The Weekend in Foolish Attention

Bits and bytes of the week.

MASKED UP AND OVER. Oh, COVID-19, you gift that keeps on giving! It wasn’t enough to bring us lockdowns, toilet paper shortages, and Zoom happy hours. No, it had to give criminals the ultimate cheat code: socially acceptable face coverings. Masks went from “bank robber chic” to “public health necessity,” and you know some people couldn’t resist exploiting that loophole!

“Put on a mask! Protect yourself and others!” Yeah, sure! But let’s be real—while most of us were trying not to kill Grandma, some jerk was thinking, “Hey, now I can rob a liquor store and look like a Good Samaritan at the same time!” Ohhh, the irony!

Before the pandemic, if you walked into a bank with your face covered, you’d have cops surrounding you faster than you could say “stick up.” But during COVID? You could waltz in looking like a goddamn bandit from an old Western, and no one would bat an eye. “Oh, he’s just being responsible!” Responsible?! He’s carrying a bag with a dollar sign on it and pointing a gun! HOW MUCH MORE OBVIOUS DOES IT HAVE TO GET?!

And don’t even get me started on the surveillance footage. You know those poor security guards are pulling their hair out trying to identify these clowns. “Can you describe the suspect?” Uh, yeah. He was wearing a black mask. And a hoodie. And sunglasses. Oh, great! That narrows it down to literally EVERYONE IN THE PAST THREE YEARS.

Here’s the oyster in the clam: some of these morons thought they were geniuses. Like they invented the concept of hiding their face. Newsflash, genius: masks are not new! But noooo, you had to take a public health crisis and turn it into your personal heist movie. “Ocean’s Eleven, but make it a Walmart heist.”

KEEPING BUSY. The winter is a slow time for shows in the venue I work for so finding lots of projects to polish up the old girl has been top of mind. After the whirlwind of the fall I’m spending a lot of energy fixing things, coming up with better ways to accomplish the standard practices. It’s a nonprofit so money is tight so my mantra has become “Perfect cannot get in the way of better.”

In the meantime, I’m getting some quality work/life balance, nights off and time to write, enjoy the city’s many artistic offerings, and trying restaurants new to me. And, with my schedule evening out some, I’m even getting back into the gym which is a bit like my own form of meditation as well as the antidote to holiday weight gain.

Films like Babygirl are brave in that they acknowledge that women, empowered to have sex like men, will do exactly that—up to and including taking inappropriate liberties in the workplace with their much younger underlings. Where they fail is in pretending that this makes them heroic figures, as opposed to total sleazebags.—Kat Rosenfeld

FACEBORG SHOWS ITS TRUE COLORS. I left Faceborg almost nine years ago because social media in general feels like a lowest common denominator cesspool that somehow people love to wade in, covering themselves and everyone around them in shit. Looks like the septic tank overfloweth:

In a number of sweeping changes that will significantly alter the way that posts, videos and other content are moderated online, Meta will adjust its content review policies on Facebook and Instagram, getting rid of fact checkers and replacing them with user-generated “community notes,” similar to Elon Musk’s X, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday.

The changes come just before President-elect Donald Trump is set to take office. Trump and other Republicans have lambasted Zuckerberg and Meta for what they view as censorship of right-wing voices.

“Fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” Zuckerberg said in a video announcing the new policy Tuesday. “What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it’s gone too far.”

The simple reality is that people both lie to themselves about things and lie to others. Sometimes they get it wrong and proliferate the mistake by spreading the mistake far and wide. People are often bullies and aggressive with their opinions. The problem with social media is not the media but the social.

I capitulated last year and added an Instagram account that practically know one follows so I could send stupid videos to my few friends. Threads came along and I held out hope. I’ll lurk for a bit just to see how bad this all gets but soon enough, the social media blackout will fully reinstate.

In the months since the election, every major tech company executive has made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring of Donald Trump. It's not just Meta, not by a lot. Amazon, Apple, Uber, OpenAI, the list goes on and on. At this point trying to extract yourself from all of the companies that have bent the knee to Trump would involve extracting yourself from most of the internet. — Dan Sinker

MORAL GYMNASTICS. Let’s talk about Islamist terrorist apologists—the people who turn every act of barbarity into a twisted TED Talk about how it’s actually your fault. You know the type. A bomb goes off, innocent lives are lost, and they swoop in with their hot take: “Well, if the West hadn’t…” Stop. Just stop. If you’re halfway through blaming someone else for a deliberate act of mass murder, you’ve already lost the plot.

These apologists are masters of moral gymnastics, flipping logic on its head to defend the indefensible. “It’s a reaction to decades of oppression!” they say, as if that justifies mowing down civilians at a market or turning children into collateral damage. Guess what? Being angry at injustice doesn’t give you a free pass to strap on a suicide vest. Civilized people write op-eds, not manifestos with bomb diagrams.

And let’s not ignore their favorite trick: weaponizing cultural relativism. “You just don’t understand their struggle!” Oh, we understand it just fine. Struggles don’t justify slaughter. The minute you start hand-waving atrocities as “complicated” or “contextual,” you’re not a critical thinker—you’re an enabler with a thesaurus.

Apologists also love to deflect. “But what about the Crusades?” The Crusades? Really? That’s like excusing a drunk driver because someone else got a DUI 900 years ago. What’s next? “Well, the Romans were oppressive too”?

Here’s the truth: these apologists don’t care about justice. They care about narrative control. They want to twist the story to make monsters look misunderstood, and victims look complicit. But no amount of rationalizing turns terrorism into activism. If you find yourself defending the indefensible, maybe it’s time to step away from the debate—and the mirror—and ask why your moral compass is spinning like a ceiling fan.

CALIFORNIA BURNS. Yeah, Chicago is cold as hell right now but we only burned down that one time.

Like a man who keeps building a balsa wood home on the coast of Florida and wakes up over and over with it destroyed by nature thus goeth the homes built in a place that was always prone to fires but in the days of Earth fighting back it’s utter chaos. My heart genuinely goes out to those who have lost, well, everything to these horrors.

If anything, the entire spectre of people losing everything they have and often no real financial portfolio in place to bounce back is disheartening. Each of us works and does his best to scrap together a basic existence on the planet. Taxes, devices, rent or mortgages, slowly eeking out a life. How full of despair one must feel to see all of that industry, frustration, and often illusory sense of security burned to a pile of ash. Is it any wonder a significant percentage of the population just gives up?

---

Woof. 2025 is starting out a bit grim, amiright? Muscle through, Dear Readers, and find time to take a break from your multiple screens.