#and my running theory is that's a large contributor to why it's so good

[flythesail]

The last third of s4 is wild because it's like oh haha Nancy and Ace still have the curse to deal with, then on top of that they throw in a cover-up of an accidental murder

[shitpostingperidot]

Kamala Khan’s bookshelves

Kamala’s room in The Marvels is an absolute treasure trove of little details to zoom in on, and I’ve identified so many books on her shelves!

Shelf 1, top to bottom:

1. Landmark Experiments in Twentieth Century Physics by George L. Trigg

College-level book about experiments that helped us learn about x-rays, lasers, isotopes, superconductors, and all kinds of other things I don’t understand. Meant to be more practical than theoretical since it talks about the actual methodologies of these experiments. Could be for school, or for Kamala and Bruno to run their own tests of Kamala’s powers. The first of many books in the Khan house that come from Dover Publications.

2. Space Time Matter by Hermann Weyl

“An esoteric initiation into space time physics” -Amazon reviewer. I’m gonna be real, I don’t understand half the words in this book description, but apparently it’s famous for introducing gauge theory, which was later reborn as phase transformations in quantum theory. I can see this being something Kamala reads to try and understand the bangle transporting her to the Partition. Also from Dover.

3. A Map to the Sun by Sloane Leong

A graphic novel about a high school girl’s basketball team learning to work together despite their many differences and conflicts. Also it has a gorgeous color palette. Seems fairly self explanatory why it’s in this movie. I’ll definitely be borrowing this from my library! Like my friend Kamala recommended a book to me herself.

4. The Good Immigrant anthology edited by Nikesh Shukla

21 essays from Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) people in the UK about their experiences. It was crowdfunded initially, extremely critically acclaimed, and has gotten spinoffs and sequels. Riz Ahmed, who is British Pakistani, is one contributor, and a fun fact is that Rish Shah (Kamran from Ms. Marvel) worked with Riz Ahmed in an Oscar winning short called The Long Goodbye. Also, the editor, Nikesh Shukla, is currently writing the Spider-Man India comics series!

5. Bright Lines by Tanwi Nandini Islam

A coming-of-age story about 3 young adults with complicated family, friend, and romantic relationships between them. They have to travel from Brooklyn to Bangladesh together one summer and thereby discover a lot about themselves. I haven’t read it, but there seems to be a ton of complex representation of LGBTQ, POC, immigrant, and Muslim characters. I wonder how much the three main characters can be compared with our three characters with complex relationships in The Marvels, and I wonder which character Kamala most relates to!

6. I can’t tell! The font is bugging the hell out of me because theoretically, with that amount of contrast, I should be able to read a word when I get two inches from the TV and mess with the settings. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

7. I also can’t tell, but I’m being easier on myself because the title is written in white on a yellow background. It’s not the only book I know off the top of my head with this color scheme (Yellowface by RF Kuang) because the title is definitely multiple words. Help!

Shelf 2, right to left:

1. One Night that Changes Everything by Lauren Barnholdt

A YA romance where, through a convoluted series of events, a teenager must face all of her insecurities in one night. I can see Kamala devouring this as brain candy after wrestling with those advanced science books, or using it as fic inspiration!

2. Can’t tell, but love the color scheme!

This next one is a weird one, because I am 100% sure of what book it is, but I cannot find a picture of a matching edition.

3. Wizard at Large by Terry Brooks

It’s definitely, without a doubt, this book (where a character and a magical medallion are accidentally transported to Earth from another realm and switches places with an evil genie). Like those are the words on the spine and the plot of the book is an obvious choice for this movie. The fonts match on the audiobook, the ebook, and the next two books in the series. But try as I might, I cannot find any proof on the internet that the physical book that appears in Kamala’s room, that uses those two fonts and that spine formatting, exists. This is haunting me…

4. (On the other side of the box) It’s not The Twilight Saga Eclipse, but I definitely thought it was before I could watch in high definition. I think it’s a journal or sketchbook of Kamala’s; there are a bunch scattered throughout the room.

Shelf 3:

I’ve only identified the bottom book, which is Einstein’s Theory of Relativity by Max Born (Dover Publications). The third one up is HAUNTING me, it looks SO identifiable and yet!

Living Room Side Table:

1. Amateur Astronomer’s Handbook by JB Sidgwick (from Dover Publications)

2. Cosmology by Hermann Bondi (also Dover)

Both of these seem less difficult than the science books in Kamala’s room, but reviewers note that it helps to know calculus when reading Cosmology. Idk which member of the Khan family is reading these, but I love their family’s connection to the stars 💫

Tbh I’m having so much fun doing this! And I really wish we got to see Monica’s living space so I can analyze her books 😭

[sociavelly]

We are going to talk about batch jobs and, what's a batch job.

Good morning, everyone so, let's get into it today we are going to talk about batch jobs and, what's a batch job. Well, basically, the idea of a batch job is to do a very large amount of work in computation terms at a given point in time. Usually you do this on a schedule or some of some sort, and it's extremely important that you know about batch jobs. If you want to build a system that is going to operate efficiently at scale now, the thing is that there are operations out there like you. May not believe it, but there's a there are actually tons and tons of tons of things that, in theory, you could be doing that literally takes so long that we're talking something like some things may take hours like I'll. Give you an example. Let'S say that you wanted to,��

I don't know, export your entire database and let's say that your applications have it has millions of millions of users moving all that data to a file or like streaming it to an another part of like another database and so forth. It will take a long time and that's where a batch job comes in and comes into play, so the trick basically to pass your best batch jobs is to figure out what computation is going to take a lot of time to to execute. Basically, and because you don't the thing, is you don't want to like in general like if you have somebody requesting something to your server or if you you're doing some logging or if you're doing, I don't know like just having your application run as normal? That'S not really like that. That'S not an use case for a batch job but, however, something like sending out a really large amount of emails or having, as I said, migrating a database or something of that nature. 

That'S a perfect, perfect, perfect thing to do for batch job. I can give you an example from work where a lot of heavy computation takes takes place in order to on you know, on the user data in order to generate statistics is another good one like if you've ever used the creative studios like the app for YouTube, Which I use myself, you will notice that there's always a delay on the information that you're getting with you know a day or two something of that nature. And that's because it's such a heavy thing to do all the database accesses and like reduce all the data down to statistics and stuff like that that it's simply it's not possible, or rather it's very inefficient - to try to do that in real time, because you have, If imagine YouTube, they have millions and millions and millions of contributors who are all generating all this data, and it's like there is no computer or you know like it will be so expensive for them to just do this all the time and real in real time. 

So that's why batch jobs are so important to know about now. I'M talking to you about this because I had a one of my viewers, we're talking asking me about how to build things, that's scale and I'm basically making a few videos now to talk about different aspects that you shouldn't or a facet like. Basically, things that you need to know about in order to manage a really really really really large system, and now I'm not talking about. If you have like like handler a few hundred users, this may not be exactly like the batch jobs. It'S not something that you use for, as I said, light operations and that's basically, a lighter operation is anything that is perceived to the user as being almost instantaneously. In other words, if your computation takes less than a few seconds, that's not a good case for a batch job. It'S really designed to do some type of really long-running process which may take hours or at least half an hour or something like that. 

It takes it. Basically takes too long for a user to be able to to sit there and wait for it, and it's it's something that you're gon na have to face when you get up to larger companies where they have usually it's because they have too many users. That'S that's the most common reason why you would use a best batch job and, what's beautiful about it, is that you really only have to. You really only have to have a single like one or a few computers who will run this batch job and, as I said, it's usually on a on a schedule. So you might run this operation once or twice a day or once every week or something of that nature, and it makes the load on your system a lot lower. 

Now you don't think so right now. Trust me if you're making some like a smaller system, because you know computers are actually so fast that you, you kind of get used to that they are always almost instantaneously, but you I'm trust me when you get up to this type of scale, that Facebook and Youtube like Google and so forth, like or in my case it was Ticketmaster where you have so many users and so much data this, but like the batch job, is going to be a part of your daily life. Trust me it's gon na happen, and so I think it's worth for you to know that it's not always a record requirement for you to do it.a I could try to think about operations that you can kind of push into the future or operations that don't have to be instantaneously instead be instant and that's. Those are usually a very good, a good candidate for bad a for a bad job. 

So, as I said like my favorite example is to send out a really large amount of emails, I think about it. As you know, how Walmart, for example, sends out email advertise advert advertisements for Black Friday like that's like, if you think about it, that's millions. Millions and millions of people who are gon na have to have those get those emails, so they most likely. That'S not something that you know they just run and then everything is hunky-dory right. It takes a lot of time to set to do something like that. So that's a good candy for a bad job and, as I said, database migrations, doing, creating lots and lots of statistics for based on your data. That'S also good a good thing, because the thing is that these operations - they take a lot of time, but they don't require you to do it in instant time. So that's basically what you should think about when it comes to a batch job. I know you mean a batch job can be anything it doesn't like. It doesn't take a specific manifestation. I think that the rule of thumb, for when you should consider a batch job is, as I said, it's the computation time of this thing. You'Re gon na do going to be measured in minutes or hours. T

hen you should really think about having a single computer or like some process that is going to run over. You know the course of maybe several hours that just finishes that computation and you should do that. You know, as often as you need may sometimes it's just once, and sometimes it's once a day, but I just wanted to inform you that a batch job is it's a it's a perfect way of saving yourself a lot of hassle and like basically resources on your System, because not all things that you do with the computer needs to be happening in real time. Some things can actually take a long. It take a little bit of a delay and some things out, but out of necessity, needs to take a little bit longer and that's when you should think batch job.

[paranormal-playgr0und]

The Lizzie Borden Playground

Introduction:

Hello Ghoul Friends! This week’s report is on the infamous Lizzie Borden house!

It’s Pride month, y’all (it may be the end of Pride month, but let’s go out with a chop, shall we?) In the spirit of Pride month, I chose the Lizzie Borden house due to one of the theories surrounding what happened there in 1892… there’s a gay theory (meant to say great, but gay works too), but what’d you expect?

Without further ado, put on some good music, and let’s get into the report!

The Report:

On the morning of August 4th, 1892, in Fall River Massachusetts, 32-year-old Lizzie Borden found her father dead on the sofa, with 11 blows to the head from what is believed to be an ax. The maid, Bridget “Maggie” Sullivan, heard Lizzie’s cry when she found the body.

“Maggie, come down! Come down quick; Father’s dead; Somebody came in and killed him.”

Maggie is reported to either be washing windows or taking a nap during the time of the murder, it is unknown which she was doing. Maggie heard nothing from where she was on the third floor.

Lizzie was in the backyard. Lizzie heard a loud thud and groaning coming from the house, and in curiosity, decided to check it out. That is when she found her father’s body.

Lizzie asked Maggie to go across the street and fetch the doctor. Maggie returned with a neighbor. Then Maggie asked about Lizzie’s stepmother, Abby. According to Maggie’s testimony, this is what Lizzie replied with.

“Oh, Maggie! I am almost sure I heard her come in. Go upstairs and see if she’s there.” 

Maggie and the neighbor found the body of Abby Borden, face down in the upstairs guest bedroom. She had also been struck with an ax- and had been struck 18 times to the head.

(Pic cred https://www.pinterest.com/pin/557883472563944808/)

Shortly after, Lizzie Borden was put on trial for the murder of Andrew and Abby Borden. She was put on trial due to the odd circumstances behind the murder, and plausible motives.

One motive was that Lizzie’s father was very wealthy, but lived frugally. The Borden’s lived off a diet of mainly mutton, however, Andrew’s net worth at the time of his death is an estimated 10 million in today’s economy. It was also reported that Andrew Borden sexually abused Lizzie, adding to her motive.

Another possible motive was Lizzie’s relationship with her stepmother, Abby. Five years before the murder, Lizzie and Abby had a falling-out, which in turn broke their relationship. The fight was over a house Andrew Borden had purchased for Lizzie’s half-sister, rather than a house for Lizzie and her sister, Emma.

During the trial, Lizzie and Maggie’s answers were inconsistent and changed every time they talked about the murder. Maggie reported that Lizzie was seen wearing an unstained blue dress when she discovered the body of Andrew Borden.

Three days after the murder, a friend of Lizzie’s reported that Lizzie had burned a dress with “old paint stains” on it. The murder weapon was never found.

A pharmacist reported that Lizzie had tried to buy a poison shortly before the murder, but this testimony was dismissed. In the end, there was no physical evidence that placed Lizzie as the murderer, and she was ruled as not guilty.

“Lizzie Borden took an ax,

and gave her mother forty whacks.

And when she saw what she had done,

she gave her father forty-one.”

(a creepy playground nursery rhyme in the spirit of the Lizzie Borden case)

One theory is the uncle of Lizzie Borden, John Morse, killed Andrew and Abby Borden. He was not seen until 12 pm, about an hour after the bodies were discovered. He claimed to be visiting a sick relative during the murder and was just down the road. He also claimed to be with the town doctor at the time, but the doctor was actually at the Borden house, looking at the bodies of Mr. and Mrs. Borden. Abby Borden was found in the bedroom Morse had slept in the night before.

His believed motive was the Borden’s financial status, Morse was the only person who mentioned and knew about Andrew’s will. John Morse was a butcher, a key detail considering that it was later speculated a meat cleaver could have been used during the murder.

The last theory is the reason why I chose this case in the spirit of Pride month. Recently, a conspiracy had emerged saying that it was possible that Maggie and Lizzie had been romantically involved, and killed Mr. and Mrs. Borden in order to keep things a secret. Maggie and Lizzie could have easily teamed up for the murder, as they were the only two people on the property while the murder took place. Both their testimonies are missing details and make little sense, but when put together the testimonies start to add up.

Lizzie also was said to have a crush on an actress later in life, a fact that explains why Lizzie’s sister, Emma moved out of their home. Neither of the Borden sisters married.

It’s worth noting that a film was made about the Borden murders, titled “Lizzie”. The film focused on the lesbian relationship between Lizzie and the Maggie.

After the acquittal, Lizzie and her sister Emma inherited the Borden family fortune, shortly thereafter buying a large house in a wealthy district of Fall River. 

The Haunts:

(Pic cred: Chicago Tribune / Contributor/ Getty Images ; https://www.history.com/news/9-things-you-may-not-know-about-lizzie-borden)

After the murders, activity rose in the Lizzie Borden house. Activity occurs in all corners of the house, but the bedrooms and where the Borden’s died, seems to see an influx of apparitions, voices, and odd occurrences.

The most haunted areas are Lizzie’s old bedroom, the places where Andrew and Abby died, the master bedroom, and Maggie’s quarters. Throughout the house, many people experience a dreadful feeling, and some people even experience headaches.

The staff at the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast claim that once a month, fire alarms will go off without reason at around 3 am. 3 am is widely known as “Dead Time,” or “Bewitching Hour” in the paranormal community, because most phenomenon are reported to happen at 3 am.

K2 meters, a ghost hunting equipment that reads electro-magnetic frequencies (the type of radio waves that come from cell phones, electronics, and ghosts), have read high amounts of energy in the spots where Andrew and Abby were killed.

Apparitions have been spotted at the Lizzie Borden house, but mostly by digital and polaroid camera. Most of the apparitions appear in mirrors around the house, sometimes visible to the naked eye.

Abby Borden is believed to be the woman seen and heard at the Borden house. People report hearing a woman weeping at night, and shoes will move on their own. A floral scent is also smelled throughout the home, and is thought to be Abby Borden walking around. The apparition of an older woman wearing a nightgown is said to appear to guests, and she will tuck them in at night.

Andrew Borden was a frugal man, in the master bedroom is a small pile of change people leave for him. It is reported that taking even a penny can result in getting physically scratched. Not much else is heard or seen from Andrew Borden.

With the murder that happened, it’s almost ironic that the front door of the Lizzie Borden house will swing wide open if not properly locked at night. Other doors open and close throughout the house, and footsteps were once reported upstairs.

Random power surges will make the lights flicker on and off, and even burn out. One power surge had a guest running for her car when the surge burst out the lightbulb in her room (and only her room…).

In the cemetery where the Borden family is buried, people report seeing flashes of light and screaming- which come from the Borden plot. These occurrences are the most noted hauntings (and possibly the only documented hauntings) at the Oak Grove Cemetery in Fall River, Massachusetts.

(Author note) Hey ghoul friends! While writing this report, especially this portion of the report- I started to feel an uneasy feeling in my room. It felt like there was someone else is my room with me, right behind me, watching me write over my shoulder. I was intrigued, and so I went to grab my K2 meter. I come back into my room, and the feeling’s almost completely vanished. (Someone is definitely staring at me right now). Anyways, in the middle of my room, the K2 meter lit up- and quickly blinked to the middle before vanishing completely. (I swear I heard someone whisper into my ear, my god- I’m listening to music by the way, Break my Stride by Matthew Wilder, around 2:20 in the song I heard the whisper in my right ear) There are no electronics in the middle of my room, no possibly explanation, and a reading like that hasn’t happened since. For context, my house is haunted, but nothing like this has happened… which is interesting. I now have the K2 meter on and next to me while I finish the report. Anyways, on with the report!

The Re-Cap:

The Lizzie Borden playground has two notable kids. They’ve claimed all part of the playground, from the swings to the monkey bars, everywhere is Andrew’s and Abby’s territory.

Andrew claims he’s a ninja, because not many people can find him- it’s almost like he’s invisible. Andrew will come out if you take a rock from his collection displayed in the tunnel. Andrew will find you before you find him, often spying on grown-ups and big kids who venture into the Lizzie Borden playground. If you really want to find Andrew, you need to look in the right place above the slide- you’ll see him.

Abby is Andrew’s girlfriend. She’s seen more than Andrew. She likes to pick the flowers that grow around the swings, and most often you can smell her flowers before you see her. She’s more welcoming than Andrew, not afraid to interact with the countless big kids and grown-ups to who come to the playground. Abby’s favorite place to be is on top of the monkey bars. If she likes you, she’ll welcome you; if she doesn’t, you won’t see her.

There’s a few small holes in the roof on top of the playground, Abby and Andrew don’t seem to mind, but other people do. Once a month, Andrew and Abby will hide a walkie-talkie somewhere in the playground and play loud music until someone finds the walkie-talkie and turns it off.

Abby and Andrew have a ritual before they leave the playground for the night- Andrew places a tall stick in front of the tunnel, and Abby and Andrew won’t leave until it’s in the perfect spot. Everyone knows not to touch the stick, if they move it- it will find it’s way back to its original position.

On the basketball court, people claim that they hear Andrew and Abby arguing, along with their friend Lizzie, who sometimes makes an appearance at the park. At night, grown-ups have reported seeing Andrew and Abby playing around with their flashlight on the basketball court.

A lot of big kids have been to the Lizzie Borden Playground. The big kids like teasing Abby and Andrew with a playground nursery rhyme, in hopes that they’ll come out and show themselves.

“Lizzie Borden took an ax,

and gave her mother forty whacks.

And when she saw what she had done,

she gave her father forty-one.”

A notable amount of grown-ups venture to the playground, it’s in a convenient location and it’s something to do in Fall River.

The Lizzie Borden Playground remains the sole hangout of Abby and Andrew Borden.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarahf (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): From the launch of his campaign to stump speeches on the trail, former Vice President Joe Biden is running on the idea that President Trump and his administration are an aberration. “This is not the Republican Party,” Biden recently told a crowd in Iowa. But some pundits, party operatives and other 2020 candidates think Biden’s stance is shortsighted and argue that Trump’s presidency is a symptom of a much bigger problem in the GOP.

So how much of an aberration is Trump? He has challenged norms and democratic values while in office, but Republicans have largely declined to break rank. Does this mean that Trump’s candidacy was just a reflection of the direction the party was already headed in?

natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): Can you draw a through-line between Trump and the Republicans that came before him? Sure, yeah. I’m not sure it’s a particularly linear through-line, though.

Something can be in line with a trend but still be an outlier. Home runs are way up in baseball this year, but if someone winds up finishing the season with 83 home runs, that’s still an outlier. Climate change makes heat extremes much more likely, but if it’s 105 degrees in Boston in May, that’s still an outlier.

matt.grossmann (Matt Grossmann, political science professor at Michigan State University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): And the tendency for Republicans to get behind their president is actually one area of continuity. Republicans trust government consistently more under Republican presidents, often dramatically reversing course after a Democratic president.

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): But at what point does it make sense to characterize something as an outlier? For example, people often point to the “Access Hollywood” tape or Trump’s remarks about the appearance of women, or his statements about immigrants as instances of norm violation. If you look at American history, racism and sexism aren’t unfamiliar themes, but it is unusual, especially in the modern era, for them to be so front and center.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): Some Republican politicians were proto-Trumps. Think former Maine Gov. Paul LePage or Iowa Rep. Steve King. The rise of the tea party foregrounded a lot of Republicans who were saying outrageous things. And I don’t know if we want to count dog whistles, like the Willie Horton ad.

julia_azari: I would count those dog whistles and point out that Democrats were not immune to the temptations of making these kinds of appeals in that era either.

natesilver: Well, you can’t really characterize it as an outlier until you see where the next couple of data points line up, Julia. Which is why my basic meta-argument is that people are way too confident about this question, in either direction.

But that’s why I like the baseball or climate change analogy. Boston might be many times more likely to have a 105-degree day now than it was 50 years ago. That doesn’t mean it’s the new normal, however.

julia_azari: Of course we can’t know if Trump is the new normal yet. But I am not satisfied with this answer. I think we can and should have some sort of metric for whether his presidency is truly out of step with trends or historical patterns.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer):

In New Hampshire, Joe Biden predicts that once President Trump is out of office, Republicans will have “an epiphany” and work with Democrats toward consensus.

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) May 14, 2019

So this is the core question to me.

Does Biden actually believe this? Or is he just saying it because swing voters might like it?

sarahf: Right. On the question of whether Trump is an aberration, a lot of what we’re asking, I think, is whether a “return to normalcy” is even possible. Within the Democratic Party, there is a perception that former President Barack Obama spent years trying to compromise with congressional Republicans and that those efforts often fell flat — Merrick Garland’s thwarted nomination to the Supreme Court is an example these folks point to. And so now it’s a question of whether Democratic voters actually think bipartisanship can still work. Biden is clearly running on a platform that he thinks it can.

julia_azari: The normalcy Biden describes was never a thing.

perry: Do you think Biden is being sincere? Biden’s comment was almost exactly what Obama said in 2012 about how his victory would break the fever of GOP opposition, and Obama was totally wrong, of course. I was shocked that Biden said something that seemed so obviously clueless, but it might fit with his electoral strategy.

natesilver: I think Biden is being sincere, for what it’s worth. He came up in an era of relatively high comity and bipartisanship in the Senate.

nrakich: And Biden is friends with many Republicans in the Senate, like Lindsey Graham. It makes sense that he thinks he can woo them to his side.

But also a President Biden would probably need to get buy-in from only a few Republican senators in order to pass his agenda and get this “bipartisanship” thing to work.

I don’t think even Biden thinks he will convince a majority of the GOP caucus to vote for his policies.

matt.grossmann: Biden was the primary Democrat involved in cutting three separate budget deals with Mitch McConnell under Obama (going in wildly different directions), so he may have little reason to believe it can’t still be done. Believe it or not, most new laws are still bipartisan, and majority parties are getting no better at enacting their agenda.

sarahf: The McConnell whisperer!

julia_azari: Ha. From a strategic perspective, maybe it makes sense. It could be that people in the primary electorate are thinking more “I would like to get something done, and maybe Biden can do it” than “fuck the other party.” I’m not sure how any of the other Democratic presidential candidates think they will get their big policy ideas through a GOP-controlled Senate.

nrakich: I do think Biden has the best chance of striking deals with a GOP Senate. It’s just that people are overestimating how big of a difference he would make. Biden might be able to convince three GOP senators to vote with him. A President Tulsi Gabbard might be able to convince zero.

natesilver: TuLsI GaBBaRd hAs BiPaRtIsAn FrIeNdS ToO, Rakich, such as former Illinois Rep. Aaron Schock.

nrakich: Ha. That’s actually true — lots of Republicans are outspoken about how much they like Gabbard, so maybe she was a bad example.

But FWIW, according to a March poll from Quinnipiac University, Democrats said 52 percent to 39 percent that they would prefer a candidate who mostly works with Republicans rather than one who mostly stands up to them.

julia_azari: I just wonder if people want compromise in practice as much as in theory — and how having a divisive Republican president like Trump may have changed that.

sarahf: So, Julia, you’re saying that there might be a larger appetite now for a more combative Democratic president who is less willing to compromise?

I buy that, and I think we’re seeing that reflected in the messaging of several candidates.

julia_azari: Yeah, I think that’s a possibility. There is still this idea about building a new national consensus (at least on the Left). People think that there will be an election like 1964 or 1980 (at least, the narrative of 1980 as a landslide — Reagan won only 50.7 percent of the popular vote) and that there will be a 55 percent to 60 percent majority for a general approach to governance. But I think that’s a steep climb no matter how many rallies in the heartland or Amtrak trips through Scranton one takes.

matt.grossmann: 100 percent agree.

natesilver: I do think we have to ask how Republicans would react to Trump being defeated, by Biden or someone else.

Let’s say it’s pretty bad, for instance. The GOP loses the popular vote by 6 points, and all the major swing states go to the Democrat. Republicans lose another 15 House seats. And Democrats eke out a 51-49 Senate majority.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a one-term president, and that president (George H.W. Bush) came after Reagan had held two terms, so Republicans couldn’t feel too upset. Trump being a one-termer would be different, more analogous to Jimmy Carter.

nrakich: I’m not sure they would react that much, Nate? I feel like McConnell is just doing his thing, Trump or no.

matt.grossmann: Republicans would act like they usually do — a big backlash against the new Democratic president.

sarahf: You don’t think it matters to Republicans who the Democratic candidate is because party trumps everything?

nrakich: Sarah, I think some Republicans would prefer Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders because they’re easier to demonize (in the same way that some Democrats preferred having Trump as the GOP nominee in 2016), and some would prefer Biden because they think the country would be less ruined under a more moderate president.

natesilver: But if Trump loses, we’d be looking at the Republican nominee having lost the popular vote for the presidency in seven out of eight election cycles.

And all of this happening despite a pretty good economy.

I don’t know. I think the party might react a lot differently than in 2008 when John McCain losing was more or less inevitable.

nrakich: Maybe Republicans would come out with an autopsy report again, like they did after the 2012 election, for how they can return to relevance — and then ignore it again in 2024, like they did in 2016.

matt.grossmann: But isn’t a backlash against the new Democratic president the best way to deal with that?

julia_azari: In the past, it has mattered somewhat whether the defeat was expected, but otherwise, losing parties have reacted by building up institutions, thinking about innovation, etc. My research on election interpretation and what we have seen with 2016 and 2018 suggest to me that Republicans would try to put forth an election narrative to serve their ends. For example, after 2012, some conservative commentators on Twitter advanced this “it’s hard to compete with Santa Claus” narrative, suggesting that Democrats’ victories were because they had promised unrealistic benefits to voters, rather than that they had won based on the strength of the campaign or the ideas.

nrakich: I’m sure there would be hand-wringing, but I just don’t know if it will change Republican behavior.

McConnell will still try to make the new Democratic president impotent, and the party’s new presidential hopefuls — the Tom Cottons and Mike Pences and Nikki Haleys of the world — will still go to Iowa talking about how unfairly Trump was treated.

natesilver: I’m reallllly not sure about that, Rakich. I think a lot of Republicans would be happy to throw Trump under the bus.

nrakich: You don’t think GOP voters (as opposed to elites) would still be loyal to Trump?

And therefore that the path to the 2024 nomination for Republican hopefuls would be cozying up to him?

If Trump loses, he will certainly remain a major force in the party. He’ll keep tweeting stuff to his base, and he might even run again in 2024! The GOP might be stuck with Trump as long as he’s still alive.

natesilver: I think you’re forgetting how much presidents are treated as losers once they lose.

Hillary Clinton has become relatively unpopular among Democrats, for instance, even though there might be a lot of reasons to feel sympathetic toward her.

matt.grossmann: And would it be that hard for Pence or Haley to thread the needle? They can offer a very different style of leadership but still say they believe Trump protected America and brought about economic recovery.

julia_azari: Yeah. I think it’s possible you will see Trumpism without Trump. In my opinion, the party has moved in a Trump-y direction (although I know Matt disagrees somewhat at least on the direction).

natesilver: “Trumpism without Trump” reminds me of “Garfield minus Garfield”:

nrakich: If it’s a close election, how many Republicans will think Trump lost fair and square, though?

natesilver: Well, I’m stipulating that it won’t be a close election.

nrakich: That’s true.

natesilver: (Stipulating, not predicting, for the case of this hypothetical.)

julia_azari: Even if it’s not, I think there will be narrative delegitimizing it.

matt.grossmann: Did we ever answer the question of whether calling Trump an aberration was a good strategy for Biden? It’s very similar to what Clinton and Obama said in 2016, but it may have been an ineffective strategy then; some Democratic-leaning voters decided it meant that Trump was less conservative than the Republican Party.

julia_azari: I’ve been thinking of the question as: “Will reaching out to anti-Trump Republicans in the electorate in this way convince them to vote for the Democratic candidate?”

But as Rakich said earlier, I think the conventional wisdom might overestimate the difference between having Biden in this position relative to any of the other candidates.

natesilver: Liberals on Twitter don’t seem to like Biden’s strategy, which is a strong sign that it’s a good strategy.

I think his comments about Republicans magically deciding to compromise were dumb, but overall the “Trump is an aberration” message is liable to be fairly well-received.

After all, Democrats spend a whole ton of time talking about how Trump is historically, unprecedentedly terrible and must be curbed, impeached, etc.

julia_azari: But Democratic primary voters might see it as a signal of less animosity toward Republicans, and my rather depressing read of a rather depressing political science literature suggests that may not be all that strategic.

natesilver: I think a lot of Biden’s messages are things that will do “just fine” with primary voters but are fairly good general election messages.

matt.grossmann: “I will be able to reach out to disaffected Obama-Trump supporters” is a good argument. “We have to get things done and I’m the one to do it” is a good argument. “I will get us past this horrible era” is even a good argument. But saying positive things about Republicans might not be necessary or even helpful.

nrakich: Remember that Biden has paired his “This is not the Republican Party” with a healthy dose of “Trump is a terrible human being and the worst thing to ever happen to America and someone who should be punched in the mouth,” which probably will appeal to primary voters.

natesilver: Also, keep in mind that Biden specifically rests his case on electability.

So if, hypothetically, independents like him because he seems more reasonable and that helps to prop him up in the polls, that could make primary voters more likely to stay with him.

julia_azari: Put that way, it comes down to whether Democratic primary voters hate Trump or Republicans more.

nrakich: (I think the answer is Trump.)

natesilver: Democratic primary voters hate Trump more than the Republican Party, right?

matt.grossmann: They do, but they dislike both.

natesilver: Or maybe it’s pretty close, actually. Only 10 percent of Democrats have a favorable view of the GOP.

nrakich: So maybe they don’t think of Trump as an aberration. Maybe they don’t overthink it. Maybe they just think the Republican Party is whatever it is in the moment.

natesilver: The fact that George W. Bush’s image has been rehabilitated quite a bit is interesting. And maybe suggests that Biden is right (strategy-wise) to treat Trump as an aberration. Bush left office with a very, very low approval rating, and now a lot of people feel nostalgic for him.

nrakich: Yeah, 61 percent of Americans said they viewed Bush favorably in this 2018 poll, including 54 percent of Democrats.

matt.grossmann: Trump was perceived differently than the Republican Party in early 2016, which is often what happens in a presidential contest. Opinions of Bush became less aligned with opinions of Republicans once Trump came along. But I don’t think it will be an issue in the same way this time around: Trump is now a known quantity and opinions won’t likely change until Republicans have another nominee.

[berniesrevolution]

IN THESE TIMES

When I ask Bernie Sanders about the surge of teachers’ strikes that swept the country earlier this year, he perks up, applauding the teachers’ display of working-class power. “The teachers may be the tip of the spear here,” he declares in his heavy Brooklyn accent.

In many ways, the strikes illustrate Sanders’ theory of political change. He has long insisted that the key to moving the country in a more progressive direction is to make ambitious demands and build movements capable of achieving them. Striking teachers in states from West Virginia to Arizona bucked the traditional tried-and-failed mechanisms for obtaining better pay and working conditions, and joined together by the tens of thousands to act. By withholding their labor, they won key demands.

At a time of staggering income inequality and stagnant wages, with unions facing an all-out assault from the Right, the teachers’ strikes have served as a rare bright spot for labor, proving that workers can still take on conservative politicians and their corporate backers. Now, with the Supreme Court’s Janus decision poised to bruise public-sector unions, Sanders is attempting to help revive the U.S. labor movement.

Over the spring, Sanders trekked across the country to stand with low-wage workers at corporations such as Disney and Amazon, spotlighting their efforts to win better treatment on the job. In May, he introduced the Workplace Democracy Act, a sweeping bill that would prevent employers from using certain anti-union tactics, make it easier for workers to unionize, and undo so-called right-to-work laws that drain unions of resources. The bill has secured support from almost a third of Senate Democrats, including prospective 2020 presidential contenders Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.

In a sprawling interview with In These Times, Sanders discusses how unions can respond to Janus, the fight to move the Democratic Party left, the recent victories of democratic socialist candidates and why he believes the 2018 midterms are the most important of his lifetime.

Why do you see labor issues as a critical rallying point in 2018?

In my view, there is really no way the middle class in this country is going to grow unless we build the trade union movement. Virtually all of the power rests with employers and large corporations. Workers without unions are finding it very difficult to get the kind of wages and benefits that they need.

The statistics are very clear that workers in union companies are earning better wages and have far better benefits than nonunion workers. And the working people in this country know it. In overwhelming numbers, workers want to join unions.

But it is increasingly difficult for them to do so. That is because of the power of employers to intimidate workers, to threaten to move their companies away, and to fire workers who are trying to organize. So it is very, very difficult now for workers to have a union. That has got to change.

You named your bill the Workplace Democracy Act. Why do you think it’s important for workers to be able to practice more democracy on the job?

It’s an issue that we don’t talk about as a nation very much. Millions and millions of people are waking up in the morning and saying, “Oh God, I have to go to work and I hate my job. I feel exploited. I feel powerless. I feel like a cog in a machine.” If we believe in democracy, it’s not just voting every four years, or every two years—it’s about empowering your whole life and having more say in what you do all day.

Workers who are in a union have the ability to have their voices heard and to express their discontent in terms of working conditions. So unions empower ordinary people to have a little bit more control over their lives.

Less than 11 percent of Americans currently belong to unions, and since taking office, the Trump administration has been waging an all-out assault on workers' rights. Yet in recent months, teachers have gone on strike across the country. Polling shows that younger people have a more favorable opinion of unions than older Americans. Are you optimistic about the future of the labor movement?

Yes, I am. With these teachers’ strikes—especially those taking place in so-called conservative states like West Virginia, Kentucky and Oklahoma—teachers have basically said, “Enough is enough.” We have to make sure that our kids get the educations that they need, that we attract good people into the teaching profession. Teachers almost spontaneously stood up and fought back and took on very right-wing legislatures. This was, I think, a very significant step forward.

The teachers may be the tip of the spear here, because you’ve got millions of people watching and saying, “Wait a minute, I work two or three jobs to make a living, 60 hours a week, and can’t afford to send my kids to college. Meanwhile, my employer is making 300 times what I make and he gets a huge tax break.”

I see an anger and a resentment among working families. They want an economy that rewards the work of ordinary people and doesn’t just allow the billionaires to get even richer. That’s what the teachers’ strikes are all about.

In terms of younger people, they’re looking at a nation where technology is exploding, where workers’ productivity has risen, and yet the average young person today has a lower standard of living than his or her parents. Younger people are saying, “What is going on? This is the wealthiest country in the history of the world—why am I still living at home? Why am I struggling to pay off my student debt 10 years after I graduated college? Why can’t I afford healthcare?” I think young people are smart enough to look around and say maybe we need unions to get the kinds of wages and benefits that working people are entitled to.

The Supreme Court’s Janus decision will spread right to work to the public sector nationwide. How can workers respond?

The Workplace Democracy Act would make it illegal for states to pass right-to-work legislation. The people of this country have a right to organize, they have a right to form trade unions, and it is not acceptable that states are denying them that right.

The Janus case is a very significant setback for the union movement. The Right is already trying to mobilize public employees to leave their unions. What we have to do is an enormous amount of organizing and educating to explain to workers: “You think you’re going to save a few bucks by not paying union dues, but in the long run you’re going to be a lot worse off when you don’t have a union negotiating a decent contract for you. If you want the benefits of that contract, you’ve got to pay your fair share of dues.”

Why do you think it’s important to highlight the plight of workers at Disney and Amazon?

In terms of Amazon, the CEO, Jeff Bezos, is the wealthiest person in the world right now. His wealth has increased in the first four months of this year by about $275 million a day. You got that? A day. That sort of astronomical number is hard to believe.

Amazon is doing phenomenally well, and yet you have thousands of employees in Amazon warehouses who are paid wages so low that the average taxpayer in this country has got to subsidize Amazon by providing them food stamps, or Medicaid, or publicly subsidized affordable housing. The taxpayers of this country should not have to subsidize a guy whose wealth is increasing by $275 million every single day. That is obscene and that is absurd. This speaks to the power of the people at the top who use their power to become even richer at the expense of working families.

With Disney, you have a corporation that made $9 billion in profit last year—a very, very profitable company. CEO Bob Iger recently reached an agreement for a $423 million, four-year compensation package. And yet he’s paying the workers in Disneyland—the people in Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck costumes, the people who serve food, the people who collect the tickets and manage the rides—starvation wages. Eighty percent of the workers there make less than $15 an hour.

Living expenses are very high in Anaheim [where Disneyland is]. Many people cannot afford an apartment and are living in their cars. They don’t have enough money for food. So here you have a profitable corporation reaching an extraordinary compensation package for their CEO and paying starvation wages to their workers. These are the kind of issues that need to be highlighted.

Between 1978 and 2017, we've seen the union membership rate in the United States fall by more than half. Over this same period, the Democratic Party has taken a more corporate-oriented turn. In President Obama’s first term, Democrats were criticized for failing to pass the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have enshrined card check, a feature of your bill. Do you think the Democratic Party establishment has been asleep at the wheel on protecting labor rights?

If your question is whether, for too many years, the Democratic Party has been paying more attention to corporate interests than the needs of working people, then the answer is yes. Ultimately, the fight is over the future of the party. The Democratic Party has got to decide, to quote Woody Guthrie, “Which side are you on?” You cannot be on the side of Wall Street and large profitable corporations and very wealthy campaign contributors while you’re claiming to be the party of working people. Nobody believes that. You can’t do both. And right now, the Democratic Party has got to decide which side it is on, and I’m doing everything that I can to make it the party of working people.

We need a party that has the guts to stand up to the 1% and to represent working families. I think it’s the right thing to do, and from a public policy point of view, I think it will make this a much better country—to put policies in place that end our high level of poverty, to address the fact that we’re the only major country not to guarantee healthcare, that we’re not being as strong as we should on climate change; that we haven’t made public colleges and universities tuition-free. Those are all ideas that will improve life in the United States of America. They’re also great political ideas.

You have worn the mantle of democratic socialist throughout your political career. Today we’re seeing socialism increase in popularity among younger people, and democratic socialists are winning local primaries and elections in states such as New York, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Montana. What do you think this shift means?

Our opponents can say, “Oh, democratic socialist, it’s radical, it’s fringe-y, it’s crazy.” But when you go issue by issue and you ask the American people what they think, they say, “Yeah, that makes sense.” For example, should the United States join every other major country and guarantee healthcare for all by moving toward Medicare for All? Is that a radical idea? No. Because healthcare is a right, not a privilege. Young people say, “Yeah, of course. That should be a right, yeah. My grandma is on Medicare, she likes it. Why can’t I get it?” Not a radical idea.

Today, in many respects, a college degree is as valuable as a high school degree was 50 years ago. So, when we talk about public education, it should be about making public colleges and universities tuition-free. Is that a radical idea? I don’t think so.

At a time when you have three people, including Jeff Bezos, who own more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the American people, is it a radical idea to say that we should significantly raise taxes on the very wealthy and large profitable corporations? Not a radical idea. Rebuilding our infrastructure, creating millions of jobs. Not a radical idea. Immigration reform. Criminal justice reform. The vast majority of the American people support both those ideas.

We are managing to get these ideas out there. The ideas are catching on. And to young people especially, they make sense.

You recently introduced a Medicare for All bill with a historic number of co-sponsors. Why do you think so many Democrats are now jumping on board with universal, single-payer healthcare?

The overwhelming majority of Democratic voters now support Medicare for All. So if I'm running for office and I see a poll that shows that 70 or 80 percent of people say that we should have Medicare for All, I don't have to be the bravest guy in the room to say I think I'm going to make that part of my program.

And by the way, you've got many Republicans today who benefit from Medicare, and their sons and daughters are saying, “My dad has Medicare; I'd like it as well.” So you have the majority of Americans and the overwhelming majority of Democrats now supporting it, so for many candidates it simply becomes common sense and good politics.

(Continue Reading)

[daveandtrev]

The 2020 Andre Johnson Sweepstakes League write-up

Friends of the Andre Johnson Sweepstakes League, welcome. I am pleased (no really, I am excited) to bring you a breakdown of the AJSL as it blessed our lives in the one-of-a-kind year of 2020. Below you will find a mix of analysis and lighthearted fun aimed at taking a first pass at what the heckfire happened this year from start to finish. We’ve got analysis on the draft, injuries and schedule plus some fun awards to give out. I won’t buffalo you any longer, lets get to it.

Draft Day Analysis

Draft day analysis interpretation: I tried to objectively pick the best teams based on my personal draft rankings (subjective draft rankings, objective draft analysis…sort of follows?). Here’s the methodology: I assigned a value to every player for above average play (in 0.25 increments). It’s essentially five tiers (+0.0 = starter, but could be replaced; +0.25 = contributing starter; +0.5 = solid starter; +0.75 = strong starter that will create a positional advantage; +1.0 = elite starter providing a distinct positional advantage). This all makes sense in my head, and it should make more sense when you look at the table. I then added up points for each team’s best possible starting lineup according to my points system and voila; Dave Stark’s handicapping of the AJSL.

A couple of notes:

·       Players are listed in the positions as there were drafted, with highest spend creating the starting lineup. For my points system, I subbed in bench players if they had a higher value than the starter.

·       I cheated on Christian McCaffrey’s value: he was a +1.25 in my book. Clearly the best player in the game with even higher upside than the traditional studs.

A few things that turned out like I thought

·       The running QBs outside of Lamar (Dak, Kyler, Russ, and DeShaun all avg 22.0+ fantasy pts/gm and sit top 7 at QB)

·       The QBs at +0.0 (Baker, Carr, Danny Dimes, Kirk Cousins, and Jimmy G basically ride the merry-go-round from one bye week fill-in to the next. Tannehill and Cousins maybe qualify as +0.25 players now, but neither averages over 20+ pts/gm)

·       Jonathan Taylor +0.0 (His value has been everywhere this year. Marlon Mack was the only reason I had him ranked this low. When Mack went down I pegged him for +0.75 with the possibility to go +1.0…and then nothing materialized until late into the year)

·       Devin Singletary +0.0 (Started hearing whispers of Zack Moss splitting carries + Josh Allen hogs goal line rushes)

A few places where I was dead wrong

·       Stefon Diggs +0.0 (Turns out, Josh Allen actually got better - +10% Completion % in 2020)

·       Josh Allen +0.5 (Averaging 24.7 pts/gm which would have been the QB2 overall last year by almost 3 pts/gm. Currently QB4)

·       Kyler Murray +0.75 (Not nearly high enough on him. Averaging 26.5 pts/gm as the QB1 overall. Playing at a +1.0 level)

·       DK Metcalf +0.25 (Seattle hired their lead chef to work full time)

·       Lamar Jackson +1.0, Mark Andrews +0.75 (Uhhh, why is this team broken?)

·       Kenyan Drake +0.75 (Beware the extravagant 8 game sample size that says someone is a world-beater)

·       Zach Ertz +0.75 (Is this the cliff year at 30 years old? How did Tony G catch 83 balls at age 37?)

·       Aaron Rod Gers +0.25 (Yeah he’s a +0.75 guy now…should have known that drafting the backup QB would light a fire under Aaron: we’ve only seen this from Alex Smith and Joe Flacco in 2 of the last 3 years…Wait, why hasn’t this applied to Wentz yet?)

·       Davante Adams +0.75 (Good golly, A-Aron’s resurgence means Davante is almost on +1.25 level when he is healthy)

·       Keenan Allen +0.25 (This was all about Tyrod…then we found out that Justin Herbert was interning specifically for Keenan Allen and the Chargers med staff decided to euthanize Tyrod)

·       TJ Hockenson +0.0 (2nd year leap puts him at TE3 overall. $20 player next year?)

·       Chris Herndon +0.0 (When you read too many draft articles, you begin to believe that an Adam Gase coached player might actually become an average contributor at his position…ha!)

Injury-ruined seasons

·       Saquon, Michael Thomas +1 (Biggest team-killers to date by far)

·       CMC at +1.25 (Still overall #1 when he plays)

·       Dak at +0.75 (Was playing like a true +1 on par with Mahomes before going down)

·       Zeke at +1 (Dak died and then Dallas decided to start “Gucci DiNucci”…yeah that didn’t go well)

·       OBJ +0.5 (Traded to Cristian’s team where he put up a combined 3.5 fantasy pts in 2 games started)

·       Courtland Sutton +0.25 (After space-cadeting Sutton’s auction bid, we got our “Ball don’t lie” moment a few weeks later. Trevor is shrugging as he reads this.)

 Great, let’s move on. Luck, imagined as either dice rolls or Luck Dragons depending on who you talk to, plays a pretty big part in fantasy success every year. Too many injuries? See you next year. Tough schedule? Hope for a good tiebreaker and maybe you can sneak into the playoffs with the #4 spot. These are probably the most talked about facets of the game since they are beyond our control and create the classic “if only I didn’t have that injury back in high school, i’d have crushed you guys” cop-out that we’ve all heard for years. Let’s see who really has a case to be upset, shall we?

Let’s start with one of my favorites – every team’s record if we played in a league where the top 6 scores secured a win each week (in lieu of head to head matchups). This is a much more “fair” look at how your team performed on a weekly basis when you throw out the schedule which is always a subject of scrutiny, consternation, and conspiracy theories each season.

There you have it. Good news is, the top 5 in our league standings would be the exact same top 5 if we played the other way. The schedule hasn’t defrauded anyone of a 2020 playoff spot. Bad news is, the bottom of this list is mildly shocking. Cristian has struggled all year for wins and this shows that his team hasn’t been half bad – but he has essentially lost out on 4 wins due to schedule. Yikes. Phil on the other hand was in playoff contention up until week 12, whereas his team has the fewest expected wins in the league….Of course for those with conspiratorial thoughts, you’ll notice the Stark brothers combine for +7 “lucky” wins due to schedule. Of course the Stark wife had to bite the bullet to make it look fair (-2 “lucky” wins). I’ll let everyone digest that and make their own judgments. (Where is that clause in the constitution involving starting a new league without the commish? This is evidence!)

The next “luck metric” that dominates our chat conversation and generally elicits “I got screwed, feel bad for me” self-pity arguments would be games lost to injury. Everyone knows it sucks and everyone experiences it to some degree every year. And if you play long enough, you will get hit by the double ACL tear/broken collarbone/never-healing ankle injury to all of your star players and be left at a severe disadvantage. It’s gonna be okay Sport, put on a brave face and hit the waiver wire. Come back next year and clap secretly at 3pm on Monday when Schefty tweets the next guy’s RB1 season-ender. (After the large exhale that it didn’t happen to your RB1 of course.) Ending rant, just know that if you experienced the injury season from hell, the rest of the league knows that it’s part of the fantasy business and are very relieved that it didn’t happen to them. Empathy runs high, sympathy runs low. (And I just removed my ability to ever complain publicly about my team’s injuries by writing this now.)

After all the talk has subsided, let’s check facts. First table: mid-game injuries. These are games where players play a much reduced role and typically produce dreadful fantasy finishes. There’s a bit of subjectivity here (if a player plays 3 quarters and gets hurt, I don’t count that as a mid game injury. But if he plays ½ or less of his normal playing time, it would count.) I also add mid-game benching to QBs because they fit the description as fantasy wreckers due to an unforeseen cutback in playing time. Here is the Commissioner’s official list:

Congrats on that title Jason, I know you were hoping for it. Just know, you weren’t THAT far ahead of the rest of us. Mon and Trevor on the other hand can only blame poor performance on their season’s disappointments (or better yet, the schedule!)

So I buried the lead a bit on Mr. Montgomery here, because the next table should give him his share of justice on 2020 injuries.

So the above list is missed games + mid-game injuries for drafted starters and traded players updated through week 13 (except for those with season long injuries – I went ahead and added week 14 there). Jason, there’s your proof. Nobody deserves to bellyache more than you, friend. 19 of those games were from QBs (Dak/Jimmy G) which added to a smattering of missed games from the rest of the roster (Godwin 4, Ridley 3, Aaron Jones 2). I haven’t tracked this before, but I imagine that this year was significantly worse than others (more soft tissue injuries and COVID positives were the biggest culprits.) The hope is that 2021 gives us a bit of a reprieve here.

Before we conclude, I recognize that there is a portion of the audience who prefers the entertainment value of this yearly endeavor, so I’m going to do my best to hand out a few fun awards. Without further ado, the 2020 AJSL Dundees (this award style hasn’t possibly been overdone, right?)

Dundee to The Scorned Lover: Mr. Jordan Swavely on behalf of Henry Ruggs.

While I wrote this tribute in his farewell on the group chat, it bears repeating: 7 pts or less scored by Ruggs in 6 straight games, starts him again for a 7th week and only a 50 yard bomb on the last play of the game saves Ruggs from another 3 point performance. Totaling the points for those 7 starts, Ruggs scored 36 points for a 5.1 average. Ruggs averaged 3.4 targets/gm in these contests. You do you, Swave. Go and get your man.

Dundee for the Best Team Name: Mr. Greg Poelman, ShlongBarry Sanders

Any reference including a dong and our beloved college town is going to score high on both the Dude and Nostalgia scales. Plus a Barry Sanders nod, we like that.

Dundee for the Best Team Picture: Mrs. Monica Stark on behalf of Presidential Security

Any time you can get combine Greg Poelman and The Donald in Photoshop and it doesn’t even look that fake, you have my attention and affection. And now you have a Dundee to go along with it. Well done.

Honorable mention: Monica’s Team, Bring Out Your Dead

Golden Tickets to the Winning Waiver Warriors: Mr. Scooter Nelson, James Robinson; Mr. Blake Grundy, Justin Herbert; Mr. Jack Holmer, Justin Jefferson

Since everyone is bidding for the “winning lottery tickets” of the waiver pool, we’re going to give out Golden Tickets to those that struck waiver wire gold this season. Scooter milked 11 starts out of Robinson who averaged 17.6 pts/gm during that span. Robinson has been the RB4 overall since the week 2 pickup. Grundy picked up Herbert for week 3 and never looked back, banking 10 starts at 22.5 pts/gm (He’s the QB7 in that time frame). Holmer nabbed Jefferson before Week 4 and was rewarded with the WR4 from that point on. Impressively he only benched him once, refusing to play him against his beloved Bears. This is the dream of every late Tuesday night and you guys reaped the spoils. Well done, gents.

Dundee to the Wounded Wavier Warriors: Mr. Phil Stark, Devonta Freeman; Mr. Jack Holmer, Darrell Henderson; Mr. Trevor Allison, Nyheim Hines

Big money, No whammy. That’s the goal. Of course more times than not, the reality is…more like this. Phil emptied out the pocketbook early on in the season after the Saquon injury to grab his replacement with a winning bid of $78 on Devonta (next highest bid: $15). Devonta responded with five games played, two of which resulted in 1 point showings. Then he followed Saquon to IR and Soape picked up the true workhorse of the Giants backfield in Wayne Gallman, who hasn’t pickup up less than 10 points in six straight games. Ouch. It took $54 to secure the rights to Darrell Henderson after week 2, seemingly the new Rams lead RB. Unfortunately Jack’s faith manifested at the wrong times: 5 starts of Henderson yielded 6.3 pts/gm, while Henderson’s two strong games (18.5 and 20.3 pts) were enjoyed on Holmer’s bench. Not fun. $46 was the bid that beat out 7 other bidders after week 1 for Nyheim Hines’s services, after which Trevor was rewarded with 5 straight games of 8 points or less. After cutting him loose over the bye week, Hines busted out for four double digit games in six tries, music no doubt to Trevor’s ears. A Dundee for your troubles, boys.

The “Fantasy Football Was A Lot More Fun Last Year” Dundee: Mr. Cristian Driver

For every obvious reason. Where did that championship belt get to?

Dundee for a Fun and Easy Season: Mr. David Stark

Injuries, COVID surprises, bad schedules, underperformance? Didn’t seem that big of a deal to me.

Dundee for Most Attempts to Defeat a Hornet’s Nest: Mr. Jason Montgomery

Similar to our favorite Office handyman Nate, Jason was tasked with eliminating the danger of his crumbling fantasy season created by the aforementioned injury bug. Both hailing from the historically-rich metropolis of “La Philadelphia”, what ensued after Jason’s 4-0 start pairs Nate and Jason together even further. Jason utilized a league-high 20 unique waiver pickups that entered the starting lineup this season. Results were bleak; the fast start was followed by a 2-7 record that signaled victory to the opposition. Maybe try the bow and arrow next time?

Receiver Corps Dundee of Excellence: Mr. Joel Soape

It only took 3 name changes to figure out which WR was needed (Red Solo Kupp -> Mike’d Up -> The Adams Bomb) , but Soape finally landed on the right guy for the job by calling on Davante Adams and his 22.1 pts/gm this year (easily the WR1 in this metric). Somehow Corey Davis (left for dead after last year) has had a career resuscitation on this team as well, dropping a 30 burger in week 12. The Receiver Corps salutes your dedication to their fraternity, Mr. Soape.

That’s all for now guys. Full disclosure, I have another 1k-2k words written that takes a deep dive into each of our performances at 1) waiver pickups, 2) positional scoring, and 3) sit/start decisions. Maybe this would be most helpful for a post-season article as it encompasses your overall strategy and ability to aid your team’s output. Look for that at some point in the future. For now, I hope you enjoyed this meaty entrée. Thanks for another great season and allowing me to bring you another fun recap, everyone!

[impromptu-manifesto]

The Literature of the Pandemic Is Already Here

For those engaging in quick-response art, mess and chaos—not polished elegance—are the forms to best mimic a crisis that has no end in sight.

Intimations BY ZADIE SMITH PENGUIN BOOKS And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again: Writers From Around the World on the COVID-19 Pandemic 

BY ILAN STAVANS (EDITOR) RESTLESS BOOKS

A bleak fact of writing is that honing sentences is often far easier than honing the thoughts they convey. 

A corollary fact is that polished, elegant prose serves as a useful, if not always intentional, hiding place for half-baked ideas. 

Walter Benjamin wrote that a key element of fascism is the aestheticization of politics— the concealment of bad thinking behind bright optics. Even in fascist-free situations, the concealment principle is common enough that I have come to approach beauty and neatness in art with some skepticism.

So far, the nascent literature of the coronavirus pandemic has reinforced my distrust. Three assemblies of coronavirus-response writing—

Zadie Smith’s essay collection Intimations; 

NY Times’ short-fiction compilation, The Decameron Project; and 

the mixed-genre anthology And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again, edited by Ilan Stavans—

tell me why: 

No one has had time to truly refine their ideas about personal life in a state of widespread isolation and existential dread, and literature, even when political, is a fundamentally personal realm.

It relies on the ability to channel inner experience outward, and because no inner experience of the coronavirus pandemic could plausibly be described as complete, prose that renders it static and comprehensible rings false. In the shaky realm of literature reacting quickly to a crisis in motion, mess and chaos are the forms that speak best to painful realities.

Zadie Smith opens Intimations, which contains six short, beautifully structured essays written largely in her characteristically gleaming prose, by acknowledging, 

“There will be many books written about the year 2020: historical, analytical, political, as well as comprehensive accounts. This is not any of those—the year isn’t halfway done. What I’ve tried to do is organize some of the feelings and thoughts that events, so far, have provoked in me.” 

So, instead of social insight, which Smith admits is not yet available, she chooses self-organization. The turn inward is entirely logical, but the structuring impulse does not bode well.

To be fair, Smith’s opting for order is unsurprising. 

In fiction, she’s a master of structure and form. Traditionally, she has allowed greater looseness in her essays and criticism—I am thinking, for instance, of Feel Free’s shaggy, implausibly delightful “Meet Justin Bieber!,” which uses a pop-star meet and greet as an occasion to revisit Martin Buber’s I and Thou—but not in Intimations. Its essays are short, tight, and glossy: pleasurable to read, but coy and cagey with their fundamental subject, which is death.

Take “Peonies,” in which a startling, lush garden sets Smith thinking about human vulnerability to biology. In theory, “Peonies” acknowledges the creative and destructive primacy of nature over determination—which includes its primacy over art. To Smith, art and determination are nearly synonymous: “Writing,” she explains, “is control. The part of the university in which I teach should properly be called the Controlling Experience Department. Experience … rolls over everybody. We try to adapt, to learn, to accommodate … But writers go further: they take this largely shapeless bewilderment and pour it into a mold of their own devising. Writing is all resistance” to experience.

Of course, this is not true for all writers. Some seek to portray bewilderment rather than shape it into reason. Smith attempts to do the former in “Peonies,” but when it comes time for her to wrangle with the crushing confusion and helplessness that disease generates, she bails on her project. The coronavirus appears explicitly in “Peonies” only once, not named but described as our “strange and overwhelming season of death”—and the moment Smith mentions it, she arrives at her argument’s end. “Peonies” is a conventionally structured literary essay, which means, as we learn in high school, that its conclusion recapitulates its beginning. Rather than continue thinking about overwhelming death, Smith returns to the place where “Peonies” began: a flower garden, and the stifled yearning for disorder that it provokes.

“Peonies” is not the only essay in which structure helps Smith turn from death. “The American Exception,” a linear, op-ed-style argument, addresses death as a mass phenomenon, but never as a personal one. “Something to Do,” a reflection on why writers write even in crisis, reads like the first portion of a writing-workshop lecture. In “Screengrabs (after Berger, before the virus),” Smith returns to the section-heavy style of her 2012 novel, NW, in which neat, titled chunks of narrative replicate the unwillingness of her hyper-controlled protagonist, Natalie, to engage with emotion. But here, Smith is the one unwilling to engage.

In its premise, “Screengrabs” does reach for emotion: Six of the essay’s seven sections are nonfictional character sketches in which Smith implicitly says goodbye to her New York life’s minor players before leaving to shelter in London. The essay is faintly elegiac—as I read, I could not escape thinking that its subjects, even the man who insists, “I survived WAY worse shit than this,” might not survive the virus. But its fragmentary structure lets Smith stop short of expressing grief. The form demands that she move quickly, even as its content might more fully emerge if she slowed down. The lone exception is the seventh section, titled “Postscript: Contempt as a Virus,” in which Smith describes and mourns the killing of George Floyd. Here, her dealing with death is not fleeting or abstract. Her prose is ragged and free of ornament; her consideration of racism as deadly contempt is the only idea that Intimations sees through from beginning to end. The reason seems clear: Floyd was killed in late May, and I received my advance copy of Intimations in mid-June. The section was evidently written quickly, but it emerges from centuries of American history. Smith has no need to hide behind structure here.

The Decameron Project has a bigger problem than a proclivity for organization. Many of its 29 stories are emotionally neat and one-note. Etgar Keret’s contribution, “Outside,” is unique in that its neatness is negative: Keret’s narrator squashes the common and sustaining dream of post-pandemic empathy and solidarity, asserting cynically, “The body remembers everything, and the heart that softened while you were alone will harden back up in no time.” Other contributors take the opposite approach, pursuing positivity and beauty at the expense of honesty. Take Alejandro Zambra’s “Screen Time,” in which the small graces of family life—watching a toddler sleep, conducting a fingernail-growing race—outweigh the stresses of quarantine, which Zambra describes with less imagination and in less detail. The mother in “Screen Time” manifests anxiety primarily by no longer “reading the beautiful and hopeless novels she reads,” which may reflect a common desire for optimism. But Zambra’s apartment-size world is too sweet, its calm too accessible and unexamined. The result is charming, but, for me, unconvincing.

Still, the Decameron Project does contain successes. Rachel Kushner, Téa Obreht, Leila Slimani, and Rivers Solomon all smartly smuggle very good stories about older, different topics—storytelling, exile, storytelling again, incarceration—into coronavirus frames. Only Tommy Orange dares an actual portrait of quarantine in “The Team,” which wobbles like a kid on her first two-wheel bike. Its language is often confusing, sometimes ugly. Words tumble from its narrator, who monologues about time, turkey vultures, marathons, pig slop, racism, Oakland housing prices, and more, with no plot or connective tissue between each topic but the speaker himself. The result demands attention simply by virtue of the narrator’s need to be heard. It has no moral or fixed meaning; to borrow Zambra’s formulation, it offers neither beauty nor hope. Yet as I read its description of time ticking past in quarantine, as “hidden and loud as the sun behind a cloud,” I felt a jolt of recognition. It is like that, I thought. Orange’s messy descriptions and run-on sentences, alone in the Decameron Project, offer small new truths.      

And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again, a genre- and border-crossing anthology of mostly translated reactions to the coronavirus, is full of mess. In fact, the editor Ilan Stavans seems to invite it. He juxtaposes styles—poetry next to literary criticism, experimental fiction next to personal essay—in a way that is consistently disorienting and sometimes jarring, but pleasantly so. He permits political contradiction: In one contribution, Mario Vargas Llosa lauds Spain’s quarantine protocols, while in another, the translator Teresa Solana expresses terror at the Spanish government’s treating the pandemic like “a war, establishing a military scenario and using bellicose language with patriotic resonances.” If Stavans’s goal were coherence, he might have cut one piece, but he lets both remain, offering non-Spanish readers multiple views of a country unclear about its path forward—and implicitly accepting his own lack of knowledge.

Uncertainty is a driving theme in And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again. So is brokenness: broken bodies, hearts, medical systems, immigration systems, and more. Lynne Tillman takes a Tommy Orange–like approach to the breakdown of time, writing hectic, unadorned prose that turns into a breathless pileup: “I am exhausted, lie down, sit up, touch my toes, swing my arms, make a phone call, ignore a call, hear a voice, see a message, answer it, don’t, there is plenty of time, too much time.” Tillman’s sentences are cramped, confined, and unbeautiful. They don’t try to impress the reader. Reading her contribution generates the same restless boredom a writer—or any inessential worker—might feel while pacing the same apartment for the 100th day, knowing that there’s nowhere to go. So does the French Tunisian writer Hubert Haddad’s, which takes the pileup strategy much further. His story is a collage of fictional “false starts, drafts, approximations, [and] broken-off openings” that describe and evoke the “hazy driftlessness” of quarantined life. Its choppy, static structure captures the dysfunction of pandemic time.

In a May essay on coronavirus journals, the New York Times book critic Parul Sehgal described the diaristic impulse as “beautifully ordinary.” 

Records of quarantine may be banal, she writes, but their very existence is reassuring enough to be lovely. In other forms of writing, however, beauty is not enough to comfort. In fact, it runs the risk of 

trivializing, 

distorting, or 

evading the crisis it portrays. 

Thus far, the coronavirus literature that works best admits certain truths about life mid-disaster: 

The news is terrible and relentless. 

Nobody knows what will happen. 

The search for a vaccine is ongoing, 

as is the search for sources of hope and meaning. 

Will the coronavirus pandemic lead to stronger social safety nets? 

Better health-care systems? 

Will it produce cohesion or despair? 

We have no way to know yet. What true story besides an uncertain, unbeautiful one is there to write?

[jmrphy]

The formal structure of paranoid leftism (why there is no such thing as a noble error)

People who want to think, write, or act outside of what is perceived as normal within currently consituted left-wing circles are now commonly talked about as possible fascist sympathizers. Typically, if you drill down into what is being said exactly, they are not accused of being fascists, they are accused of not clearly enough differentiating themselves from fascism, to a degree that exceeds the currently established expectations of what anti-fascism is believed to look like. When you drill down, the root of the problem (and sometimes admittedly) is reputation: “I know you’re not a fascist but these other people will wonder, ergo I must disavow you as inadequately anti-fascist.”

The problem is that this model of changing the culture is premised on the willful acceptance and promotion of incorrect judgments. Contemporary left culture is premised on the belief that you can change the world through noble mistakes. But as a rule, you cannot change the world for the better by agreeing to make mistakes. You will either fail to change anything because you are operating in a fantasy land, or you will make the world much worse as you try to forcibly deform it around your mistakes. There is no such thing as a noble error. Every error or mistaken judgment that is tolerated or promoted in left culture as “solidarity,” will directly and demonstrably lead to a decreased probability of achieving equality and freedom.

As I have tried to make this argument in the past but typically to closed ears, the purpose of this post is to demonstrate the problem in the clearest, most demonstrable and undeniable fashion, using some basic concepts from my background as a social scientist. Basically, the issue is that for human beings errors are unavoidable, but there are different types of errors and whether we like it or not we make choices about which types of errors we are more or less willing to accept before acting on a judgment. Even more usefully, we can generate some predictions about future outcomes based on which types of errors we decide to be comfortable with. Currently, left culture is deeply invested in reducing one type of error while it is almost infinitely comfortable with a different type of error. As I try to show below, the only possible result is that membership in the organized radical left must ultimately drop to zero, a process I believe is currently underway. I am also able to generate some predictions about the temporal shape of this extinction event that I fear is currently underway. I believe that soon this post will not even be necessary, as the predicted outcomes I outline below come true; but as these outcomes have not yet fully arrived, it is my wager that posts such as this might be enough to make the currently doomed strategies collapse once and for all.

I will focus on the particular example of anti-fascism because it offers an attractively simple and well-known structure of left/right group differentiation. But everything I say here can be applied to a variety of attitudes and behaviors dominant in left culture.

Two different types of error and the example of anti-fascism

Scientists distinguish between Type 1 errors (false positives, you think something exists when it really doesn’t) and Type 2 errors (false negatives, you think something is not there when it really is). If you are one of those people who genuinely believe there is no objective reality outside of our interpretations of it, buckle up.

Whenever we are confronted with a question about something in the world, there is some risk of both types of error. If you maybe just saw a snake in the bush, there is some probability you are right and some probability you are wrong. And you have to decide what to do, so what’s at stake here is not some obscure scientific theory: I am talking about basic unavoidable challenges of being a human. We can either do them intelligently and act on the world effectively (dodge snakes when they are there and relax when they are not there), or we can pretend we don’t have to grapple with them and basically sign-up to be helpless victims of our environment (never really run and never really relax, but just accept you’re probably going to get eaten by a python eventually so whatever).

This scenario is exactly analogous to the problem of anti-fascism. If there is someone in our movement for collective equality who is actually sympathetic to fascism or likely to say/do things that help fascism, then we probably won’t want to work with them. This is reasonable enough, and it is widely seen as a serious and urgent issue. But there is also another problem, which is symptomatically not discussed as very urgent or serious, which is that you will sometimes incorrectly refuse to work with someone who actually, on net, would help your team get to where it’s trying to go. People on the left like to act like this is not a genuine problem of judgment; it’s just how things are, there are norms, if someone wants to break those norms, then they can’t work with left groups, “it’s not up to me.” But that’s what Sartre called bad faith. It is up to you, it’s unavoidably up to everyone in the struggle for political change to decide who you will and who you will not work with. Everyone on the radical left has to make individual and group judgments that carry an unavoidable risk of being false, either failing to eject forces of harm or ejecting forces of good. You can also easily see how this basic structure is observed in many other particular questions of how to conduct ourselves in trying to produce social change.

So we think we might have seen a snake—we think someone in our groups will do more harm to our project than good—but we can’t know for sure. The idea that person X is basically good and would be a net contributor to collective liberation if we worked togetehr, we will call that the “null hypothesis” (usually denoted H0). The idea that person X would be a net detractor of the project for collective liberation if allowed to remain in the group, and should therefore be labeled as outside the project for public relations purposes, we will call the “alternative hypothesis” (usually denoted H1). For any person, there must exist some distribution that defines the probability of each scenario being true. Imagine it looks like this.

The overlap of the two distributions reflects a trade-off between false positive and false negatives. If you are really concerned to make one type of error as unlikely as possible, you increase the probability of the other. We can never know for sure, so the idea of being exactly right in every case is not possible. So we have to decide the threshold of confidence we need to exclude someone from our group. Are we comfortable with a 5% chance of being incorrect? A 50% chance of being incorrect? In the graph above, “any mean” refers to how often you are willing to be wrong after operating on your judgment over a large number of cases. To decide how comfortable we should be with false positives and false negatives, we need to have a sense of the costs of each type of error.

What is the real cost of an undetected fascist being in our group?

What is the real cost of ejecting someone who could and would help make revolution?

Now, these are very interesting and highly debatable questions. Future revolutionaries will need to devote themselve to answering these questions. At present, the main point to understand is that contemporary left culture does not think, let alone debate, these questions. Current left culture operates on the assumption the cost of a false negative is very high and that the cost of false positives is very low. It doesn’t take a social scientist to predict what will happen: you will be very effective in making sure no Nazis are hiding in your groups, but you will also ensure that many good people are pushed out.

The non-linear temporal dynamics of paranoid leftism

So what will happen if we operate on this set of assumptions? Let’s say we start out with a nice sizeable number of anti-fascist comrades, 100, say. At first, maybe you find some people on the street who kind of look like Nazis so you tell them they can’t be in your movement and they go home very sad. These people turn out to be good people, so in fact you lost a few potential supporters but your group is still 100 people, so no big deal. Those poor guys are expendable, an unfortunate cost of your noble responsibility to keep the streets clean. But a few weeks later someone accuses one of your own member of having fascist sympathies, so the group decides to eject them. Turns out they were a secret member of the KKK, so everyone is delighted at their good judgment! You decide that everyone should be even more on guard to fascists, so you increase your allowable Type 1 error rate even higher. So the next week you kick out two members who later turn out to be good people who would have done much more good than harm had they stayed in the group. Here, the power of your group decreases concretely, due to your errors, but only a little bit. It decreases by a quantity of 2 power units, say, the lost power of those two people. Some concerns about this are raised within the group, but everyone decides it’s just an unfortunate byproduct of keeping the group safe. This is where you start to get non-linear effects that very few radicals want to think about.

Now, some of the other good people in the group realize there is a decent chance I will become a false positive. Realizing this, they either leave the group out of very reasonable fear of being unfairly and incorrectly maligned, or if leaving is not an option (if, for instance, their identity and relationships are dependent on the radical left milieu), what will they do? They will do everything they can to find a fascist in their midst, to demonstrate to their group their fearless and passionate anti-fascist credibility! Fortunately, since they believe nothing bad really happens if we incorrectly diagnose a good person as fascist, protecting their anti-fascist credibility is not even a very taxing task: just take your best guess among any other member, if they are a fascist you’re a vigilant hero and if they are not, well that’s just an unavoidable byproduct of you valiantly keeping the group safe. Well, to see the outcome of this situation, consider the following figure, which plots the predicted size of your noble left project as a function of your comfort with false positives. The inflection point where the size of your group rapidly plunges toward zero can be thought of as that false-positive error-rate at which good members have good reason to fear being incorrectly labeled fascist. As soon as that happens, the whole project is doomed.

Paranoid leftism can be formally defined as the pathological insistence on sub-optimally high Type 1 error rates.

There is only one non-obvious extension I would like to make. I believe the internet exacerbates the problem of under-estimating the cost of false-positives. Why? For the simple reason that the internet increases the number of people one can communicate and establish affiliations with, and there are a very small number of fascists relative to the number of good people, all of whom we have more or less equal and direct access to. Radicals have to remember that everything they say and do has effects not only on every individual we interact with, but also, rapidly, on the large number of individuals that individual interacts with. So reputational effects cut both ways: ejecting good people as inadequately anti-fascist loses trust among many people who simply do not inform you about it. If you accidentally eject one good person for being inadequately anti-fascist, you will lose the trust of the much larger group of people who trust that person, but who just happen to be sociologically distant from you. Therefore paranoid anti-fascism pretends to be about preserving trust with oppressed people but it’s really about avoiding difficult conversations with socially proximate actors. False positives patently destroy trust toward the very notion of organizing radical social change. Most people in the wealthy countries come to see radical groups as ridiculous losers with no credibility, in part because we run around eating our own in ways that anyone other than us can see to be stupid and insane.

The paranoid leftist values their own discomfort with impurity and their own reputation within a small miliue more than the prospect of generating large-scale, emancipatory, cultural dynamics tending toward the dissolution of fascism and the promotion of egalitarianism and abundance. The neo-Nazi is a fascist of the short-run; the paranoid leftist is a fascist of the long-run. It is a way of being so concerned with signaling the appearance of opposition to Bad People that you would rather see the power of your own movement decrease than assume the responsibility of simply explaining one’s reasoned judgments in difficult conversations with a small number of people who might be “concerned.”

from Justin Murphy http://ift.tt/2pddCvU

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarah (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Next week, former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial is finally scheduled to begin, which should give us some insight into how far Republicans are willing to go to distance themselves from Trump. (Hint: not much.)

But first, House Republicans must face a dilemma of their own, which in many ways underscores the dynamics we’ll see at play in the upcoming impeachment trial: Either strip the No. 3 GOP House leader, Liz Cheney, who voted to impeach Trump and publicly rebuked him, of her leadership role or strip Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who made racist and conspiracy-ridden comments before she got to Congress but who has Trump’s ear, of her committee positions. (House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has, at this point, signaled that he condemns Greene’s previous comments, but he will not look to strip her of her committee assignments and instead blames Democrats for politicizing the issue, as they will push the issue to a vote.)

Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has thrown his support behind Cheney and without directly naming Greene made it clear in a statement to The Hill on Monday that he thought her “loony lies and conspiracy theories” were a “cancer for the Republican Party.” But it’s also possible that McConnell and other members of the Republican establishment are just out of touch with where the party is headed.

What do these two very different calls for action in the House tell us about the direction the GOP is headed and Trump’s continued influence in the party?

lee.drutman (Lee Drutman, senior fellow at New America and FiveThirtyEight contributor): I think it tells us that the party is deeply torn between two theories of how they win elections. One theory is that the GOP has to play to the Trump base to keep them voting, because these are the voters most likely to not show up. The other theory is that if the GOP gets too associated with the “loony” wing, they can’t win suburban districts. Both theories are probably right, which is why the party is so torn.

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): I am not sure what we’re seeing play out now is really about Trump specifically. Cheney’s joining the Democrats to back Trump’s impeachment is viewed as an anti-Republican/pro-Democrat action by the party’s conservative base and conservative lawmakers, so that’s Cheney’s problem. Her move also broke with the “own the libs” ethos of today’s GOP. Greene, on the other hand, at least before she officially started in Congress, went too far in the “own the libs” direction — her campaign literature showed her holding a gun and calling herself the “Squad’s Worst Nightmare.”

And the GOP mainstream is somewhere between Cheney and Greene.

Kaleigh (Kaleigh Rogers, tech and politics reporter): It seems to me that the party is trying to thread the needle, neither distancing themselves from Trump nor actively conjuring his ghost, in an effort to reap all the benefits of Trumpian politics without the pitfalls of Trump himself. And it’s understandable why. As Julia Azari wrote for FiveThirtyEight in her look at the future of the Republican Party, Trump capitalized by tapping into white grievance, and that is only going to continue.

The GOP can’t just put Trump behind them if they want to maintain voter support: 65 percent of Republicans said they were much or somewhat less likely to support a candidate who voted to impeach Trump, according to a recent survey from Echelon Insights, and a Washington Post-ABC News poll last month found nearly 6 in 10 Republicans said the party should “follow Trump’s leadership” rather than move in a new direction.

The notion that support for Trump is somehow a fringe ideology or doesn’t represent the broader GOP doesn’t bear out. And, to me, Greene represents the “Trumpian with Trump” part of the equation that they may be trying to tamp down without fully censuring her.

lee.drutman: Perry’s onto an important point about the “own the libs” ethos. I haven’t seen any polling that gets at this directly, though self-identified “Trump Republicans” (those who consider themselves “mostly supporters of former President Donald Trump”) are much less likely to want to compromise with Biden than “Party Republicans” (those who consider themselves “more supporters of the Republican Party.”)

laura (Laura Bronner, quantitative editor): I thought that stat was really illuminating, Lee, especially because it shows that the split within the Democratic Party is not nearly as large as the split within the GOP — just a 10 percentage point difference compared with 30 points within the GOP. Of course, the question is about working with Biden, so that might explain some of that gap, but with Biden in power now, that difference still points to a key discrepancy about how different factions in the two parties think about the right way forward.

Kaleigh: And that split would be particularly concerning for Republicans if Trump was to make good on his threat to start a third party.

lee.drutman: Indeed, Kaleigh. According to that NBC poll, Republicans are equally split between “Trump Republicans” and “Party Republicans.”

laura: I’m somewhat skeptical of polling about a potential third party, though, which is how I feel about polling about a hypothetical party landscape in general.

sarah: More than two* parties in American politics!?! You all jest.

*Two successful parties, I should say.

Agree with Laura on this one.

lee.drutman: Well, we’re not going to get more than two successful parties until we change the way we vote. A more proportional voting system would allow those different parties to operate independently of one another. And this would be a very good thing, as I argue in my book, Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: The Case for Multiparty Democracy in America.

sarah: Kaleigh, I was thinking about Julia Azari’s piece, too. On the one hand, I think Perry’s point about this not entirely being the latest loyalty test to Trump is right. Cheney’s actions just aren’t representative of where the party is (i.e., compromising with Democrats).

One question I had, though, and something Julia mentioned in her piece, was that when it comes to someone like Greene or Madison Cawthorn, another GOP member of the pro-Trump faction is that “there is still a key difference between them and Trump in terms of power and influence: A group of representatives can make up a faction of a party, but only the president serves as the party’s mouthpiece.” What do we make of that? It’s something Sen. Marco Rubio also echoed earlier today in a tweet.

Reporting that a politician believes in/flirts with conspiracy theories is legit, but the attention they get should be proportional to their ability to influence actual public policy

Don’t make them famous, help them raise money or elevate conspiracy theories

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) February 3, 2021

That is, do we have a sense of how representative of the GOP someone like Greene is, or someone like Rep. Lauren Boebert is? Or Cawthorn?

perry: I happen to think Republicans are split in three, not two: the rule of law/very pro-democracy people (Rep. Adam Kinzinger and Cheney; Sen. Mitt Romney), the anti-democratic folks (Trump, Greene) and then a big group of people (McConnell, most other Republicans) who are fine with laws making it harder for Black people to vote but uncomfortable with more overt actions to disqualify Black people from voting, like disqualifying the results from the Detroit area, for example.

sarah: We’ve touched on it a little already, but how much data do we have on the share of Republicans who share Greene’s POV?

In other words, how big a slice of the GOP is in Greene’s faction?

lee.drutman: So, I think we need to define what Greene’s POV is.

Is it just basically supporting QAnon?

sarah: Or is it espousing anti-establishment views more broadly?

lee.drutman: If it’s just QAnon, there’s not wide support even within the GOP.

Kaleigh: Well, according to that Echelon Insights poll I cited before, 43 percent of Republicans think Trump won the election, so this is not a small faction within the party.

lee.drutman: Similarly, 41 percent of adults who identify as Republican say QAnon is good for the country, according to a poll by Pew Research.

And about 23 percent of Republicans still said in December that they believe in the QAnon conspiracy theory, according to an NPR/Ipsos poll.

I think the basic calculus in the Republican Party is that they are going to need these Q voters to show up.

laura: Yeah, there was also an interesting (and mildly terrifying) Ipsos poll recently that shows that when asked a series of nine true-or-false statements around misinformation, just 31 percent of Republicans got four or more correct. That’s compared with 88 percent of Democrats. So, the misinformation scourge has really taken hold of the Republican Party, particularly on election-related misinformation (i.e., whether Biden legitimately won, whether voting machines falsified votes, etc.). Just about one-fourth of Republicans gave the correct answer, though many said they didn’t know. Additionally, just 23 percent of Republicans said the Capitol rioters weren’t undercover Antifa members. And on QAnon, less than half said it was false that “a group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media.”

lee.drutman: I saw that too, Laura — it’s interesting what they got correct and what they didn’t.

Kaleigh: There’s also a real resistance among the right in general to reining in politicians too tightly. They reject what they see as “thought policing” and gatekeeping on the left and consider it a source of pride that there is room for a wide breadth of ideology within the Republican Party as part of its “big tent” branding. So, even voters who reject QAnon might not want to see QAnon supporters rejected wholesale. And this is something that party leaders like McCarthy might lean on if pressed about why they aren’t censuring Greene more explicitly, for example.

The risk is that leaning into the Q contingent will push away more centrist conservatives, which is why I think Republicans are starting off with a kind of quiet acceptance rather than an embrace or rejection of these ideas — they don’t want to scare off either end of the spectrum.

lee.drutman: Another thing about Q supporters is that they are generally very anti-establishment. It can be difficult to distinguish between the Q conspiracy and generally anti-establishment views.

Kaleigh: And QAnon is a very a-la-carte kind of conspiracy! You can believe parts of it and disbelieve others and still feel like a part of that overall community.

sarah: Yeah, it’s hard for me to make sense of a lot of this polling. This was published by The New York Times’s Emily Badger long before the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, so keep that in mind, but there does seem to be some evidence that Republicans don’t always literally mean what they say in polls.

That is obviously fraught, because we saw what four years of taking Trump seriously and not literally culminated in; however, I do think Greene’s POV is one that is more anti-establishment than core conservative policies, and that is gaining traction in the party.

The Morning Consult poll showing that Cheney’s and McConnell’s favorability is down among Republican voters should be taken as a sign of where large sections of the GOP base are headed. And maybe that’s a sign that the GOP establishment types, like Cheney and McConnell, are increasingly out of touch.

Lee wrote last summer that there were already very few moderate GOP members left, and with high-profile retirements of GOP moderates like Pat Toomey and Rob Portman in the Senate, it does seem as if that wing of the party is shrinking. How does the current battle over Cheney and Greene in the House encapsulate this?

perry: The anti-establishment wing was already big and growing in the electorate. I think they are now growing increasingly big in the House. The Freedom Caucus is larger, for instance. And in my view, McCarthy is really limited in how he can take on Greene because the House members aren’t really inclined to do that. The members who rejected the election results are pretty anti-establishment, and they are the majority. But in the Senate, the anti-establishment wing hasn’t taken over yet, so you have lots of senators defending Cheney and opposed to Greene.

I think the Romney wing (anti-Trumpism) is smaller than the Greene wing (very pro-Trumpism) on the Hill, but the Rubio/McConnell wing (more generic Republicans) is way bigger than each of those other two.

lee.drutman: But the anti-establishment wing is growing in the Senate. If you look at who supported overturning the election, it was a lot of recently elected Republicans (either in ’20 or ’18): Tommy Tuberville, Rick Scott, Roger Marshall, Cindy Hyde-Smith, Josh Hawley, Cynthia Lummis. Ted Cruz has been around a little longer, though, as has John Kennedy.

sarah: Democrats in the House will now push the situation with Greene to a floor vote to strip her of committee assignments. Is this a risky move for Democrats?

One thing I’m struggling with is how this is substantively different from what happened to former Rep. Steve King — other than the fact that he made those comments while he was a congressman.

lee.drutman: Well, one big difference is that stripping King of a committee assignment was more significant, since he was on the Agriculture Committee, which meant a lot to his Iowa constituents. My sense is that Greene, though, could care less about committee work, and so stripping her of committee assignments will only make her more powerful as an anti-establishment figure.

perry: The most important thing McCarthy has done, at this point, is meet with Trump in Florida. It was the opposite of a power move. It was basically kissing the ring and almost suggesting Trump is the boss of the House Republicans.

I find these “what Democrats should be doing” discussions kind of hard to have. If the other party is heading in an anti-democratic direction, they don’t have a lot of great choices. Ignoring the behavior could lead to more of it, and condemning it creates the risk of tit-for-tat, but I think we are well past this now. Republicans have suggested they’ll go after Rep. Ilhan Omar’s committee assignments, but it’s not just that Omar has to worry about congressional Republicans taking her off committees if they have the majority — she has to worry about them also encouraging their supporters to kill her right now, as does fellow Squad member Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The remarkable thing about where we are now is that Cheney has been doing some outreach to fellow Republicans about her vote to impeach Trump, trying to rebuild whatever goodwill she might have lost. Greene, on the other hand, is not backtracking at all.

laura: My impression is that after Jan. 6, there may have been somewhat of a potential opening: For a while there, even a substantial chunk of Republicans were shocked about the Capitol riot, and it seemed to me at least that they were more willing to consider how that event was tied to the party itself: Right after the riot, 39 percent of Republicans thought their own party was on the wrong track, and 36 percent disapproved of Trump’s handling of the situation.

perry: You mean GOP voters or members?

laura: I mean voters — in polls at least, many seemed to express shock. But also, just 17 percent of Republicans in our tracker of public opinion said they supported Trump’s impeachment when we launched. That dipped some, but not much.

But I’m thinking GOP members of Congress, too. Cheney is a prominent example.

lee.drutman: Laura, I admire your capacity for hope post-Jan. 6.

I think what’s happening here, though, is an example of elite leadership operating on public opinion. Following Jan. 6, enough Republican leaders were expressing criticism that some Republican got the idea that there was enough support to say they support impeachment.

perry: It seems like members — McConnell, in particular — saw Jan. 6 as a way to break not only from Trump but from the kind of “own the libs” style of the party. But the party’s base and its activist core wasn’t there then (and isn’t there now). In fact, McConnell faced an effort in Kentucky to have him rebuked in a GOP party resolution. There was also an effort to start primarying the members who voted for impeachment.

And the activists seem to have succeeded in getting the party leaders to back off from any real change.

sarah: And now that elite GOP criticism is more muted, we see a dip in public opinion, as Laura said?

lee.drutman: Exactly. Once Republicans got in line, Republican voters followed the elite cues.

sarah: So where does that leave us with the upcoming impeachment trial? Is it the latest litmus test of GOP support for Trump? Or is that the wrong way to think about it? And how does it tie into these issues we’re seeing play out in the House over Cheney and Greene?

perry: So I think the story is party activists/Fox News pushing members to back off any rethinking about moving on from Trump or Trumpism. Then members got voters to stop rethinking — that sequencing is important.

McCarthy is less powerful than Fox News, in short.

lee.drutman: That seems exactly right, Perry.

It seems as if everybody just wants to be over and done with the impeachment trial, and as a result, it will go somewhat quickly. Democrats have their agenda to pass, and Republicans don’t want to have to dwell on anything potentially divisive within their party. The sooner they can get to rediscovering the importance of “fiscal responsibility,” the happier they will be.

laura: In looking at polls on average support for the impeachment trial, one interesting thing that stood out to me is that there is greater support for barring Trump from office — around 57 percent overall support that — compared with convicting him (51 percent support this). And that split exists among Republicans, too: 19 percent support barring him from office, compared with 12 percent who support convicting him.

Of course, it’s unclear — and unlikely — that Trump can actually be barred from office absent a conviction.

perry: The impeachment trial has already happened on the conservative side.

The party activists balked at the idea of convicting Trump, the party leaders heard that and quickly found a position that accommodated the base’s activists: A president can’t be convicted after he leaves office.

But I don’t think this is necessarily a show of support for Trump — impeachment was a way for the libs to own the conservatives, and the GOP was never going to let that happen.

Kaleigh: I concur. Any Democrats with dreams of this impeachment trial being anything more than a repeat of Trump’s last impeachment trial are going to be disappointed.

sarah: On that note, are there any bigger implications or takeaways if impeachment fails for the second time in the Senate?

lee.drutman: Now that Republicans have latched onto a theory that this impeachment is somehow unconstitutional, they can shake their finger at Trump’s actions and distance themselves from it but still say this would set a bad precedent, that voters have already made their choice, that we should move on, etc. Democrats know this so they just want to put stuff in the historical record for posterity.

laura: In the 2019 impeachment trial, by the end of the process, 61 percent of voters thought impeachment was a bad use of time — including 37 percent of Democrats. One can only imagine that share would be even higher now that Trump’s survival in office is no longer at stake.

perry: I don’t expect we will have future presidents incite riots at the Capitol or encourage foreign nations to investigate their political rivals, so I don’t think we can draw much from these Trump episodes. The Democrats basically had to impeach him in both instances. Those were very serious offenses.

Kaleigh: I agree with Lee that there’s this fatigue among the general public. After the election, the pandemic still upending everyone’s lives, and the economy, I think the average citizen might not want to have to think about anything “big” like impeachment right now…as depressing as that is for politics reporters.

lee.drutman: A lot will happen over the next two years. By the time of the next election, and by the time of the next Republican presidential primary, what’s happening now will be a distant memory.

sarah: But the divisions we’re seeing play out in the Republican Party won’t be.

lee.drutman: Maybe, maybe not. Once the Democrats start passing legislation, Republicans can unite in opposing it, just like they did in 2009-2010.

[newstfionline]

Conspiracy theories and the left

Charlie Warzel, BuzzFeed News, Feb. 12, 2017

Just after 3 a.m. last Friday morning, Huffington Post contributor and progressive advocate Alex Mohajer set to work on a brief investigative project on Twitter. Pulling together red marker–circled articles, graphs, and screenshots from numerous financial websites, he rifled off 16 tweets with prosecutorial zeal and one ambitious goal: to build a compelling case linking Donald Trump to Russia’s $11 billion sale of its oil giant, Rosneft.

“It’s getting harder to ignore growing evidence that Trump was involved with Russian oil deal,” Mohajer wrote after compiling his tweets into a longer Twitter Moments thread. “CONCLUSION? Koch-backed front cos financed climate deniers/alt-right, took control of govt while Trump diverts attn for Exxon, Koch, Rosneft,” he wrote. A minute later he offered a hedge: “ALTERNATIVE CONCLUSION: I am bat---t crazy and need some sleep! Good night world. I will be curious to see if others are able to confirm.”

Mohajer wasn’t wrong to assume that others might try to confirm his tweetstorm. Since the election, he’s emerged as one of a number of vigilante investigators dutifully entering evidence into Twitter’s court of public opinion in hope of exposing corruption in Trumpland. Now that Trump is exercising his presidential power, the tweetstorms are intensifying--and growing ever-more conspiratorial. Unlike their more fantastical Infowars analogs, these vigilante investigators steer clear of explicit allegations, hewing instead to grave insinuations. Their evidence is almost exclusively rooted in already-published reporting; they sift through the tea leaves of unconnected media stories, raising questions yet to be answered by the professionals.

Call it the Alex Jonesification of the left or the rise of the Blue Detectives--the pure id of a strand of conspiratorial thought of the left and the anti-Trump movement. It’s intriguing and eyeroll-inspiring all at once, but for the #resistance crowd it’s a mooring force. Most of all, it’s an effective messaging tactic: It’s designed to go viral, to spark outrage--and perhaps even action.

If you spend enough time online, you’ll see Blue Detectives springing up everywhere. Two weeks ago, Google engineer Yonatan Zunger wrote a post on Medium that went viral. In it, he laid out a succession of “raw news reports” suggesting that the haphazard rollout and enforcement of Trump’s refugee ban across the country “was the trial balloon for a coup d’etat against the United States.” But as some, including Slate, have pointed out, Zunger’s post sometimes elides fact in favor of intrigue: His suggestion that the Department of Homeland Security could become a force loyal to the President alone, for example, does not acknowledge that DHS Secretary John Kelly was reportedly unaware of the administration’s immigration order until just moments before Trump signed it.

On Twitter, especially, the Blue Detectives are increasingly active in theorizing that Trump and his associates are involved in a dizzying multidimensional plot--and, crucially, are always 10 steps ahead of the American public. Perhaps the most infamous example comes from technology and business strategist Eric Garland’s “game theory” tweetstorm, which suggests a cunning on the part of the Trump administration and Russia to distract, dodge, and outwit the American public while bolstering its coffers and power.

Meanwhile on Twitter, writers with a flair for what could be true and a good sense for their audience have taken those investigations well past the brink of what they know. The most effective of the bunch is Adam Khan, a former marketing consultant and tech guru turned Twitter investigator. Khan, who goes by the handle @Khanoisseur, is an indefatigable presence on Twitter. Each day he monomaniacally strings together observations, charts, and images into detailed tweetstorms that rack up thousands of retweets. None of them make news, but they raise questions and do attract eyeballs.

The images--mostly screenshots from deeply reported coverage of Russia and the Trump organization--are frequently annotated with red type, arrows, and lines that encourage the reader to follow Khan’s logic.

Khan--who wrote an e-book on how to gain followers and influence on Twitter--uses the social network because he sees it as a direct line to journalists and big thinkers. He views his job as building flow charts of publicly available information to raise the big questions. “I’m not manufacturing anything new,” he told BuzzFeed News. “But I’m taking this piece of reporting from this journalist and showing clearly how it aligns with something else out there. And put together, I think it shows there’s a bigger story. If nothing else, I hope my work leads to more people doing their own investigative journalism.”

Just after the election, Khan quit his freelance consulting job to pursue the Trump investigations full-time. He has so far raised nearly $14,000 on GoFundMe in support of this effort. If he raises enough money, he may write a book.

Recently, Khan riled the tech world with a 23-tweet thread musing about possible ties between Russia, Trump senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, and some of the startups in which he’s invested. “The more I dive into Russian-backed/Kushners’ data collection efforts, the more I’m convinced there’s a bigger strategy,” Khan tweeted with a link to a different thread on the Kushner brothers’ investments. “Trump potentially has his own shadow NSA,” he further mused. Left unsaid, a crucial caveat: Kushner investments, made via a venture capital company called Thrive, do not appear to give the Kushners operational control of the companies in which they invest. The thread checks all the boxes of the viral anti-Trump conspiracy: It’s well-researched, endlessly intriguing, and unsupported by evidence.

The internet has historically been a near perfect incubator for conspiracy theories. Not long after the attacks of 9/11 average citizens flocked to Blogspot accounts dedicated to vigilante investigations of the events leading up to that day. The same happened after Hurricane Katrina, with blogs launching serious amateur analysis of the collapse of New Orleans’ levees. A decade ago, conspiracy-minded bloggers made major contributions to reporting around everything from George W. Bush’s National Guard service to intelligence failures in the run-up to the Iraq War.

Once these sorts of efforts were largely confined to obscure message boards, little-known blogs, and occasionally AM talk radio. Their prominent voices tended to be volatile fringe figures who’d rarely appear in public. More recently--particularly with the advent of the Trump era--they’ve attained much greater visibility. Today, the work of the Blue Detectives and those on the far right is amplified and extended by same-minded people sharing what they want to believe--a byproduct of the social media echo chambers that birthed “fake news.” Once peddled by anonymous tinfoil hat–wearers, even utterly unfounded conspiratorial musings are now disseminated by tech employees, opinion journalists--and even some of the left’s well known voices.

Take former United States Labor Secretary Robert Reich--a regular on cable news and a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley. Two weeks ago, after a planned visit turned riot by Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos, Reich penned a blog post about the event titled “A Yiannopoulos, Bannon, Trump Plot to Control American Universities?”

In their coverage of the riot, far-right outlets including Breitbart News had suggested the Trump administration pull federal funding for the school. Reich’s response took a conspiratorial page from the far right, suggesting that “the possibility that Yiannopoulos and Breitbart were in cahoots with the agitators in order to lay the groundwork for a Trump crackdown on universities and their federal funding.” While not a tweetstorm, Reich made his case in a familiar bulleted list. “Hmmm. Connect these dots,” he wrote before rattling off six semi-related points connecting Yiannopoulos to Breitbart and then the Trump administration. “I don’t want to add to the conspiratorial musings of so many about this very conspiratorial administration, but it strikes me there may be something worrying going on here,” he concluded.

The post is a textbook example of a Blue Detective conspiracy musing. It’s a bit ridiculous, but not quite out of the realm of possibility. It attempts to use well reported information to “connect the dots” and raise an ultimately unanswerable question. And it ends, like so many Blue Detective theories, with a self-effacing nod to readers: Yes, I know how crazy this sounds.

In person, Reich is more cautious about shifting the political discourse toward conspiracy theories. “That fringe stuff is out there more and more, and that’s dangerous,” he told BuzzFeed News last week. “If we become a conspiracy society, we all carry around a degree of paranoia and that’s not healthy for democracy. And that’s why transparency is so critically important--we now have a responsibility to call a lie a lie.”

This desire for transparency is a key engine of the Blue Detectives. Its emergence is a side-effect of the rise of the Upside Down conservative media, which, along with its “alternative facts,” audience, and interpretation of the truth, has created two opposing political realities. With basic facts in dispute, efforts by the anti-Trump #resistance to monopolize truth have manifested in a peculiar role reversal. While the far right is building a media ecosystem that looks and feels a lot like the mainstream, some on the left are beginning to resemble the more conspiratorial fringes of the far-right.

But the emergence of the Blue Detectives is also a pointed critique of the mainstream press. The message: The media isn’t doing its job, so we’ll do the legwork for them. Adam Khan agrees.

“No question there was a huge failing among the media during this last election,” Khan said. “There’s so much to be chased down in a Woodward and Bernstein manner and so my job is to ask the questions for others to answer. To ask ‘Why? Why isn’t anyone else pursuing this angle?’” Khan believes without the right pressure and grassroots investigations from people like him, Trump will only claim more power. “There’s a need to apply more pressure to the press,” he said. “It’s sad, but if that’s what it’ll take to get the accountability, we’ll do it.”

Members of the Upside Down media are paying attention, too. “It’s even happening to people who have reputations in the media for being pretty normal,” new right blogger and Twitter personality Mike Cernovich told BuzzFeed News. “I saw this great meme the other day that said if there’s ever a terrorist attack in America under Trump the left is going to go full Infowars. And I think that’s totally true.” For Cernovich, the rise of the left’s conspiracy-theory tendencies is an opportunity to appeal to a broader audience.

“They’ve adopted that fringe-level mentality aggressively,” Cernovich said. “People on left are making themselves look ridiculous and so I see it as an opportunity to look reasonable by comparison.”

[bentonpena]

Five Years In, DeFi Now Defines Ethereum

Five Years In, DeFi Now Defines Ethereum https://bit.ly/33jl0u2

DeFi Dad is a DeFi super user sharing his money experiments and tutorials on Twitter and YouTube. He is an organizing member of the Ethereal Summit and Sessions, host of The Ethereal Podcast and a weekly contributor to The Defiant and Bankless.

Ethereum has always been difficult to explain. Even the founders of Ethereum have sometimes struggled to communicate the project’s transformative potential in layperson’s terms. Metaphors such as “world computer” and “gas” tried to translate Ethereum to the world, but looking back it’s clear how little we understood about the platform’s true capabilities. 

By 2017, big promises were being made that Ethereum would “bank the unbanked.” But that promise seemed to go largely unfulfilled in the wake of the initial coin offering (ICO) craze. Nevertheless, the oft-repeated slogan represented the first attempt to describe Ethereum’s potential to transform personal finance. 

While the ICO mania showed Ethereum’s potential as a distributive technology that could emulate, improve upon and democratize the initial stock offering, what was missing then was a simple personal financial use case that could be demonstrated to a friend, such as a mobile app. In those early days, there were many white papers, promises and signs of progress by a few teams (some of which have led to the top DeFi projects such as ChainLink, Kyber, and Set), but most of the benefits had yet to be delivered.

Meanwhile, there were lots of inspiring speakers from the Ethereum community who drew us into believing Ethereum would change the world. It just required a patient newcomer willing to wade through new ideas, intricate foreign concepts and a firehose of new information daily. Nothing was a simple elevator pitch.

When I saw Joe Lubin speak at Ethereal SF 2017, there was an inspiring message to take home. A lot of detail flew over my head at the time, but if you listened carefully it was impossible to not buy the idea that Ethereum could change the world for the better.

It’s worth noting that in 2017, ConsenSys and other early adopters and builders were also educating institutional players and enterprise software companies on how they could benefit from many blockchain use cases on Ethereum. Partnerships with Microsoft, IBM and Hyperledger helped cement Ethereum’s credibility in the enterprise blockchain race.

Fast forward to July 2018, when I started full-time work in Ethereum. We were all recovering from the hangover of 2017, thinking the bull run might return sooner before watching markets unravel and get even bloodier. We were emerging from an era without a coherent elevator pitch to be easily understood, including language that sounded like it had come from a “Big Bang Theory” script.

I recognized that Ethereum had to find any small group of fanatical users. For better or worse, I began drawing on my experience in SaaS, which taught me that startups need loyal users who find so much utility in an application that, if it were taken away, they wouldn’t have an alternative.

DeFi days

By spring 2019, I am working full time on the Ethereal Summit, a series of events celebrating the founders and builders of the decentralized web on Ethereum. It was around then that Ethereum’s narrative began to change. I heard about Compound, where you can lend and borrow – similar to MakerDAO, but with better loan-to-value (LTV) ratios. 

I was astonished – $50 MILLION in an app built on Ethereum! It was exhilarating to learn a second finance application had been built, launched and had been running on Ethereum for more than six months. 

All this activity came to be known as decentralized finance, or DeFi. The term was coined in 2018 by members of the 0x team, but the industry was just getting going. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I began researching every project we were hosting at Ethereal – PoolTogether, Kyber Argent and Zerion. And I did something even more radical: I began testing and using the damn products! 

I needed to see my investment make money to realize the power of these DeFi applications. I started lending dai on Compound for over 10% APY and it just clicked. I’m lending dai and others borrow that money, but there’s no bank to collect the middleman fees. So, in turn, I earn better lending interest and borrowers pay smaller fees, and without know your customer (KYC) or anyone’s permission.

What stood in the way of DeFi mass adoption was better storytelling and more visual demonstration of how DeFi can work for anyone

It had long been a talking point in crypto the user experience (UX) had to improve for Ethereum to see adoption, but I found those same people espousing such criticisms often had zero experience with DeFi applications. It seemed like a lie that had stuck around long enough to become a truth, even though I was finding some DeFi UX better than my experience with legacy banking. 

For me, what stood in the way of DeFi mass adoption was better storytelling and more visual demonstration of how DeFi can work for anyone. EthHub.io and Cami Russo’s The Defiant were already doing lots of legwork in this space but there was clearly more to build upon.

In late 2019, the DeFi community was still small compared to today, only a few thousand or possibly even a few hundred users, but it felt like we were on a bustling rocket ship of excitement. We rallied around this term DeFi, the simplest term to describe any peer-to-peer finance app built on Ethereum, requiring a Web 3 wallet like MetaMask, that doesn’t need KYC and has no single point of failure. If ETH is money, DeFi is your bank. 

What started as a concept is now an economy of interlinked applications with more than $4 billion in value invested. But it’s more than just money. DeFi has changed the way people think about Ethereum itself and given rise to new narratives and memes.

A meme is born

Shortly after this spark was really gaining momentum in the fall 2019, DeFi users naturally found a second totem to rally around. That was the concept of Total Value Locked (TLV), coined by the team at DeFi Pulse. 

TVL refers to the sum of all value deposited into a DeFi app’s smart contracts, whether that’s measured in U.S. dollars (USD) or in ETH. TVL reflected a new, un-gameable metric for adoption. It was a way to compare how much trust DeFi users put into an application. It has its flaws, but those flaws are no worse than reducing Bitcoin to its price. 

DeFi also helped solidify the “ETH is money” meme. As co-host of the Bankless Podcast David Hoffman said, ETH is a triple-point asset, because it acts as a store-of-value, a capital asset, and a consumable asset. “ETH is Money” is an intentional pivot from “ETH is gas,” and updates the world on how ETH is actually used on Ethereum.  

Plain and simple: ETH is money. It always has been money and to label it otherwise was a product marketing mistake in the early days of Ethereum.

Yield farming is the latest viral meme in Ethereum. DeFi is a larger all-encompassing category of p2p, self-custody, KYC-less, finance apps built on Ethereum, but yield farming describes a popular incentives program where you often provide liquidity to a DeFi application in exchange for a combination of rewards. 

As Dan Elitzer of IDEO CoLab Ventures put it, yield farming is like aquaponics because it creates a symbiotic relationship between DeFi protocols, meaning DeFi participants can earn three or more forms of yield such as interest, market-making fees and pooled rewards such as a governance token like BAL or COMP. Because of the most composable incentive designs in DeFi, yield farming (aka “liquidity mining”) is like passive income on steroids, with programs delivering anywhere from 10-200% daily APY on average. 

Universal appeal

Five years ago, you could argue Ethereum was attempting to do too much. Even two to three years ago, that was still a valid hypothesis, with stagnant adoption.

Today, the bold experiment of Ethereum is working. Alongside the $4 billion in assets deposited into DeFi, we’ve seen a 227% year-on-year increase in ETH locked in DeFi, and a 20X increase in tokenized BTC on Ethereum (equivalent to ~$220 million) since January 1. 

What was a drawback – doing “too much” – is now a strength and a reason why Ethereum’s daily transaction volume and daily network fees have eclipsed Bitcoin’s. Although Ethereum is less than half Bitcoin’s age, it has accomplished more in the last five years, building the most advanced permissionless p2p finance system in the world while Bitcoin has continued to champion the narrower digital gold meme.

It’s getting easier every day to point to DeFi apps that clearly demonstrate value and utility you cannot find elsewhere. If you’ve managed to ignore these developments, now is as good a time as ever to catch yourself up. The story of DeFi and Ethereum is just getting started.

Disclosure

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

Trading via CoinDesk https://bit.ly/35KxIA1 August 1, 2020 at 09:06AM

[holytheoristtastemaker]

1. Put community before ego

When working on a design system, a lot of the focus tends to be on the stuff it contains and the speed with which you can deliver it.

Practically, it’s often quicker to knuckle down and deliver it yourself. Reaching outside of the team means more opinions to negotiate and time spent teaching others about your conventions and processes.

But building a community is what differentiates a design system from a pattern library. You need people to participate by using it, contributing to it and advocating for it, and you need to foster a whole lot of goodwill to achieve that.

And that’s where service designers come in. They, ours in particular, possess an incredible natural instinct towards collaboration.

Eliciting cooperation from disparate groups of stakeholders is no mean feat, but it’s essential if you’re trying to engage a large organisation and get it to converge on a collection of patterns.

By valuing the whole over the individual, our service designer has empowered people to participate. She’s worked transparently, sharing and documenting her work to involve others, and in doing so has ensured its longevity. This doesn’t happen if you focus on individual ownership.

Prioritising collaboration even, sometimes, at the expensive of short term efficiency, makes a design system far more sustainable in the long run.

2. Favour action over deliberation

One of the government design principles is ‘Make things open, it makes things better’. The belief that by sharing work with others and receiving feedback improves its quality and reduces risks.

In practice, there is usually a good amount confidence-building that happens before something is shared in the open. You’ll mull over your idea first, make personal notes and sketches. You may discuss it with one or two team members, consider its merit, adjust it, then reconsider it.

This deliberation in the safety of a small group is a way of strengthening conviction before an idea or a piece of work is shared more widely, ensuring that the pitch is honed and challenges are expected and prepared for.

While there’s some value in that, working with our service designer has taught me that there’s infinitely more reward in having the courage to take action and make things open earlier.

She regularly turns to me at the end of a discussion and says “so what are we going to do?”. My natural instincts urge me to continue the discussion, but she’ll challenge me to make something happen.

I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t daunting at first, this pressure to share my ideas in the open before they were fully developed. The idea that someone might spot a flaw I could have preempted is uncomfortable, but that’s ego talking.

Turning deliberation into an artefact, a pilot process or a blog creates a talking point. It exposes strengths and the weaknesses immediately, accelerates discussion and alignment, and takes you far more quickly from an idea to a good idea.

3. Be both a decision maker and a doer

It’s a popular belief that at some stage in your career you have to kiss goodbye to practice and step into a world of theory. That in order to progress, you start planning and stop participating.

But good service design requires a good deal of both. You have to pitch in and immerse yourself in the detail, and you have to know when to step away and take stock of the big picture.

When helping us to develop our contribution process, our service designer spent weeks interviewing both past and potential contributors, researching open source models and understanding the challenges and opportunities at play. She used this to develop an impressively intricate contribution journey map, and helped the team to translate these learnings into a well-oiled contribution model.

She helped us create documentation detailing the steps and expectations for contributors, the assurance process, and what our team would do to support these activities.

Her attention to detail impressed me, but what impressed me more was her ability to step away.

Despite all she’d invested in it, when the time came, she quietly relinquished control. She moved onto the next challenge, entrusting the team and community to continue this work.

And that’s what good service design is. It’s mucking in, not just understanding the detail but experiencing it. Immersing yourself in the minutiae, gaining empathy for users by getting the full picture, and then zooming out again. Attention to detail is important but transient. Attention to the service remains a constant.

4. Practice human-centred design, always

When people talk about design systems, they tend to focus on the platform, the features and the significance of technology choices.

But making a design system work is not about bells and whistles. Success lies in how well it’s adopted into an organisation’s culture, processes and infrastructure, and the key to all of that is people.

Thinking in a more human way has led us to ask bigger questions of our service. How could we involve more people? How do we win trust? Where can we do better?

From helping us provide the best possible support to users when they get stuck, to enabling the wider community to contribute, our service designer has driven us to maintain a constant and necessary focus on our users.

By challenging us to be more considerate, more inclusive and more accommodating to our users, she’s taken us from building a product to delivering a service that puts people at its heart.

The value of service design

The value of service design can be tricky to quantify. It’s not one thing, but a thousand little things. From a shared sense of purpose cultivated within a team or community, to the collection of incremental improvements that combine to transform user experiences.

For me personally, it would be hard to overstate the value of our service designer’s input and support in the time we’ve worked together. As well as a valued colleague, she’s become my friend, and I’ll continue to watch and learn from her after she’s moved.

So my one piece of advice to you is this: if you’re building a design system, be sure to include a service designer — you’re going to need one.

[supervillainproject]

Five Secrets You Will Not Want To Know About SEO 2019

With the way things proceed so fast on the internet, many business people find internet design and search engine optimisation (SEO) to become like the moving target. You may generally see outcomes of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION efforts once the webpage proceeds to be crawled and listed by a internet search motor. Most likely the best form of sociable media to pay attention in order to when turning to SEO will be Google Plus. 1 of the most successful approaches to ensure your clients get your photography business is simply by implementing an SEO strategy, this specific is more than just producing it to number 1 upon Google, it means ensuring the fact that a varied and steady supply of traffic is heading to your site, over in addition to above that of your opponents. If you are usually willing to improvise your web site search and boost up your own Google ranking, but do not really have time or resources with regard to doing that, hire an SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION specialist for the same objective. Mobile SEO will You Should Experience SEO 2019 At Least Once In Your Lifetime And Here's Why be mobile search engine optimization or even optimizing content for a much better search ranking. Titles on pages and explanations affect what people see within search results, so it's important to check these out within any SEO audit. Search motors give some guidelines for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, but big search engines maintain result ranking as a industry secret. Along with $80 billion forecast to turn out to be spent annually on SEO — and content marketing set to be able to become a $300+ billion industry by means of 2019 — it might end up being tempting for stakeholders to notice SEO and content marketing while cost centers rather than earnings centers. While that will theory is sound (when concentrated on a single page, when the particular intent is to deliver energy content to a Google user) using old school SEO strategies on especially a large web site spread out across many web pages seems to amplify site high quality problems, after recent algorithm modifications, and so this type associated with optimisation without keeping track associated with overall site quality is self-defeating in the long run.

Upon the subject of speed, with the beginning of 2017 generally there was still much resistance in order to AMP in the SEO neighborhood overall, but as we mind toward 2018 that feels in order to be dissipating now somewhat along with a reluctant acceptance that AMPLIFIER looks as though it's not really going away sooner. The biggest way that individuals misuse SEO is assuming that will it's a game or that will it's about outsmarting or deceiving the search engines. Both are crucial to the particular success of an SEO advertising campaign, but they're on completely different edges of the fence when this comes to improving your search motor rankings. Over 50% of mobile phone customers started using voice search correct from 2015, and so we all can expect that in 2019 and after that not much less than 50% of searches may be in the form associated with voice search. Within the past, getting a great SEO was only about making use of keywords. Just remember that , SEO is definitely about targeting real people, not really only search engines. In the event that you do these on-page plus off-page elements of SEO with least along with your competition, you can achieve higher research engine ranking positions in the particular organic section of search motor results pages and have the quality website capable of keeping your revenue goals. In my opinion that 2018 is going to be the particular year where voice search changes how users search and SEOs need to optimize. SEO or Search engine optimisation is a term coined collectively to describe the techniques that will the website should use in order to boost its rankings on the search engine. Getting SEO right may influence your business hugely because you start to build organic and natural traffic to your site which in turn will naturally grow without typically the need for any underhanded SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION tactics or even spending a lot of money on perfectly efficient but pricey solutions such since Pay Per Click or deluxe ads. Searchmetrics is happy to have this partnership along with Elephate, a leading content plus SEO agency with years associated with invaluable experience. However, the particular webmasters can grasp search motor optimization SEO through websites. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION offers incredible opportunity and entry (it's an inherently free advertising channel) to inbound traffic, yet it can be hard in order to know where to start plus what advice to follow. Video can become an important contributor to your own overall SEO and digital advertising strategy, but it's important in order to be superior on how video clip is going to help a person achieve your marketing and SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION goals. If you have got ever been into black-hat SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, spam, and un-natural links, Search engines will never forgive you plus you could be penalized by google at any time. As mentioned earlier, SEO firms are usually the most experienced in working with various verticals of online marketing, mainly expected to the nature of their own work. Monitoring: Often overlooked, but one associated with the most important areas associated with successful SEO, this section strolls through how you can monitor your success and tie your own efforts back to real visitors and business, which gives a person the chance to future modify and optimize your programs.

Without the doubt, one of the greatest trends that has already started to take place and may continue well into 2018 will be the consolidation of niche MarTech gamers by larger content cloud suppliers, with the role and significance of SEO increasing significantly all through this transformation. SEO Internet marketing offers major components, which develop the particular website traffic, and top lookup engine rankings. SEO is brief for Seo, and there is definitely nothing really mystical about this particular. You might have heard the lot about SEO and just how it works, but basically exactly what is a measurable, repeatable procedure which is used to deliver signals to search engines that will the pages are worth displaying in Google's index. Topic clusters possess been lauded because Blog9T the future associated with SEO and content strategy, yet are widely underreported on (so now's the time to hit! ) 93% of B2B companies use content marketing. Teresa Walsh, Marketing Professional at automobile site, Cazana, forecasts that hyper organic targeting will probably increase its importance in 2019 with more location search plus more voice search. We get to the particular bottom of on-page SEO difficulties in order for search motors to clearly see what your own website is all about. SEO requires you to continuously be considered a student because of exactly how quickly the algorithms of lookup engine companies change. Google's punishing methods probably class pages as some thing akin to a poor UX if they meet certain detectable criteria e. g. lack associated with reputation or old-school SEO stuff such as keyword stuffing a site. It looks frequently used in SEO as the general definition for the method that the mathematical detection associated with synonyms, and how certain terms are related to others within a piece of text, is used to the indexing of websites by search engines like search engines. So if you would end up being to write 5% for every keyword then your word SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and Article will be within the content 75 times every. Like any good SEO company before concentrating on the details will do a proper hyperlink edit and fix all the particular error pages. Taking the energy to comprehend even the essentials of SEO can help your own site gain higher click-through prices, engagement, and of course, search positions. Kent Lewis, President and Founder of the particular Portland based performance firm, Anvil, predicts that both Amazon lookup and voice search will become trends in 2019. MarketingVox warns towards getting tied to a "link farm" whose bad SEO routines could bring you down. Your web webpages must earn that high positioning with high-quality content and best-practice SEO. Content is the 2nd major SEO ranking factor, plus is just as important since links. Previously known since WordPress SEO by Yoast, Yoast SEO is one of the particular most quintessential WordPress plugins whenever it comes to search motor optimization. While SEOs need in order to understand it is not just about rankings, UX specialists require to admit that user knowledge kicks in even before making use of the website. You can find on-site and off site SEO techniques that you may use to higher your research engine ranking. One thing will be crystal clear: if you desire people to discover your function, you need search engine marketing (SEO). This just about all means when you're thinking regarding your SEO strategy, you require to think about how your own social networking strategy fits into the particular puzzle, too. As your visitors slowly increases, ensure that you include various other SEO strategies (like adding exterior and internal links, guest publishing, etc) to engage more customers and keep your metrics higher. Google has remaining a very narrow band associated with opportunity when it comes in order to SEO - and punishments are developed to take you out associated with the game for some period while you cleanup the infractions. Head of Marketing, Shiny Edstrom, at BioClarity, a San Diego based health-science company, thinks that SEO is going in order to see a decreased importance within 2019, and SEOs should begin ensuring they're competent in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. The best rank that you could notice the profile with contact information and maps on right hands side of search result web page is achieved after long process for using SEO tactics. Numerous search engine marketing. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the technique of customization a website for search motor discovery and indexing. SEO is actually a technique which search motors require that sites must enhance properly, so that they show up high in search results. The European Search Honours is an international competition that will shines the spotlight around the best SEO and Content Marketing firms in Europe. An extensive dental marketing plus dental SEO campaign can become attained by the enterprise just if the web address associated with a dental practice includes directly into all the promotional materials with regard to the business. This shows the importance of focussing voice search engine results within order to grow your company, marketing, and Search Engine Optimization(SEO) strategies. They obtain this by increasing their site rank through a method known as SEO or even search engine optimization. Just like most other SEO approaches, be certain your links are appropriate, plus be careful to not cross the particular line into excessive linking : you don't want your website visitors to obtain annoyed. Bryan Yeager, Research Director at Gartner, can share 9 Key Insights through Gartner's Marketing Technology Survey in order to Help You Prepare for 2019 and Beyond. SEO is a combination associated with digital marketing efforts all functioning together to increase a website's value to users and presence in search. On-page SEO (also recognized as "on-site" SEO) could be the take action of optimizing different parts associated with your site that affect your own search engine rankings. In 2019, we will have to optimize voice lookup answers with CTAs that Google's algorithms don't pick up upon, but humans do. Dan Mallette, Lead SEO Strategist at each InVue Digital & HearstDMS, forecasts that SEOs will need in order to optimize for voice search and discover new avenues as SERP real estate property shrinks. Obviously, a social media marketing web page that has more interaction will bring bigger SEO benefits to be able to some business than one of which has less interaction, but simply having a social presence will be a good start. Our six experts talk about their favorite SEO tips plus tactics for building big targeted traffic in 2018. Yes, we all know it's still June plus we know it's only 2018 but if you haven't began planning and researching key tendencies which will affect you SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION in 2019 you could currently be falling behind. We furthermore take a look at exactly how new technologies like AI plus Voice search will begin in order to impact more on SEO because we move nearer to 2019 and beyond. Whenever every nation across the globe is busy in making their own due contribution within the advancement sector in their own method by taking the route associated with SEO service and online marketing and advertising, Singapore cannot stop stand nevertheless in one point. By 2019, articles marketing is set to turn out to be an industry worth $300 billion dollars. Off page SEO pertains to the strategies performed over and above your website that can end up being used to improve your lookup engine rankings. Due in order to the success of inbound advertising and SEO, more marketers are usually dedicated to improving their position over other tactics. The best way to focus on these customers is by supplying high-quality SEO content that offers genuine and useful information in the direction of the readers. Another method provides a different page based upon whether the page is becoming requested with a human website visitor or a search engine, the strategy known as cloaking An additional category sometimes used is gray hat SEO This is within between black hat and whitened hat approaches, where the strategies employed avoid the site getting penalized, but do not work in producing the best articles for users. By merging a fresh way to work along with SEO and prioritized lists associated with recommendations—not to mention competitor evaluation and keyword monitoring—Siteimprove SEO is usually your all-in-one tool to develop traffic, prove ROI, and effortlessly create content. All the SEO developments listed here may have started in late 2017 or earlier 2018, but their true advantage could be reaped in 2019. Google's Steve Mueller said on Twitter, along with the disclaimer of him placing his user hat on (ofcourse not Google hat), that relabeling older content as new, with simply no additional changes is a poor SEO hack. All of us associated with creatives, designers & developers function alongside our SEO & content material teams to ideate, research, style & create remarkable infographics and interactive content for brands that will get shared across the internet. Contemporary SEO strategy may be the process associated with organizing a website's content simply by topic, which helps search engines like yahoo realize a user's intent when looking. Page loading time is dependent upon Page Load speed, Web page loading time is one associated with the important factors in Portable SEO 2017. Sociable Media as a platform are unable to be ignored in any SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION plan. Seo stands with regard to search engine optimization, when a person are searching for an SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION or Search Engine Optimization Organization then you needs to appear for various factors which may have a favorable and bad affect on your business. Every advertising SEO blog is definitely talking about online video marketing and advertising and every third company professional you talk to is about to shift marketing dollars to a good online video campaign. ” Simply by 2019, video is expected in order to account for 80 percent associated with all web traffic. Don't set it and overlook it. Take time to review your SEO keyword strategy each few months to make certain it's still relevant and attaining the final results you want. Stories are a easy method to do marketing, you simply need to include some custom made images or text in purchase to let people know they will could swipe to click plus see where you can obtain a skirt, grill, buy SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, or anything else you're attempting to pitch to the world. Jana Granko, PR (public relations) head in SEMrush - one of the particular top marketing tools of the particular world - believe that within 2019 AI (artificial intelligence) might change the way people research for keywords. In fact, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is simply one part associated with every successful digital marketing technique, but possibly the most essential part. These are called SEO standing factors. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is the art and technology of driving the most competent visitors to your website simply by attaining high search engine outcomes. From Digital SEO Land, Rintu Biswas a professional SEO expert inside Kolkata will assist you for you to build quality backlinks aimed at your website. This ‘what is SEO‘ guide (and this whole website) is not about churn and burn type of Search engines SEO (called webspam to Google) as that is too dangerous to deploy on a actual business website in 2018. If you work in research marketing, you'll know that SMX is one of the greatest search engine marketing conferences associated with the year, covering topics which includes SEO and PPC. SEO is conducted each on-site and off-site via various resources that are the existence of your web identity associated with different social media platform plus prominent display of your home page's link on other well-reputed internet sites. Our unique data science-driven SEO & content marketing platform can help your eCommerce business find out millions of dollars' worth of earlier untapped organic search marketing possibilities. On the other hands, if the website doesn't make use of any digital marketing strategies or even SEO services, no one troubles to search for pages plus pages on Google just in order to find your website and go to it. Some dentists, who possess tried applying SEO, have not really been very successful in moving their website to the best of Google search engine. Just before we do, let's check away a couple essential areas with regard to SEO: social media and cellular. SEO can price between $100 and $500 for each month if you do this yourself with a keyword analysis tool. This SEO guidebook explains acquiring links from exterior domains. Let's review the basic principles of SEO (search engine optimization). SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is conducted on the knowning that webpages rank because associated with how relevant a webpage is definitely to a search query plus how many links point in order to that webpage. Business professionals try to rely on these SEO techniques intended for optimization wishing for a larger profit.

Keep in mind that will links, content, and user encounter are all major SEO rank factors. Could holistic approach will ultimately eliminate a lot of the particular issues created by some SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION practitioners over the years, We suspect that search engines' technicians will initially overestimate the accuracy of their AI, resulting within Penguin-level collateral damage. SEO (Search Motor Optimization) is the process associated with making a website more noticeable in search results, also called improving search rankings. Siteimprove SEO furthermore provides in-tool tips on where to start and the way to get the most out associated with your keyword research and supervising. We've already been operating in the SEO plus content marketing industry since last year and know how search motors work. Generally there are a great number associated with resources out there surrounding competing link analysis (and a great deal that have been authored simply by me! ) but whenever We speak with people that are usually working on SEO projects, it can always one of those "yeah, I am aware I should do this more" tasks. Amy Kilvington, Marketing Executive at Custom Drapes, believes that SEOs are heading to have to optimize social media marketing more as Google indexes this and prioritizes it over their own sites' pages. Social media is usually the easiest and most efficient way to push the SEO-based content. However, right now there are some easy adjustments that will you can make to the particular search engine optimization (SEO) component of it, which will ideally provide you with fantastic results.

SEO companies are able to track almost every aspect of their technique, like increases in rankings, visitors and conversions. The strategies which were the simplest (reciprocal links or directory submissions) perform not work anymore, therefore the particular SEOs spend a lot associated with time trying different approaches. The particular Moz Pro is another collection of Tools that check the particular important factors related to your own website's search ranking. Selection of key phrases or phrases plays an essential component in an SEO campaign considering that it saves you the photos in the dark. In 2019 the particular digital marketing companies can anticipate a lot of voice queries, and by 2020, about 50 percent of the searches will end up being either voice searches or image-based searches. Read our Mobile SEO 2019 Checklist before you decide in order to implement. The particular first element of optimizing images will be including your keywords in this image file name (seo_guide. jpg). The inevitable adjustments that will occur in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION in the near future are usually abolition of keywords stuffing plus spam backlinks, real-time personalized customer care by online marketers, improvement within the quality of visual articles as a result of development of video SEO, optimization associated with websites with conversational keywords plus generating massive quantity of current data. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION remains one of the lengthy term marketing strategies that function best for companies that are usually looking to improve their on-line visibility. I think it as simple as a good example to illustrate an element of onpage SEO or ‘rank modification', that's white hat, totally Google friendly plus not, ever going to result in you a issue with Search engines. So in the event that you want to get began which includes basic SEO, the particular first thing that I would certainly recommend would be choosing the set of keywords for every page on your website. Away from page, SEO has contrasted along with it. Undoubtedly, off page optimisation is all about link developing, but the quality links plus content. Via a direct incorporation of Google's Search Console, Siteimprove SEO helps you understand how the particular world's most popular search motor and its users see and—more importantly—find your website. On Page Ranking Factors — Moz's on page ranking elements explains the different on web page elements and their importance within SEO. Surprisingly enough, some sort of lot of SEOs out presently there do tend to underestimate this power of Google Trends The particular tool has a separate "YouTube search" feature, which hides underneath the "Web search" option. An SEO agency may work together with a firm to provide an added viewpoint, when it comes to knowing and developing marketing strategies intended for different sectors and various sorts of business websites. Given the search positions and search volume, SEO may drive considerable traffic and network marketing leads for Grainger. SEO stands for lookup engine optimization - that significantly has stayed the same. But they keep on transforming their algorithms making it challenging to rely on one specific tool for SEO optimization Plus today you could have a good appropriate rank which may not really last in the coming 6 months.

Dave Gregory, Content Marketing Supervisor from the UK based efficiency marketing agency, SiteVisibility, predicts that will 2019, and not 2018, is definitely going to be the genuine year of voice. If we consider Google's Guide then there are almost 200+ factors that lead a web site in ranking, which we possess researched and clustered in twenty one On Page SEO Factors, that will needs your attention in 2019. SEO Wise Links can automatically link crucial terms in your posts plus comments with corresponding posts, web pages, categories and tags on your own blog. 41. An effective sociable media strategy needs a strong SEO plan. Google does make several of this data obtainable in their own free Webmaster Tools interface (if you haven't set up a free account, this is a very beneficial SEO tool both for unearthing search query data and regarding diagnosing various technical SEO issues). AI and Tone of voice Search Impact SEO, Lets notice how voice search analytics Impact's SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and can impact in the particular coming time. A great many businesses choose to hire external help in order to get the full benefits associated with SEO, so a large component of our audience is understanding how to convince their consumers that search is an excellent investment (and then prove it! ). Nevertheless, SEOs tend in order to prefer links higher on the page. Because your site, thanks to the nature of your current business is going to end up being more image orientated than written text heavy, you can be at a minor disadvantage when it comes to be able to employing SEO techniques such while keywords, backlinking and so up.

[infotainmentplus-blog]

Why is my phone so slow? Common causes explained Why is my phone so slow? This is one of the most commonly asked questions about aging handsets. It seems our phones almost inevitably transform from fresh and nimble into bloated and sluggish without any obvious reason why. There are a number of possible causes for your smartphone slowing down with age. Fortunately, a number of them are fixable or preventable with the right knowledge. Here are some things you can do. Background apps You’ve probably heard this one before but too many apps running in the background is a key cause for slow phones. We all accumulate apps over time and probably forget to delete the many we seldom or never use. Many of these apps require background resources, refreshing their data, connecting to the net, or monitoring some part of the system in the background for when it might be needed. Phones have limited resources (RAM, CPU, and the like), which have to be split among all the background and high priority tasks. So lots of stuff running in the background can slow down your system when it comes to a more demanding application like gaming. Android is pretty good at managing resources, but it can’t work miracles on a bogged down system. When Android P arrives things will change, with Background Execution Limits and limited access for apps not actively in the foreground. In the meantime there are a few things you can do. Removing old and unused applications is an important and super simple maintenance practice. Fortunately, recent versions of Android make this easier than ever, offering storage cleanup tools that can automatically delete apps you haven’t used in a long time. Editor's Pick How to stop Android apps running in the background A frustrating problem with any smartphone is a battery that drains faster than you expect. Having to recharge during the day after a full charge overnight is always a sad feeling. Maybe you've also noticed … To check out the services currently running on your phone, enable Developer Options by tapping seven times on the build number under Settings > About phone. From there, go into Developer Options and tap the Running services tab. Alternatively, you can run a service tracking app like Greenify or Servicely to see how these services affect your resources and battery life over time if your device is rooted. This will help identify the worst offenders, which you can uninstall to improve performance. Full storage and fragmentation The write speeds of NAND flash drives (internal storage memory) slow down as you fill them up, which can be why your phone feels sluggish once its memory starts to fill up. This can come about from a backlog of apps, years of undeleted photos and videos, and app cache files that get out of hand. Fortunately, Android will display a notification once you’re running out of memory, presenting you with options to clear out unused media and app files. It’s best to keep on top of the situation before that occurs though, either by removing files manually or using your phone’s built-in storage cleaner. Even if you don’t spot one of those “free up space” notifications, memory cluttered from age and old deleted apps can still slow down the system. This is known as fragmentation. Fragmentation also occurs due to failed memory areas that result from age and approaching the drive’s read and write cycle limit, where failed sectors can no longer be accessed. Flash memory and SSDs don’t have moving parts like older hard drives so the random read performance penalties aren’t a problem, but there can be increased latency from retrieving data from multiple unorganized blocks. Keeping track of fragmented files on a very large drive can increase scanning time and there is a notable performance penalty for writing data to fragmented flash storage, as locating available free spaces is a problem. Android and drive controllers do a reasonable job of keeping flash memory from becoming too fragmented via trimming. However, as your memory fills up, it becomes increasingly difficult to move and save new files and apps due to the lack of spare space. If your memory is full or sluggish, a factory reset to wipe it clean (after you’ve saved your data elsewhere, of course) should solve the problem, unless the flash drive is simply too old. It’s also better to save pictures, music, movies, and other files that are changed regularly to a microSD card rather than flash memory because microSD cards can be replaced once they age. Cloud storage is another good option for large files like music, videos, and so on. Battery age Batteries age too — it’s one of portable electronics biggest problems. After two or maybe three years of service, battery capacity falls and our devices can no longer last a day on a full charge (check out these battery charging tips to prolong that). Another part of this aging process is an increase in internal resistance within the battery from electrode film build-up. Internal resistance has two effects on performance. Higher resistance causes the output voltage to fall during a high current draw (V = I2R if you remember your physics lessons). This is known as voltage droop. This wasted energy is then dissipated as heat, causing the battery and other phone internals to warm up, which is bad for performance. CPUs are sensitive to temperature, so the phone’s power management controller might dial back the processor’s speed if the phone becomes too hot due to an old battery. CPU and memory running at high clock speeds also require more current and therefore induce a higher voltage drop. A very old battery might not be able to provide both the required current and a stable voltage, which means further dialing back peak speeds or risk execution errors. Aging batteries have a knock-on effect for processing and storage components. Last year’s iPhone CPU throttling update issued after degrading batteries is a prime example of this type of problem. A number of Android manufacturers claim they don’t follow the same practice, at least not with software updates, and it’s unlikely they’re driving their chips so hard they can’t accommodate eventual drops in battery voltage. Nevertheless, a less stable power supply makes it tougher for CPUs to maintain their highest clock speeds and is just as problematic for RAM and ROM reads and writes. Editor's Pick iPhone CPU throttling is another argument for replaceable batteries Reddit has struck again, this week correctly identifying that Apple is slowing down its older iPhones with iOS updates that throttle peak CPU speeds. The reason, according to Apple itself, is that it needs to … At its worst, a failing battery can cause enough power issues throughout the system that a phone will reboot. The only solution to this problem is to replace the battery with a new one. Unfortunately, the latest high-end smartphones seal their batteries in, meaning difficult DIY repairs or sending your phone away for an expensive replacement from the manufacturer. Failing memory As well as aging batteries, flash memory and RAM suffer from the effects of time too. Flash memory is graded with a maximum number of write cycles. This is because the program/erase process causes a deterioration of the oxide layer that traps electrons in a NAND flash memory cell, eventually making them unsuitable. Just like batteries, memory capacity degrades over time. This certainly doesn’t help with the fragmentation issue mentioned above, and it increases the number of writing errors as time goes on, which slows down the memory from the user’s perspective. Some level of redundancy is built into memory chips so new sectors are introduced as old sectors become worn out. Ultimately, the lifespan of your memory will depend on how much new data you save. In general, you should easily see between two and three years of use. Many chips can last between five and 10 years. OS and app updates? Another very common theory for devices slowing down as they age is that operating systems like Android and iOS, as well as the applications that run on them, become more resource heavy as they are continually updated, to benefit from the latest and greatest hardware. Therefore our old smartphones with dated hardware struggle to keep pace. I am personally skeptical about this theory, at least in the Android space. Most devices don’t see OS updates past two years, so they aren’t running more demanding versions of Android anyway. Additionally, the minimum requirements for Android haven’t massively changed between iterations. An old phone with 1GB of RAM isn’t suddenly unable to run Oreo or Android P. IOS is a different matter. Very old phones might struggle with newer apps and games. It’s possible some apps become more demanding over time as more features are added. Facebook is definitely more bloated than it was five years ago. However, most apps only consume tens or low hundreds of MBs of RAM, rather than GBs. Most applications are also designed with battery life in mind, rather than peak performance, because consumers will likely remove major battery drainers — especially now that Android alerts users to battery draining apps (games being the obvious exception of course). While more demanding software is a potential contributor to devices appearing to slow down, I think it’s a minor factor. The nocebo effect If none of the above is crippling your phone’s performance, it’s possible expectations are playing a role in our perception. We’re constantly being told how fast and superior new products are, which can instill the notion that old products must be slow by comparison. In reality, generational performance improvements are negligible in day-to-day tasks. Older devices that have been well looked after can function just fine for years. Time spent with a phone lets us pick out the niggles and problems we simply didn’t spot when they were shiny and new. We inevitably become more aware of those slightly longer than ideal loading times and app stutters, but it doesn’t mean our phone is broken. Editor's Pick Speed up my phone – what can I do to make that happen? Android devices have a tendency of getting old. And not only in the physical way, prolonged usage can also take a toll on performance, making it seem like you need to upgrade your phone sooner … Smartphones do slow down over time, that’s just an unfortunate fact due the lifespan of the components inside them. But we can take steps to keep our handsets in good shape, so be sure to check out our guide to keep your phone in tip-top condition., via Android Authority http://bit.ly/2zhntYr

[nicholemhearn]

Libertarian Origins, Libertarian Influence, and the Ruling American Right

At the Washington Post’s Volokh Conspiracy blog, Ilya Somin has responded to my recent essay on the way libertarian antipathy to democracy has influenced the small-government, free-market right. Somin’s gracious and thoughtful reply is most welcome. However, I’m afraid he has misunderstood my argument and the scope of my claims. I’m sure this is as much my my fault  as his, so I’m grateful for the opportunity to clarify.

My argument, as Somin reconstructs it, is that libertarians are hostile to democracy due to an “absolutist conception of property rights,” this hostility has “infected the mainstream Republican right,” and has become “a major factor in [the right’s] undermining of various key norms of liberal democracy.” But this is totally wrong, Somin argues, because libertarian skepticism about democracy isn’t driven primarily by property rights absolutism, and “it is not a significant contributor to the pathologies of the conservative right.”  

Somin does not dispute that libertarians are generally skeptical of and often hostile to democracy. It’s agreed on all sides that libertarians tend to be down on democracy.  The contested questions then are “Why?” and “How much influence have libertarian anti-democracy ideas had on actual Republicans?”  

I’m largely unmoved by Somin’s response. First, he somewhat misstates my view about the source of libertarian hostility to democracy. Second, Somin’s implicit theory of influence is overly intellectualized and unreasonably demanding, which allows him to wave off otherwise undeniable libertarian influence on Republican politics.    

My argument is not, as Somin says, that property-rights absolutism drives libertarian democracy skepticism. This actually gets my diagnostic narrative backwards, which is why Somin’s response seems to me orthogonal to the argument I tried to make. That said, my argument wasn’t as clear as it might have been. I failed to clearly distinguish my story about the genealogy or history of certain libertarian ideas, on the one hand, and, on the other, the influence of those ideas in our political culture. I’ll try to clear that up.

But Somin and I are also running into a different confusion around the usage of “libertarianism” and “classical liberalism.” I’ll clear this up first.

Classical liberalism versus libertarianism: semantics and substance

I’ve told a historical story, which Somin doesn’t really address, that tries to say something about what distinguishes libertarianism from classical liberalism. In my story, there’s speciation in the intellectual lineage. Libertarianism branches off from classical liberalism, and the speciation event is the emergence of property-rights absolutism. It’s true that, as a matter of history and political sociology, classical liberals and libertarians continued to make common cause, and that, as a matter of linguistic usage, it became common to refer to classical liberals as “libertarians.” But in the context of a historical claim that a radical view about the inviolability of property rights accounts for the emergence of libertarianism as a philosophical and political stance distinct from classical liberalism, it begs the question to casually lump classical liberals and libertarians together.

Somin writes:

In modern times, the two most significant libertarian critics of majoritarian democracy were economists F.A. Hayek and James Buchanan (one of the founders of public choice theory). Neither of them favored absolute property rights either. Buchanan even advocated a 100% inheritance tax. Wilkinson tries sidestep this by classifying Hayek and Buchanan as “classical liberals” rather than “libertarians.” But whatever terminology we use, it is pretty obvious that Hayek and Buchanan’s ideas (combined with more recent works flowing from the same traditions) are the most influential bases for most modern libertarian skepticism about democracy. And these theories are not based on any notion of absolute property rights.

I’m not sidestepping anything by labeling Hayek and Buchanan “classical liberals” rather than “libertarians.” I’m saying that they aren’t libertarians in  the sense I’m interested in, precisely because they aren’t property rights absolutists.

Cleaving libertarianism from classical liberalism at the property rights joint is neither historically nor philosophically arbitrary. Consider this passage from Samuel Freeman, a distinguished liberal political philosopher:

It is commonly held that libertarianism is a liberal view. Also, many who affirm classical liberalism call themselves libertarians and vice versa. I argue that libertarianism’s resemblance to liberalism is superficial; in the end, libertarians reject essential liberal institutions. Correctly understood, libertarianism resembles a view that liberalism historically defined itself against, the doctrine of private political power that underlies feudalism. Like feudalism, libertarianism conceives of justified political power as based in a network of private contracts. It rejects the idea, essential to liberalism, that political power is a public power, to be impartially exercised for the common good.    

I resisted this for a long time, but I’ve come around to Freeman’s view. The implications for classical liberal/libertarian relations are profound. If Freeman’s right, classical liberalism isn’t simply a “soft” or less “principled” version of libertarianism. Rather, the distinction is that classical liberalism is a form of liberalism and libertarianism isn’t.

Now, I don’t think the distinction is really so starkly binary as that, since there’s a range of more-or-less strict views about the (in)violability of property rights.  Still, it remains that classical liberalism is in conversation with the dominant liberal view (which Freeman calls “high liberalism”) on the question of the status of economic rights and liberties in a way that libertarianism is not. Should we grant economic liberties the same legal protections afforded to civil and political liberties, and thereby further restrict the scope of democratic choice by expanding the list of basic rights? Classical liberals say “Yes.” High liberals (e.g., Rawlsians like Freeman) say “No.”  

Absolutist rights-based libertarianism isn’t really part of this conversation at all. It’s effectively an argument against liberalism and the legitimacy of liberal political institutions, which is why it’s so confusing that the folk taxonomy lumps libertarianism and classical liberalism together,  and sets them against standard left-liberalism. The dispute between liberalism and hardcore libertarianism concerns whether it’s possible to justify democratic political authority at all. The dispute within liberalism, about the status of economic rights and the legitimate scope of democratic decision-making, is much smaller than that.  

From this perspective, Somin and I both are firmly on Team Liberal. Our philosophical differences are actually exceedingly small. We both disagree with “high liberals” like Freeman more than we disagree with one another. And we disagree with liberals like Freeman less than we disagree with, say, Ron Paul.  Likewise, Jason Brennan, author of Against Democracy, who I mentioned at the outset of my essay as an example of a libertarian democracy skeptic, isn’t libertarian, in this sense, either—as he has explained himself. Brennan, like me, is an updated classical liberal—he uses the term “neoclassical liberal.”

Political labels are confusing, and I encouraged confusion about labels myself by identifying Hayek and Buchanan as classical liberals rather than libertarians, in accordance with my historical theory about the emergence of libertarianism, but followed common usage at the outset of my piece when I identified Somin, Brennan, and Bryan Caplan as libertarians, despite the fact that none of them are property rights absolutists.

This is confusing, but I don’t think it is fundamentally confused. Brennan and Caplan (I’m a little less sure about Somin) are very culturally libertarian, in much the way that some atheists are culturally Jewish or Catholic of Mormon. And that’s why it makes sense to see their books as libertarian critiques of democracy, despite the fact that none of them is a property rights absolutist, and none of them argues from notably libertarian premises.

Each of these books is based, in one way or another, on the voter ignorance literature, which doesn’t really have an ideological valence. What’s interesting is that libertarians or ex-libertarians (starting with Jeffrey Friedman at Critical Review), already relatively disenchanted about democracy, were first to latch onto the deep implications of profound public obliviousness, and laid out the dire picture with a sort of told-you-so glee. Standard liberals, burdened with a romantic attachment to an idealistic vision of democracy, have fought these implications kicking and screaming, and are only now starting to square up, rather morosely, to the bleakness of the picture.

Political philosophies exist and develop in time, and political movements and identities are social and historical. Classical liberals and libertarians have been involved in the same institutions, going to the same meetings, and attending the same parties since libertarianism got off the ground. This has libertarianized the views of classical liberals a good deal. Moreover, many new-style classical liberals, like me, came through radical libertarianism, which has continued to shape our views both as a foil and as a filter through which we can’t help but continue to experience the world.

Influence is complicated. You can change your mind without changing your heart. Doctrinal communities structure our thoughts, sentiments, and group attachments long after we’ve strayed from orthodoxy or left the group. It’s impossible to understand how political ideas influence political culture without understanding this.

What drives libertarian antipathy to democracy, again?

I strongly agree with Somin that classical liberal ideas have been a very influential source of libertarian skepticism about democracy, but these ideas aren’t distinctively libertarian. I also agree that, in elite academic and legal circles, classical liberal democracy skepticism is much more influential than radical rights-based libertarian democracy skepticism. No one doubts that Hayek and Buchanan are classier than Ayn Rand and Murray Rothbard, and less likely to be sneered at in a university seminar room. But this doesn’t imply, logically or empirically, that radical libertarian democracy skepticism has not had a big influence on the political culture of the right.  

Classical liberals have always opposed unconstrained majoritarian democracy. Madisonian anti-majoritarianism is a pervasive background influence on American liberalism, left and right. My genealogical/historical argument is that the specifically modern classical liberal fear of democracy was rooted in the worry that unconstrained democratic majorities, in the grip of radical socialist ideals of economic justice, would redistribute their way into penury and tyranny. Hayek is the representative figure here. His worries about democracy’s vulnerability to dangerous ideological fads motivated his constitutionalism and his conservative-ish defense of the independent political authority of the common law and established social norms against romantic majoritarians. This work has been enormously influential, and I’m a huge fan. (That I generally agree with Hayek’s view of democracy didn’t come across to some readers.)  

The next step in my story, which I’ll expand on here, is that other, even more vehemently anti-socialist classical liberals, such as Isabel Patterson and Ayn Rand, were animated by the exact same worries, but feared that refurbished classical liberal anti-majoritarianism was too morally and rhetorically insipid to stem the surging red tide.

Hayek thought that, in order to survive, liberalism needed to be updated and refreshed for the modern era. But Hayek frankly acknowledged that the fate of the liberal order ultimately depends on vagaries of public sentiment, and he visibly struggled with the problem of how to make liberalism as inspiring as socialism without dishonoring the complexity of truth. If you’re worried about the survival of liberal capitalism, this is unnerving.

Rand took the problem of inspiration and moral passion head on. She developed a radical, individualist moral and political theory expressly designed to neutralize radical socialism, sold it to the masses by weaving it into thrilling anti-collectivist propaganda, and insulated it from criticism by packing it all inside a cult of reason.

So, again, my claim is that modern classical liberal worries about democracy largely motivated absolutist theories of property rights, like Rand’s, which created a new political philosophy distinct from classical liberalism. The initial political point of libertarian property rights theory was to serve as a countervailing cultural force to the idea that leveling redistribution is a requirement of justice, and to popular myths about the unique authority and legitimacy of unlimited majoritarian sovereignty.

This is the sense in which Somin is wrong to say that I’m arguing that property rights absolutism drives libertarian democracy skepticism. On the contrary, I’m arguing that classical liberal democracy skepticism drove the adoption of property rights absolutism, which launched libertarianism as a distinct ideology.

The gospel according to Murray Rothbard

I’ve suggested that the theory of rights in Rand’s fiction and nonfiction was the, um, fountainhead of libertarianism as a distinct philosophy and political movement. Her influence has been enormous. The opinions of millions, including some extremely powerful people, have been shaped by her books. But much of Rand’s influence has been indirect, flowing through the almost mind-boggling sway of Murray Rothbard. Pausing to detail the various channels of Rothbard’s influence will help make my claim about the influence of libertarianism on the ruling American right much less abstract.   

Rothbard, effectively Jesus to Rand’s John the Baptist, created the orthodox, hardcore libertarian catechism by sprinkling Rand’s absolutist rights-based individualism with a pinch of secularized Catholic natural law doctrine and fusing it to Ludwig von Mises’ economic theories. As Jacob Levy recently noted, a smart historian looking to spin a gripping dark yarn about the influence of libertarian ideas on the American right would pass right over James Buchanan, a high-minded scholar’s scholar, and fix on Rothbard, an obscure but colorful figure who has exerted extraordinary influence on American political culture at every level of brow. high, middle and low.

On the high-brow side, Rothbard directly influenced the great Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick. Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, which made hardcore libertarianism academically respectable, was a Rothbardian defense of the minimal state again’s Rothbard’s own anarchism. Untold thousands of undergrad and grad students have been exposed to libertarian ideas through Nozick’s reputable version of Rothbard and Rand.

At the cultural middle, Rothbard was a major influence on the billionaire industrialist Charles Koch, who co-founded the Cato Institute with Rothbard and Ed Crane. According to David Gordon, Koch “met Rothbard and was so impressed with him and his ideas that he decided to endow an organization to promote libertarian theory and policies.” More than a few of us here at Niskanen worked at that organization for more than a few years. It is not without influence.

On the low-brow side, Rothbard