Sunday, December 29, 2024

Doom Report (Week -4: Goodbye, 2024)


The rapidity with which Musk and Trump are falling out is highly amusing to me.  I mean, they are two malignant narcissists: they were never going to be able to work together for long.  But I did think it would happen after he actually took office.  The fact that they just can’t wait to start sniping at each other is quite delightful to me.  Is this schadenfreude on my part?  Oh, certainly.  Does it make me a bad person?  Shit, I dunno; maybe.  Do I care?  Fuck no.

I should clarify: Trump and Musk have not quite started going directly at each other.  Mostly what’s been happening over the holidays is that Musk (in typical Musk fashion) could not wait to start putting his agenda out there, and part of his agenda is to ramp up H-1B visas: people on such visas don’t typically ask for raises, and they certainly can’t unionize, so they’re sort of the perfect workforce for someone like Musk.  But, see, the crazy MAGA-heads don’t want more immigrants: they’re busy trying to get rid of all the ones we already have.  And they (in typical crazy MAGA fashion) don’t much care who’s footing the bill—they’ll spew all over whoever gets in their way.  So it’s less Trump going after Musk and more Steve Bannon and Matt Gaetz and ever-reliable looney Laura Loomer doing so.  If you want a breakdown of the ongoing saga, which I would title “Vicious Tweets,” you could watch a recent BTC video, but, trust me: you don’t actually want that.  It has all the high intellectualism of a middle school mean girls drama (the high school equivalent would have much more depth, believe it or not) and even lacks the draw of making you want to root for one side or the other, because in this case both sides are equally execrable.  Just take my word for it that it’s all unraveling before it’s even gotten started.

Now, Trump has been conspiciously missing from these articulate “you’re a poopyhead!” “nuh-unh! you are!” exchanges, because he actually does know (and, apparently, care) where the money’s coming from.  Remember, people like Bannon and kids-in-cages architect Stephen Miller appear to be true White Nationalist believers, but Trump is strictly in it for the money.  He’s not Christian, but he’ll take money from the Christians (see also: $60 Bible).  He’s not a neo-Nazi, but he’ll take money from the neo-Nazis (stand by, Proud Boys!).  For Trump, being President is the ultimate grift: he overcharges the Secret Service for staying in his hotels, secured billions from the Saudis by going through Jared Kushner, and conned ABC into donating $15 million not by having a great case (the case was almost certainly unwinnable), but because parent company Disney didn’t really want to be on the wrong side of the incoming administration.  At this point, he’s basically selling cabinet positions and ambassadorships: we will soon have a cabinet with a net worth of over $10 billion dollars, and that’s not even considering Musk, whose “department” is not even a real department, so he won’t be part of the cabinet.  So Trump knows where his bread is buttered, and he’s not quite willing to join in with the MAGA nutjobs.

BUT.  At the same time, Trump hates it when people other than him get attention.  And the Democrats know this, and so they started the whole “President Musk” meme.  Just as they knew that talking about his dwindling crowd sizes would get under his skin, they’re transparently playing him, trying to drive a wedge between him and Musk.  And the great thing about playing this game with Trump is that it always works, no matter how obviously you do it.  So where I see the true friction—the real breakdown of the bromance—is in this fantastic clip where he goes back and forth, nearly Gollum-like, between praising Musk and snidely pointing out that he can’t be president, because he wasn’t born here.  You really have to listen to that part of the clip: the fake, Nelson Muntz-like laugh at Musk’s foreign-born status, followed by a whiplash-inducing “nah, he’s a great guy” is so revealing.  If the Dems can keep the whole “President Musk” thing in the news for a bit longer, that’ll solve the problem right there.

But the pitched battle over immigration—“absolutely no one” on the one side vs “only the ‘good’ ones” on the other—is also pretty entertaining to watch, though I’m not sure it will lead to the dissolution as fast as the President Musk bit.  At the end of the day, Trump likes people like Bannon and Loomer because they worship him.  But he doesn’t need them.  If they become inconvenient, he’ll ditch them in a heartbeat, as he has so many others.  Loyalty is never rewarded in Trump-world; Trump lives by the credo of the old Janet Jackson song: what have you done for me lately?  So, from his perspective, he’s happy to sit back and watch them fight it out—he probably thinks of himself as a Roman emperor, facilitating gladiatorial “survival of the fittest” fantasies—but I think that if he has to pick, he’ll go with the checkbook.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the show in the meantime.

Because we must take our joys where we can find them.  Though that clip doesn’t show it, the speech Trump is giving there is the same one where he said this:

On my first day back in the Oval Office, I will sign a historic slate of executive orders to close our border to illegal aliens and stop the invasion of our country.  And on that same day, we will begin the largest deportation operation in American history, larger even than that of President Dwight D Eisenhower.

Of course, the deportation is a grift as well: the value of the private prison industry is soaring right now, and which company gets to lock up all those prospective deportees will no doubt go to whichever company manages to line the pockets of the Trump family most effectively.  But that doesn’t ameliorate the wave of human misery that is about to be unleashed.  I’ve heard many commentators point out that this will be radically unpopular and may be the very thing that costs the Repubs control of the government ... but there’s a real cost to real people in the meantime.  Will some of those rounded up end up being Americans who actually voted for Trump, possibly screaming “wait, wait: I didn’t think you meant me!” the whole time?  Maybe.  But not that many of them.  So, even if we’re cruel enough to revel in the classic joke of “I never thought leopards would eat my face,” sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party, it still wouldn’t be worth the cost to all those who never even got the chance to vote, because ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS DON’T VOTE ILLEGALLY.  Man, I thought the con man who convinced people to pay for bottles of something that comes out of the tap for free was a genius, but the hustler who managed to convince half the country that people terrified of being deported would risk their freedom to do something nearly half of Americans can’t be bothered to do ... man, that guy was really slick.  So the horrors, they are a-comin’, and thus we takes our small joys where we can find them, even when they’re a bit cruel.

And, by the way, if you find yourself a bit overwhelmed by the thought of all that human misery and unsure what to do about it, I’ll pass on a message from Jesse Thorn, founder of Maximum Fun and co-host of Judge John Hodgman, who’s worked with his wife Theresa for a couple of different immigrant advocacy organizations.  Jesse advises us to donate to Al Otro Lado (that’s “to the other side,” for those whose Spanish is a bit rusty).  While they’ve already nearly doubled their goal as I write this—blowing away the amount that Jesse and Theresa pledged to mach dollar for dollar—I’ve no doubt they’d still be happy to receive more financial help.  These are folks who provide free legal help to immigrants (remember: unlike most people who are arrested in our country, immigrants don’t have access to a free attorney), and, as Jesse said in a recent episode of JJH:

One of the pieces of good news that I can offer is, as cruel and unjust as our immigration system is for migrants, migrants who have legal representation and have legal assistance actually have a pretty good shot.  The reason is that our government is so incompetent that they always mess up a thousand things.

And that’s, once again, a bit of a sad place to find comfort, but, as I said: wherever we can find it.

Finally, I thought I’d address the “Trump can’t take the oath” thing that seems to be going around.  Remember how, in 2020, the MAGA crowd kept saying that Trump would just refuse to leave the White House, and that way he’d stay president?  Remember how we all laughed at them and shook our heads sadly at how deluded they were?  Well, liberals have their sad little delusions too, and this is one of them.  Let’s break it down.

Remember how Trump incited an insurrection?  And remember how the 14th Amendment says that people who do that can’t hold office?  Okay, now remember how several states sued to keep Trump off the ballot on the grounds that, you know, the 14th Amendment said he couldn’t be President?  And then remember how the Supreme Court said, fuck the Constitution! we work for Trump, and he can do whatever he wants!  Remember all that?  Well, it wasn’t quite like that.

See, the Supreme Court didn’t actually say that the 14th Amendment didn’t apply to Trump.  And they didn’t say that Trump wasn’t an insurrectionist ... because they couldn’t.  Although the Supreme Court has gotten very good lately at doing things they’re not supposed to be able to do, they weren’t actually willing to go as far as that.  See, one of the rules of an appeal to the Supreme Court is that they’re not there to overturn what’s called “findings of fact.” And the Colorado courts (and a couple of others as well) had adjudicated Trump as an insurrectionist as a finding of fact.  So the Supreme Court couldn’t (theoretically) even look at that aspect.  They just had to decide whether that fact meant that he could be kept off the ballot.  And what they decided, in the end, was that the 14th Amendment never says an insurrectionist can’t run for President ... only that they can’t take the oath of office.  So taking someone off the ballot isn’t an option.

But now (so the liberal delusion goes) it’s actually time for that oath of office, and so now the 14th Amendment will kick in and Trump can’t become President.  See?  Where this fantasy falls apart is, of course, that the person administering the oath of office is ... the chief justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts.  And remember how the Supreme Court works for Trump?  Well, it might be more fair to say that the 6 conservatives on the Court work for Trump.  And, actually, it might be even more fair to say that Alito and Thomas work for Trump—and even more fair to point out that Thomas just works for whoever pays him the most—while Roberts, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh work for the Conservative legal movement (and Barrett sort of does too, though I suspect that one day she’ll be more of a moderate than most people think at the moment).  But I think that’s a distinction without a difference in this case: Roberts has absolutely no problem with ignoring the whole inconvenience of the 14th Amendment and giving Trump the Oath, which he will do, and there we’ll have it.  It’s a really pretty fantasy, guys, but it’s just that.

So that’s where we are, here at the end of another fairly awful year.  Do I wish I were talking more about, say, the fact that a favorite hobby of mine has returned after nearly 15 years being out of print?  Sure.  Or that I were talking about how my middle child (typically referred to in these posts as “the Smaller Animal,” despite the fact that they’re now the tallest of my children, and nearly a foot taller than myself) became an adult this year, getting to vote in their first Presidential election?  Definitely.  But we are where we are, and there’s no use crying over spilled water under the bridge or what-have-you.  The year has held a few bright spots, but mostly it’s been a great steaming pile of shit, and I don’t think I’ll be too sad to see the back of it.  Next year?  I mean, honestly I don’t hold out a lot of hope.  So I’ll take my amusements—like watching idiots such as Loomer and Musk go at each other like the Real Housewives of MAGAwhile I can still get ’em.  Wherever we can find it.









Sunday, December 22, 2024

Everything's gonna be cool this Christmas


This week, we’ve all been ridiculously sick.  Which is a shame too, because I totally wanted to talk about the whole “President Musk” meme.  But I’m sure there’ll be time for that later.  Till then.









Sunday, December 15, 2024

Doom Report (Week -6)


This week, I really enjoyed The Weekly Show, where Jon Stewart interviewed billionaire Mark Cuban.  Cuban is famous for supplanting Warren Buffet as “the good billionaire”: a billionaire who seems to want to do some good in the world instead of just screwing over everyone else.  When Stewart talks about how people only rail againt billionaires on the “other” side—basically, that whatever billionaires do is fine, but only if they’re “our” billionaires—the billionaires he’s talking about as being “ours” are Cuban, Buffet, and perhaps George Soros, who of course has long been the boogeyman billionaire of Fox “News,” where they constantly trot him out to cover for the much more sinister billionaires behind the curtain that are propping them up, like Murdoch and the Koch Brothers and Harlan Crow (most notable for being the “emotional support billionaire,” as the ladies of Strict Scrutiny put it, of at least one Supreme Court justice).  One gets the idea that Stewart is vaguely saying that all billionaires are probably bad, though he typically has a good enough time talking to Cuban that he doesn’t want to go quite that far explicitly.  And, if you’d like to hear a well-reasoned rant on why all billionaires are bad, Adam Conover has you covered, and, if you’d like to hear specifically why George Soros is the target of so many right-wing conspiracies, and which ones may actually have some foundation in reality, the Some More News team has got you covered there too.  But, in general, I think that people like Cuban—and maybe even only Cuban, since I’ve never heard Buffet or Soros talk as openly about their philosophies—are a fascinating mix of good billionaire and bad billionaire.  Many people (such as Ingrid Robeyns and, to a lesser extent, Bernie Sanders) have argued that you can’t be both a billionaire and a good person, and I think there’s some grain of truth to that.  Certainly there are times when I’ve listened to Cuban and thought, ah, there’s the coldness and moral apathy that earned him those billions.  But there are also times when he says things that are both articulate and progressive.  So I always have a fun time listening to his interviews.

I noted this one for a couple of places where he seemed to be agreeing with some of my prior posts.  For instance, when talking about AI, he said this:

Cuban: Then there’s using AI.  And so there are things like NEPA, which go into the environmental protection stuff to try to find out if there’s a little frog or whatever before something’s built.  In my opinion, in the conversations I had with some of the Harris folks, is that’s where AI really, really can apply.  Because there’s a process designed for the people in NEPA who go through and determine what should be approved and what data is required and what friction should be added or what friction should be removed.  Artificial intelligence is great for that. All the rules that the individuals on those councils and boards that make those determinations, they have rules that they follow. They have guidebooks that they follow.

Stewart: It’s onerous.

Cuban: Yeah, it’s onerous.  There’s tons of bureaucracy, but tons of data there.  You put that into artificial intelligence,
into a large language model, and you use that to train the large language model.  And then when a new project comes along, you set up agents which then feed the questions and the answers, and the answers to the responses to that new organization, whatever it is they may be building.

Which is exactly correct: this is using AI in how it’s meant to be used.  There’s a process, and it takes a long time for humans to complete that process, but a computer can do it faster.  Up until now, whenever that process involved people weighing different abstract factors and trying to figure out what’s the best approach, you just couldn’t use a computer to speed things up, because computers can’t do that.  But AIs—more specifically, LLMs—can.  (You can read more of my thoughts on the current crop of AIs in my post questioning is AI intelligent and several other posts: just click “technology” in the “Things about Things” box over there to the left.)

But Jon comes back with this:

Stewart: Does that abdicate our autonomy?  ...

Cuban: ...  The challenge is, who makes that decision?  When it’s obvious, it’s easy.  When it’s not so obvious, it’s far more difficult.  And so that’s where the AI comes in and large language models.  Because across the breadth, however many instances of evaluations that need to take place across the country, you don’t want individuals having to make those decisions.

Stewart: But I thought that’s the whole point.  I thought the whole point of people running for office is that they’ve got a vision and they earn our trust, as opposed to AI. And this, again, may be more of the Luddite’s view of not understanding ... AI. I’m nervous about abdicating that.  At least with people, there is a certain regime of accountability that we can bring through.  I can’t vote out a large language model.

And Cuban was, surprisingly, not able to mount a cogent response to this.  I, however, am.
  • You can’t vote out the dozens—sometimes hundreds—of people in the EPA or whichever bureaucracy we’re talking about who are making the decisions about how to navigate all those regulations either.  You can vote out the guy at the top, maybe, but they’re just the person who either approved or rejected the work of all those faceless bureaucrats.  How is that different from the AI example?  Asking the AI to help make a decision doesn’t automatically mean that there’s not someone at the end of the day who will either approve or reject the AI’s plan.
  • Jon says it would be better to just get rid of all the red tape.  Well, duh.  Of course that would be better.  Sadly, the “science fiction” plan of replacing the work of all those bureaucrats with AI is more feasible (and likely) than any plan to reduce the current bureaucracy of our governmental agencies.
  • Jon also says that people can cut through the red tape too, like Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro did when fixing the collapse of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia.  Cuban points out that humans can do things quickly when the answer is easy, but not so much when the answer is harder.  This is vaguely correct, but it doesn’t explain things well enough.  He was closer when he talked about the “little frog.” There are always going to be cases where the “right” decision means weighing environmental factors vs economic ones (to take a simple example), and for the most part we have a tendency to devolove into camps.  There are people who are always going to take the side of the environment, regardless of the cost, and there are people who are always going to take the side of the business, regardless of the impact on the planet.  But an AI doesn’t have a predetermined agenda.  It can weigh factors, given all the background context, and make a dispassionate decision on where to draw the balance.
  • And, despite the fact that people are predisposed (by scifi thrillers, mostly) to believe that AIs are black boxes and we can never understand how they arrive at their decisions, the truth is that, at least for the LLMs that are currently what we mean when we say “AI,” we actually do know exactly how they arrive at those decisions.  LLMs use something called “chain of thought reasoning” (usually abbreviated in LLM literature as CoT), which basically means that LLMs “think out loud” so that humans can review all their logic and make sure it’s sound.
  • Which also knocks down Jon’s other objection (which is expanded upon in the show’s closing segments, where his producers talk about the very real cases of people losing their jobs to AI): that this process will eliminate people’s jobs.  Sure, in business this is a very real problem: many businesses look at AI as a way to save money, and eliminating jobs is one way to do that.  But that ain’t an AI problem.  Why do so many companies lay off people right around Christmas?  Because it makes their bottom line look better at end-of-year.  Companies killing jobs to improve their bottom lines ain’t an AI problem: it’s a shitty company problem.  But government is different.  Most government workers have protection from being downsized in this fashion.  Plus, the whole reason all this red tape takes forever is that the government is constantly understaffed.  Having AI make decisions which are then reviewed by experts doesn’t in any way reduce how many people you need to get the thing accomplished: it only reduces the amount of time those people have to devote to the job.

Anyway, another place Cuban appeared to agree with me is on the topic of insurance, which I broached in a long tangent last week.

Cuban: But it gets worse.  It gets worse.  And so now these providers, the hospitals and doctors, they negotiate with the big insurance companies.  And it’s fascinating.  If you walk into a hospital to pay for an MRI, as an example, and you don’t mention your insurance, you just say, I want a cash price, they’ll probably say it’s $350 to $450, depending on where you live.  That same hospital will negotiate with what they call the BUCAs, the big insurance companies.  For that same thing, they’ll negotiate a price of $2,000.

Stewart: What?

Cuban: Yeah.  So you would think that big insurance company negotiating with the hospital and that insurance company
covers millions of lives.  They insure or deal with—

Stewart: Why wouldn’t they negotiate that if it’s a bulk thing to $100?  Why would it be higher?

Cuban: Because the hospital needs the insurance company as a sales funnel to bring patients in so they can pay their bills. And the insurance company wants that price to be higher, particularly for things like the ACA, because the ACA requires for all the plans they cover that they spend up to 85%.

Again, I’m not sure Cuban is explaining it particularly well, but remember how I put it last week: “companies couldn’t charge that much for medical care if the insurance companies weren’t picking everyone’s pockets ...  insurance is enabling the whole cycle.”

Anyway, that’s my too-long review of the Mark Cuban interview.  I’ll just ding Stewart one last time—and I really do love Jon Stewart, don’t get me wrong, but he’s not always right, and I’m not afraid to call him out on it—on some lack of self awareness.  In the wrap-up with his producers, he reiterates his skepticism on using AI that I talked about above: he refers to it as “dystopian” and then extrapolates to “hey, just so we’re clear here, you’re saying that the computer controls the entire hospital and decides what oxygen to turn on and turn off through analytics?” Then, less than a minute later, he answers a listener question about what he thinks his mistakes were for the year.

Well, you guys know this.  I get annoyed at myself for being a little high-horsey.  And you get a little of the sanctimony in there.  So I try to relax sometimes on the certainty of my opinions.

Oh, you get a little sanctimonious, do you?  You mean, like you did a few seconds ago?  Work harder on the relaxation part, my man.

But, all that aside, still a great host, very incisive, very trenchant.  Looking forward to more shows next year.









Sunday, December 8, 2024

Doom Report (Week -7: Stop Calling It Inflation!)


This week, many of my normal political shows collided, either in radical agreement, or complete contradiction.  While I’m not a political expert by any means, I do seem to have the advantage of apparently being the only person in the world watching all these sources at once.  At the very least, they’re definitely not watching each other.  Here, then, is my synthesis of the week’s news.

These are the shows I’ll be referencing throughout this week’s report; feel free to watch them yourselves and evaluate whether you think I’m fairly representing their views:

  • On this week’s episode of The Weekly Show, Jon Stewart interviews Bernie Sanders on “Rebuilding Trust & Efficacy in the Government”.  Stewart is of course the former host of The Daily Show, and is now back there one night a week; I trust I don’t need to explain who Sanders is.
  • On this week’s episode of Some More News, Cody Johnston and Katy Stoll do a fairly in-depth post-mortem on the election somewhat incisively titled “Is Everyone Stupid?” Cody and Katy were writers for Cracked.com, where they worked on a faux news report à la SNL’s “Weekend Update” called “Some News”; Some More News is a continuation of that.  They’re super-progressive and not particularly fond of the Democrats.
  • On this week’s episode of The Coffee Klatch, Robert Reich, Heather Lofthouse, and Michael Lahanas-Calderón do their weekly news roundup, this week entitled “Rage Against the Machine”.  Reich was Secretary of Labor under Bill Clinton (meaning he’s as old as Biden and Trump), and has been a professor and political pundit in the years since, mainly expounding on our growing income inequality (much like Sanders).  He cofounded Inequality Media; Lofthouse is the president of Inequality Media’s Civic Action org.  Calderon is their director of digital strategy, and the official Gen Z represntative on the panel.  These guys are fairly pro-Democrat and moderately progressive.
  • This week, Brian Tyler Cohen interviewed Mehdi Hasan on his YouTube channel.  BTC is a staunch Democrat, and the only “serious” news source that I picked up during the writer’s strike that I still watch.  He’s often too pro-Dem for my tastes, but he also covers things I can’t get elsewhere.  Mehdi is a British-born journalist perhaps most famous having his MSNBC show cancelled during the early days of the genocide in Gaza; the network said that fact that he was Muslim was “coincidental.” Yeah, right.  This year he started a new website and YouTube channel called Zeteo (a Greek word meaning “to seek out the truth”); contributors will reportedly include Greta Thunberg and Bassem Youssef.  He’s fairly liberal and not afraid to drop an F-bomb, so I might watch some of the Zeteo videos.1

So, first and foremost, we need to stop calling the horrible price increases we’re all dealing with “inflation.” I really think this is part of the messaging problem that the Kamala campaign was suffering from.  As I talked about in our last Doom Report, there does seem to be a strong concensus developing that a big part of Kamala’s defeat—if not the entirety of it—was because she toed the Biden party line that the economy is going great, even though people can easily see (and feel) that it really isn’t.  Mehdi Hasan talked about how the administration has done all these great economic things, but they aren’t getting “credit” for it.  BTC ate this up, since it reinforces the line he’s been harping on since the election: the right-wing media machine is very effective, and the left-wing media machine basically doesn’t exist.  And this, of course, is why voters were too stupid to realize that the economy is actually great.

I malign BTC, of course: he didn’t actually call the voters stupid.  Even Cody wouldn’t go that far, and he was hosting a video titled “Is Everyone Stupid?” But, in the first section, Cody opined that people aren’t stupid ... they just don’t know as much about politics as the rest of us.  You know, us smart people.  I’m being a bit unfair to Cody as well, but I think both of these takes are missing the point.  While it’s been reported that Google searches for “what are tarriffs” spiked after the election, understandably leading many to (figuratively) facepalm and wonder why folks couldn’t have Googled that before they voted, it’s still overly dismissive to ascribe this disconnect to ignorance.

So what, in my opinion, is the problem?  The problem is that the Democrats kept telling people that inflation was going down, and it was.  But prices aren’t coming down.  And that has nothing to do with inflation.  Inflation, as an economic term, is defined as follows: “a persistent, substantial rise in the general level of prices related to an increase in the volume of money and resulting in the loss of value of currency.” But when prices are high because corporations are just gouging us—which they can do because Reagan (primarily following the philosophy his solicitor general Robert Bork) gutted antitrust enforcement—that ain’t inflation.  Bork tried to convince us that consumers benefit from corporate mergers in his 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox, but 40+ years of actual experience (and data) show us that that’s bullshit.  If a corporation can raise prices, they will, and, during the pandemic, they could, so they did.  Why would they bother to bring them back down?  Well, in a marketplace with vigorous competition, they’d bring them back down because, if they didn’t, the competitors would eat their lunch.  But when you’re a company that controls 85% of the market (which is true of multiple industries in our country at this point), you’ve got no real competition, so fuck it: keep on gougin’.

So, when the Democrats were saying “inflation is down” and “the economy is much better,” they were right.  And also completely missing the point.  What they should have said is, “yes, you’re paying too much for everything these days, but it’s nothing to do with inflation: you’re getting screwed by corporations.”

And, here’s the fucked up part: as SMN pointed out, The Atlantic broke the story that Kamala wanted to go after big business, but apparently her brother-in-law Tony West—the chief legal officer of Über—wrote her a letter urging her not to do that.  So she didn’t.  So she lost.

Okay, I’m oversimplifying again.  But try to imagine how much different things would be if Kamala had answered the question “what will you do differently than Biden?” by saying “I’m going to go after these corporate oligarchs who are raping and pillaging our country and picking your pocket.” It makes for an interesting thought experiment at the very least.

Sadly, the Dems are not only not going to start doing that, they’re probably not going to start doing much of anything differently.  The people who advised Harris, as well as other Democratic strategists, are already looking for other people to blame.  In reponse to Maureen Dowd’s contention that “politically correct” language like “Latinx” and “BIPOC” are responsible for the Democrats’ loss, Katy Stoll responds:

Does she present any actual data that the term “BIPOC” alienated half of the country or more?  Let’s see ... no, no, that’s dumb.  Who needs data?  Data’s for wokes.  Also, as we already showed, there isn’t any data.  It’s just vibes.  But, beyond vibes, these people are transparently trying to cover their own asses.  Kamala Harris ran the campaign they wanted.  Joe Biden reads Matt Yglesias and watches Joe Scarborough.  They got the centrist, non-woke campaign they’re complaining that they didn’t, and now they’re scrambling to blame someone else, because that campaign lost.

Mehdi Hasan goes further:

We’ve seen ... all the team of advisors around Harris ... basically saying, we got nothing wrong.  We did nothing wrong, we’re not contrite, we have no apologies, we’d do it all the same.

Sure, it’s true that incumbents lost all around the world.  But, as Mehdi points out: okay, but why did they all lose?

They [Harris’ campaign strategists] keep going, “well, you have to understand: we inherited a really bad situation.  The internal polling was really bad.  Joe Biden was more unpopular than even you knew.” Then why the F did you not break with Biden ... ?  It actually makes it worse for them, not breaking with Biden, by them now admitting that they knew he was more unpopular than the public knew.  Because, then, the arguments were “oh, well, we can’t break with a sitting president”—you can if your internal polling is telling you that he is toxic and pulling you down.2

Blaming phrases like “Latinx” is just blame-shifting.  Sure, it’s true that, as a strategist pointed out in a clip that Katy showed, Latine people don’t themselves use “Latinx,” because it’s impossible to pronounce and it’s just weird.3  But to then extrpolate that that’s why Latine’s didn’t vote for Harris is just insane.  I’m not sure I want to go so far as Katy in saying that a lot of these liberal elites are just blaming minorities the same way that Republicans are, but it’s also fair to note that Maureen Dowd is absolutely a Boomer (and white): she’s just 6 years younger than Trump.

Look, at the end of the day, Jon Stewart nails the whole shebang right in the opening sentences of his interview:

But I got the sense that, what kind of happened to the Democrats was that they were in a position to defend a status quo that most voters—certainly, many—felt was no longer delivering for them.  ...  that many Democrats felt like: oh, no, we are improving your lives.  You just don’t realize it.

Sanders responds that, among other things, Citizens United has turned Congresspeople into employees of megacorps.  Which means that any party that wants to appeal to working class voters has two options: pretend that the system is working just fine, even when people can clearly see that it’s not, or .... you know, just lie.  Also known as, the Democratic strategy and the Republican strategy.  Sigh.

Reich bemoans that we now take democracy for granted (contrasting us with South Korea, who this week quashed a coup by barricading the doors of the National Assembly and just voting; Riech’s point was that democracy in South Korea is new enough that their people are still willing to fight for it).  But this is naïve: Stewart points out that defending democracy isn’t appealing to people for whom democracy is failing them.  Or, as BTC puts it:

By saying, “we have to protect our institutions; we have to protect our democracy,” for so many people out there for whom democracy (and our institutions) isn’t working, that is not the message they want to hear.  That is the message that’s going to push them away.

So what should the message be?  Mehdi points out that, with the exception of Joe Biden in 2020, when the Dems put up an “establishment” candidate (e.g. Kerry, Hillary, Kamala, Al Gore), they lose.  When they put up a “Washington outsider” (e.g. Clinton, Obama), they win.  And that’s probably not a coincidence.  As Cody pointed out, Obama won by running on hope and change.  Maybe we didn’t get enough of that once he actually got in office, but that’s what he ran on, and he won.  Twice.  When BTC asks why so many Dems won House seats even though the country shifted to the right in the Presidential election, and mentions the success of Golden in Maine and Perez in Washington, and wonders if they won because they tacked right, Mehdi responds:

You mention Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez: yeah, I don’t share their politics; they’re definitely to the right of me.  But, did they run right-wing campaigns, or did they run populist, authentic campaigns?  Did they say “right to repair” (in her case); ... “anti-monopoly” (in his case)?  All right, this is what we need to be talking about right now.  It’s not about whether you sign a tick-box of “I’m left,” “I’m right,” “I do these policies”; it’s about: Who are you fighting for? Do you have a fighting spirit? Do people know what you stand for? Are you authentic, or are you just a kind of, poll-tested, focus-group-tested, bland person who no one thinks is going to fight for them in Washington, D.C.?

Will the Dems do this?  Unlikely.  They’re still trapped by the corporate profit cycle.  Stewart and Sanders talked about the food corps spending all this money to design food which is making us diabetic, and then the drug corps spending all this money to develop drugs to cure our diabetes.  And they do this because it makes them money.  (I would have added that the insurance companies enable this.  You think you need insurance because otherwise you couldn’t afford medical care, but of course companies couldn’t charge that much for medical care if the insurance companies weren’t picking everyone’s pockets and funneling the cash to big pharma and big healthcare companies such as United Health Care.  If no one could afford to pay those exorbitant costs, we’d all just die and the companies would go out of business.  Instead, insurance is enabling the whole cycle.  But I digress.)  Stewart asks Sanders what it would take for Congress to wake up and understand how badly things are going for ordinary people, but Sanders points out that they do understand: it’s just that all the corporate money prevents them from voting their conscience.  Stewart says that that’s depressing: it means they know they’re screwing us and it’s all cynical.  Sanders counterpoints that when megacorps have millions of dollars to devote to destroying you in your next election, and you realize that the guy who replaces you could be much worse, it’s not you that sucks, but the system.

Basically, as Cody and Katy point out, the Repubs have the Dems playing defense, and you can’t win playing defense.  These episodes—and my synthesis of them—contains several ideas on how they might turn that around into playing offense, but they don’t seem inclined to want to do that.  Hell, take a simple example: Cody points out that campaign strategists told Walz to “lay off” calling the Repubs “weird,” even though it was actually working.  Mehdi goes further and says Walz was “buried”; when Walz badmouthed the electoral college; the Harris campaign disavowed his remarks, even though the American public really hates the electoral college.  Yeah, Tim: stop saying all that stuff that actually appeals to people!  Walz was really hard-done by these “strategists.”

Gaza is another place where the Dems could have made some inroads, but dropped the ball.  Mehdi said that he had at first decided that Trump’s margin was so large that the loss of Muslim-Americans over the Dems’ Gaza policy must not have made any difference.  But he later reconsidered: sure, 65% of Muslims voted for Harris, but it’s also true that Harris lost Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by a combined 230,000 votes (roughly).  If slightly more than 115,000 Muslim-Americans in those three states had switched from voting for Trump to voting for Kamala, she might well have won the electoral college while losing the popular vote (and what delicious irony that would have been).  Impossible to say whether he’s right on that score, but he also points out that, even above and beyond the numbers, vowing to do better than Biden on the Gaza situation would have at least been a difference from Biden, the lack of which was, again, her biggest weakness.

I’m also pretty sick of hearing this, which Reich repeated this week:

Well, in fairness, she only had 3 months.

THE ENTIRE UK GENERAL ELECTION TOOK 43 DAYS.  Kamala had 107.  Shut the fuck up about not having enough time.

Speaking of United Health Care (as I was a few paragraphs ago), their CEO was assassinated this week.  There was a lot of hand wringing about how awful it is that some people on the Internet are ... shall we say ... lacking in sympathy over this incident.  Lofthouse and Reich had this exchange:

Heather: But, so what are the big take-homes from this?  Medicare for all?
Reich: Well, I would say ... you can’t use somebody’s death ... to do anything with.

On which I have to call bullshit.  This is the crap that Republicans say when there’s a school shooting.  When a tragedy happens is exactly the time to talk about the factors that led up to it, and how we can change things to make sure it doesn’t happen again.  And it is possible to say that the killing of this man is a horrible tragey on a personal level, and to feel overwhelming grief for his family, and to note that he made $10 million dollars a year and that UHC has made a policy of denying claims which has led to the deaths of thousands of Americans ... probably more.  If you need more info on how terrible a company UHC is, More Perfect Union has a good video on the topic.  Does that mean he deserved to die?  No, of course not.  It also doesn’t mean we should pretend that none of that is true.4

I have two big takeaways.  The first is that the Democratic party is not the answer.  I am strongly considering joining the Working Families Party.  It’s in some ways a faction inside the Democratic party (much like the Tea Party Republicans), but also in many ways a completely separate party, with a strategy for creating a third party alternative that doesn’t take votes away from one party or another.  Which sounds like a fantasy, but they’ve been working at it since 1998, and they’ve achieved some amazing things.  On the city council of Philadelphia, there are 2 WFP members to only 1 Republican; on the Hartford CT city council, there are 3 WFP members and no Repubs at all.  In a few states, such as New York, you can vote for the Democratic candidate on a separate line; this helps the candidates understand where their support is coming from.  Beyond some good articles on the Internet, there are 3 videos that I think help people understand who they are:

Secondly, when I wrote my election reflections post, I went on for some time about how I hoped I was wrong about all my dire predictions.  I was somewhat pleased to hear Cody Johnston echo my words nearly exactly:

We have to assume Trump is going to do all the stuff he said he wants to do.  Granted, there are things that might prevent him from doing those things, and, if he is prevented from doing them, people are gonna call us alarmists for saying he’ll do bad stuff, but frankly, that would be great.  I would love—loveto be wrong.  I would love to prepare for the worst and for that to be a waste of time.  But that’s not gonna stop me from preparing.

Can’t sum it up better myself.



__________

1 But probably only the non-serious ones.  They have a series where they talk to comedians about news that sounds pretty interesting.

2 Yes, he actually said the letter “F” instead of “fuck.” It was early in the interview.  He loosened up a bit by the end.

3 If you need more details about this difference, there are good articles about that on the Internet.  Short answer: “Latinx” is a white people thing.

4 Speaking of More Perfect Union and healthcare, they just did a fantastic video on Medicare “Advantage”, which I, sadly, am rapidly approaching the age where I really need to know that.  Spoiler alert: it’s not particularly advantageous.











Sunday, December 1, 2024

Thankful for Heroscape (among other things)


This week was Thanksgiving, and I took an extra two days off, so I had sort of a 6-day weekend.  One of those days we ate a lot of food (but not so much turkey this year) and came up with some ideas of what we were thankful for.  (One of the things I was thankful for was that we didn’t have to have any of those uncomfortable conversations so many “news” stories lately have been telling us how to navigate—or trying to tell us, anyway.  With brilliant advice such as “avoid politics”—gee, ya think?—none of the ones I saw were actually particularly useful.  Thankfully, we didn’t have to worry about that because our Thanksgiving dinner comprised 4 people who all happen to have compatible political views.  But I digress.)

One of the days was spent having an all day (about 6 hours all told, I’d say) Heroscape battle: 3-way, 2v1, with me holding the heights against two swarm armies (Marro drones and vipers) run by the Smaller Animal (who, again, is way taller than me by this point) and one of his best friends who hasn’t played in a while.  And another day was another 3-way Heroscape battle (1v1v1 this time) with me, the Smaller Animal, and my youngest, who thus far had resisted playing (though they’re fully into the crafting aspects of making custom elements for the game).  But suddenly they found an army that interested them, and demanded we play for a second day in a row.  For the record, I won the 2v1 (primarily because I drafted a long-range army who was able to tear up the mostly-melee attacking armies before they could get close enough to engage), and the Smaller Animal won the 1v1v1 (because they chose a regenerating army that was devilishly difficult to exterminate permanently).

So it’s a been a family-focussed few days, and then it’s back to work tomorrow.  I think the break did me some good, and it should be fun to get back to work again.  Let’s find out.