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ethangach · 6 years

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Envy and admiration

Here’s a story about obsessive Halo: Reach players who have gone to lengths equally impressive and ridiculous to try and explore an area previously reserved for one of the game’s unplayable cutscenes. It’s very good and of course it is: Patricia Hernandez wrote it. Seven years is a long time to work on anything, let alone trying to fundamentally break an old Halo spin-off, but Patricia makes it sound like it all went down yesterday, condensing the drama into a fascinating and propulsive 3 minutes read.

I started writing about video games seven years ago, around the same time Termacious Trickocity began the saga Patricia chronicles. It was mostly bad blog posts here and there in-between slightly less bad blog posts about politics. I wrote some stuff in the Destructoid and 1up community sections. At some point I think I got ScrewAttack promoted a story of mine about Pokemon to the front page. Usually I just aggregated whatever interesting topics GamesIndustry.biz had reported on that day. After getting my first pitch accepted at The Escapist and then never actually writing it I looked around for smaller sites that looked open to doing weirder, less game-centric stuff. In the late winter of 2012 I somehow stumbled upon Nightmare Mode and pitched something on Call of Duty and the never ending war on terror.

I don’t remember exactly what happened next but within a week or two she accepted the pitch, I’d submitted a draft, and an edited and much improved version went up on the site. I consider it the first real thing I’ve ever written, and thanks to some archiving efforts by Aram Zucker-Scharff it survives to this day. It doesn’t hold up, but I still appreciate, as I did then, the relief it provided getting to same something I felt was important and meaningful and which I’d wanted to say for a long time under the patient but discerning eyes of a committed editor.

I pitched some more stuff and then Patricia asked if I wanted to become a contributor. I did. And so I got to work alongside a host of other passionate and smart writers for a time. Six years later I still do at Kotaku, a place I never would have gotten to if without Patricia’s generosity and editorial stewardship, two things which somehow I have the unlikely good fortune to somehow still rely on today. I’m indebted to a handful of great editors, but they each are part of a slightly different story, and perhaps I never would have found my way to any of them if Patricia hadn’t first decided, through whatever twisted logic compelled her, to respond to my original earnest but still almost completely publishable pitch. I still have the email notifiying when my Nightmare Mode wordpress account went active on February 29, 2012.

#Editors #Writing #Video Games #Kotaku #Nightmare Mode

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ethangach · 7 years

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How To Train Your Worker

Derek Thompson of The Atlantic has an article up today on the topic of worker training. The premise is maybe we can make them better by paying companies to do the training instead of the government. If the training programs suck, it must be because the government sucks, not because the idea itself is flawed, or so the argument goes.

People love the idea of worker training programs. They seem like an easy compromise between the government simply transferring money to unemployed people and those same people just being shit out of luck when they can’t find a job. Instead of doing anything to address why people can’t seem to find good paying jobs that don’t completely destroy their souls, however, worker training programs are a way for the politicians to offer mild improvements to the status quo that require next to nothing of the stake holders who have the most to gain: employers.

The problem as Thompson frames it is that government retraining programs are garbage and come with a stigma. So why not have the government simply pay companies to do the training themselves?

He writes,

“It is called 'pay for performance.' Here’s the idea in a nutshell. A young worker comes to Derek’s Factory to make freezers. After a year, I decide freezers are a terrible business, so I spend a couple thousand dollars training the young worker to make dishwashers. If she’s great at it, and her wages rise, the government will pay back Derek’s Factory a certain portion of my training cost. And what if the young worker leaves for Goldberg’s Factory? Doesn’t matter. I still get the same compensation from the government.

There’s a slightly different way to think about this idea. It’s not just a retraining policy. It’s an investment policy. By training workers, businesses are essentially buying a small equity stake in their future wages. If their wages rise, the company gets money, while the worker gives up nothing, purely benefiting from the training program. 'We have done a really crummy job to help people who are dislocated by trade,' Senator Warner told me. 'We’ve struggled to retrain them with government programs. This is an experiment that could work.’”

In Thompson’s scenario, the person who was making X and who would have been fired will now be re-trained by the same company to make Y. But the example assumes a bunch of things, including that the company in question is now making more of Y instead of simply not making X.

Usually, when layoffs hit, it’s because there’s less demand or because the work in question was automated or outsourced. I’m not an economist, and I don’t have the experience reporting on business that Thompson does, but as far as I can tell his example bears little to no relation to the kinds of problems actually facing displaced workers.

First of all, it presumes that there’s something valuable the person who would otherwise be fired could be doing instead if only they had the right skills. According to a number of reports and analyses, this “skills mismatch” is a myth. Companies don’t hire certain people not because they lack the proper skills but because they don’t want to. Second, the whole gimmick is based on “if wages rise,” which, at least given the last 30 years of data, is extremely questionable. And then there’s the fact that instead of giving this money to workers, the entire point of the program is to funnel it through employers.

Thompson counters this concern by explaining that the “recoup rate” for companies doing the training would not be enough to make any exploitation of the program an issue, which makes one wonder how it would ever be enough to incentivize them to do risky, expensive retraining in the first place.

It should be noted that the entire idea is cribbed from the Aspen Institute's Future of Work initiative co-chaired by Senator Mark Warner and former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, so you can know it’s almost guaranteed to be garbage. The site Thompson links to doesn’t mention “pay for performance,” but it does state that one of its goals for “new capitalism” is to,

“Create a more standardized and skills-based credentialing system so that workers have more control over their training and businesses can hire based on proven skills.”

That certainly sounds like something somebody who just got laid off from the steel plant would be desperately hoping for. “I just lost my job and now have no health insurance...if only there was a way for prospective employers to better understand my resume.”

#Labor #Manufacturing #Jobs #Retraining #The Atlantic

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ethangach · 8 years

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Don’t Let Pundits Scare You Into Settling

Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine wrote a long essay for the latest issue and it really sucks but some people don’t think so, and they also think that the people who do think so are just being silly assholes, so I wanted to talk about the piece at length on Tumblr dot com because Twitter has a character limit and also most of the people who follow me there don’t give a shit about intra-Left beefs.

I will probably (not) post a TL;DR follow-up at some point.

***

Chait starts by calling the “Great Man Theory” of history a “fusty old school of thought.” He then says that Donald Trump is “horrifyingly unique.” “Never before in our history has a major presidential character stood apart as so great (in the Great Fire of London sense) or so opposite-of-great,” he argues. As a result, we are all “Great Man theorists” now according to Chait.

In the second to last paragraph, however, he argues that Clinton has had the “luxury of competing” against Trump. Trump does not hide his grossness, which makes Trump easier to defeat. At the start of his essay, Chait implies its these qualities that have elevated Trump to greatness, but by the end he’s claiming that they also make Trump a tempest in a teapot. This seems to contradict the entire point of Chait’s essay, which is to prophesize about the political future based on Trump’s ability to influence the present by, I guess, being a really bad presidential candidate.

So by the second paragraph, Chait has dispensed with Great Man theorism. “Consider Trump’s rise not in terms of his uniquely dangerous personality but instead as the interplay of broader trends,” he writes. It’s hard to go wrong trying to tackle dense political questions, much less prognostication, by examining the “interplay of broader trends.” But of course Chait’s not going to do that, because in actuality Chait really does like Great Man theories. Chait’s not a data-dweeb or an academic, he’s an essayist and a pundit. He’s also not a particularly good one.

That’s why he makes up terms like “Trumpism” and then doesn’t define them. Instead, it’s simply a label for everyone planning on voting for Trump. It is a “convergence of two movements” that fall under a banner of a Republican Party” that is “more unified than one might imagine.” Trumpism is “more extreme than anything in the free world,” and for that reason threatens “democratic character,” another meaningless phrase Chait doesn’t define.

From there, Chait tries to depict how disparate movements like the Republican Party and conservatism became aligned. He doesn’t do that by looking at data, or even broader trends, but instead by listing the things great men have said and done. Chait mentions Marco Rubio, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, David Cameron, and Stephen Harper in the same paragraph. Invoking their names is supposed to show that Republicans didn’t used to think government was always bad. Take his word for it, I guess.

According to Chait, these were the leaders that “modern conservatism,” i.e. a movement that started in the 1950s, was a reaction to. He then likens that minority movement to Bernie Sanders. Because in Chait’s world, or at least his readers live in, everything can be reduced to a binary. Barry Goldwater was just like Bernie Sanders, except the opposite, and so kind of the same, or whatever.

In order to stop being a minority force in American politics, modern conservatism had to make their “fuck the government” politics reconcile with the fact that most people like welfare programs, says Chait. The movement, defined by great men (Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, Russell Kirk, Phyllis Schlafly), found allies in the white South. Chait then condenses centuries of southern politics into a few lines before ending at a quote from a 1962 Republican primary debate that no one really remembers but is supposed to give his rushed historical analysis anecdotal weight.

Goldwater won the debate, says Chait, and then yada yada yada, a few decades later the moderate Republican Party goes extinct. These years were apparently marked by numerous great Repubican men deciding how much to concede to the growing right wing of their party (Nixon, Ford, Reagan, H.W. Bush).

By the time Chait gets to Bush #2, he has actually transformed him into a moderate, keeping the right wing forces underlying his party at bay.

“The collapse of the George W. Bush administration was greeted among his party not as an indictment of its fanatical tax-cutting, deregulatory agenda and failed effort to privatize Social Security, but as evidence that Bush was not conservative enough,” writes Chait.

“Greeted among his party.” This is confusing. We’ve been talking about the Republican Party as separate from the conservative movement, but also about how the conservative movement took over the Republican Party, so by this point it’s not at all clear who Chait is talking about. Republican leadership? Think tanks? Grass-roots organizers? McCain, Ryan, Romney?

Apparently anyone who was not a movement conservative was purged in the primaries that followed, because, you know, all politics isn’t local, it’s national and plays out according to very neat and tidy narratives published in regional magazines.

The extent to which Chait tries to show how unique and ideologically aligned this new Party is, is captured well in the following line,

“According to one measure of ideology used widely by political scientists, the most conservative Republican in the House 25 years ago, when the House attacked a Republican president for the heresy of increasing taxes, would be among the most liberal House Republicans today.”

And of course because Chait is a Great Man theorist, he sprinkles in some quotes from Paul Ryan just to be safe. Paul Ryan is not a congressional member from a small state whose political clout and credibility is mostly derived from Chait’s colleagues treating him like a very serious statesman, who became speaker largely on accident as a result of this image, he is a perfect avatar for new conservatism, from Western PA to Southern Texas, because at one point he said, “I’m a conservative from the conservative wing of the conservative movement.”

Chait is making two errors here. The first is trying to distill the “interplay of broader trends” from a few words spoken by a politician. The second is pretending that Paul Ryan’s plan to shrink government and gut the welfare state is, like, new, and something Republicans have been trying to do for decades, long before Tea Partiers were tailgating Glen Beck rallies. Bush tried to privatize social security after giving away billions in tax cuts to the wealthiest, and yet only now do we stand at the precipice.

***

Chait’s trying to establish a clear line “from a doddering Ronald Reagan to Dan Quayle to George W. Bush to Sarah Palin” to Trump, but he never gets there. Sarah Palin sunk McCain’s presidential campaign. Romney represented the Republican Party after a relatively easy primary four years ago, and has not come out to support Trump. Trump is underperforming all most all of the Republican Senate candidates down-ticket. Apparently the conservatives who supported those candidates through the primary process haven’t gotten the memo about Trumpism.

In this way, the second half of Chait’s essay is even weirder than the first. Having supposedly gotten the history that’s supposed to explain the rise of authoritarianism on the right out of the way, he goes on for a few thousand more words talking about how a Trump presidency would probably look pretty similar to a Cruz presidency, and that even if Democrats manage to hold back the barbarians this time, the next time they might not be so lucky.

The right is more energized and poses a greater threat than ever because, surprise surprise, they might be on the verge of scaling back government regulation, cutting the welfare state, and cutting taxes. The more things change, the more they seem to stay the same.

At one point, Chait writes, “Republican leadership as nothing but a gaggle of sad-sack cowards is to create a personality-based explanation for a phenomenon that has a deeper, structural explanation. They support Trump not only out of character weakness but because his election would grant them transformational power.”

Calling Republicans (who remember, are also synonymous with right-wing movement conservatives at this point) power-hungry is somehow a structural explanation. Why are things more dire now than ever before? Because Republicans are more power-hungry than ever before?

And if Chait’s essay is terrible at trying to explain what’s going on in modern politics, it’s even worse at proposing what to do about it. Just as important as what Chait says is what he doesn’t mention, namely what kind of political agenda can be offered as an alternative to authoritarian supply-side economics. “If Democrats keep losing, Republicans will keep winning,” is basically how he ends the essay. Trump might not win this time, but whoever replaces him in four years might so…so what?

Into this void people will read what they want. Some will nod their heads sagely, others will say “Whoa Chait, nice try, I see what you’re trying to do here, building up the new Trumpism as a powerful monster that’s here to stay, and can probably only be kept at bay by a series of moderate, market-friendly proposals and continued strong-man posturing on Russia, etc.” It’s almost like the world Chait depicts in his essay is the exact one that would support all of his criticisms of Sanders from back during the primary.

Yes you can punch right and left at the same time. That’s what centrism means. It’s what moderation entails. The status quo needs enemies to define itself against, and Chait has no shortage of them by the end of his essay. You’d think Clinton was all that’s standing between us and a new authoritarian morning in America. And if you do think Clinton is all that’s standing in the way of that sort of takeover, it makes it a lot easier to argue, as Chait inevitably will, that X, Y, or Z policy, even if it’s not bad (cause Chait is on your side, he swears), isn’t worth the risk that Republicans complete their utter and total domination of the American political system.

Conspicuously absent from the end of Chait’s piece is any mention of a resurgent, grass-roots left, of the growing possibility that even in the year of Trumpism, Democrats could take back the Senate, or how some old dude from Brooklyn was able to brand himself a democratic socialist and somehow come out that campaign the most popular politician in the country. I guess reading anything into that would just be another Ad Hominem.

#Politics #2016 Election #Clinton #Trump #Chait

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ethangach · 8 years

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Mr. Robot, Season 2 Premier: Quicken Corp

We’ll always have the first season of Mr. Robot.

Unassuming and relatively unknown, it got on with its business unhindered by a lot of the bullshit it was critiquing. Almost nobody was watching it, so hardly anyone cared. Brought to you by USA, the cable network best known for endless marathons of that show where the West Wing aide helps a West Coast bro solve crimes ripped straight from the yellowed pages of your uncle’s old Hardy Boys books, the show was lightening in a bottle, and when it escaped we all smiled in admiration as we apprehended ever so briefly the itch in the corner of our brains whispering day in and day out, “Are you really satisfied with this?”

Or at least I did. It was like someone had peeled back my flesh and observed the deepest crevices of my soul unadorned. Something about the world order didn’t sit right with the main characters of the show and for a few minutes each week my girlfriend and I felt less alone.

Now Andy Greenwald, TV critic for the late Grantland and probably still doing that somewhere else, is beaming at me through glazed eyes and powdered cheeks talking about the show I’ve just watched to a panel of creatives who helped make it while everyone looks sideways at one another like a supernova is about to explode out from the cracks in their face and rip apart the very fabric of existence.

I’d love to talk about how beautifully constructed Elliot’s “regiment” was. Or the disquieting desperation on Gideon’s face before he was assassinated. Or the thrill of seeing Angela own at her job while my heart broke at seeing her sell out for it. But I’m having a hard time focusing on all of those things, thanks not only to the shrill enthusiasm of Greenwald’s expertly crafted Black Mirror persona, but also the deafening appeals of more than one Quicken Loan ad broadcast during Mr. Robot’s 1.5 hour season 2 premier.

In case you missed them, those were the ghoulish Star Trek sketches woven in-between the actual promotions for the upcoming Star Trek movie. Because what says great deals on no hassle mortgages like post-future, intra-galactic exploration? Props to Quicken Loan for co-opting the nation’s most iconographic space faring socialists and assimilating them into the struggle for greater penetration into the retail debt market.

If you aren’t familiar with Quicken Loan, they have just about as many complaints lodged against them at consumeraffairs.com as Bank of America, you know, that institution that defrauded millions and cost the economy billions. Quicken Loans has no doubt lied to many people, but this woman actually won a lawsuit against them for it.

Furthermore, as noted by publicintegrity.org,

Last February, a state court judge in West Virginia found that Detroit-based Quicken had committed fraud against a homeowner by misleading her about the details of her loan, charging excessive fees, and using an appraisal that exaggerated the value of her home by nearly 300 percent. The judge called the lender’s conduct “unconscionable.”

The company has also had disputes with employees who alleged being denied overtime pay for performing work that exceeded the normal forty hours per week,

“In closing arguments Monday before Judge Stephen Murphy III in the U.S. District Court's Eastern District in Detroit, attorneys gave vastly different job descriptions of the company's mortgage bankers. One image was of salespeople forced to work 12-hour days and make enough sales to not be fired.The other was of highly paid analysts helping consumers weather their debt situations.”

And honestly, who would ever suspect Quicken Loan ‘analysts’ of being gloried salespeople, especially after watching their geek as fuck new marketing spots?

The founder of Quicken Loans and head of its Board is Dan Gilber, who I guess most people know as the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, but who also retweeted this allegedly not-sponsored TechCrunch story about how the company’s new robo-singing 2.0 program, called Rocket, might very well be the iPhone of mortgages, whatever the fuck that meant.

People love comparing things to coffee. I’m listening to Pandora as I type this, and an ad for Pandora just said something about how doing another thing is easier than buying a cup of coffee. The ingenious kid who wrote the TechCrunch story had a similar idea and so compared Quicken Loan selling people money for a house to the very same cup of roasted hickory bits, “The goal was to allow a person to get a mortgage or refinance their home while standing in line for a cup of coffee.”

Because, you know, if the great financial crisis of nearly a decade ago taught us anything, it’s that starting yourself on the path to a lifetime of potentially crippling debt should be even easier than brewing your own cup of joe.

In case this might have seemed worrying to you, later on, Matt Burns wrote, “Farner explained that Quicken Loans, which prides itself as a technology company instead of a mortgage company, employees 1,280 people to manage and develop its technology. A significant chunk of them have been working on Rocket Mortgage, he said.” See, it’s ok. Quicken Loans isn’t even really a debt retailer, that’s just something they do on the side.

“Security is a concern,” Burns continued, but again, don’t worry, because he was “assured by Regis Hadiaris, Rocket Mortgage product lead, that the company did extensive penetration testing on the Quicken Loans systems touching Rocket Mortgage to ensure all the client data are safe.” And how could you not implicitly trust Burns, who implicitly trusts Quicken Loan? After all, he has a middling but not insignificant understanding of how the company operates, as he disclosed at the end of the article, writing: “I worked as a mortgage banker at Quicken Loans from 2007 to 2008 where I made more money blogging for Engadget in my cubical than selling mortgages.”

You can understand then why being bombarded with Quicken Loan commercials during the premier of my favorite anti-capitalist psycho-thriller really kills the mood. Just when I’m trying to get my conspiratorial proletariat jam on the man shows me a vulcan doing the only rational thing left and seeking to secure hundreds of thousands in debt through a piece of smartphone malware. But perhaps the point of eps2.0_unm4sk-pt1.tc and pt2 was to make me feel just that: detached, defeated, and alone.

#mr robot #mortgage #quicken loan #fraud #techcrunch

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ethangach · 8 years

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No goal or respect against powerhouse Argentina

There’s a theory going around that last night’s 4-0 thrashing of the U.S. men’s team by Argentina was a “good thing.” Grant Wahl for one believes it was “useful” because American sports fans got a front row seat to just how “thrilling this sport can be when a team—Argentina, in this case—plays near the limits of its vast capabilities.”

What game was Wahl watching?

The Argentina I saw seized opportunity when it arose but sat back the rest of the time, content no doubt to save itself for a brutal rematch against its likely opponent in the final, Chile. Messi & Co. used their overwhelming advantage in talent, experience and cohesion to punish the U.S. for its mistakes, but offered little in the way of probing attacks or engineered build-up in the final third. And they didn’t need to, instead taking space as it was given and playing simple balls over the top of a daft U.S. backline intent on getting burned again and again their quicker, more skilled opponents.

“The gap is significant right now between the U.S. and world powerhouses like Argentina, and it helps everyone to understand just how much needs to be done for the U.S. to make up that difference,” writes Wahl. But as a fan of soccer who feels compelled to root for my national team, one tortuous performance after another, I don’t need reminding. And I doubt anyone else does either. If you’re even the least bit familiar with European football or have played more than a few rounds of FIFA, you knew that the U.S. was going to be hopelessly outclassed. What you maybe didn’t know is that they’d be thoroughly humiliated.

Or maybe, deep down, you did. After falling to Jamaica in last year’s Gold Cup, nearly frittering its 2018 World Cup aspirations to Guatemala earlier this year, and looking wobbly throughout the group stage of this Copa, U.S. fans have been forced to rock back and forth nervously as they dread which version of their team is going to show up to any given match.

“A Good Shitkicking Is What U.S. Soccer Needed” writes Barry Petchesky. Since the shitkicking was all but inevitable, perhaps what the U.S. men’s team needed was to show some resilience in the face of total domination. There were certainly signs of life, with a fiery performance from Zardes and Yedlin offering a glimpse of the kind of pace and poise down the wing the U.S. might be able to rely on in the future. But zombies can look lively too, and the kind of lapses on defense and poor decision making under pressure that have become hallmarks of the men’s team point to continued decay.

It’s remarkable that there was only one yellow card during the match, Wondolowski’s foul on Messi, the closest the aging U.S. forward came to being associated with a goal all night. Rather than trying to scrape together a single shot on net the men’s team played like it was embarrassed to even be on the same field as Argentina. Where Iceland willed Portugal to a draw a few weeks ago, the U.S. seemed relieved to only have three more minutes of stoppage time to jog through. Whereas 77th ranked Venezuela found opportunities to strike, including a poorly taken penalty kick that would have allowed them a 4-2 finish more reflective of their performance, the U.S.’s final score of 4-0 was all too generous.

#usmnt #Soccer #copa america #argentina #messi

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ethangach · 8 years

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A lack of imagination

On the most recent episode of Vox’s Weeds podcast, Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias discuss the controversy over New York’s closed primary process.

To begin, I think it’s revealing to see how long they can talk about the issue without ever laying anything on the table that even resembles first principles. Instead of beginning with questions like “What are the point of elections?” or “Why do we value democracy?”, Klein and Yglesias dive right into speculating about the rise and fall of institutional trust and the fragile nature of party loyalty. All interesting topics no doubt, but as starting points they kind of suck.

Yglesias in particular is glued to the idea that having to register for the party whose primary you want to vote in, even if its same day, creates enough of a link between the voter and the party to increase the stability and legitimacy of the process, or something. Klein on the other hand is worried that as ideological partisanship increases, and party affiliation decreases, the electoral system will produce candidates that don’t adequately reflect the constituencies they claim to represent. Neither of these things has anything to do with whether decreasing barriers to voting is a good or what sorts of policies might help accomplish that.

It would be one thing if Yglesias and Klein were very explicitly just discussing their own concerns and views, but their tone suggests the idea they they are somehow cutting to the core of the disagreement.

Towards the end of the segment, Yglesias distills this disagreement into one in which Sanders supporters yell at him on Twitter about how the primary process is unfair while he reminds them that if every state just voted all at once in the very beginning, it would surely make it harder for insurgent campaigns, not easier. It’s a point that’s as clever as it is painfully obtuse. If he or anyone else were re-designing the national presidential primary process from the ground up, I am 100% confident that 1.) they would not leave it exactly as is, and 2.) would not favor having everyone vote on the same day in late winter or early spring.

Toward the end of an electoral process course I had in college, the professor gave us an assignment to basically do just that: re-create the primary process from scratch and explain both potential strengths and weakness of our new version. It’s illuminating both because you’re forced to decide on what the entire point of that system is supposed to be and also because it’s clear that almost any rule you can decide on will have some drawbacks. The idea then is to hedge as much as possible so that as many of the drawbacks as possible are balanced out by other benefits.

Maybe instead of having Iowa go first by itself, you let it go the same time as New Hampshire, New Mexico, and Mississippi or South Carolina, with the hope that this first batch of states will be both more diverse but also include smaller geographies to limit the advantage of political insiders. Instead of having closed primaries, you have open primaries. Maybe you enforce a cap on the amount of total spending by any one campaign prior to each new batch of primaries, or maybe you don’t since candidates with lower name recognition will understandably need to spend more in order to even the playing field. And this is only if you limit yourself to the broad contours of the United States political system, which is itself kinda crap.

The point is that voting is a complex thing, but also an incredibly important one, and yet most people do not get to vote on most thing most of the time. You either care about fixing that or you don’t.

#Vox #Elections #Sanders #Clinton

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ethangach · 8 years

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Game of Thrones season 6, episode 1, tiring but not tired

No matter how much Game of Thrones seems to change with each new season, the show feels more akin to the ebb and flow of a tide than the slow burn of a volcano or the after shocks of an earthquake. As much as the show’s world has been transformed by wars and assassinations, the moments shared by individual characters remain familiar, echoing through each episode since the very first season.

The look on someone’s face when a long time friend guts them. The tender warmth of two enemies taking refuge in one another’s embrace. That feeling of dread as a sentimental gesture is twisted into a motivating force for new horrors. Like the night sky, Game of Thrones is always moving but a few key constellations remain constants: power, love, pity, betrayal.

Last night’s season premier, “The Red Woman,” illuminated each with the sort of pace, precision, and inconclusiveness that has kept the show both recognizable and yet dynamic after half a decade. To the degree that Game of Thrones revels in harsh realities, it leans on the sharp contrast of good and bad fortunes, from moment to moment rather than tallied in sum, to soften the blow.

Arya Stark is now blind, begging for scraps on the streets of Bravos far from home. But the return of Jaqen H'ghar offers hope. She still has a part to play in things, even if that currently means getting bludgeoned with a walking stick in the House of Black and White’s equivalent of Daredevil school. It’s a peculiar kind of narrative accomplishment, but one whose pleasure the show has by now become adept at producing.

Sansa and Theon’s escape through the North’s Narnia-like forests and rivers was last night’s biggest relief. After so many seasons of torture, abuse, and helplessness, both finally caught a break with Brienne and Podrick’s timely arrival. After trying to appease his father and then a stint in hell with Ramsey, Theon finally got a chance to further unearth some of his Stark upbringing, first trying to distract Boltan’s men before later reclaiming some part of his dignity by thrusting a sword into one of their heads. After being broken and helpless for so long, the hollowness of the victory, and the fact that only violence is able to restore some part of him, helps give keeps the otherwise jubilant moment anchored.

Game of Thrones has a way of building things up so they can be torn apart, Whether its a righteous rebellion or a tyrant’s rule, things only go up so that at some point they can come bad down much faster and harder. In this way, the never quite glorifies violence in one scene without doing so in the service of underlining its futility or horrendous necessity. In Meereen, violence begets more violence. For Brienne, with knighthood and its romanticized duties comes the gutting of opponents as they lay writing in the ground, just in case. That pledging loyalty to one another in a wintery wasteland surrounded by blood and corpses can feel as merry and heartwarming as wedding (more so, in fact) is another one of Game of Thrones’ distinct charms.

And compared to the following scene’s reunited Jaime and Cersei, they certainly look in that moment, though cold and homeless, like they have it all by comparison. With still one child left, it’s Jaime’s promise of revenge that seems to comfort Cersei, not any hint of trying to salvage what they still have. It’s a credit to the show and their performances that their emotional exchange in the warm comfort of King’s Landing felt more bone chillingly awful than anything Theon and Sansa experienced while fording the river.

These and other contrasts peaked, visually at least, with Melisandre’s transformation in front of the mirror as she removed her choker to reveal an ancient, tired, and decaying old woman. It was symbolic not just of the razor’s edge on which so many of the differences on circumstance and outcome hinge, but of the quiet exhaustion Game of Thrones’ constant disorientation induces. In the face of such large and hostile forces, a good night’s sleep in a soft bed with warm furs is its own kind of win condition. Though her faith is at least in question, the truth about her age and feebleness spoke more to the resilience of the body than it’s emptiness, especially in a world where so many of them die young.

#Game of thrones #The Red Woman #HBO #Recap #TV

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ethangach · 8 years

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Support is earned, not owed

Yesterday was revealing. In a New York primary Clinton was slated to win, in the midst of a nominating process she had minimal chance of ever losing, self-identified liberal supporters of her decided to pick a fight over the closed primary process.

You would think that something as basic and agreed upon as democratic values would remain uncontroversial in a campaign between so-called Democrats. Especially when the front-runner has positioned herself as the symbolic opposite of Donald Trump and the Republican party. They want to build a wall and keep people down, she wants to erase barriers and help people up.

Surprisingly, or not, that message doesn’t apply to the election itself. Registration to vote in New York’s primary ended last October, back before the first Democratic debate, before anyone even suspected Sanders might present a serious challenge to Clinton’s legitimacy, before most New Yorkers thought the Democratic primary would be anything other than a formality.

You would think that being a liberal, or progressive, or democratic socialist, or whatever, would mean you believe in a certain set of values and principles in spite of, or at least prior to, tribal loyalties. Instead, what this primary process has demonstrated again and again is that even for media elites, journalists, analysts, and pundits on the left who consider themselves beacons of light in a fallen world, the arguments and debates are driven more by status signaling and networking than personal beliefs.

How else to explain a bunch of intelligent people squabbling over what qualifies as “onerous” in the voting process, or how burdensome voting rules and restrictions need to get before they amount to some form of voter suppression?

Look, I think we should have more people voting, not less. Voting should be easier, not harder. Democracy should be more direct and transparent, not less. So yes, the caucus process in many states that Sanders won are bad. Voter ID laws in states like Wisconsin are bad. But not having same day registration is also bad. Excluding people from the voting process because they have to work or can’t get to polling places is also bad. Super-delegates are also bad. The electoral college is also bad. The two party system we have is also bad.

The most chilling and disheartening thing about an election cycle like this one isn’t feeling like the people who most represent what you believe in are going to lose. It’s not that the kind of progress you want seems like it will never come soon enough. Those setbacks are challenging, but expected.

No, the thing that’s truly alienating is having so many people who say they are on your side, who claim to share your beliefs and values, repeatedly denigrate those beliefs and values in the service of their preferred ruling interest.

Clinton’s campaign has not run on a platform of “change you can actually get done.” It has not articulated an alternate theory of “pragmatic progressiveness,” i.e. while we all might like X, Y, and Z, laying the groundwork for future change requires these incremental steps first. Instead, her campaign has attacked Sanders for not supporting Israel strongly enough, for not embracing a doctrine of intervention and militarism around the world, and for being too preoccupied with the invasion of Iraq, a war that will soon have spanned three separate administrations.

More importantly, it attacked Sanders for wanting a $15 minimum wage, for wanting universal healthcare, for wanting free post-secondary education, and for wanting to raise taxes in order to do it. Her surrogates in the Times and other outlets attacked him for wanting to break up powerful financial interests and for focusing too much on the lack of any daylight between power brokers on Wall Street and power brokers in D.C.

Now her campaign and its proponents will expect Sanders and his coalition to fall in line in order to fight the big bad Trump. No doubt in the fall, those tweeting #Imwithher will be celebrating if she wins as some sort of victory. If Clinton was willing to torpedo the left’s agenda during the primary, it’s hard to imagine any general election in which she doesn’t jettison all but the most superficial goals of centrist Democrats. By that point, we will no doubt be expected to be grateful that she won and Trump lost, despite everything that was sacrificed in the process. Like walking up to a homeless person on the street and giving them a new coat and a sandwich, the homeless person will be better off, but still homeless.

#imwithher #berniebro #fightfor15 #HillaryClinton #BernieSanders #NYC

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ethangach · 8 years

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“Abolish the CIA” should be a Democratic applause line

This Politico story on Sanders’ view of the CIA is a good example of what’s wrong with how foreign policy gets litigated by Democrats.

The opening paragraph:

“In his most recent debate with Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders befuddled some viewers with an arcane reference to a 1953 U.S.-backed coup in Iran, which Sanders called an example of America’s history of ‘overthrowing governments.’”

As Ned Resnikoff pointed out on Twitter, calling this act of war an “arcane reference” shows just how corrupted some people’s views of history are. There is an entire Wikipedia page on the attempted coup:

“The 1953 Iranian coup d'état, known in Iran as the 28 Mordad coup, was the overthrow of the Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favour of strengthening the monarchical rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi on 19 August 1953, orchestrated by the United Kingdom (under the name "Operation Boot") and the United States (under the name TPAJAX Project).”

Stephen Kinzer wrote a decent enough book on the subject. This is from an Interview with Democracy Now in 2008,

“The British tried all sorts of things to bring Mosaddegh down. They imposed a crushing economic embargo on Iran. They required all their oil technicians to leave. Many of them wanted to stay in Iran and work for the nationalized company. The British wouldn’t allow this. So, since they had been very careful not to train anyone how to run the oil refinery, any Iranians, that was the end of the possibility of oil refining. Just in case the Iranians could figure out how to extract any oil, the British imposed a naval embargo around the port, where oil is exported from in Iran. The British took Mosaddegh to the United Nations, they took him to the World Court, both unsuccessfully. The British were arguing that the Iranian oil industry was their private property and that Mosaddegh had stolen it from them. That was their complaint, but they failed to get any redress in international fora.

So then the British decided they would have to overthrow Mosaddegh, and they started a plot to do that. But Mosaddegh figured out what was happening, and he did the only thing he could have done to protect himself: he closed the British embassy. He sent home all the British diplomats. And among those diplomats were, of course, all the spies and the secret agents that were arranging the coup. So then, the only thing that Prime Minister Churchill could think of to do was to ask Harry Truman, the American president, to do this job for us: Can you please overthrow Mosaddegh, because we don’t have anyone in Iran now that can do it? And Truman said no. Truman believed that the CIA could be a covert action and intelligence-gathering agency, but he never wanted it to get involved in overthrowing governments. So that was the end of the line for Britain, until there was regime change in the United States.

We had the election of 1952. Dwight Eisenhower took office. John Foster Dulles became his secretary of state. And Dulles had spent his whole adult life working as a lawyer for giant international corporations. And the idea that a country should be able to get away with nationalizing such a big company, such a big corporate resource, was, as Dulles very well understood, a great threat to the system that he had been representing all his life, the system of multinational enterprise. And he realized that it was in the interest of the United States, as he saw them, to make sure that no such example could be set. So the new administration, the Eisenhower administration, reversed the policy of the Truman administration. They agreed to send a CIA agent, Kermit Roosevelt, to Iran in the summer of 1953. And that’s the story that I tell in my book.”

Point being, the U.S. has a long and well documented history of being involved in regime change. The CIA is of course only one instrument among many through which regime change has been attempted, but it’s also the least accountable.

It should be as uncontroversial that Sanders once though the department should be abolished as it is unsurprising that he changed his mind later on as he became more involved in national politics. At least for Democrats and self-avowed progressives. Mainstream Republicans routinely call for the dismantling of government entities ranging from the U.S. Postal Service to the IRS.

And yet as the article points out, it’s “Democratic allies of Hillary Clinton who are on the attack.” This is part of the ideological asymmetry that’s at the heart of the leftist opposition to HRC. While Republicans want to increase the power of the CIA, Democrats refuse even to let the public know how much funding it gets.

The Obama administration failed to meaningfully prosecute anyone on Wall Street responsible for causing the Great Recession, and the only person who went to jail for committing torture was a whistleblower. If that’s the legacy Clinton wants to continue, is it any wonder that so many on the left want no part in it?

#Iran #CIA #Empire #Sanders #Politico

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ethangach · 8 years

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Wall Street obliterated black wealth

Matthew Yglesias explains why it’s not impossible that Sanders could make headway among blacks and latinos in the upcoming primary states. It’s a pretty straightforward case: yes, Clinton has deep support with those voter groups, but that support has also never been tested the way it will be now.

Usually, a candidate like Clinton might have both the “electability” and “shares my values” arguments going for her. However, against Sanders’ populism, it’s possible for the second to fall into question, forcing her to rely much more heavily on the first. (Which is why I find it odd that Team Clinton seems so set on trying to pound Sanders from the left on single-payer and taxes, rather than just focusing on his un-electability and seemingly poor grasp of foreign policy).

Michelle Alexander writes that Clinton “doesn’t deserve the black vote,” hammering the usual criticisms of the Clintons as a political twofer: he signed legislation that increased the disproportionate incarceration of blacks, which she supported, he signed welfare reform that increased poverty disproportionately among blacks, which she supported.

Even though the Clintons have reversed course on and apologized for these policies, that doesn’t mean there is a necessarily a positive case to be made in their favor. She concludes, “But recognizing that Bernie, like Hillary, has blurred vision when it comes to race is not the same thing as saying their views are equally problematic.” The most charitable interpretation of the piece on the Clinton side then is not that blacks shouldn’t vote for her, but that if she wants their support she should have to take material steps and make substantive pledges in order to earn it back. And that’s where Sanders needs to beat her.

Looking at tonight’s debate then, if Clinton’s greatest appeal at the moment is her electability, Sanders needs to make the case that his current platform and its emphasis are as much black issues as they are white ones. Lots of pundits chide Sanders (rightfully in some instances) for being too focused on Wall Street reform. But that issue, shorthand for banking reform more generally, is extremely wide reaching, and its consequences, especially for people of color, were both disproportionately devastating and never addressed.

As Ylan Mui reported back in 2012, the mortgage crisis hit black homeowners the hardest, writing that, “Instead of helping black communities build wealth, the lending boom destroyed it.” According to report by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis released last fall, “From 2007 through 2013, the typical black and hispanic households in the US headed by people with four-year college degrees lost more than half their net worth.” Jamelle Bouie outlined the attack on black wealth thoroughly in a 2014 article,

“By the official end of the recession in 2009, median household net worth for blacks had fallen to $5,677—a generation’s worth of hard work and progress wiped out. (The number for whites, by comparison, was $113,149.) Overall, from 2007 to 2010, wealth for blacks declined by an average of 31 percent, home equity by an average of 28 percent, and retirement savings by an average of 35 percent. By contrast, whites lost 11 percent in wealth, lost 24 percent in home equity, and gained 9 percent in retirement savings. According to a 2013 report by researchers at Brandeis University, ‘half the collective wealth of African-American families was stripped away during the Great Recession.’”

He concluded by calling for a “return to race-conscious policymaking, from programs to increase the geographic mobility of low-income workers—relocation grants for individuals or transportation grants for communities with a spatial mismatch between jobs and housing—to public works programs aimed at low-income minority communities, to race-based affirmative action as a way to boost a flagging black middle class.”

Sanders, who has not been particularly adept at or at times even seemed interested in speaking specifically about black issues, needs to do just that tonight. And not just if he hopes to win or even survive until the spring, but in order to show that his brand of Democratic Socialism can be inclusive. That it and provide both critiques of the economic system and policy solutions for it which engage with the racial dimensions of income and wealth inequality, and isn’t color blind and only oriented around class.

#Class #Race #Banking #Recession #Sanders #Clinton #Debate

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ethangach · 8 years

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Something wicked

Ryan Cooper writes, “[I]t's time for the political professionals, both the pundits and the political scientists, to admit they have a hazy idea at best about what's going to happen.”

Of course, their collective failure to predict how either primary would develop through the late fall and into Iowa and New Hampshire doesn’t seem to have phased them. Especially when it comes to Donald Trump. The man won 35.2% of the vote in a crowded field. That’s more than the 2nd and 3rd place runner-ups combined, and more than three times the amount of votes needed to earn Jeb! his allegedly “strong 4th place” finish. Mitt Romney’s win in 2012, and John McCain’s in 2008, were both less decisive.

More importantly, two out of three New Hampshire Republican voters agree with Trump and believe Muslims should be banned from entering the U.S. for the foreseeable future. Other candidates who disagreed lost, and not because of some radical fringe of the party who mobilized around Trump, but because of broad-based support.

And yet the real news coming out of New Hampshire for some seems to be that “Jeb Bush may finally be hitting his stride.”

#New Hampshire #Trump #Pundit

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ethangach · 8 years

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The lesser of two lefts

Matt Bruenig tries to “psychoanalyze why the pundits are psychoanalyzing youth.” His theory,

“I think part of the answer is that, for many of these pundits, being leftist (nay 'very liberal') is a big part of their self-identity. They cut their teeth being the 'very liberal' bloggers and pundits of the 2000s. And they just cannot stand the idea that they are more conservative than the generation coming up behind them. Even though their politics have not changed, they are now the lamewads because the youth are actually more left than they are. They cannot countenance this and so they refuse to countenance it.”

Policy writers have dealt with this by making the argument that Clinton’s agenda multiplied by her ability to implement aspects of it puts her ahead of Sanders in the leftier-than-thou race. Left-leaning political generalists have dealt with this by focusing on still as yet unquantified #Berniebro phenomenon and Clinton’s strong support among African Americans. Sanders’ might be a self-styled Democratic Socialist, but he’s a white dude who’s not very adept at speaking about black issues.

#berniebro #leftist #Sanders #Clinton

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ethangach · 8 years

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Why Clinton’s Iraq vote still matters

In last night’s Democratic debate when Sanders brought up Clinton’s vote in favor of invading Iraq, she responded, “A vote in 2002 is not a plan to defeat ISIS."

Ezra Klein called it “Clinton's best line of the night.” If that’s true, what does that say about the Clinton campaign? She was at her best, rhetorically, when pivoting away from her vote on the defining foreign policy issue of our time to talk instead about how she will drop even more bombs in the region to make make things right again?

In her defense, Sanders is an absolute horror show on foreign policy as well. Perhaps his only leg up is that he’s less interested in it, and thus (maybe) less likely to exercise the U.S.’s imperial apparatus around the world, or forcefully defend its funding priorities during budget negotiations.

Taken on its own terms, however, her quip, and the approving nods it no doubt garnered from other serious journalists and pundits, is just straight fucked up.

Between 150,000 and 170,000 documented civilian deaths.

Between 1.9 and 4.0 million Iraqi refugees.

Over 4,000 American troops killed, and tens of thousands more injured.

$1.7 trillion spent, not including future veteran benefits which could total nearly $6 trillion over the next 40 years.

Add to this the civil wars in Libya and Syria, the creation of a terrorist quasi-state, ongoing terrorist attacks, drone strikes, and U.S. facilitated state violence in the rest of the region, and the tragedy only deepens. The U.S.’s “mistakes, excuses, and painful lessons“ in the Middle East did not start with Iraq.

And yet people like Klein, who supported the invasion of Iraq, just like Clinton, and many other elites, power brokers and thought leaders, don’t look at it as part of an ongoing pathology. They see it simply as an error in judgment. A problem of perception and analysis. The problem with the war was how it was sold, or how it was conceived of, not that it was, you know, a war, with a foreign country, who had not attacked us.

That is: the problem with the Iraq war was how the game was played, not the game itself. When asked about mission creep in Syria, historian and foreign policy critic Andrew Bacevich explained the problem concisely,

“I think the way you posed the question, you’re really putting your finger on the main issue. And it is an issue that gets largely ignored by the media, and certainly ignored by those aspiring to be the next president. We have been engaged militarily in an enterprise that, by my telling, has now gone on for 35 years, beginning with the promulgation of the Carter Doctrine back in 1980, a project that assumes that somehow or other the adroit use of American military power can bring order, pacify, democratize, somehow fix large parts of the Islamic world that are increasingly enveloped in turmoil. And yet, when we look at U.S. military actions across this entire span of time, what we see is that however great U.S. military power may be, it does not suffice to achieve those objectives that our leaders claim they seek to achieve.“

He continued,

“[M]y argument would be it’s far more important to take stock of the dimensions of this administration’s military efforts in that part of the world, and then to connect them to the military efforts undertaken by his several predecessors. Only then, it seems, do we get an appreciation of the magnitude of our military failure. And only by taking stock of the full magnitude of our military failure can we come to an appreciation of how—of the imperative of beginning to think differently about our approach to the region.”

Even after all of the body counts and ensuing conflicts, all of the mea culpas, thinkpiecs, and explainers, few moderates, liberals, or self-described progressives have come to terms with the “magnitude of our military failure.”

Especially Clinton, who swats away questions about her judgement regarding the Iraq War because that was, like, so 12 years ago, and hey did you hear all these great things Henry Kissinger has been saying about me? And yet someone of Klein’s stature and weight will nevertheless applaud her for doing so, never for a minute deigning to investigate what her admiration for Kissinger says about the moral rot upon which her foreign policy expertise is founded.

#Foreign Policy #Clinton #Iraq War

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ethangach · 8 years

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What Chait gets wrong about Clinton’s “pluralism”

Jonathan Chait is either disingenuous or just not very perceptive when, on the ideological divide in last night’s debate between Sanders and Clinton he writes

“[Sanders] frames Wall Street as a problem of political economy, not economy. Wall Street is so big and rich that it is inherently dangerous, and will by its nature corrupt the political system.

Clinton does not believe that. Her political ideal is what some political scientists have called “pluralism.” A pluralist politics venerates the careful balancing of competing interests. It is okay to bring business to the bargaining table as long as there is also a place for labor, environmentalists, consumer advocates, and other countervailing interests. Clinton’s Democratic Party, and Obama’s, is one in which pluralist agreements struck important progress not only in financial reform but also health care, public investment, green energy, and other priorities.

Sanders does not completely reject the products of these pluralist compromises. (He grudgingly accepts them as worthwhile, piecemeal steps.) What he rejects is the political model that treats pluralism as the normal model of political action. Sanders believes the interest of the public is not divided, it is united, and only the corrupt influence of big business has thwarted it. He consequently vows to smash its power through a combination of a mass upsurge in political activism and campaign-finance reform.”

Chait uses the term “pluralism” to describe Clinton’s preferred mode of politics, but really its transactional. Pluralism pre-supposes, as Chait points out, a series of competing but balanced political forces. The entire Sanders campaign is predicated on the belief that no such balance currently exists, or could exist, while money remains as concentrated and unequally distributed as it currently is. No doubt the Senator from Vermont spends so much time talking about Wall Street because no other two words can do as much rhetorical work as them in describing the inequity so many people currently feel and experience in the United States.

Thus even framing the argument, no matter how inaccurate that framing is to begin with, as “political revolution” vs. “pluralism” is to deny the premises of the former. It would be one thing to grant that everything

Sanders supporters are angry about is true, that ordinary citizens get burdened with the consequences of austerity or the meager results of trickle down economics while those in the upper echelons of American society continue to accrue more wealth and power, and from there argue that he’s just not the best person to fix that because of a lack of experience, pragmatism, and political savvy.

But as Sanders has become more of a threat to the Clinton campaign and the Democratic establishment that backs her, what you actually hear are variations on the above, e.g. this is business as usual, so we need a Democratic candidate who understands how to negotiate with the relevant players.

The reason Sanders supporters distrust Clinton, I would venture, isn’t because they think she won’t negotiate on their behalf, it’s that they don’t think she’s willing to draw a line in the sand that she won’t cross, whether on reforming Social Security, the federal budget, or any number of other subjects on which her base and the powers that be are in fierce disagreement. If she really is a pluralist as Chait says, the problem isn’t that she’ll be willing to negotiate and compromise, but that she will do so according to the current political landscape, one in which moneyed interests were able to secure bailouts for the banks and golden parachutes for the people who worked there while at the same time pushing a “grand bargain” agenda in D.C. that would further erode programs which benefit the poor and working class.

#Clinton #Sanders #Chait #Pluralism

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