Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts

Sunday, October 20, 2024

Wake up and smell the catfood in your bank account


Hey, look: two microposts for the price of one!


What Kamala Should Have Said

I’m sure by now everyone’s seen at least clips of Kamala’s Fox “News” interview with Bret Baier.  Several excerpts have been replayed ad nauseum, but the one that interested me was this one:

Bret: If that’s the case, why is half the country supporting him?  Why is he beating you in a lot of swing states?  Why—if he’s as bad as you say—that half of this country is now supporting this person who could be the 47th president of the United States?  Why is that happening?
Kamala: This is an election for President of the United States.  It’s not supposed to be easy.
Bret: I know, but ...
Kamala: It’s not supposed to be ... it is not supposed to be a cakewalk for anyone.
Bret: So, are they misguided, the 50%? Are they stupid?  What is it?
Kamala: Oh, God, I would never say that about the American people.  And, in fact, if you listen to Donald Trump, if you watch any of his rallies, he’s the one who tends to demean, and belittle, and diminish the American people.  He is the one who talks about an enemy within: an enemy within—talking about the American people, suggesting he would turn the American military on the American people.

Now, Kamala is currently getting credit for not “falling for” that “trap” (although it was so clumsy and obvious that I can’t really believe that anyone would have fallen for it), and I understand that she had her talking points that she needed to get out, and this was a score for her in that department.  But here’s what I wish she would have said instead:

Imagine there’s a user car salesman.  And he sells a lot of cars.  But the reason he keeps selling those cars is because he keeps telling lies: he makes claims about the cars that just plain aren’t true.  And people keep believing him, because they assume that he wouldn’t be allowed to outright lie like that.  Surely, they think, surely if he were completely making shit up, someone would come along and stop him, because that would be bad.  Probabaly illegal, even.  So he keeps conning people into buying the cars.  Now, in this situation, we wouldn’t blame the victims of this con job ... we wouldn’t say that the people buying these cars are stupid.  We have to blame the conman, right?  He’s the one doing the lying and cheating.

(And we could also blame the TV station who keeps showing ads saying how great this criminal is even though they know he’s lying.  But that might be too subtle for a Fox audience.)

So that’s what I wish she’d said.  And, I know, she needed to get her point in about the Nazi quotes Trump keeps spewing (quick, who said this, Hitler or Trump? “Those nations who are still opposed to us will some day recognize the greater enemy within. Then they will join us in a combined front.”*), and also there’s no way she could have gotten through an answer that long without Baier interrupting her.  Multiple times, even.  But, still ... that was the right answer, I think.


Beetlejuice Redux

This weekend we rewatched Beetlejuice, in preparation for watching Beetlejuice Beetlejuice next week.  Here are the the things I had to explain to my children:

  • This movie is so old that the “little girl” in this movie is the mom in Stranger Things.  (And you should have heard the gasps of disbelief.)
  • Who Ozzie and Harriet were.  And, looking back on it, that was an outdated reference at the time: the only reason I know anything about The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet is because of second-hand stories from my parents.  Not sure what Burton was thinking on that one.
  • The sandworms look like they escaped from The Nightmare Before Christmas because of Tim Burton’s involvement in both.
  • Why the concept of a “talking Marcel Marceau statue” is dumb (and therefore funny).
Despite all that, they really enjoyed it (again/still), and are now sufficiently refreshed on the story to watch the sequel.  Just in time for spooky season.



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* And are you willing to admit that you only knew it was Hitler because Trump isn’t that articulate?











Sunday, September 29, 2024

It's Easy to Criticize (But Cut It Out)


Some months ago, I wrote a politics post, which I framed as primarily being about third parties, but I also addressed this idea that that young people might not vote for Biden (primarily because of his stance on Palestine), and the conflicting attitudes that engendered from the “experts.” And I included a long quote from Democratic lawyer Marc Elias who was doing exactly what liberal podcaster David Rees said he wouldn’t do, and what liberal commentator (and former lawyer) Elie Mystal said one shouldn’t do: scolding people (especially young people) for saying they wouldn’t vote for Biden by fuming about how Trump would definitely be worse.

Well, the race is quite different now—what a difference nine months can make!—and yet many things haven’t changed.  I still hear Elias going off on those rants (although I tend to just fast-forward through them nowadays, because I know them by heart, and also they make me a bit queasy).  Look, Elias is a brilliant (and relentless) lawyer, and he’s out there fighting for voting rights in states across the country, and I’m so glad he’s doing it.  I have a great deal of respect for him.  But that doesn’t mean I can’t also criticize him when I think he’s wrong.  And he’s kind of a jerk on this topic.

See how it’s possible to like and appreciate someone and disagree with them?  Kind of like when people say they don’t agree with Biden’s take on the Israel/Palestine conflict (which is now morphing into the Israeal/Palestine/Lebanon conflict).  Instead of responding to that with a knee-jerk “but Trump would be worse!” perhaps it’s worthwhile to consider the closing words of Mystal’s article from The Nation that I quoted last time:

The people saying they won’t vote for Biden know that Trump would be worse.  They’re saying Biden should be better.

And, while Harris isn’t Biden, she definitely inherits his policies via guilt by association if nothing else.  Of course, if you believe Trump and Vance, those policies have ceased to be Biden’s policies altogether: they’re Harris’ policies now.  This is, of course, somewhat silly ... as Trump also said, the vice-presdient “makes no difference.” Harris was probably in the room when these decisions were made, but to imagine that she had any real control over them is just dumb.  So the truth of the matter is, we don’t actually know whether Harris’ approach to the Middle East would be as controversial as Biden’s.

But that, of course, is the problem.  She’s had plenty of chances to distance herself from the pro-genocide position, but has taken none of them.  At the Democratic convention, they had the opportunity to highlight pro-Palestinian voices, to vet the speeches ahead of time, to show the world that even people who disagree with her administration’s actions would still support her in the election.  Nope.  Not a single Palestinian-American voice was allowed on the stage, being instead consigned to hold protests outside.  And I’ve heard plenty of people say that this is the right move for her: that, by picking a side, she can only make things worse.  Which, maybe, is true.  But of course if you’re taking that attitude, then you just have to accept that some people are going to take the silence as proof of being just as bad as Biden.

And, yes, I use the term “pro-genocide” advisedly.  If you pay any attention to what Netanyahu and the members of his cabinet actually say, you know very well that they are remarkably open about their goals to eliminate the Palestinian people from the Earth, and that’s kind of what “genocide” actually means.  “The deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group” says Dictionary.com, quite succinctly.  When the deputy speaker of the Knesset says “Now we all have one common goal—erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth”, or when the Heritage Minister says it would be okay to nuke the population because “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza” (this presumably includes all the children: nearly half of the Palestinian population is under 18), or when the Defense Minister says “we will eliminate everything”, or when the major general in charge of the military in Gaza says “you wanted hell, you will get hell” ... when those are the things they say out loud, I’m not sure anyone can reasonably accuse me (or anyone else) of using the phrase “genocide” in an inflammatory way.  I consider it quite matter-of-fact, actually.

And the problem with sending a country a shit-ton of bombs and then saying that you had no idea that they were going to be used for whichever atrocity-du-jour they’ve been used for is that that only works if you then stop sending them bombs.  Which, you know, we haven’t.  Saying, “well, we told them that this was unacceptable and then just gave them more bombs” is not taking an anti-genocide stance.  So you can say my language is deliberately inflammatory when I call Biden’s policies “pro-genocide” if you like, but I stand by my statement that it’s more factual than incendiary.  And now they’re bombing even more people with the bombs we’re faithfully continuing to supply them with?  It’s utter insanity, I tell you.

But I digress.  I was reminded of this whole “scolding” thing yesterday while watching Robert Reich.  Now, I really like Reich.  Possibly because, like me, he’s an old liberaltwenty years older than I, even.  Possibly because he’s a short guy, like me (5 inches shorter than I, even).  Mostly because we agree on just about everything, and he can explain things pretty well on YouTube, which is defniitely a skill.  So I was a bit surprised to hear him say this:1

Why is this not getting through to people: why are there still so many people who are willing to say, well I’m going to go with Trump ... you know, why are they voting against their own self-interest?  ...  I mean, what why are people voting, or willing to vote, against their economic self-interest?  I really don’t quite know, except that, you know, ... for so many years, so many people have been so devastated by the economy ...

Robert Reich, The Saturday Coffee Klatch, 9/28/24

I suppose that, one of the things I like the most about Robert Reich is that he’s a nearly 80-year-old man who doesn’t sound like a typical old man.  And I suppose that’s why I found this particular quote so disappointing: because here he does sound like the old guy shaking his head about “these kids today.” Note that, in this particular video, his regular co-host Heather Lofthouse2 is out sick and he’s talking instead to Michael Lahanas-Calderón, one of their producers who happens to be a member of Gen Z (as Michael puts it earlier in the video, “the oldest of the Gen Z’s, yes”), so maybe that’s partially responsible for his falling into the trap of the rambling-old-man-speak.  Here’s another, perhaps more telling example, after discussing the recent announcement by Chapel Roan that she was not officially endorsing Harris:3

But don’t they, Michael, don’t they understand that Trump would be worse!  That is, if ... you’re making a choice here.  I mean, by not making a choice, you’re making a choice.  By not voting for Harris, you are essentially voting for Trump.  Don’t they understand this, your friends, your generation?

Ummm ... yeah, Robert.  They understand that Trump would be worse.  But, if Harris can’t inspire them to give a shit about politics, if it seems like she’s promising more of the same old horrible crap we’re already living through, they just might not bother.

The weird thing (at least to me) is that these same pundits seem to understand it perfectly when the shoe’s on the other foot.  Listen to any given batch of them talking about how the ridiculosity that is Mark Robinson could discourage Republican turnout:4

This is what I think you’re hoping for if you’re Kamala Harris: that there’s some category of people in North Carolina that are just like, “These guys are too crazy, I’m not gonna ... I’m just not gonna bother this year.  I’m taking this year off.”

Tim Miller, Inside the Right, 9/22/24

This sort of perfectly describes my father, who hates Trump, but almost certainly can’t bring himself to vote for a black woman.5  But, when it comes to young people feeling the same about Harris, people just don’t seem to get it.

Don’t get me wrong: I will be voting for Harris, personally.  I actually think she’s been rather energizing in this race, and, far from being someone who didn’t know who she was before becoming vice-president, I’ve actually voted for her before, both when she ran for Attorney General in 2010 and when she ran for Senator in 2016.  Plus she had some great YouTube moments making Trump appointees look dumb in congressional committees.  And, while I think she won’t be as firm with Israel as I’d like, I agree with Cody Johnston (of Some More News) that she at least represents a break from the generation of Israel-is-always-right old white guys, of which Biden is hopefully the last.  So at least there’s a chance that she’ll be better than Biden, and that’s good enough for me.  But, if you’re a younger person (or even an older person) who thinks it isn’t good enough, that she damned well ought to come out and say she’s against murdering Palestinian children no matter how evil Hamas is ... well, I totally respect that position too.

People have various reasons for seemingly voting against their economic interests. In the case of my father, and many others, I’m sure, it’s simple racism.  In the case of many other working class folks, it’s just that they’ve been told all their life that capitalism is good and socialism is bad, and from that perspective voting for anyone other than a Republican seems a bit insane.  But these things are changing.  Only the oldest among us truly remember McCarthyism, and even the Cold War is a fading memory.  So the boogeyman of communism doesn’t hold the power it used to, and equating socialism with communism, when we have modern counterexamples like France and Sweden,6 is also falling a bit flat these days.  And, while racism is certainly still going strong in our country, it does seem to be going more and more underground.  Today’s younger generations not only have lived with diversity all their lives, but they’ve lived with the pain of late-stage capitalism and seem to instinctively understand that there must be a better way.

And some of what appears to be “voting against one’s own economic interests” is just plain evil marketing campaigns launched by rich people, who desire nothing more than to continue to be rich (and not to collect any more peers).  For decades, rich people convinced poor white people that poor black people would take their jobs, their homes, and their American dreams.  Nowadays they’ve mostly switched to convincing poor people both black and white that it’s the immigrants coming for their bounty, but it’s the same playbook.  And it might be easy to think that people that buy into these messages are dumb, but that’s oversimplifying the issue: people who are struggling will often latch onto any message, especially the ones that are slickly produced, and there’s no point in being naïve about the fact that advertising works.  Getting upset at the victims of these evil marketing campaigns is sort of missing the point.

So I’d love to see less of people railing against young people for not voting against Trump, and railing against working class people for “voting against their interests,” and more people pushing Harris to do more to try and reach these cohorts.  I think she’s doing great in many ways, but could she be doing better? Absolutely.  And the polls are too close for her not to try.



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1 If you want to follow along, here’s the video; jump to around 14:09.

2 Heather is also the president of Inequality Media, who produces those videos.

3 Same video, around 11:20.

4 Again, follow along in the video at about 8:26.

5 You may recall that I said recently that my father claimed he’d vote for anyone the Democrats put up, unless it was Biden.  Well, his sexist, racist ass is kind of eating those words now.

6 Yes, yes: neither France nor Sweden is technically socialist.  But then neither are any of the policies that Republicans label as socialist.  So I think it’s a fair correlation.











Sunday, July 28, 2024

Enshittification Happens


Once upon a time, Cory Doctorow was known for writing books (inasmuch as he was known at all, which was probably only in very specific circles).  Nowadays, he’s more known for his opinions on modern Internet culture: opposing DRM, encouraging Creative Commons, etc.  He’s been featured in xkcd comics and in Ready Player One (the book, not the movie).  I’ve never read a Cory Doctorow novel (or short story, or graphic novel, or anything).  But I know what enshittification is.

So I was quite surprised—but pleased—to see Cory Doctorow show up in a More Perfect Union video that I was watching.  If you don’t know MPU, they do exposé-style videos, primarily focussing on how the billionaires are trying to screw you over (and mostly succeeding).  Well worth a YouTube subscribe, if you’re into that sort of thing.  And, the other night, right in the middle of learning why food delivery has gotten so ridiculously expensive, there’s Cory Doctorow, talking about enshittification.

Now, if you don’t know what that means, here’s how he phrased it when he first coined the term in a Wired article:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.  Then, they die.  I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Or, if you prefer, just check out the video I just mentioned, and hop to around 6:19.  It’ll take longer, but it’s a more gradual explanation (with examples, even), so it may work better for some people.

Now, first of all, Cory is absolutely correct about what enshittification is, how it works, and that it’s a real, observable phenomenon.  But where I will nitpick his definition is that I don’t think it’s limited to Internet platforms.  This is a pattern that we’ve seen repeated in businesses throughout the modern age.  Remember AT&T?  Once upon a time AT&T was considered considered the most reliable name in the communications business.  Then they were a customer service joke that every business had to use because what other options were there?  None that a fledgling business could take seriously!  And then they were a monopoly and the government broke them up.

Since, I’m very old, I actually remember the breakup of AT&T and the creation of the “Baby Bells.” I distinctly remember my father (the staunch Republican) repeating exactly what he’d been told: this will hurt the consumer!  Prices will go up, not down!  And, you know what?  He was right.  In the short term, the prices did actually go up, while the Baby Bells figured out how to charge and what fees to tack on where.  But, less than 10 years later, minutes of long distance became so cheap that some companies tried literally giving them away: one 90s ad screamed “you can’t beat free!” But then I suppose concentrating on short-term gains and ignoring long-term consequences is sort of the whole vibe of the Republican party.

You see this pattern in plenty of other companies’ histories: IBM (when my father was in charge of computers for a large paper mill, buying Hewlett-Packard instead of IBM was considered a risky move; nowadays IBM marketing is a literal joke: “if IBM bought KFC, they’d rename the product to ‘greasy dead chicken parts.’”), Microsoft (their OS market share went from 93% in 2009 to 27% today; in the same period, their browser market share dropped from 65% to 5%), Boeing (from the only plane some people would fly in to the butt of late-night comedians, Congressional investigations, and NTSB sanctions).  And everyone has their anecdotal evidence.  In my case, it’s Dropbox.  When I first signed up with Dropbox in 2010, they were a small, scrappy company with amazing customer service.  What led me to cancelling their service entirely was having a single ticket closed 4 times in a row without ever receiving a single answer to my actual question.  Ten years ago I could get an email from an actual tech person.  Three years ago, it was obvious people were being judged on how fast they “closed” a ticket and not at all on whether the customers actually got any help.  They had their users locked in, they had their businesses locked in, and the amount of trouble I had to go through to drop them is just not something most people will suffer through.  Personally, I would have paid ten times what a Dropbox subscription cost, as long as I wasn’t paying it to them—hell, I’m sure I actually did end up paying about that much, in the long run.  But then I’m a stubborn asshole.  Most people will just suffer in silence, resigned to their fate.  It takes longer for a company than an Internet platform, but it’s the same process.  Enshittification.

Now, one thing you might notice about Cory’s original definition that doesn’t fit my examples is this sentence: “Then, they die.” AT&T got broken up, but they didn’t actually die ... they’re currently (as of 2023) 13th in the Fortune 500.  Microsoft was eventually declared a monopoly, but no one ever did anything about it; things like Internet Explorer and the Zune and the BSOD (or “Blue Screen of Death”) became cultural punchlines, but they’re currently 14th in the Fortune 500.  As for Boeing ... well the stock has dipped, and its Fortune 500 rating is down (somewhere in the neighborhood of 52nd, I believe), but it hardly seems in danger of disappearing altogether.  Time will tell, but I shouldn’t at all be surprised to see Boeing rising from the ashes in a few years.  It’ll likely get a bit worse before it gets better, but I’m sure it’ll be fine in the long run.

Of course, the trick here is that Cory was talking about platforms ... not companies.  Facebook may well die (and it damn well should), but Meta will likely live on.  Google’s search engine’s lifespan is probably measured in units of AI advancement, but Alphabet will continue to produce gobbledygook that we simply must use.  And how about Über, whose branch Über Eats was fingered in the very video that inspired this post?  Oh, they’re riding high right now: they locked in the users by killing taxi service, they locked in the businesses (in this case, restaurants) by making individual delivery drivers economically impratical and crushing their competition (like Grubhub), and now they’re (finally) making money by charging us as much as 50% more for food than we’d pay if we’d just get off our lazy butts and go pick it up ourselves.  But there will come the inevitable crash—at some point, we just won’t be able to afford to be lazy any more—and Über Eats will probably die ... but I bet Über itself won’t.  In business parlance, this is called “pivoting”: one market is performing poorly, so you pivot to another.  A more apt analogy would be a sharecropper who wasn’t bright enough to rotate their crops and so now the soil won’t grow anything, so they just pick up and move down the road to a fresh plot of land.  Or a traveling carny saying “we’ve fleeced all the suckers we can here; time to move on to the next town.”

It’s interesting to me to watch the landscape changing.  When I was a kid, “socialist” was about the worst thing you could call a policy or an idea.  Nowadays, when anyone on TV says “that’s socialism!” you’ll find a dozen (or a hundred) videos on YouTube or TikTok responding “so what?” All the adults in my life taught me that unions were terrible: any time you saw a bunch of people standing around doing nothing, you’d blame the unions.  It never made much sense to me—the organizations that brought us the weekend, and overtime pay, and minimum wage, and sick leave, and child labor laws ... those are somehow bad?—but almost everyone I knew bought into it.  Nowadays, there are new unions popping up everywhere, and the President is appearing on picket lines to show solidarity.  In my father’s time (and still in my father’s mind) it seemed to be universally accepted that rich people must be geniuses, and that giving them more money would somehow “trickle down” to the rest of us.  Now the majority of society seems to be waking up to the wise words of Dogbert, who once said “Beware the advice of successful people: they do not seek company.”

If you think about it, this makes sense.  Anyone who goes to the trouble of amassing a billion dollars (or more) is just getting money for the sake of getting money.  At some point, you had enough money to buy anything you wanted, to pass on to your children if you felt like it ... to just live off the interest.  But still you kept getting more.  Why?  Just to show you could, I suppose.  So these people—and the companies they found, or run, or espouse—are attempting to separate us from our wallets in the most expedient way possible, and, as soon as one way stops working—or even falters just a bit, so that an easier way seems more attractive—they move on to the next.  I don’t necessarily blame those people: to me, that seems like blaming a tiger for eating you.  The tiger is just hungry, that’s all.  But when there are people in the village telling you how awesome and handsome and brilliant the tiger is for eating all your neighbors ... well, those people I can blame.  The tiger doesn’t need your help.  He’s doing just fine all on his own.  You know who needs your help?  The people building the anti-tiger defense system.  How about we all pitch in on that?  At the very least, perhaps we can slow the tide of enshittification.  Because tiger droppings are full of the corpses of the most vulnerable members of the village.  And ignoring that reality is ... kinda shitty.









Sunday, July 14, 2024

Talking Is a Free Action


For some reason (most likely the reason is Nish Kumar), I’ve started watching Pod Save the UK.  I’m a bit of an Anglophile, and, while my main interest in the British is their comedians, I do find their politics a bit fascinating as well.  I’ll admit that, when I first starting getting into it many moons ago, it was primarily so I could understand more British jokes.  But I think it’s sort of morphed into a fascination with someone else’s politics.  When something in the UK is worse than it is here in the US, I can feel relieved that, as bad as it is here, at least we don’t have that problem; when something in the UK is better than here, I can bask in some envy and tell myself that here’s proof that we can do better too; when someting in the UK is about the same, I can commiserate and feel some camaraderie.  It’s a win/win/win.

As you may know, they recently held an election (which they initiated, conducted, and completed in about 3 weeks’ time), and in it the country roundly rejected the Conservative party (often still called the “Tories”), which had held sway for the past 14 years, privatizing things such as public transportation and water treatment to devastating effect, attempting to ship political refugees off to Rwanda, and (perhaps most infamously) engineering Brexit.  The election was even more of a rout for the Tories than predicted, with Labour more than doubling their number of seats, the Liberal Democrats more than sextupling their seats, the Greens quadrupling their seats (which brings them up to a whopping 4, but still), and the Tories plummeting from 372 seats to 121.  With things going so poorly in my own country’s politics, it’s nice to have a bit of vicarious joy in the politics of others.

But—and here’s the reason I bring all this up—in the run-up to their election, Pod Save the UK aired an episode on “tactical voting.” I wasn’t sure WTF this could possibly be, but it seemed quite controversial: many people were saying this was crucial for everyone to do, and others were saying it was a terrible precedent to set.  As I watched the episode, I began to realize that “tactical voting” just meant voting for the person who needs to win in order to get the outcome you want at the national level, rather than just voting for the candidate whose views most aligned with your own.  Of course, in the US, we just call that “voting.”

Hmph.

And so this whole kerfuffle about Biden really puzzles me.  It’s okay for the Democratic party to tell us to just vote for whoever they put up because they’re better than Trump, but it’s not okay for people to question whether or not Biden is the best choice to win against him?  I thought we were voting tactically here.  Perhaps it isn’t practical to replace Biden at this stage of the game, but for people to denigrate anyone who even brings up the topic is pretty ridiculous.  And there’s a lot of that going around these days.  I’m not sure I understand where they’re coming from.  But let me be clear about my viewpoint on the topic.

If you’re saying people should stop questioning Biden and just support him, you sound like those folks at the tail end of the pyramid scheme saying that everyone needs to calm down so that people continue to make their commissions.  Ignoring the problem doesn’t make it go away.  It’s not like we can just pretend that Biden isn’t old, or that people don’t have serious misgivings about his performance.  I can tell you, for instance, that my father, a staunch Republican for as long as I’ve known him (and undoubtedly long before that), has already said that he will vote for anyone the Democrats put up ... except Biden.  I’m not saying this is a sensible attitude; I’m just saying that’s what he says.  Now, perhaps my father is completely unique among disaffected Republicans.  But I bet he isn’t.

If you’re saying it’s dumb to ask whether Biden can do the difficult job of being President because he’s already doing it, you’re completely missing the point.  It’s utterly irrelvant whether he can do the job or not.  The question is, can he win against Trump?  Personally, I would vote for a turnip running with the campaign slogan “At least I’m not Trump!” ... but that doesn’t mean I want the turnip to run.  Because the turnip can’t win.  Because not everyone is me.  Because not everyone is convinced by the “at least it’s not Trump” argument.  If Biden can’t win, he never gets the chance to do the job, so it makes zero difference whether he’s capable of doing it or not.

If you’re saying that the debate performance doesn’t matter, because we’re not electing the best debater, you’re being deliberately disingenuous.  It’s not just about that one debate (though, admittedly, that was pretty bad).  The appearances since then have ranged from relatively encouraging—like the Chumbawumba speech just days after the debate: when you get knocked down, you get back up again! and then presumably have a whiskey drink, a lager drinnk, etc—to downright terrifying, like the George Stephanopoulos interview where he said that he’d only drop out if God came down and asked him to, and that if he lost he’d still feel okay that he’d done the “goodest job” he could have done.  I mean, if you lose, Joe, you get to go home with your Secret Service detail and live out the rest of your life, and ... not to be harsh, but it’s unlikely to be long enough to really feel the regrets that all the rest of us are gonna have.

Again, I’m not saying the Democrats definitely should replace Biden.  Nor am I saying they definitely should not.  But a meaningful conversation isn’t out of the question.  I dunno; I thought the last time Trump got elected it was going to be disastrous, and it turned out that the man was so incompetent and crazy that he had trouble actually accomplishing the worst things he wanted to do.  But this time we have the whole Project 2025 thing: people much smarter than him (though no less crazy) have laid out a blueprint for how to make all the things work ... even the illegal ones.  Which Trump’s Supreme Court has greased the wheels of pretty nicely by saying that the President can’t be held liable for anything he does.  And, for anyone else in the administration, the President can just issue a pardon.  Done and dusted.

So I think it’s perfectly reasonable to demand that the Democrats put up someone that can actually win against this chilling prospect.  Maybe that’s Biden.  Maybe not.  But at least we can talk about it.









Sunday, June 16, 2024

Fall in love with a bright idea


Hey, remember six weeks ago when I talked about college campus protests?  Well, this week’s Some More Newsa YouTube show I started watching during the dark days of the writer’s strike—says almost exactly what I said, only funnier, and with more actual facts.  If you’ve been feeling unsure how to think about the whole campus protest thing, what with competing reports of police brutality and anti-Semitism and “outside agitators,” I really encourage you to watch “How To Cynically Dismiss The Campus Protests Against Genocide”.  Like every episode of SMN, it contains a fair amount of in-jokes (the writers are mostly former employees of Cracked), but I think you’ll find it entertaining nonetheless.  And, who knows? you might just learn something.









Sunday, May 5, 2024

To those who cannot remember the past ...


This week, I had the good fortune to attend an anniversary dinner for my work, where I enjoyed some lovely cuisine with 10 of the 11 other people who have also worked for our company for 10 years or more.  We ate, and drank, and talked, for several hours.

At some point the topic of the recent college student protests against their institutions’ ongoing financial support for the killing of innocent people in Palestine came up.  Now, I think there’s a very interesting discussion to be had about how it really shouldn’t be a controversial opinion to be anti-genocide, and it really shouldn’t be controversial to say that they have the right to protest—it’s literally one of their First Amendment rights, along with freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion.  But that wasn’t the discussion we had.  The discussion we had was how much of an idiot you have to be to think it’s a good idea to call the police to “break up” a protest on a college campus.  Even a completely clueless administrator (or rich donor, or Speaker of the House) with only a cursory understanding of history should understand that attempts to stop a protest via violence only makes it worse.  (Special dispensation for the Speaker, who doesn’t seem to know any history that isn’t found in the Bible.)  I would more likely believe that the suggestion to call the police on a campus protest came from an undercover instigator who was trying to make damn sure that the protests succeeded than credit the notion that some college president said, with complete lack of irony, “I know: we’ll call in the cops and the National Guard and that will definitely put this silly protest thing behind us.” I am not old enough to remember the violence at Kent State—I was in fact four years old at the time—but I know about it, and even I understand what a moronic idea that is.

The thing that I thought of after that discussion, too late to contribute it there, so that now I must share it here with you, is that it might also behoove people in positions of collegial power to try to think of a time when there were widespread college protests that we currently look back on and think, man, those college kids were totally wrong.  Would it be the Free Speech Movement in 1964? the civil rights protests against racial inequality in 1968? the antiwar protests of 1970? the anti-apartheid protests of 1985? the protests against school shootings in 2018? the Black Lives Matter protests of 2014 and again in 2020?  Which of these are people looking back on and saying “well, here’s an example of where the college kids really blew it, and I bet they’re embarrassed about it now!” Is there a single counterexample that I’ve missed? a single case where the protests were misguided? a single case where these people—and to call them “young people” is just pointlessly reductive—really should have been told to “stop the nonsense; stop wasting your parents’ money”?  I haven’t thought of one yet.  But perhaps I lack the imagination of those wiser than I.  (Although, I gotta tell you: at this point, I’ve managed to live long enough that most of the idiots spewing this sort of garbage are no longer older than I, so maybe I should start referring to them as the “young people.”)

Anyway, that’s just what I’ve been thinking about recently.  Thinking about, as Elizabeth Shackleford put it in the Chicago Tribune, college protests and the right side of history; thinking about the ACLU’s advice to college presidents.  Thinking about how stupid you have to be to want to escalate college protests, and how morally bankrupt you have to be to think you’re going to come out looking good trying to quash them.  Just little stuff like that; nothing too heavy.









Sunday, March 3, 2024

Be Liberal in What You Accept


If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart.  If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.

Winston Churchill

You may have seen this quote floating around online.  Certainly it’s a darling of modern conservatives.  And if so great a luminary as Churchill said it ... well, then, certainly it must be true.

Except, of course, Churchill never said that. The International Churchill society points out that:

There is no record of anyone hearing Winston Churchill say this. Paul Addison of Edinburgh University made this comment: ‘Surely Churchill can’t have used the words attributed to him. He’d been a Conservative at 15 and a Liberal at 35!  And would he have talked so disrespectfully of Clemmie, who is generally thought to have been a lifelong Liberal?’

By “Clemmie,” Addison is referring here to Clementine, the Baroness Spencer-Churchill, a.k.a. Winston’s wife.  So I think these are pretty compelling points that attributing this quote to Churchill is just wishful thinking.

If you really want to know the convoluted origin of this quote, you can read all about it on the Quote Investigator, but basically it likely started off as this:

A boy of fifteen who is not a democrat is good for nothing, and he is no better who is a democrat at twenty.

John Adams, 1799

which then evolved to this:

Several of my friends urged me to respond with Burke’s famous line: “Anyone who is not a republican at twenty casts doubt on the generosity of his soul; but he who, after thirty years, perseveres, casts doubt on the soundness of his mind.”

Jules Claretie (translated from the original French), 1872

Along with many, many variations along the way, and since.  Here’s my favorite of the ones QI cites:

An excited supporter burst into the private chambers of the old tiger Clemenceau one day and cried, “Your son has just joined the Communist Party.” Clemenceau regarded his visitor calmly and remarked, “Monsieur, my son is 22 years old. If he had not become a Communist at 22, I would have disowned him. If he is still a Communist at 30, I will do it then.”

Bennet Cerf, writing about Georges Clemenceau, 1944

That one at least is clever.  The rest are all at least moderately clumsy in the phrasing, not to mention not uttered by anyone as famous as Churchill.  Although John Adams is close.  But also pay attention to what Adams is really saying here: that, by the time you’re merely twenty years old, you should have learned not to have faith in democracy.  I know we Americans have a great belief that we live in a democracy, and that we do so because of our revered founding fathers, but often we forget that irksome things like the electoral college exist precisely because those founding fathers (or at least a majority of them) felt that the common man couldn’t be expected to be informed enough to vote sensibly, so the best they could be trusted to do was to elect someone smarter than they were.  

Of course, as I wrote in my very first blog post about quotes, “really it doesn’t even matter who said it: the wisdom or truth of the words is contained within them, regardless of any external attribution.” So who cares who said it, if it’s true.

Except ...

Well, except that it’s crap.  Even confining ourselves to the fairly modern definitions of “liberal” and “conservative”—and completely ignoring the far right (MAGA, QAnon, etc)—I can quite trivially provide two counterexamples: my father was the same conversative he is today at 25, and I continue to be just as liberal as I ever was well beyond 35.  Or 45 ... hell, I’ve now moved beyond 55, even, and I continue to be, what I’m sure is to my more conservative friends, annoyingly liberal.

And, yes, I do have conservative friends.  Remember: I said we were not defining “conservative” as meaning the MAGA crowd—I’m definitely not friends with any of them.  But, using the normal definition of “political conservative” to mean small government, taxes bad, trickle-down economics good, capitalism great, unions suck, etc. ... sure, I have friends like that.  People like that can be very reasonable and even fun.  The fact that they’re wrong doesn’t make them bad people.  (I’m kidding.  Mostly.)

No, this lovely idea that liberalism is founded on idealism, which is something you really ought to have when you’re young, but you really ought to grow out of at some point, is just crap.  Doesn’t make any sense, and doesn’t bear out in reality.  The best proof of this concept that I’ve run across is in an article from Scientific American, which posits (with some interesting studies to back it up) that conservative and liberal brains are just different.  Liberals have bigger cingulate cortices, while conservatives have bigger amygdalae.  Which means, broadly speaking, that liberals are better at detecting errors and resolving conflicts, while conservatives are better at regulating emotions and evaluating threats.  Nothing wrong with either of those characteristics, of course: each are good, in different situations.  And there’s still some disagreement over which comes first:

There is also an unresolved chicken-and-egg problem:  Do brains start out processing the world differently or do they become increasingly different as our politics evolve?

But I find this whole area fascinating.  Especially because there isn’t anything black-and-white about it, which as you know appeals to my sense of balance and paradox.  Sure, conservatives are less likely to question the status quo, but that means they’re often happier because they’re more willing to accept and enjoy their circumstances.  Sure, liberals may be better at processsing contradictory information, but we’re also prone to waffling and it can take us forever to make up our minds about an issue (that one hits particularly hard for me).  And, yes, all this is a whole lot of generalization, and individuals will differ in how they approach things regardless of their overall tendencies, and obviously we can rise above our programming ... but, at least to me, it’s actually a bit comforting to think that, when a friend expresses some surprisingly conservative viewpoint, I can say to myself, oh: they’re just wired differently.  And that’s okay.

As I’ve said before, the world would be a pretty boring place if we all agreed on everything.  So, while I continue to believe that my politics are the best politics, I don’t hate the other side ... hell, I don’t even dislike or distrust the other side.  But, I must once again stress: Trump supporters are not the other side.  Those are the folks who’ve gone way beyond the other side and out the door and down the road and across the field.  Even my father, bastion of conservatism that he is, is no longer a Trump supporter.  Trump gives conservatism a bad name, sadly.  And I think that Trump will likely not win in the presidential race this year precisely because more and more conservatives are realizing this.  I could be wrong about that ... but I don’t think I am.  And that’s a good thing.

I think proper conservatism deserves a reboot.  I still think they’re all wrong, of course, but it’s never great to have people in charge who all think the same way.  Diversity is important (again, ignoring those ultra-right-wingers who foam at the mouth when you talk about diversity), and, just as having diversity in the workplace makes your business more profitable (look it up if you don’t believe this; there are multiple studies which support this fact), so too is diversity of opinions in government important.  If the government were entirely run by liberals, we’d probably be in just as much trouble as we would be if it were run entirely by conservatives.  Finding the balance is what’s important ... but of course I would say that (balance and paradox again).

What I really wish is that our two political parties would both split in two.  The Republicans have become sharply divided between the MAGA crowd and the “traditional” conservatives, while the Democrats have become too crowded, and people as different as Biden and Sanders both claiming the same party feels weird.  If we had four parties, they could perhaps be led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Kamala Harris, Liz Cheney, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and I think the vast majority of Americans would know exactly which quadrant of the spectrum they fall into just from that alone.  I’d love it, personally.  I would probably vote for AOC’s party the most often, but I’d vote for the Harris ticket plenty, and probably even the Cheney party every now and again.  (The less said on how I feel about the Greene-led crowd, the better.)  But we’d truly have some meaningful choices again, that’s the important bit.  And I think that would be good for our country, for our government, and for our sanity.

Sadly, I think it’s mostly just wishful thinking.  I think the two-party stranglehold on our political system is not giving up its deathgrip any time soon, and we’ll be the poorer for it.  But, as fraught with emotion as the current times are, I think we should still all remember that conservative, liberal—they’re just a difference in how we’re wired, and that’s fine.  We can still all get along, and we can still see the good in others.  And I think that’s a worthy goal.




[Today’s title is the latter half of the Robustness Principle, a.k.a. Postel’s law: be conservative in what you emit; be liberal in what you accept.  So perhaps it’s just my technogeek nature to recognize that both philosophies have value.]









Sunday, February 25, 2024

The Return of Stew-beef


I have, to my knowledge, seen nearly every episode of The Daily Show, since the very beginning.  That means I’ve not only seen what I believe to be every single episode hosted by Jon Stewart and every single episode hosted by Trevor Noah, but every episode in between and since, and even the majority of the episodes hosted by Craig Kilborn, who preceded Stewart.  It was a very different show back then, but I watched ’em all.  There’s been a lot of individual bits of various shows that I’ve disliked, but I don’t think there’s been a single show in these past 28 years that hasn’t made me laugh at least once, and most of them far more often than that.

So obviously I was pretty happy to see Stewart come back to the show a couple of weeks ago.  I thought his first show back was pretty awesome: as his Apple+ show (The Problem with Jon Stewart) proved, he really hasn’t lost a step since his “retirement.” He’s still got the rhythm, and the biting commentary that’s perfectly happy to skewer public figures on both sides of the aisle.  I laughed plenty.

Both not everyone appreciated his homecoming as much as I.  There was, in fact, quite a bit of criticism, perhaps most emblematically summed up by Keith Olbermann, who tweeted:

Well after nine years away, there’s nothing else to say to the bothsidesist fraud Jon Stewart bashing Biden, except: Please make it another nine years

Of course, Olbermann has been a critic of Stewart for years, going back to saying that he’d “jumped the shark” back when Stewart (along with co-host Colbert) put on the “Rally to Restore Sanity (and/or Fear)” (which I quite enjoyed, personally).  So it shouldn’t have been news.  But, somehow it was ... perhaps boosted by similar criticism from Mary Trump, the hosts of The View, and a bunch of people described as “liberal media figures” whose names I’ve never heard in my life.  Basically, they accused him of “both-sides-ism.” Well, fair enough: as I noted above, Stewart is fond of not letting anyone off the hook, regardless of “sides.” But what did he actually say, actually?

Well, he said this:*

What’s crazy is thinking that we are the ones as voters who must silence concerns and criticisms.  It is the candidate’s job to assuage concerns, not the voter’s job not to mention them.

and this:

Look, Joe Biden isn’t Donald Trump.  He hasn’t been indicted as many times, hasn’t had as many fraudulent businesses, or been convicted in a civil trial for sexual assault, or been ordered to pay defamation, had his charities disbanded, or stiffed a shit-ton of blue-collar tradesmen he’d hired.  Should we even get to the grab the pussy stuff?  Probably not.

But the stakes of this election don’t make Donald Trump’s opponent less subject to scrutiny.  It actually makes him more subject to scrutiny.

Which ... sounds pretty reasonable to me.  I’m not sure what Olbermann and friends expected Stewart to do—was he supposed to pretend that Biden isn’t old, or that no one realizes he’s old?  I mean, The Nation expresses it better than I ever could, so I’ll just quote them:

Stewart’s segment was fundamentally pro-Biden, a shrewd use of comedy to address unease while also, as Stewart at his best always does, keeping the big political picture in mind. It’s a way to address the age issue on pro-Biden terms but still maintain the trust of independents and nonpartisan Democrats, who are the swing voters in danger of abandoning Biden or staying home.

Yep, that’s what I thought too.



__________

* If you want to follow along at home, you can watch his monologue on YouTube; my first quote starts at 15:53, and the second starts at 17:30.











Sunday, January 28, 2024

TIL: Vibecession

Many years (and a couple of jobs) ago, I was part of a weird corporate experiment that was referred to as “swim teams.” I’m not sure this was a thing except at my one company, but there is a business concept called “swimlanes” that I think might be related.  But, anyhow, what it was, was this: All the employees who were considered “squeaky wheels” were gathered up in a single room (and let me tell you, we were all looking around like, uh-oh), and were told that we were going to get assigned to one or two “swim teams,” and each team was going to work on one thing to make the business better.  That is, don’t just complain about the problems: participate in coming up with solutions.  And this was lovely, and a nice idea, and obviously it didn’t work at all.

You can probably guess why, but I’ll drill down a bit further.  One of my “swim teams” (I really can’t even type that without the air quotes) was called “employee engagement,” and it was one of the only ones—maybe the only one—where our actual CEO was on the team.  And, as she put it, the point of the team was to figure out how to get employees to treat the company as if it were their own, and not just a paycheck.  Our team came up with a number of good ideas, none of which were ever implemented.  One example: I proposed implementing financial transparency (long-time readers will recall this as cornerstone #1 of the Barefoot Philosophy).  The CEO was scandalized: let all the employees have all that sensitive financial data?  They can’t be trusted with that!  Then, a couple of weeks later, I was forced to listen to her rant on about how “employees these days” feel like they’re entitled to a job but they don’t want to work very hard for it.  And I thought to myself—very quietly, because there was no point in getting fired over a zinger—wait, you think you deserve employee engagement, but you won’t take any action that would earn that?  Who exactly is the party feeling entitled here?

But I tell you that story so I can tell you this one: I recently learned what ”vibecession” means.  It’s a topic of great interest in this political climate, with many high-level Democrats seeming to complain that people just aren’t understanding how good they’ve got it.  Unemployment is low! wages are up! the stock market is booming! interest rates on things like savings accounts are higher than they’ve been in most people’s entire lifetimes!  So why are people still complaining?  These silly consumers just need to understand what’s really going on so that they can understand how awesome the Biden presidency has been.  Hopefully they all wake up by the time the election rolls around.

But, you see, this attitude is exactly like my old CEO.  Faced with two contradictory situations—the status quo of economic indicators vs the attitudes of the common people—then obviously the status quo must be right and the people must be wrong (and also ungrateful).  I keep hearing so-called experts trying to work out how to spin the economic numbers so people will finally “get it.” What I don’t hear is anyone questioning whether it makes sense to keep using the same old numbers when they obviously don’t reflect how ordinary, non-academics are being impacted in the current economy.

They should maybe try that.  I don’t think they will, but they should probably try.  Just one man’s opinion.









Sunday, December 17, 2023

Third Party Blind


Less than two weeks ago, I was listening to Election Profit Makers, and they read a letter from a younger fan who said that they were not going to vote for Biden because of his approach toward Israel, and they wanted the hosts (David Rees and Jon Kimball) to weigh on in that situation.

At the time, I didn’t realize this was A Thing.  Sure, I’d heard that there’s a growing movement in the U.S. that thinks that the government of Israel shouldn’t be allowed—much less encouraged—to wipe the Palestinian people from the face of the Earth.  I’d even heard that this utterly radical stance was mostly held by younger people, and that they blamed Biden’s willingness to just go along with whatever Israel does (including offering them weapons to do even more of it) on his being a very old man.  After all, blind allegiance to Israel is sort of an American tradition.  Because otherwise you’re antisemitic ... right?

So, sure, I knew it was a thing, and that it was mostly a thing with younger people, but I didn’t know it was A Thing.  But apparently it is: ABC News says it is, The Guardian in the UK says it is, NPR says it is.  So I guess it is.  Apparently it’s quite popular for political experts to weigh in and say that Biden’s pro-Israel stance might seriously jeopardize his chances next year.

So what did the hosts of EPM have to say in response to their young interlocutor?

Rees: When it comes to young voters saying, “I’ll never vote for Joe Biden, this is a, this is a bridge too far (his support of Israel),” I’m like: all right.  I don’t even feel interested in trying to convince young people that they should vote for Biden because Trump would be worse.  ...  I used to totally be the third-party, protest-vote guy.  Now I am much older than I used to be, and I see electoral politics now as nothing more than harm reduction.  ...  One thing I have no interest in, and I will not support, is older voters scolding younger voters for deciding to vote with their principles, even if I happen to think, like “yeah, good luck, let’s see how that turns out, champ.” I’m not gonna ...

Kimball: Totally agree.

Rees: I’m not gonna get on a high horse and try to shame young people.  I think that’s tactically stupid, and also demeans what’s so exciting about politics when you’re younger, and, for some of us, even when you’re older.  It’s like, it is a mechanism by which you can express your idealism.  And that’s beautiful to have that.

(For the full discussion, check out Episode 237, starting at about 24:20; the quotes above kick in about 5 minutes into that discussion.)

And I identified with what David is saying there.  First of all because I have totally been the person voting for a third party, and second of all because I’m much older now than I used to be, and also when he says that trying to shame people into not voting for third parties demeans everyone’s idealism, young or old.  Beacuse, here’s my dirty secret: I still vote for third parties (sometimes), even now that I’m old.  Now, as I’ve pointed out, I live in California, so I have a luxury that many Americans do not: the Democratic candidate for President will win my state, regardless of how I vote.  Therefore, I’m free to vote for the person whose stated opinions and policies most align with my own.  Sometimes that’s the Democrat, it theoretically might be a Republican—while I have voted for Republicans before for other offices, there’s never been a Presidential candidate who’s impressed me sufficiently to get my vote—or it might be a different party entirely, and I don’t give a flying shit if that’s a Green party candidate, a Libertarian party candidate, or just a raw independent.  Your “party affiliation” is just a box next to your name.  It means nothing to me, especially these days, when people like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema can claim to be Democrats, and the Republican party still (mostly) encompasses people like Liz Cheny and Adam Kinzinger (I could actually see myself voting for that guy for President, depending on the opponents).  What matters is what you (claim to) stand for, and how well your actions match your rhetoric.  If that stuff comes closer to what I want to see than any other candidate, then I don’t care if you’re a member of the Monster Raving Loony party: you get my vote.

But, as I say, I have the luxury of living in California where I actually can vote my conscience and still know that it won’t end up screwing the country.  I used to live in Virginia, where the margin of victory for the Republicans was frequently less than 10 points; I did (sometimes) vote third-party there, but then again I was younger.  If I still lived there today, would I still be so bold as to vote for whoever is the best candidate?  Or would I succumb to the “truth” that you may only vote for the better candidate?

What amuses me most about David Rees’ statement (which so strongly resonated with me and which I found most eminently reasonable), was that I was watching an episode of Democracy Docket with Brian Tyler Cohen and Marc Elias less than a week later, and Elias said this in response to a question from BTC about third parties:

So I, I just got to speak directly to your audience, because I imagine your audience is a lot of good Democrats, but also people who have very high standards for their elected officials.  And let me just tell you something: if you think voting for Jill Stein is doing anything other than electing Donald Trump, you are wrong.  If you vote for Jill Stein you’re voting for Donald Trump. If you vote for Bobby Kennedy you are voting for Donald Trump.  If you vote for the No Labels candidate, whoever he or she is ... if you vote for the No Labels candidate you are voting for Donald Trump.  And I’ll tell you one more thing: if you sit at home, because you’re disappointed, or you sit at home because you think your vote doesn’t matter, or you sit at home for whatever reason, and you don’t vote, you’re helping elect Donald Trump.  So you know I’m tired of the people who are saying ... you know, “I’m gonna have a protest, or I’m gonna sit out ...”.  If you don’t participate in this election, and enthusiastically drag your friends, your neighbors, your family, drag ’em to the polls, make sure they’re registered, drag ’em to the polls and make sure they vote, then you are you are feeding into what Donald Trump wants for this country, which is a dictatorship.

(Again, if you want to follow along, this was the 12/11 episode, and the question and answer happens at about 8:10.)

And, if you don’t know who Marc Elias is, he’s sort of the epitome of what David Rees was talking about when he said “older voters scolding younger voters for deciding to vote with their principles”: he’s a balding, old white guy (not quite as old as I am, according to Wikipedia, but damned close), he’s a lawyer, and just listen to what he’s saying there.  “If you don’t vote for my political party, your vote worse than doesn’t count: it counts for the bad guy.” If a salesman was telling you, if you don’t buy their product, it’s the same as giving your money to burglars so they can come take your stuff, you’d roll your eyes at them.  If a realtor told you that, if you didn’t buy this house, you’re just giving permission to people to come knock your current house down, you’d probably look for another realtor.  But, when it comes to politics, we not only don’t think twice about this sort of rhetoric, we expect it.  Worse, we believe it.  And, regardless of whether it’s true or not, our belief makes it true.

Here’s a simple example: two Democrat groups (Third Way and MoveOn) have issued a statement about the potential new “No Labels” party.  An article says:

Third Way and MoveOn followed up Tuesday by asking the staffers to convince their bosses to publicly denounce the effort.

“We, the undersigned elected officials, recognizing the urgent and unique threat to democracy in the form of right-wing extremism on the ballot in 2024, call on No Labels to halt their irresponsible efforts to launch a third-party candidacy,” reads the statement for the lawmakers’ signatures.

“Their candidate cannot win, but they can and would serve as a spoiler that could return someone like Donald Trump to office. I therefore commit to opposing a No Labels third-party ticket in 2024 for the good of the country.”

Now, I’m not saying voting for the (potential) No Labels candidate is a good idea—I’ll have to make that determination when we’re closer to the actual election, but I will say that so far I’m unimpressed with any of the names being floated—but just look at this statement.  This is what oligopolies do: a small handful of companies in a space very aggressively lobby their customers against considering any possible competition.  You may think the Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on anything these days, but they absolutely agree that they don’t want any more players on the field.  You get to pick one of these two, and yes they’re both shitty, but that’s just the way it is and no one can change it so you might as well get used to it.

Definitely don’t look over there.  Yes, the UK has nearly a dozen major parties, 5 of which have 10 or more representatives in Parliament; Japan has the same, only with six parties holding 10 or more members of the National Diet; Germany has 8 parties with 10 or more members in the Bundestag and closer to two dozen in total; France has only 5 major parties, but every single one has more than 60 members in their Parliament.  But pay no attention to those countries.  Just pick one of these two shitty options.  It’s your duty to do that.  And also not to question it.

Look, it’s perfectly acceptable for you to do the electoral calculus and come to the conclusion that, if you don’t vote for Biden, you’re throwing your vote away (or, worse, that you’re effectively voting for Trump).  That’s a lovely thing for any individual “you” to do.  But don’t think it’s okay to try to shove that down everyone else’s throat.  And maybe also think about whether it’s okay to just accept that blindly and not believe it can ever change.

While researching this blog post, I came across this article from The Nation.  Now, The Nation is, admittedly, a pretty liberal news outlet, and it should be read with the understanding of that bias going in.  But this article (which you really should read in its entirety) makes some pretty compelling points, which I will quote here.

The astute reader will note that I’ve been comparing Trump to Biden as if this will be the choice facing American voters next fall. But this is a false choice—a false binary that I subscribe to, but that many young voters do not.  ...

...  Many young people felt pressured into voting for him in 2020 because of the unique threat to democratic self-government posed by Trump. That threat is no less real in 2024, but this time around, Biden’s foreign policy is giving young voters a moral stance to pin their dissatisfaction to. And many voters of color who already viewed voting for Biden as merely a harm-mitigation strategy are wondering how the guy who ran against white supremacy now lets his team smear protesters who call for peace as equivalent to the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville.

Responding to these valid moral criticisms with “Well, I hope you like it when Trump deports your family and takes away your voting rights” might feel like a cutting retort, but it’s actually a schoolyard bully’s threat masquerading as a political position.  ...

...  But just know that your use of Trump as a threat is not convincing them. The people saying they won’t vote for Biden know that Trump would be worse. They’re saying Biden should be better.

Perhaps the primary difference between Marc Elias and the author of this piece, Elie Mystal, is that Mystal is not an old white man.  He’s not necessarily a young man either, but being a person of color perhaps gives him a much better perspective to see how this “strategy” is becoming tiresome.  The Democrats tell us that democracy is at stake ... just like they told us the last time, and the time before that.  Even if they’re right—and I’m certainly not saying they’re wrong—they need new material.  And they need to stop using it as an excuse to muscle out any other party that tries to horn in on their territory.









Sunday, October 15, 2023

I thought Jared Kushner was going to fix this ...

When the WGA went on strike earlier this year, I was miffed for an entirely selfish reason: I get almost all of my news from places that employ writers, like The Daily Show and Steven Colbert on The Late Show.  Just as when the coronavirus first hit, I was abruptly plunged into a news-free zone.  As I noted back then:

Sure, I could sit around and watch CNN or something along those lines, but I gotta tell you: I spent a long time doing that right after 9/11, and all I got for it was way more stressed and not particularly more well-informed.  In fact, study after study has shown that “fake news” shows such as The Daily Show produce more well-informed viewers than almost any other outlet.  So right now I’m losing not only my major source of news about the world, but also the coping mechanism I was using to deal with the stress of said news: being able to laugh at it.

During this year’s stoppage, I found some new outlets, mostly on YouTube, where creators are not writing for the AMPTP, so the strike allowed them to continue.  Most of them, however, were not nearly amusing enough.  I’ve grown somewhat fond of Brian Tyler Cohen, for instance, but there’s no denying that he’s not only a radical liberal (which I don’t mind so much), but also a staunch Democrat (which I’m far less tolerant of).  Generally speaking, the Democrats are not nearly as liberal/progressive as I’d like, and they fuck up just as badly as the Republicans (case in point: Bob Menendez).  Then there are the “dirtbag left” and their less extreme offshoots, who will happily—even gleefully—attack Democrats, but traffic more in manufactured outrage than incisive and funny commentary.  About the only truly postive find during this long dry spell was Some More News, who are not so much current news like Colbert and whoever ends up being the next Trevor Noah, but more like John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight: deep dives into an single problematic situation, trying to use humor to explore the nuances of the story that traditional news outlets (even the “fake” news ones) just don’t have time to cover.

But now the strike is over, and Colbert is back, Meyers is back, Oliver is back, and The Daily Show will be back tomorrow night.  And just in time for the most violent flare-up between Israel and Palestine in decades; by the time it’s over—and I’m being optimistic just in assuming it will eventually be over—it will almost certainly jettison the “almost” from that description.  This is the type of thing that it is very difficult to inject even a modicum of humor into, but one of the reasons I truly respect these folks is that they always find a way: you can’t make jokes about the tragedy itself, of course, but you can make jokes about the idiots talking about the tragedy, or trying to “manage” it.  You can point out hypocrisies and people being greedy and foolish.  They figured out a way to do it about 9/11 (eventually), and they figured out a way to do it about the pandemic.  And, I have to say: I’m a bit disappointed by the lack of even trying that I’m seeing from my usual outlets.  That probably sounds a bit crass, like I’m complaining that this humanitarian crisis, where thousands are being killed, isn’t funny enough for me.  But that’s not what I mean to imply.  I’m more disappointed in how this is the line that my comedic news idols are afraid to cross.  A world-wide pandemic that killed 7 million people?  Sure, we can find a way to make jokes about that.  The Middle East?  Fuck that, man: I’m not touching that.

I think the main source of the problem is, perhaps more than any other hot-button issue in the United States—perhaps more even than abortion, or gun rights—there are reflexive reactions to stating a position on either side.  If you refuse to say you stand with Israel, well then of course you’re supporting terrorists.  And, if you do say you stand with Israel, then you’re supporting apartheid at the best and genocide at the worst.  Best just not to take a side.  Except ...

Except I reject this false dichotomy.  I do not stand with Israel, nor do I stand with Hamas (or any of the other Paletinian terrorist groups-du-jour).  I stand with the innocent civilians.

Numbers are hard to pin down, but the United Nations says that “More than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals, the majority of whom were civilians, were reportedly killed ...” and that ”... at least 1,100 Palestinians have been killed, including older persons and 290 children ...” ABC News reports that “In Israel, at least 1,300 people have been killed ...” and that “Palestinian authorities said at least 2,329 people have been killed ...” Would it really be so controversial to posit that killing innocent civilians is bad, regardless of which side is doing it?

This conflict has been going on so long that people don’t even bother going back to its beginning in their lists any more: the United Nations lists casualties only going back as far as 2008; Wikpedia’s list of military operations headed “Gaza-Israel conflict” only goes back to 2006 (and has 21 entries in those 18 years).  But, trying to extrapolate from Wikipedia’s timeline, I think there have been more than 50 incidents just in my lifetimethe first of which started when I was 7 months old—ranging from plane hijackings to full-on wars.  And I was only trying to count incidents in which multiple innocent bystanders were killed: I skipped all the assasinations of military and political figures by both sides.  Also, once it became clear I was going to hit 50 (easily), I actually quit counting, because it was just so goddamned depressing.  The Israelis and the Palestinians have bcome the Hatfields and McCoys of our lifetimes, except if the Hatfields and McCoys were wiping out huge swaths of the West Virginia population.

And I understand the issues of conflating the state of Israel with the Jewish people, but I don’t think it’s antisemitic to criticize the government of Israel.  If it were, there would quite a few antisemitc Jews these days: Jon Stewart has done some of this, not to mention there’s an entire organization of Jews for whom it is the raison d’être.  But it’s harder for non-Jewish people (such as myself) to do so.  In fact, there are, bizarrely, actual laws in 35 states (including my own) saying that you’re not allowed to boycott Israel in protest of its policies.  You know where it’s not illegal to protest Israel?  Israel.  Many Israeli newspapers have been extremely critical of Netanyahu in particular, which is only sensible: in a democracy, people are supposed to be critical of their governments.  They are supposed to hold them accountable.  There are no laws in the US about not being able to protest the US government (probably), but it’s okay to make it illegal to protest other countries’ governments?  It’s just surreal.

Meanwhile the Palestinians have the opposite problem: too often the face of their people is a group like Hamas (or Hezbollah, or Fatah, or the PLO, or ...), which everybody condemns, and rightfully so.  But condemning a terrorist group that operates in a country is not the same as condemning the people of that country, and expressing support for the people is not the same as expressing support for the terrorist group.  Netanyahu has said that “the enemy will pay an unprecedented price”; does that mean that Hamas will pay this price?  Because it sure seems like it’s the Palestinian people paying it right now.  If the Israelis wanted to hunt down every single Hamas soldier who participated in this henious attack on their country, who would speak out against them?  But bombing innocent civilians back to the stone age because of the actions of some madmen who claim to speak for them?  Does that really seem “justified”?

So I would like to take the (hopefully!) uncontroversial stance that people in both Israel and Palestine have the right to live their lives without fear of being shot, kidnapped, or bombed.  I dunno ... that just seems like common sense—and common decency—to me.



Even More News, the current news discussion podcast from the Some More News folks that I mentioned way back at the beginning of this post, had an almost entirely humor-free discussion of the current situation in Israel and Palestine that you could check out for more in depth discussion.  The episode of Some More News that they reference is actually two years old at this point, but (as Cody says) it’s eerily relevant to today’s news, so you should probably watch that.  The older video does lean more towards the Palestine side, but the recent podcast is more balanced.  And all the information is good regardless.









Sunday, April 16, 2023

The Fox May Grow Grey, but Never Good

Many moons ago, I would often tell people that I didn’t think that Rush Limbaugh believed the things he said.  “This guy,” I would tell anyone who asked, “is just performing for the audience.  Oh, he might believe something he’s saying every once in a while, but it’s almost accidental: believing or not believing is completely irrelevant for him.  He makes a lot of money with this act, and he will literally say anything for the money.”

Now, Rush’s popularity faded, and eventually he died, and younger folks today might not even remember who he was.  But the sad thing is that there was always someone coming along behind him, trotting out the same old act—some even priding themselves on taking it further—saying the same old bullshit, and making the same old bank.  First Bill O’Reilly, who has himself come and gone by this point, then Glen Beck (gone but trying to stage a comeback, I’ve heard), Alex Jones (fading fast), Sean Hannity (still around), and current star pupil Tucker Carlson.  Not to imply that right-wing douchebaggery is only a man’s game, of course—folks like Laura Ingraham and Jeanine Pirro are fighting to break that glass ceiling, for some reason—but it’s mostly been the men, hogging the spotlight, as men are wont to do.  But the point is, there’s always been someone, and usually several someones.  And, for every single one of them, I’ve said, repeatedly, I think it’s all an act.  I don’t believe for one second that any of those motherfuckers believed a single word of the shit they were spewing, except maybe by accident.  Many of them are very well educated, and it’s quite simply not logical to believe they’re that stupid.  ‘Cause, you know, they’ve said some stupid shit.  Limbaugh once said that “firsthand smoke takes 50 years to kill people, if it does” (he, of course, died of lung cancer).  Jones once said “the majority of frogs in most areas of the United States are now gay.” Megyn Kelly (who is not Laura Ingraham, but is a credible imitation) once said “Santa just is white.” Not only do I not believe that any of these people believe what they’re saying, I think they’re engaged in a competition to see who can say the most ridiculous bullshit and make it sound credible.  I imagine a Victorian-style English gentlemen’s club where Hannity, wearing a long walrus moustahce, is slapping Kelly on the back and saying, “oh, good one Megyn! ‘Santa just is white’ ... bally good show, eh wot wot?”

And, for all the decades that I’ve been saying this, people have been telling me I’m full of shit.

Not just conservatives, mind you.  Most liberals also seem convinced that these folks are true believers, which of course is more dangerous.  Though ... is it?  Would it be more dangerous if someone truly believed the hate they were shoveling, or if they were cynically manipulating people into a hate they couldn’t be bothered to feel?  Perhaps an academic question.  Point being, I’ve been ridiculed for having this view just about every time, by just about everybody, from just about every point on the political spectrum.  I’d like to say that I kept saying, “just wait: one day you’ll see.” But, the truth is, I didn’t actually hold out much hope of this.

Oh, I’ve had some glimmers of hope along the way.  In 2017, Alex Jones was involved in a vicious custody battle; his wife, unsurprisingly, said she didn’t want her kids being raised by someone who routinely made homophobic comments and indulged in outlandish conspiracy theories.  Jones’ lawyer claimed: “He’s playing a character.  He is a performance artist.” Kinda sounds like what I’ve been saying for years, right?  But of course people said he was just saying those things to get out of legal trouble (which was probably true).  In late 2016, Glenn Beck did an interview with Samantha Bee of Full Frontal wherein he said: “As a guy who has done damage, I don’t want to do any more damage. I know what I did. I helped divide.” Sure sounds like he not only wasn’t drinking his own Kool-Aid, but had rather come to regret ever selling the stuff.  Still, people said that Sam Bee and her people had edited the interview to show the narrative they wanted to show (which, also, was probably true).

But now, my friends, I have achieved total vindication, thanks to Dominion Voting Systems, and their more than one billion dollar lawsuit against Fox News.  See, because what we’re learning now is not what Fox News people are saying in court; no, what we’re learing now is things they said, to each other, in private, which is now evidence in court.  And I don’t think anyone believes that the court is editing the information to fit a narrative ... in fact, if anything, Fox is the one doing the editing.  Just this week, the judge in the case sanctioned Fox News for withholding evidence.  Plus, as law professor RonNell Andersen Jones pointed out in an interview with Jon Stewart, there’s still a lot of information that is redacted in the court filings.  The stuff that we know about is the stuff that “either they thought that they could let it go or ... they lost in an effort to redact it.”

So what do the texts and other messages say?  By now you’ve likely heard the worst of them.  Tucker Carlson describing Trump as “a demonic force, a destroyer” and writing of the ex-president’s lawyer “Sidney Powell is lying by the way. I caught her”; Ingraham replying “Sidney is a complete nut”; Hannity saying of Giuliani “Rudy is acting like an insane person” and calling Powell a “fucking lunatic.” Not only do the messages show that the on-air personalities didn’t buy the bullshit they were peddling; they also tell us exactly why: it’s all about the money.  When the New York Post asked Trump to stop claiming the election was stolen, they started losing readers; Rupert Murdoch (owner of both the Post and Fox News) messaged the Post’s chief executive “Getting creamed by CNN!” When a Fox reporter tweeted that “there is no evidence” of voter machine defect or fraud, Carlson texted Hannity “Please get her fired.  Seriously what the fuck?  Actually shocked.  It needs to stop immediately, like tonight.  It’s measurably hurting the company.  The stock price is down.” None of this is controversial.  None of this disputed.  None of this is paraphrased or edited in any way.  All of it has been reported multiple times by reputable outlets (the links I’ve included above range from ABC News to the Guardian in the UK to Rolling Stone magazine), and they’re direct quotes from court evidence.  And this, as Andersen Jones points out, is what they couldn’t get suppressed.  There’s like a lot worse out there waiting to be unredacted.

But, hey: this is sufficient for me.  This, I think, proves my point to a T.  These idiots don’t believe what they’re saying.  What’s worse, they don’t care how much damage it does, as long as they keep making money.  At the end of the day, that’s really all it’s about.  So is it more dangerous that they might all be true believers?  I’m not sure.  I think the truth might be even more dangerous than that: that they are all cynical, performative, money-grubbing assholes who care more about lining their pockets than they do about the state of our democracy.  They are, in many ways, the ultimate expression of late-stage capitalism: fuck ’em all, let the world burn, as long as I get my nut.  That’s plenty scary enough for me.



[A side note on today’s title.  Wiktionary refers to it merely as a “proverb,” and says it basically means the same as “a leopard cannot change its spots.” Now, if you ask the Internet, it will gleefully tell you that this saying derives from Benjamin Franklin, and one source (which I refuse to link to) even has the balls to source it as being from Poor Richard Improved.  But, see, here’s the thing: the entire works of Mr. Franklin are available on Project Gutenberg, including Franklin’s Way to Wealth; or, “Poor Richard Improved", and the only thing it says about foxes is that “the sleeping fox catches no poultry.” In fact, after some diligent searching, I have concluded with a decent degree of confidence that Franklin never said any such thing.  So, you know ... don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.  If you want more musings on quotes, I got you covered.]