, yet so many people are unaware of it. And the problem is people aren't talking about it. What I've learned, as a guy, is to just ask women questions and listen to what they have to say. Go to your group of female friends and ask them about times they've experienced sexism at their job, and you'll get blown away by the things they tell you." (from his Wikipedia page, link inserted by me to synopsis/review of the episode)

You can read/revisit the Babe.net article if you feel a need to.

And then Aziz addresses it in his 2019 comedy special, which I have not watched owing to lack of interest, but the pull quote is from Aziz' wikipedia page:

"If this made not just me but other people be more thoughtful, then that's a good thing, and that's how I feel about it."

And much like Louis, this would probably benefit greatly from a clear timeline, which would go something like 2014 > self-identifies as a feminist, 2015 > releases book 'Modern Romance' featuring chapter on Buenos Aires, Argentina and the impacts of Machismo culture, among other in depth exploration of sexual politics, 2016 > Wins some Emmys for Master of None season 1, 2017 > releases Master of None season 2, goes on bad date. 2018 > Wins Golden Globe award for Master of none, girl from date tells story of date to Babe.net.

So Aziz' conduct occurs after his successful career, at the arguable height of his celebrity power (he could still become a Republican POTUS) having presented not just an onscreen persona in Dev, but his personal public persona. Keep in mind how upset people seem to be over Ellen Degeneres not living up to her 'be kind' public persona.

It's the sacking of Troy, and Louis CK is Achilles, or Hector, whatever side you want to identify with. I don't care, the point is Louis is going out day after day and being all like 'Imma gonna kill you! You are my enemy' except in this case it was 'I'm a nuerotic guy with low self esteem and sexual kinks and I talk a lot about masturbating and my obsession with young attractive women and how they are physically repulsed by me!' and then Louis gets outed in the media, Achilles kills Hector (or Paris kills Achilles) and a large community reacts with 'we assumed you were joking this whole time.'

Whereas Aziz Ansari is more like 'Hey Trojans, I'm a horse yeah, bring me inside your city gates it will please your gods.' which is to say, Aziz Ansari identified as a feminist, incorporated it into his creative output and interprets a request to slow down as moving to the couch and pointing at his crotch to request a blowjob. The recount of the date and Aziz' conduct might be inaccurate, it's not like there were no mitigating factors like the conduct of his date doing a lot to imply consent or at least mislead as to her willingness to participate in the sexual activity.

Just to my knowledge, Aziz has never given an alternative account (he may in the 2019 special I have not watched) particularly anything to the effect of 'I didn't say that thing about a glass of wine moving us to the second date' or 'I never said anything like "seems like you don't hate me"'

Even if his date feels validated after discussing it with numerous friends that his conduct constituted sexual assault, that doesn't mean her feeling is in anyway validated by law nor would meet the burden of proof to make a case.

The thing that bothers me about the Aziz Ansari case is in direct comparison to the fallout for Louis CK. I admittedly haven't dug into the media monitoring data, it probably remains true that Aziz' profile has never been as large as Louis CK (in line with their respective earning power) and that does 99% of the explaining why Louis recieves so much more criticism and resistance to resuming working than Aziz does. The other mitigating factor is that I assume, people feel visceral implicit differences between somebody using their power as a celebrity to pressure someone into being penetrated in the context of a consensual date, and somebody using the power of seniority or their role to pressure someone into consenting to watch them masturbate in the context of a workplace.

Analogous to the outrage felt over a women being murdered by a man who is a stranger, versus being murdered by her husband. Even if people never intelligibly articulate it, the respective public reactions imply that nested in the collective unconscious is an idea that either a) the offense is diminished by her choice of spouse or b) women remain the property of their husband or father or both.

I do not identify as a feminist, for reasons that I have explained many times but is highlighted by the case of Aziz Ansari - because it costs men nothing to be feminists. The one and only criteria for a man to be a feminist as near as I have been able to determine, is for men to say they are.

Where Aziz gets off lightly, is in not-being expelled from feminism having demonstrated a comprehensive cynicism. Unlike the criminal charge, I feel that case is incredibly easy to make.

The timing of Louis' comeback should essentially be left to Louis and whatever audience remains him, and dissenting opinions being free to dissent should not attempt to encroach or de-platform Louis. Aziz on the other hand, his comeback should be essentially contingent on creating a new non-hypocritical persona. That his experience may have prompted to think that maybe the scope of feminism reaches into how he conducts himself on a first date suggests that maybe feminism's membership threshold is too low.

One thing I take away from the whole Trump, Bryan Kavanaugh and the Christian single-issue voters is an impression of the Christian conservative voter base. The fact that they don't care about the conduct of these men, just that they are on team Pro-Life diminishes Christianity to mere tribalism, in-group loyalty. The tolerance of these men's conduct invalidates their belief system as a moral authority.

Aziz poses the same threat to feminism as a whole. How feminists react to Aziz' cynacism and hypocrisy says things to me about the movement in general. And yes, there's no amazon queen to make decrees of feminism, but there are informal consensus and champions that get more oxygen than others. It makes feminism look like 'We hate Louis because he won't grovel, he won't kowtow and pay lip-service, we are okay with Aziz because he pays lip-service.'

It moves from a movement I might actually identify with of 'we object to the treatment of women, we are equal in dignity and this conduct falls below our dignity as living feeling beings' to one I have no sympathy with of 'all we care about is solidarity, you're with us or against us, get the fuck out of the way of my will to power! Nietzsche ruuuuuuuuuuuuuuulllllllllles!'

I suspect, owing to phenomena like preference falsification, the market will fall inline with my expectations - Louis will get richer, Aziz' earning power will never recover.

I reserve the right to change my mind, once I have good reason to on both men. Further allegations, criminal charges etc. that substantiate that Louis has not in fact changed at all and has even become worse would be sufficient to change my mind. As would any evidence that Aziz Ansari can be taken at his word, or has learned or changed in some way. In Aziz case however, the great struggle is given the level of his hypocrasy, I'm not sure what would actually constitute that evidence, nor what a realistic time-frame is.

If Aziz was truly influenced by Louis CK, I guess something compelling would be if Aziz adopted a persona more in line with Louis' one of vice-signalling, similar to Kevin Hart, of basically presenting himself as 'yeah I'm a guy who's really insecure and would say anything, anything to get laid.' That may just cut it.