Monster Jam

Remember when Samantha Power called Hillary Clinton a "monster"?

It was in the middle of the 2008 primary. Feelings ran hot. Emotions were intense. But it just wasn't the sort of thing you can do. So Power resigned from Barack Obama's campaign. Later, when Obama was elected, she returned and served in his administration (along with Secretary of State Clinton).

This past week, Rashida Tlaib led the crowd at a Bernie Sanders rally in a rousing round of boos for Hillary Clinton. She now sort-of regrets it (this thread would not score highly in my "rate that apology" series). Of course, many people are defending her and saying of course she should boo Clinton, she has all the reason in the world to boo Clinton, everyone should boo Clinton, look at all the terrible things Clinton has done to Bernie Sanders.

For me, though, this is just like the Power scenario. I backed Obama over Clinton in 2008, and I am a massive admirer of Samantha Power. But -- putting aside whether it was "appropriate" in some objective sense -- calling your main intraparty opponent who still carries significant support among the class of voters you need both the primary and the general a "monster" is just bad message discipline. The project of political campaigning means sometimes -- probably often -- biting your lip and not saying what you really feel, even -- especially -- when emotions are running hot. If you can't do that, you're a liability. I said then, and I meant it, and I believe it, that Power was correct to resign from the campaign (I also said, and I meant it and I believe it, that this was not a call for permanent exile -- and I was thrilled when she rejoined the Obama administration).

I was very unlikely to vote for Joe Biden in this primary field, but one of the things that has especially driven me away from him is the repeated clips of him snapping at prospective voters who've asked challenging questions to "vote for someone else." I'm sure Biden feels like he's being unfairly harangued. I'm sure the questions he's facing make him hot under the collar. Maybe I think some of the questions he's facing are unfair too. But you've got to keep it together. Joe Biden lacks discipline, and that makes him a weaker candidate in a grueling election season.

I saw one prominent leftist writer defend the Sanders campaign re: Tlaib by saying, in essence, that the reason Sanders was so great was that he doesn't try to regulate what his surrogates say. Everyone's allowed to speak from the heart! That is such a lovely, egalitarian, romantic idea for running a campaign that will barrel headfirst into electoral catastrophe. Campaigns need discipline. They need people to keep their heads on straight.

The fact of the matter is -- and too many Sanders supporters seem unwilling to accept this -- they need to appeal to Hillary Clinton voters. Lots of Democrats like Hillary Clinton! And Obama! And other members of the dreaded "establishment"! Obama and Clinton won their primaries! They've gotten the support of most Democrats! Telling a Democratic primary voter -- and I've gotten this exact phone call -- that they shouldn't vote for so-and-so in the primary because she's "an Obama Democrat" is such a colossal misreading of the political space, it's campaign malpractice. If I'm cutting ads against Sanders in primaries in South Carolina or Georgia, it's just going to be a string of clips of Sanders and his surrogates dismissively deriding popular Democratic figures.

Plenty of Sanders supporters are frustrated with Hillary Clinton (plenty of Biden supporters are frustrated with Bernie Sanders!). I get it. There's some bad blood, and the primary season is intense. Too bad. Suck it up. Politics ain't beanbag, but it isn't a therapy session for you to vent your honest emotional truth either. Campaigns need discipline. If you're on a campaign and you can't hold it inside when necessary, you need to step back.

The Good Place: Final Thoughts

*MAJOR SPOILERS*

At the conclusion of season three, I registered my prediction of how The Good Place would end:

The abolition of the afterlife in its entirety (no more good or bad places); a re-emphasis on doing as best you can when it matters (i.e., during one's actual life); the core quartet is sent back to Earth to live out the rest of their natural lives as friends.

I would say that, like most religions, I got about 5% right. The afterlife, as we knew it, is abolished. And the series does end with all of the human characters passing on. But in between, The Good Place takes a much more audacious swing: a genuine attempt to reform the afterlife. And -- and I think this is perhaps even more profound -- an essential acknowledgment that this attempt fell short. A perfect paradise was not created, and in fact the final conclusion of The Good Place seems to be that such a paradise is impossible even in concept.

After all, cut away the underbrush and the heroes' solution to the problem afflicting The Good Place was to offer the choice of suicide. And while the penultimate episode suggests that perhaps just having the option will suffice to stave off the ennui of eternal bliss, the finale refuses to accept that out. Every human character, eventually, kills themselves. Their happy ending is that they are content to die. The best possible paradise is one where people can and do eventually choose to erase themselves from existence. Skip over the beatific forest setting and the stipulation of emotional contentment, and that's a rather melancholic, if not outright grim, conclusion.

It's easy to draw a parallel between the last episode and the need for fans to accept the voluntarily-chosen end of a great show like The Good Place (it's even easier to draw it to the need to accept our own mortality). But another recurrent theme in The Good Place is the failure of systems. Over and over again, the systems the characters find themselves in are revealed to be either malfunctioning or outright designed to immiserate them.

From the very beginning, Eleanor and Chidi confront the brutal harshness of the points system, which results in nearly all people being horrifically tortured for eternity (incidentally, that Chidi isn't immediately repelled by -- and suspicious of -- this set-up is a rare miscue in terms of characterization, if not plotting). They resolve to try and improve Eleanor, only to find out that they're actually in a perpetual torture chamber which will literally reset every time they come close to escaping it.

At this point, the series becomes a repeated effort to find ever-higher levers in the celestial bureaucracy that can be appealed to. They find a judge, who is at best indifferent to their predicament and not particularly interested in helping them. Upon returning to earth, they discover first that they can't ever improve enough to enter The Good Place (because -- knowing the stakes -- their motivations are corrupt) and then that nobody can successfully enter The Good Place because existence has become too interwoven and morally interdependent for anyone to satisfy the standard of admission. They meet the actual Good Place committee, who are worse than useless and content to let everyone suffer forever because taking any concrete action risks violating some procedural norm. And when they finally enter The Good Place, they discover it's as dysfunctional as everywhere else -- gradually sucking the life out of its residents who, given eternity, eventually tire of everything. All the systems fail. All of them are doomed to fail. They can't not.

Hence, the suicide gate (and sidenote: If The Good Place ever has a spin-off series -- and lord knows it shouldn't -- it should definitely involve exploring the first murder in the Good Place when someone gets involuntarily shoved through that archway).

By the time it reaches its conclusion, The Good Place is one of the few depictions of the afterlife to take the concept of eternity seriously. Some other venues glance in this direction. Agent Smith in The Matrix tells Neo that humans reject a simulation of paradise -- the implication is because we're diseased, but perhaps also indicating that perfect, eternal happiness ... isn't. Maya Rudolph's other afterlife vehicle, Forever, certainly touches on this theme. The Order of the Stick has an afterlife where people can eat all the food and have all the sex and otherwise satisfy all the "messed-up urges you people have leftover after having your soul stuck in a glorified sausage all your life". But this is only the "first tier" of heaven: once you're bored, you can "climb the mountain" to search for a higher level of spiritual satisfaction. And while what this entails is left vague, it is not death -- those who ascend can, if they wish, descend back down to the lowlier pleasures (OOTS also introduces the very neat concept of "Postmortum Time Disassociation Disorder").

But the story which provides perhaps the most powerful foil to The Good Place's view of eternity and immortality is (and of the approximately 143,000 Good Place retrospectives being written right now, I bet I'm the only one to make this comparison) Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

The ultimate adversary in HPMOR is not Snape, or Malfoy, or Voldemort. It is death, and Harry is committed to the "absolute rejection of death as the natural order." The message on the Potters' gravestone is, after all, "The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death" (and it's a sign of my cloistered Jewish upbringing that I thought this was a Rowling original -- it is in fact a quote from I Corinthians). Harry Potter wants people to live forever. And the story anticipates the objection, placed in the mouth of Dumbledore, "What would you do with eternity, Harry?"

Harry took a deep breath. "Meet all the interesting people in the world, read all the good books and then write something even better, celebrate my first grandchild's tenth birthday party on the Moon, celebrate my first great-great-great grandchild's hundredth birthday party around the Rings of Saturn, learn the deepest and final rules of Nature, understand the nature of consciousness, find out why anything exists in the first place, visit other stars, discover aliens, create aliens, rendezvous with everyone for a party on the other side of the Milky Way once we've explored the whole thing, meet up with everyone else who was born on Old Earth to watch the Sun finally go out, and I used to worry about finding a way to escape this universe before it ran out of negentropy but I'm a lot more hopeful now that I've discovered the so-called laws of physics are just optional guidelines."

The last few episodes of The Good Place are, in a sense, a calling of this bluff. Even if you play out the string all the way to extinguishment of the sun or the heat death of the universe -- well, forever is a long time. It can wait. Harry argues that the only reason we accept death is because we're used to it, and if you took someone who lived in a world where there was no death and asked them if they'd prefer to live in a universe where eventually people ceased to exist, they'd look at you like you're crazy. The Good Place provocatively argues the precise opposite -- that if death didn't exist, people would have to invent it. Or they would go crazy, with infinite time on their hands.

And so we are, perhaps, back to where we started. The paradise the heroes create is certainly better than that which they replaced. But it still is deeply, tragically flawed -- and The Good Place seems to believe that these flaws are fundamentally inescapable.

The suicide option is the clearest manifestation of how cracked paradise must be, but there is another issue that the show alludes to: paradise depends on other people, and on their choices. Way back in the first season, "Real Eleanor" raises this precise point: if her soulmate doesn't love her, "this will never truly be my Good Place." Sure it's actually a contrivance to torture Chidi, but it's easy to imagine it as real. What if your paradise is to live blissfully with a certain special someone and ... that person doesn't love you back? Both Simone and Tahani seem okay with Chidi and Jason respectively choosing someone other than them (Eleanor and Janet). But that's in harmony with the audience's happy ending. It's not hard to imagine a different world where they were less sanguine about it.

Or take a far more direct problem: If paradise comes with a suicide option, what happens if your loved one takes it? Harry's excited declaration of all the things he'd do with infinite time is not fundamentally, the reason why he desires immortality. When push comes to shove, he's motivated by a far more basic yearning: to make it so "people won't have to say goodbye any more."

Eleanor's utter panic at the thought of losing Chidi forever was, for me at least, the most visceral emotional gut-punch of the entire series -- even more than the finale of season three (at least there, we could be reasonably assured their separation was temporary). She eventually comes to terms with it. But sit on it a little more: imagine a "paradise" where your soulmate has left you forever. People fantasize about heaven to be reunited with their loved ones, yet we end up looping right back into eternal separation. What kind of paradise is this, where people still have to say goodbye?

So we have two problems that seem to threaten even the conceptual coherency of a paradise:

• First, if paradise is forever, eventually everything will become tired. That suicide is presented as a good solution to this problem shows just how serious it is (and, for what it's worth, I'm not sure the suicide "option" would necessarily bring relief. It could easily generate crippling anxiety -- a sense of trappedness between the irrevocable permanence of death and the unbearable ennui of existence). 
• Second, if paradise depends on the choices other people make, how can we be sure they'll make choices compatible with your happy ending?

The Good Place presents the first problem as unavoidable and skates past the second entirely. But could they be overcome?

Maybe. In the penultimate episode of The Good Place, one solution proposed to the problem of eternal ennui is to reset people's memories, so the things that bored them become fresh again. This is swiftly rejected as a repetition of how the quartet was tortured in The Bad Place. Too swiftly, in my view. Neighborhoods were also used to torture -- should those be jettisoned too?

The problem with eternity is that eventually, everything gets repetitive. Go-Kart Racing against monkeys may be a blast the first time, but it loses its luster after a million reiterations. The wistfulness comes from wishing one could go back to that initial burst of discovery and experience -- before one had the memory of doing it all over again. This was my immediate solution to the ennui problem -- not that some demon should periodically reset you, but that you should be able to choose when, where, and how to reset yourself. It's not just about going back in time. It's reoccupying any memory state you've ever possessed. Go back to before you ever raced against monkeys -- then zoom forward to when you've already experienced all the monkey-races you could handle.

It's like a load/save system for your mind. Hell, you can even adjust the "difficulty" level. It's true that, for many, a "paradise" where one simply automatically gets whatever one wants will feel unsatisfying. But one needn't set the parameters of paradise to guarantee success. It can be as hard or easy as one wants; people can be as pliant or obstinate as one likes (not for nothing is one of the afterlife attractions in OOTS -- a fantasy roleplaying-based setting -- "The Dungeon of Monsters That Are Just Strong Enough to Really Challenge You").

Or dream bigger. If one has infinite ability to reverse and remake memory as one wishes, then one could at any point adapt any set of memories one ever could have had. Don't just live a different life, remember a different life. Then jump forward and remember all the different lives you lived -- each of which (when you lived them) you had erased the memories of all the others. Every single possible timeline is lived -- and can be relived in all its glory, as many times as one wants.

For me, at least, this dissolves the problem of others' choices as well. If anyone can make not just any possible choice, but live through any possible timeline, what does it mean to ask which one is "real"? If your paradise involves loving and being loved by a particular someone, will in your paradise, the person you need to love you, loves you, and stays with you as long as you need. In their paradise, they might love someone else. You enjoy a timeline where people choose exactly the choices that would make you most happy; they live in a timeline which is the same for them. Of course, the sorts of philosophical questions that would raise (among others: What does it mean for the "same" person to simultaneously exist across multiple timelines? Who, exactly, is "choosing" which version they occupy? And if the one that does choose doesn't choose a timeline that involves them loving you back, is the version that does love you really "them"?) are even more esoteric and less accessible to a network audience than the moral philosophy questions The Good Place did try to introduce. So I don't blame them for skipping by it.

* * *

The last enemy to be defeated may not, after all, be death. It may be time.  Time ruins all things. Eventually you run out of it. And even if you never ran out of it -- you had infinite time -- it would defeat you in a different way: via boredom, repetition, and ennui. We can, perhaps, imagine a world where we vanquish death. But can we imagine one where (forgot about possibility, and just think conceptually) we defeat time?

I can. Barely, but I can. Of course, it's in many ways a moot point, since I'm profoundly skeptical that humanity ever will master time in this way -- or even if it's practically possible (that it won't happen in my lifetime is actually less material, given that if it ever did happen we'd probably be at Omega Point anyway). But at least it holds out the possibility of an actual happy ending -- where the last enemy is truly vanquished, and nobody has to say goodbye.

Bernie Sanders, Joe Rogan and the Politics of Conviction

If you're relying on me to inform you about the Bernie Sanders/Joe Rogan controversy, you need to read more widely.

The short version is this: Joe Rogan is a podcaster with a brand of anti-PC anti-establishment angry comedy, who is popular with ... exactly the sort of crowd that likes anti-PC anti-establishment anger. He endorsed Bernie Sanders, and Sanders loudly trumpeted the endorsement.

On one level, Rogan's endorsement is a big coup for Sanders insofar as it gives him credibility with the proverbial disaffected White voter. Sanders ability to appeal to this crowd is central to his "electability" case.

On another level, Rogan's "brand of anti-PC anti-establishment angry comedy" often in practice has been vicious racist, transphobic, Islamophobic, and anti-immigrant. So Sanders is taking a lot of flak from people who think the supposed standard-bearer of the left shouldn't be aligning himself with that sort of reactionary hatred.

Sanders' defenders think this is all yet another bad-faith cheap shot from the "establishment" desperate to take Bernie down a peg. After all, how many other candidates have accepted endorsements from morally compromised figures (Henry Kissinger is a popular target) and not gotten half the backlash? Many of the critics rejoin by saying they are not anti-Sanders per se -- some are even backers -- but feel especially betrayed that Bernie Sanders is elevating and amplifying the voice of the likes of Joe Rogan.

So that's the controversy in a nutshell. And I have two points. First, when people argued that Bernie Sanders could build a different sort of political coalition because he could uniquely appeal to disaffected White voters, this is what they meant. They may not have realized it was what they meant; there's been quite a bit of romantic naivete that when these voters back Sanders they were doing so because they've become converts to a true-blue socialist vision that goes all the way down, and in comradeship they would join the left cultural issues right alongside economic ones. But in reality, this was always going to be the way that it worked -- if Sanders was able to build a novel coalition that brought back these angry White male voters that had been attracted to Trump back into the fold, they were going to come with all the baggage that made them Trump-curious in the first place. As I remarked last year, it's fine to say "that's politics" and accept that political coalitions always will entail alliances with some unsavory sorts. But one can't just wear blinders that this is what one is doing.

Which brings me to point number two. One of the reason Bernie Sanders, in particular, is taking flak over this sort of arguably unremarkable political compromise is because so much of his campaign's organizing narrative is based on the idea that he doesn't compromise. In contrast to an establishment that is hopelessly tainted by disreputable associations and opportunistic corrupt bargaining, Sanders stands as someone who will always do the right thing, even if it's the hard path. He has his convictions, and he sticks to them. That's what makes him stand out, and -- for his more passionate supporters -- that's what makes other Democrats unpalatable. They play the game. Sanders will overturn the game table.

What Sanders is finding out, though, is something Max Weber observed years ago: nobody who is actually seeking to exercise political power can get away with the pure politics of conviction. One will always have to compromise, there will always be instances where one has to sacrifice ideals on the altar of expediency. Sanders is getting hit harder for the Rogan endorsement because in some ways the very controversy falsifies one of his core campaign narratives. When you've held yourself as the beacon of uncompromising conviction, obviously you're going to take a few shots when you so publicly engage in a political compromise -- accepting Rogan's backing (and the disaffected White voters he may bring with him) and the expense of excusing his anti-egalitarian rantings against various other marginalized groups.

It's kind of like conservative legal originalists. They get on such a high horse about how they're the only legal interpreters who are apolitical and unideological and just calling "balls and strikes". And so when they inevitably have to engage in judgment calls and contested interpretation -- and those calls and interpretations oh-so-shockingly skew towards their political priors -- there's going to be some extra mustard on the ensuing denunciations. It's not that adherents of other legal theories are immune to those sorts of behaviors. But they haven't dedicated their entire public profile to declaring they are so immune (and therefore superior).

Me, I'm a pragmatist -- I've long since come to terms with the fact that politics entails political compromises, so I don't get too exercised when I see it in the wild. Whether or not I think Joe Rogan's endorsement is a net positive or negative, it is not in the family of political misconduct that particularly bothers me (for similar reasons, actually, to why I don't get too worked up that "Linda Sarsour is a campaign surrogate!"). All it tells me is that Bernie Sanders is a perfectly ordinary politician -- and to be honest, it never occurred to me to view him as anything else.

No. Matter. Who.

First things first: If you are a Democrat, the only valid answer to the question "will you support the Democratic nominee regardless of who it is?" is "yes." No hemming. No hawing. No "it depends." Yes.

I don't care whether the nominee is Biden or Warren or Sanders or Klobuchar or Bloomberg or Tulsi frickin' Gabbard. The answer is yes.

So: Joe Biden gets today's tsk of shame for not answering this question correctly:

Former Vice President Joe Biden stopped short Tuesday of saying he’d support Bernie Sanders if the progressive Vermont senator wins the Democratic presidential nomination.

“I’m not going to make judgments now,” Biden told reporters in Muscatine, six days before the Iowa caucuses. “I just think that it depends upon how we treat one another between now and the time we have a nominee.”

Bzzzt. Wrong answer. The correct answer is "yes", without further adornment. See above.

But a new poll suggests that while Biden-the-candidate may be getting it wrong; at least his supporters are getting it right. And as for Bernie Sanders -- well, vice versa. He's taken the right line on the issue, but his supporters....

Only a small majority of Bernie Sanders voters say they will definitely support the eventual Democratic nominee at the 2020 election if the independent Vermont senator does not win the race, according to a poll.

The National Emerson College Poll of 1,128 registered voters between January 21 and January 23 found that 53 percent of Sanders supporters said "yes" when asked if they would support the Democratic nominee even if it is not their candidate.

Another 31 percent of Sanders supporters said it depends on who the nominee is and 16 percent flat-out said no. The poll, conducted via landline calls and an online panel, has a 2.8 percentage point margin of error.

The poll suggests some Sanders supporters are out of step with their own chosen candidate on the question of supporting the Democratic nominee regardless of who it is.

"Let me be clear: If any of the women on this stage or any of the men on this stage win the nomination—I hope that's not the case, I hope it's me—but if they do I will do everything in my power to make sure that they are elected in order to defeat the most dangerous president in the history of our country," Sanders said at the recent Iowa debate.

By comparison to Sanders, 87 percent of former vice president Joe Biden's supporters said yes to voting for whoever wins the nomination, 9 percent it depends on the winning candidate, and 5 percent said no to anyone that is not Biden.

And 90 percent of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren's supporters said they would vote for whoever is the nominee, while the remaining 10 percent said it depended on who won the nomination.

None of Warren's supporters said they would not vote for the eventual nominee if she loses the Democratic race.

Chalk this up as another data point in favor of "Bernie Sanders" being far, far superior to "Bernie Sanders supporters."

Wilder/Fury II: Preview

It's been awhile since we had a boxing post on this site, but I've got $40 on Tyson Fury to defeat Deontay Wilder in the rematch, so why not run through my thinking?

Full disclosure: My track record of boxing betting involving any fight not including Floyd Mayweather is not great. So take what I say with a grain of salt -- or as a guide in the opposite direction.

When I visited Las Vegas a few weeks ago, the Wilder/Fury fight was a pure toss-up -- -110 odds for either fighter. That makes some sense, given that their first fight went to a draw. But the more I thought about it, the more I liked Fury in the rematch -- and that's accounting for the fact that as a fan I greatly prefer Wilder. Two things loomed largest in pointing towards "The Gypsy King":

First, most observers thought that if anybody won the first fight, it was Fury. Instead the outcome was a draw. In my experience, when most people thought boxer A defeated boxer B in the first fight, but the judges disagree, boxer A beats boxer B more decisively in the rematch. Think Pacquiao/Bradley. There are exceptions, but they tend to fall into two categories. Either A's win would have been a huge upset (in which case, often the explanation is that B overlooked A, and doesn't make the same mistake twice); or B has a lot more drawing power/promoter backing than A. Neither one applies here: Wilder and Fury are roughly equally popular, and were viewed as evenly-matched from the start. It's hard to imagine Wilder was "overlooking" Fury in their first fight.

But that's mostly me doing amateur psychology on the mindset of the judges. Substantively, I see a much bigger issue for Wilder -- at the very top level, he's repeatedly needed his power to bail him out. That was true in both Ortiz fights, each of which he was losing before he came-from-behind with a knockout. And it was true in the first Fury fight, where he needed two knockdowns (including one in the final round) to scrape out a draw that even then many observers thought he was lucky to get. If Wilder didn't land his one big shot, he loses those fights.

Now of course, if ever there was an eraser, it's Deontay Wilder's power. I don't overlook that. And I get the whole argument that Tyson Fury has to be good for 12 rounds, while Deontay Wilder only has to be good for one second. Even still, it's never a good thing to go into a fight needing a knockout. There's a reason why Randall Bailey didn't win every fight he was ever in. If that's your only dimension, eventually you'll encounter a guy who can neutralize it long enough to take a decision.

And let's not forget -- Tyson Fury might be the one guy on the planet capable of surviving Wilder's power. The punch that dropped Fury in the 12th round of their first fight was the sort of shot I didn't think it possible to get up from. But Fury did, and survived the round. It's not enough for Wilder to land the big shot, it has to actually end the fight. Against 99% of all opposition, that's a foreordained conclusion. Against Fury, it isn't.

Tyson Fury certainly didn't look perfect against Otto Wallin in his last fight. But unlike Wilder, he didn't have to bail himself out of a hole with one punch. Much the opposite, he gritted out a decision under deep adversity (and I'd point out that we really have no idea just how good Wallin is). He showed heart and discipline, two things he'll need in spades against Wilder. But if he sticks to a gameplan and boxes smart, I think he can ride out Wilder's one punch, and get the victory many observers thought he deserved the first time around.

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume LVII: The Death of Kobe Bryant

When seeking to attribute a given historical happening that doesn't seem to involve Jews to a Jewish conspiracy, one generally can take one of two routes.

The first is to find a connection between a critical figure in the event and a Jewish person in their social orbit. This isn't hard, since most of the prominent figures one would want to build a conspiracy theory around probably know at least some Jews. This is the angle that gave us classics like "Blaming Jews for a coup in Turkey" or "Blaming Jews for Taylor Swift endorsing Phil Bredesen".

But if the connection can't be found or feels to tenuous (though lord knows what could be "too tenuous" for the people in this series), there's another route: it's a distraction to draw attention away from some other news.

The people who -- surprising no one -- immediately jumped aboard the "Jews killed Kobe Bryant!" train appear to be taking Door #2.

Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and the rest of the child molesting adrenochrome injecting jew rats killed Kobe to distract from the fact THAT THEY ARE STILL LETTING FLIGHTS FROM WUHAN LAND AT LAX, JFK, ATL...

— MicroaggressionMedia ✝️ (@MicroAgMedia) January 26, 2020

More examples of the genre collected here.

My sincere condolences to the Bryant family and all those who died today.

Technically, Any Number of Seconds Can Be Split Any Number of Times

Yesterday, in Chestnut v. Wallace,* the Eighth Circuit denied an officer qualified immunity. That itself is arguably worthy of noting, since the Eighth Circuit is not exactly predisposed to denying qualified immunity.

The case itself is straightforward: a man (Chestnut) quietly observed a St. Louis police officer perform a traffic stop from about 30 - 40 feet away, while leaning against a tree. The officer viewed this as suspicious, and called for backup. A new officer asked for Chestnut's name, birthday, and social security number; he refused to provide the last of these. The officer then frisked Chestnut for weapons, found none, and then proceeded to have Chestnut handcuffed. After about twenty minutes and a conversation with the officer's supervisor, Chestnut was released. Since observing the police does not provide reasonable suspicion of criminal activity, and since people are allowed to not answer questions from the police (such as providing their social security number), no reasonable officer could have had suspicion of criminal activity, and so there is no qualified immunity.

Judge Gruender dissented. This is considerably less noteworthy, since an officer could probably shove a handcuffed detainee off a six-story building and Judge Gruender would conclude he has qualified immunity.

I do want to flag one thing though, from the end of Judge Gruender's opinion. He writes that "police officers are not—and should not be—expected to parse fine distinctions between statutory and constitutional law in split-second decisions." This rhetoric of "split-second decisions" is increasingly common in judicial opinions that seek to insulate police officers from accountability, particularly in use-of-force cases. Maybe we have sympathy for it in that context, maybe we don't.

But it is interesting to see this rhetoric make a near-reflexive showing in this case, as nothing about the police's interaction with Chestnut involved anything like a "split-second decision". There were no sudden movements, no unpredictable reversals or unexpected flinches. Chestnut was far away from the action and was not an imminent threat to anyone. By the time he was placed in handcuffs, the police already knew he was unarmed. That Judge Gruender nonetheless characterizes this case as involving a "split-second" decision suggests that anything the police do deserves that label. But it's just not true. Not every decision a police officer makes in the field is a "split-second" one; the decision to detain Chestnut certainly was not. It was a decision taken after many seconds, under no particular pressures and with ample time to deliberate.

In that same paragraph, Judge Gruender hoarily remarks that police officers in the field are not "participating in a law school seminar." Indeed, they are not. They are taking real actions which have real consequences for real people. Kevin Chestnut was placed in handcuffs for having the temerity to look at the police in public. That's a terrible thing to have experienced; obscured though it might be behind rhetoric of "reasonable suspicion" and the fuzzy line between "detention" and "arrest". We should step out from the legalese fictions that justify qualified immunity, and start taking the reality of what the police do -- and who they are doing it to -- a lot more seriously.

* The opinion was authored by Judge Arnold, joined by Judge Grasz -- and I'll reiterate again what a pleasant surprise Judge Grasz has been on qualified immunity issues.

On the AMCHA "Bringing BDS into the Classroom" Study

The AMCHA Initiative has a new self-published study, which is gaining some attention in the Jewish Press, purporting to show that when teaching courses related to Israel, Palestine, or Zionism, (academic) BDS-backing faculty are more likely load up their syllabi with fellow BDS-supporters, as opposed to giving their students a balanced perspective. Their big takeaway findings are:

• For academic BDS supporters, a median 78% of syllabi readings are by "BDS supporters", compared to a 17% for non-BDS supporters.
• All academic BDS supporters have  at least a majority of readings from "BDS supporters", whereas only 6% of non-BDS supporters have a majority of readings from "BDS supporters".

I'd been hearing about this study for awhile, and I was finally prompted to look it over after reading this laudatory account from Daniel Gordon. Gordon argues that the AMCHA study proves that BDS supporters are sabotaging the values of balance and even-handedness in favor of a one-sided propagandistic approach in their classrooms -- so much so that he suggests that either academic administrators or "the public" at large might be justified in interfering with their content.

That's an aggressive claim, and one that requires equally strong proof. Yet the AMCHA study provides, at best, mixed evidence regarding who is actually being one-sided. Let me present AMCHA's data in a different way that might generate a different intuition (this is derived from "Figure 1" of the study):

• 63% of "no BDS" faculty have at least 80% of their syllabus readings come from fellow "no BDS" authors. For 31%, that number rises to 90%.
• By contrast, just 33% of academic BDS supporters have at least 80% of their syllabus readings come from fellow BDS supporters. And only 7% (aka, one syllabus) has over 90% of readings come from other BDS supporters.

Framed that way, one could argue that it's the BDS supporters who do a better job avoiding overwhelmingly one-sided syllabi. Two-thirds of them devote at least a non-trivial chunk of their syllabi to their ideological opponents. By contrast, BDS opponents are far more likely to completely or almost completely load their syllabi up exclusively with fellow BDS opponents. If the idea is, in Gordon's words, to present "competing narratives", it's far from clear that BDS opponents are doing their diligence in meaningfully presenting the "opposing side".

Now to be clear, I think one can very easily overinterpret this framing as well. Most notably, it doesn't take into account the base rate -- what percentage of authors active in Israel Studies qualify as "BDS supporters"? If it's only a marginal few, then the "no BDS" crowd might be giving their views proportionate weight even if they only occupy 10 - 20 % of the syllabus (and this would, similarly, suggest that BDS backers are significantly oversampling their side relative to its support levels). But base rate levels are very difficult to tease out, and almost certainly vary depending on the specific topic of the course. It's quite plausible that many more authors working on "Palestinian Literature of Resistance" support BDS compared to those working on "Israeli Constitutional Law", and so the fact that a class on the former contains many BDS-backers on the syllabus (or one on the latter contains few) does not necessarily reveal any especial bias on the part of the professor. And that doesn't even go into the over-simplified notion that "BDS support/opposition" necessarily mark out the relevant ideological "sides" for every class.  The difficulties in parsing these out in practice, when they're almost always going to be matters of interpretation, are just some of the many reasons why outside observers should be very leery about substituting their own judgments regarding "balance" and "even-handedness" for that of the professor.

The AMCHA study also raises another pertinent question: Who counts as a "BDS supporter"? Here, the study authors do something rather slick -- they change their answer for the independent versus the dependent variable. The result is to significantly inflate the level of same-side bias that exists on the side of the "BDS supporters".

Here's how it works: For the independent variable -- that is, the professors authoring the syllabi -- the study only includes supporters of academic BDS, specifically, as "BDS supporters". On the other side, "no BDS" professors are those who oppose BDS in all its forms (not just academic BDS but, say, settlement boycotts as well). Those who fit into neither group (people who support some forms of BDS, but not academic boycotts) are excluded.

But for the dependent variable -- that is, which syllabus readings are identified as being authored by "BDS supporters" -- that entire middle-ground category is grouped back into the pro-BDS crowd. Along this axis, "BDS supporter" includes not just academic boycotters, but also

• Anyone who has supported, or signed a petition in favor of, any form of BDS (including settlement boycotts);
• Anyone who has supported a boycott of "specific Israeli leaders"; 
• For Israeli scholars, anyone who either has "challeng[ed] Israel’s right to exist as a sovereign Jewish state" or "call[ed] on Israelis to resist obligatory military service", regardless of whether they've endorsed any form of BDS or not.

And any reading that is even co-authored by anyone in this expansive category is coded as being by a "BDS supporter".

Putting these two different renditions of "BDS supporter" together, the study is measuring the homophily of what we think of as the hardest core of BDS supporters (those favoring academic boycotts) by asking how many of their syllabi readings are at least co-authored by anyone at least as left-wing as Peter Beinart. This is not, to say the least, an especially illuminating metric.

In short, the AMCHA study fails to demonstrate that pro-BDS faculty produce syllabi that are more one-sided than their anti-BDS peers. Indeed, it may instead offer some (albeit weak) evidence in the opposite direction. Not only does it almost certainly exaggerate the same-side bias of BDS supporters by contracting and then expanding the definition of "BDS supporters", but even on face the study findings seem to show that the most ideologically-lopsided syllabi -- in terms of giving significant attention to authors on the opposite side of the BDS ideological divide -- tend to come from BDS opponents.

NYTimes Endorses Warren and Klobuchar

The New York Times has officially endorsed not one, but two candidates in the 2020 Democratic primary: Senators Elizabeth Warren (MA) and Amy Klobuchar (MN). In essence, the Times' picked one candidate from the "moderate" lane and one candidate from the "progressive" lane, while suggesting that either one can and should be acceptable to any decent person seeking to defeat Trump.

The internet reaction, at least in my quarters of it, has been mostly disdainful. The NYT should have had the gumption to make an actual choice. Choosing two people was a cop out. Dismiss dismiss dismiss.

Most of this reaction has stemmed from more left-ward elements. And to be fair, on net the double-endorsement probably helps Klobuchar, who has struggled to gain traction, more than Warren. So it maybe isn't surprising that the left isn't wild about this choice, insofar as it probably does more to help an "establishment" candidate they dislike over a more progressive candidate they (well, some of "they") like or are at least fine with.

But I think there's another element in play here. Recent events notwithstanding, there remains some efforts on the left-side of the party to build a unified front along the axis of either Warren or Sanders, as against the "establishment" wing represented by Biden or Klobuchar. Key to their efforts is a strong distinction between these two wings, such that it is important to maintain progressive unity so we don't hand the nomination to a moderate because the left can't stop fighting amongst itself. This view is very much adverse to the sentiment, communicated by the Times, that all the Democrats (Klobuchar, Biden, Warren, Sanders ...) are fundamentally on the same side, so that we should all be content no matter which of them is picked. This aspect of the editorial is probably what got the most sustained mocking, at least in my feed.

It also is, as you probably know, a view I basically endorse, which is why the Times' double-endorsement didn't bother me all that much. I'm inclined to think that Warren is the best of the "progressive" wing, and Klobuchar probably the best of the "moderate" wing. There's a case to be made for nominating a progressive wing candidate, and a case for a moderate wing candidate, but if the nomination goes in the direction I disprefer I wouldn't view at as a betrayal. Either way, we'd still be getting a candidate who is more-or-less on my side.

What's the Catch of Clickbait?

Harvard Law Professor Larry Lessig is suing the New York Times for defamation, stemming from a headline that read "A Harvard Professor Doubles Down: If You Take Epstein’s Money, Do It in Secret". The lede of the article, in turn, opens by saying "It is hard to defend soliciting donations from the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law professor, has been trying."

Lessig contends that this grotesquely misrepresents the position he was taking, which is to not condemn fundraisers when some of the donors they solicit turn out to be unsavory or disreputable. He also asserts that the Times refused to alter its headline or lede after Lessig complained, preferring a flashy and provocative (albeit misleading) title to one that more accurately (but dully) reflects Lessig's actual view. While the article does give a more balanced presentation of his argument later on, Lessig contends that many people never read past the headline and so will only come away with a false picture.

This is all very interesting to defamation scholars, I'm sure. But I want to focus on what has to be the least important aspect of Lessig's complaint: What does "click-bait" mean?

Defendant's actions here are part of a growing journalistic culture of click-baiting. . . . Defendants are fully aware that many, if not most, readers never read past the clickbait...The use of this tactic represents a uniquely troubling media practice as it relates to the harm to and destruction of the reputation of the target of the clickbait.

Here's my bone of contention: clearly there is an issue whereby readers see only a headline and read no further, rendering moot the presence of a more complex depiction in the body text.

But it strikes me as weird to use "clickbait" to characterize the phenomenon. "Clickbait" literally refers to the use of a provocative or flashy headline as means of prompting ("baiting") readers to access ("click") the whole article. The idea is that the title is so juicy and irresistible that the person who sees it on, say, Facebook cannot help but click the link and read the article.

Now to be sure, part of the function of click-bait is that the site owner only cares about the click, that is, that the reader accessed the page (and thereby juices the site's hit rate for ad revenue purposes). The site probably doesn't care if the reader actually ends up reading any of the article text, much less if she completes it. Indeed, it seems likely that many of the readers who are attracted by the title ("oh man, this I've got to see!") will drift away disappointed once they encountered the more prosaic story underneath.

Nonetheless, it strikes me as a weird to say that "readers never read past the clickbait", because the whole purpose of the clickbait is to drive them to the site with the full article. If they only read the clickbait, then the clickbait has failed, because the actual "clickbait" is the content that one can see without ever clicking through to the site. If the New York Times runs a headline like this, the last thing they want is for me to see that headline on Facebook and then read nothing more. They want the bait to catch me -- for me to click the link and actually head over to the NYT site (where I will, presumably, read at least a little more of the article before realizing I've been, well, baited).

Delaware GOP Ousts Official Over Antisemitic Remarks

Nelly Jordan, Vice-Chairwoman of the Sussex County (Delaware) GOP, has been ousted from her position after she blamed "Jews" for orchestrating Trump's impeachment and said that they were "going against God's will". Quick thoughts:

• It's good they did this. I've noted before that the GOP has proven incredibly resistant to implementing any accountability for antisemitism in its party, and this is a welcome break from that trend.
• That said, the vote was apparently razor-thin, with large numbers of people showing up to back Jordan and rail against "political correctness" and in support of "free speech". So there was significant division in the ranks on this.
• Quoth one local Republican: "If we were to throw everybody out here who made a racial/ethnic remark, this place would be totally empty." Hey, you said it, not me!
• Jordan did apologize for her remarks, and -- in what I consider to be an unbelievable upset -- she did not say "I am a strong supporter of Israel". Not once! I wish I wasn't shocked, but I was. Well done, Ms. Jordan!

In other Delaware news, a different GOP official, New Castle GOP Chairman Chris Rowe, resigned after referring to ideological opponents as "faggots" in a social media post. Though he resigned, he wants you to know that:

The Disgrace was not mine, but displayed how weak & timid society has devolved by allowing itself to be injured & offended by viewing a printed word. The words uttered by the Left are words employed by the mentally weak to push shame upon those with which they disagree. They assume because they would be offended, so would their targeted individual or group. Then again, being mentally strong, I do not get offended by words as is your aim.

Kudos to Rowe for showing how mentally strong he is (he proceeded to text the local newspaper and inform them that "The Cancel Culture are now attacking me and causing me hurt.")

One More Reason Why Black Voters Back Biden

Joe Biden's status as front-runner, right now, rests almost entirely on the fact that he is far and away the top choice of African-American voters. There are many explanations for why Black voters like Biden, but I'll add one more, rather simple explanation, to the fray:

As a group, Black voters are more liberal than the average American. But they're not so much more liberal so as to explain voting upwards of 90% for Democratic candidates. You only reach those august heights when a good chunk of Black voters who might otherwise be Republicans are Democrats solely because the the Republican Party is unacceptably racist. Indeed, there are plenty of Black voters who identify as conservative -- they just don't identify as Republicans. What that means is that there is a good chunk of relatively conservative Black voters who are Democrats. A full 30% of Black Democrats identify as having "conservative" political views (compared to 8% of White Democrats).

So given that there are actually plenty of Black conservatives, a large proportion -- maybe even a majority! -- of whom nonetheless identify as Democrats, it's maybe not that surprising that one sees a cluster of support among Black voters for one of the more high-profile moderates in the race.

And, for what it's worth, this also helps explain why Bernie Sanders -- who has the second-highest level of Black support (Biden is at 48%, Sanders at 20%) -- wins among Black voters under 35. Voters under 35, across all races, represent a more liberal demographic. The corollary to "more conservative Blacks back candidates like Biden" is "more liberal Blacks back candidates like Sanders". That might sound obvious, and in many ways it is -- what obscures it is that we mentally sharply underestimate levels of conservativism (or even moderation) among Black voters because of their overwhelming partisan lean towards Democrats.

Why Do White Jews Analogize to the Black Experience (and Vice Versa)?

The latest drama on Jewish Twitter comes from a column from the AJC's Seffi Kogen, speaking on how Orthodox Jews cannot practically avoid antisemitism that targets them as visible Jews. Seeking to illustrate this point, Kogen wrote (in a section that was intentionally highlighted as the pull quote by the AJC):

Without betraying who they are, none of these Jews can hide the fact that they are Jewish any more than people of color could step out of their skin to avoid racism.

A great many Black Jews did not appreciate this comparison. Kogen, for his part, was not exactly defiant, but wasn't particularly contrite either. He did not apologize, nor did he withdraw the comparison. He's sticking by it, and demanding that everyone respect his good intentions.

The easiest move for Kogen would have been to just let the analogy go. His argument doesn't depend on the analogy, it would not collapse if it were removed. It seems to be a cost-free concession to a groundswell of hurt from fellow Jews -- in some cases (as in Black Orthodox Jews) the Jews best positioned to assess the validity of the comparison! -- who are telling him that phenomenologically the comparison does not carry.

Yet he didn't do that. He clearly wants to defend the legitimacy of the analogy, and putting aside his specific case these analogies keep on being made by Jews even in full knowledge of their reception. And I think a lot of us are kind of at a loss as to why.  What makes this analogy so important, that it must be stuck to no matter the reaction from the African-American community (including African-American Jews)? Why do Jews -- and Kogen is by no means alone here -- insist on couching their anti-antisemitism appeals via analogy to the Black experience? What makes that move so popular? What drives it?

I think I can answer these related questions. The reason this analogy is so popular comes at the confluence of two beliefs that are deeply-held in many portions of the Jewish community -- one which is reasonable and understandable, the other which is fictive and toxic.

The reasonable belief is the fear that articulating the rights of Jews-qua-Jews will not suffice to persuade non-Jewish listeners that those rights ought to be defended. That is, even if it were effectively communicated to the listener how important these religious symbols and practices are to observant Orthodox Jews, many would still be at best indifferent to the argument because they do not take protecting Jews to be a sufficiently important motivation in of itself. The fear is that, upon hearing "(Orthodox) Jews are marginalized in X way", the response will be a shrug (or worse): "So what? What do I care about what happens to Jews?"

In response to this vulnerability, the natural response is to look for a broader principle to appeal to by analogy. "You care about X in Y case, so you should care about it in the Jewish case too." And in selecting the "Y" analogous case, the more accepted it is the better. It does no good to pick a "Y" that would also be met with a shrug. The "Y" needs to stand as an impregnable, knockdown case that everyone would accept -- a sure-fire bet to prop up the otherwise precarious Jewish example.

And so we get to the fictive and toxic belief: the belief that anti-Black racism is that "Y". It is the case everyone agrees on, we are absolutely convinced that while people might shrug off hurting the Jews, they would never countenance anything that marginalizes African-Americans. I cannot count the instances where I've seen Jews make arguments premised on this logic: "We would never tolerate this were it said about Black people...." The analogy is made as a means of accessing this imagined power held in the hands of the Black community. Black people are assumed to possess a bounty Jews only wish we could have.

But again: it's a fiction, and it's fictiveness is part of the reason why it is received so poorly. For the reality is that people do countenance marginalizing African-Americans, and do so regularly, and so there is something quite insulting about seeking to conscript -- dare I say "appropriate" -- Black experience to bolster our own position on the premise that they have such an overabundance of social capital that who could object to the less fortunate seizing a piece? The premise is that racism is, in essence, a universally agreed-upon "bad", and so we are justified in diverting some of its surplus power to those cases where such agreement does not existence. That diversion is far less innocent when the premise isn't accepted.

One sees, incidentally, this same dynamic apply in the reverse, for I think similar reasons and I think yielding the same negative reaction from the appropriated party. One sometimes sees various social tragedies referred to as "holocausts" -- for example, the slave trade called the "African holocaust" or other genocides referred to as "holocausts" (a generic term). But why are they taking that term? Well, one reason is presumably the belief that describing the atrocity in its own, organic terms won't sufficiently motivate people to care about it (often a reasonable fear). And another reason is the sense that if it's acknowledged as a holocaust, if it's treated the way we treat a holocaust, why then nobody would think to question the full extent of its horrors. It is assumed that the Holocaust -- that is, antisemitic oppression -- represents the apex of what nobody today would ever countenance or question or shrug off. And at that point, it becomes viewed almost as a hoarded resource -- how dare the Jews keep such a bounty to ourselves? Why not share it with the less fortunate? Whereas we Jews know that "Holocaust" does not actually accord us this impregnability or universal deference, and so reasonably react poorly to efforts to divert it away from a Jewish case that is by no means a won argument.

One reason we know the premise is false is because of the ferocity with which the analogy is clung to. Were it the case that people immediately and unquestionably shrink away from anything that marginalizes the Black community, then the fact that the Black community so clearly disdains this analogy would cause us to immediately drop it. We don't because the fantastical image of a universally-rejected "anti-Blackness" is in fact far stronger than the actual reality of popular commitment to avoiding anti-Blackness.

And so I hope my efforts to explain this phenomenon are not taken to justify it. The analogy generates needless antagonism, and that should suffice to abandon it. And I think the case of Orthodox Jews can be argued fully effectively without it. I've regularly used the case of religion as an example of why "choice", taken literally, doesn't matter -- one can "choose" one's religion or religious practice but do we really want to say that therefore any amount of religious discrimination is justified (because one could always opt out)? The question isn't whether Orthodox Jews are literally, existentially capable of not wearing identifiable Jewish garb, the question is whether it is justifiable to ask them to make such a choice or to impose consequences upon them for choosing wrongly.

This is, indeed, a different question from that faced Black persons who have no way of peeling off their skin -- a true lack of choice. But so what? We should be able to make the argument on its own terms. We should have the confidence to defend Jewish rights in our own language, without the need to appropriate from others.

Karlie Kloss is not her Brother-in-Law

*Project Runway spoilers*

For the past few years, my nickel description of Karlie Kloss -- Heidi Klum's replacement on Project Runway -- has been "she's a supermodel who married one of the good Kushners". Karlie's husband is Joshua Kushner, brother of Jared Kushner, son-in-law to you-know-who. But unlike her brother, Joshua is a public-and-proud Democrat, and Karlie too has not been shy about her progressive values. And Jared and his father were apparently real assholes to Karlie when she started dated Josh (I know, who would have guessed?).

This all shifted from "interesting trivia" to "very relevant" last night thanks to a comment by one designer on the most recent episode of Project Runway.

The challenge was to design a look for Karlie Kloss to wear to a fashion gala in Paris. Designer Tyler created a look that was ... not that. It looked old -- not "classic", just out-of-date. When it walked the runway, Jill and I remarked that it was not for Paris ... but maybe for the Kushners ("it looks like something Ivanka would wear", Jill said, not intending it as a compliment).

We thought we were being very snarky. But when Tyler ended up on the bottom and listened to the judges berating him that Karlie wouldn't wear this to Paris or Martha's Vineyard or anywhere else, he couldn't help himself. "Not even to dinner with the Kushners?", he said with a smirk.

Now, Jill and I did basically say exactly that too -- but we meant it to underscore how badly Tyler missed the mark in the challenge (which was not "dress Karlie Kloss to look like her obnoxious in-laws"). But Tyler clearly meant it, not quite as a defense, but as a jab -- a defensive clapback at Karlie for having the temerity to (fairly) criticize his look. It was a jaw-dropping moment, and after getting over the initial shock Kloss handled it with professionalism (which is to say, she proceeded to explain in exquisite and cutting detail why Tyler's look was garbage). Tyler ended up being eliminated, and for the record it was entirely deserved based solely on the merits. His look was terrible, he had struggled all season-long, and this wasn't the first time his mouth seemed to outpace his skills.

Tyler did apologize at the end of the episode. But there is a very popular take around the internet that he said nothing wrong. This reaction is typical:

The reaction shots show how how easy it must have been for all those fashion labels to go Nazi. This level of accountability is scandalous? https://t.co/Hm8nQb3EIN

— Corey Pein 😃🤑😐😩💀 (@coreypein) January 4, 2020

The idea is that Tyler was actually a bold truth-sayer, holding Karlie to account for ... what exactly? Her brother-in-law's politics? Why? She doesn't share them. She's never defended them. She's never given the slightest hint she's sympathetic to them. She's her own woman, with her own views (as, for that matter, is Joshua Kushner, who is of course not his brother either). Yet of course, that doesn't matter in the slightest, because misogyny. And it sickens me to see how many people seem to think they're boldly speaking truth-to-power when they reduce a woman to her male relatives.

Karlie Kloss is not her in-laws. She is her own person. If she herself has done wrong, call her out for that. But who her relatives are is not her wrong, and if you think smugly reminding Karlie Kloss that she's related to the Trump family as some sort of gotcha is anything other than a dick move you're telling on yourself far more than you are on her.

What Went Wrong in 2016?

Right up until election day, most people thought Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election. She didn't, and many people have many different theories about what went wrong. Which one you ascribe to probably does a fair bit of work in explaining who you back in 2020 and why. And the fact that we don't really know which answer is the right one, and feel an urge to cover all our bases "just to be sure", probably contributes to the Johnny Unbeatable problem -- the explanations aren't all mutually compatible, and so "learning their lessons" will pull us in contradictory directions.

Theory #1: It was anti-Clinton mania: Claim: Hillary Clinton is uniquely reviled for idiosyncratic and effectively non-ideological reasons. Lesson: don't nominate Hillary Clinton. Simple.

Theory #2: It was misogyny: It's not just Hillary Clinton. Any female candidate is going to whip up a toxic brew of wounded masculinity and machismo. People nervous about nominating another woman often believe this.

Theory #3: Clinton was too elitist: Generally a favorite of not-Democrats, though endorsed by some "moderates" too. The idea here is that Hillary Clinton represents a far-left agenda and the Democrats need to return to the good old days when they were the party of ... Bill Clinton? JFK? FDR? Unclear. What is clear is that Democrats need to show more respect for rural heartland voters, respect people who oppose gay rights, respect people who want to deport immigrant children, and above all respect people who want to ban abortion. Oh, and under no circumstances should a Democrat call anyone "deplorable" -- except maybe Ilhan Omar. These folks believe Joe Biden would have won in a cakewalk

Theory #4: Clinton was too centrist: Hillary Clinton didn't offer a true progressive alternative to conservatism, to capitalism, to corporatism, to technocracy, or to neoliberalism. Hence she didn't inspire voters thirsting for an alternative. Donald Trump at least purported to speak to voters who believed the system had failed him, and a Democrat who basically was seen as a "the status quo is okay" figure would not do well. A bold and uncompromising progressive vision that unabashedly targets the systemic forces immiserating us all, by contrast, can speak to the millions of Americans who feel dejected, disempowered, and ready for a change. Favored diagnosis of the "Bernie would have won!" crowd.

Theory #5: Clinton abandoned the Midwest: "She didn't even visit Wisconsin!" The blue wall cracked, Democrats lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. So to win -- rebuild that blue wall, by nominating a candidate most likely to be extremely popular among rust belt swing voters in the Midwest. This could point you anywhere from Joe Biden to Tim Ryan to Amy Klobuchar to "recruit Sherrod Brown".

Theory #6: Clinton didn't excite the base: Democrats took for granted the constituencies that are most responsible for powering them to victory and so left a ton of votes on the table. Rather than chase the elusive (and probably white) swing voter, the strategy here is to goose turnout among voters (especially women) of color. It's not the same as Theory #4 because -- despite what Jacobin Mag would have you believe -- it is not necessarily the case that people of color are inspired by fire-eating leftism of the Jacobin Mag bent. Often believed by those who think Democrats must nominate a woman and/or person of color; and often also paired with a belief that Democrats should abandon the rust belt and focus more on winning emergent sun belt swing states like Arizona, North Carolina, or (dare to dream) Georgia and Texas.

Theory #7: PC backlash: The Democratic Party allowed themselves to be taken over by a radical identity politics fringe who alienated regular Americans with all this talk of "intersectionality" and "microaggressions" and "trigger warnings". Trump's victory was a result of a PC backlash prompted by White men who just was sick and tired of being called racist all the time, and lashed out by ... endorsing a really racist candidate. The interesting thing about this diagnosis is that its political description basically boils down to "White Americans are hella racist" while its political prescription is usually "don't ever say White Americans are racist." Facts sure care about those feelings.

Theory #8: Voter suppression: Lower turnout among the base wasn't (just) because of less enthusiasm for Clinton. It was also a function of a sustained conservative campaign to obstruct poor and minority communities from voting. Proponents of this view aren't necessarily tied to a particular candidate as they are to urging Democrats to take voter access seriously as a top priority -- both in terms of legislating and in terms of activism. Unfortunately, the Senate won't pass any legislation, the courts are basically endorsers of the voter suppression project, and it's not like Republicans are going to be less invested in voter suppression the next time around, so this can rapidly turn fatalistic.

Theory #9: Conspiracy theories: Russian interference, social media, fake news. Voters were buffeted by a frenzy of misleading or outright false information. Not only were some taken in by outlandish nonsense (QAnon, Pizzagate, Soros conspiracies), even those who weren't directly affected often suffered a general decline in trust for political institutions and the reliability of authority -- something that ended up redounding to Trump's benefit. And the Republicans exploited media timidity and its reflexive instinct to tell "both sides" to put naked falsehoods on par with actual truth. To a large extent, people in this camp think the media has to accept in a much more decisive manner its obligation call lies lies -- even if it makes "certain" elected officials mad.

Theory #10: The Democratic Party is corrupt/incompetent/in disarray: Democrats don't really want to win, or they don't want to win if it means displeasing their true corporate masters. The party is beholden to an out-of-touch consultant class and big money donors locking them into unpopular positions that predictably lose elections. Only by seizing control of the party apparatus and smashing the old guard can Democrats actually run races that will actually inspire people. The more militant version of Theory #4.

Theory #11: Nothing went wrong -- it was a fluke: During the entire 2016 cycle, the polls oscillated between a high of "Hillary Clinton landslide" and a low of "statistical dead heat". The argument here is that all that happened in 2016 is that election day happened to have the tremendous bad luck of occurring at one of the nadirs, leading to what was effectively a statistical dead heat and a coin-flip Donald Trump win. The lesson here is that there is no lesson: if you have a campaign strategy that gives you a win 75% of the time, that's a pretty good strategy even though (as Nate Silver reminds us) statistically you should lose a quarter of the time. All the efforts to "explain" the outcome basically a function of statistical illiteracy. To the extent Democrats should be on alert for anything, it's in letting the "we have to change something" impulse to tinker lead to making things worse.

Some Nuanced Thoughts on Protecting Jews via Police

NBC News, which as a mainstream media source Is Not Covering Violence Against Jews(tm), has an interesting article up discussing how the Jewish community in New York is assessing calls to increase police presence in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods as a means of combating rising antisemitic violence:

Audrey Sasson, executive director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, or JFREJ, a left-wing "movement to dismantle racism and economic exploitation" based in New York City, said deployment of more police would be an understandable reaction — and one that would worry her.

"Of course, we all need to feel safe. That's fundamental, and there is no arguing with that," Sasson said. "But how do we get there?"

Sasson said that her group is multiracial, as is the Jewish community at large, and that many Jewish people wouldn't feel safer with a greater police presence.  

"Right now, the tools we have for safety [are] more police and more guns," Sasson said, "but the question for me is how can we build other tools?" 

Those tools, according to Sasson and JFREJ, include making sure the Jewish community is in a coalition with other targeted communities, having a better system for reporting violence that doesn't rely so heavily on police, creating community-led transformative justice projects and implementing non-punitive and restorative-oriented approaches to violence. 

Sasson acknowledged that the vision is a long-term one, and she does not discount the desire for more police from people living in fear after "the whole holiday was marked by attacks." [emphasis added -- DS]

This is good, and I dare say snaps my long streak wherein everything I've ever read from JFREJ is neither bad nor good but "meh" (Mazel Tov!). The reason I like it is because:

(a) It does not disparage those Jews who desire police protection in the immediate term, or suggest that it reflects a failure of solidarity on their part to desire this solution;

 (b) It acknowledges that viable alternatives to police protection need to be built -- that is, they do not exist now -- and that this construction project is has a long-term time horizon attached to it.

Those twin acknowledgments are, I think necessary if the critique of "more police" is to have ethical traction. Without them, the objection to more policing sounds like a demand that Jews place our lives in the hand of vague feel-good bromides about "community building" or some such that have all the practical bite of a consciousness-raising bed-in project -- and if we don't accede to the demand we're basically giving into our inner-fascists. I think Sasson is read properly in tandem with Eric Ward:

"You can't tell a community that is being physically assaulted that they can't increase law enforcement response but then offer them nothing in response," Ward said. 

Still, Ward, who has studied anti-Semitism extensively, acknowledged that it's not that simple. 

"We know increased policing brings increased racial profiling," he said, adding that high police presence to protect Jews "is likely to be seen as feeding into black and Jewish tension."

Ward is, I think, making the same point as Sasson, just with the opposite emphasis. Telling Jews "how dare you ask for more police" when there isn't any practical, immediate-term alternative isn't going to be received well, and reasonably so. That's true even though, as Ward also points out, there are real costs to the "increased policing" proposal -- including costs along the very dimension its nominally supposed to help (tamping down on intra-group tensions and hostility). There's legitimate space to critique the "more police" response -- but it has to come with enough humility to acknowledge that there's ample reason to be skeptical of the existence of viable alternatives in the short-term.

Ultimately, my view on this is basically that of Batya Ungar-Sargon: Whatever my intuitions are on the wisdom of this strategy, I should defer to the people on the ground. Of course, the people on the ground will themselves often have divergent takes. But one suspects the consensus that will emerge will lie somewhere in between "abolish the NYPD" and "send in the National Guard."

New Year's Resolutions: 2020 Edition

Or is it New Decade's Resolutions? It'd take the pressure off to have ten years instead of a measly one.

The 2019 resolutions are here, and the series is collected here. But we start with how we performed last year:

Met: 2, 6 (absolutely!), 7, 9 (just a few weeks ago!), 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.

Missed: 1 (it's crawling along), 5, 8, 10.

Pick 'em: 3, 4.

Forward unto the dawn of 2020!

* * *

1) Submit one political theory article to a journal. (Met)

2) Complete a draft of a new law review article. (Missed)

3) Have a complete draft of something that could pass as a dissertation. (Met -- in the nick of time!)

4) Become, to my own satisfaction, passably good at Super Mario Maker 2. (Missed--got distracted and then our Switch became 100% Animal Crossing)

5) Travel to one new city I have never been to before. (Missed -- 2020....)

6) Present at a conference (any field). (Missed -- again, 2020....)

7) Regularly do the exercises recommended by my physical therapist. (Pick 'em, to be very generous)

8) Write at least four articles published in the popular press. (Missed, through no fault of 2020)

9) Seek out candid career advice from people, even when it hurts your pride to ask. (Met)

10) Attend a professional sporting event. (Met, back in February)

11) Make substantial headway at organizing a conference. (Missed)

12) See old friends at a time other than the annual new year's get-together. (Missed--2020!!!)

13) Attend a Jewish event that is not a religious service (Seder not included). (Missed--seriously 2020 can burn in a fire)

14) Donate to a political candidate who is not running for President. (Met)

15) Write an unsolicited note to an academic figure whose work I like just to say I like their work. (Met)

16) Unlock my Twitter account. (Met, and for the happiest of reasons!)

Rise of Skywalker: Quick Thoughts

In keeping with the traditional Jewish Christmas festivities, I saw a movie last night. I actually managed to avoid most of the substantive discussions of Rise of Skywalker in advance, and what I did read sounded so muddled and crossed that I managed to come in with no substantive expectations.

Now that I've seen it, I can say one thing with confidence: Rise of Skywalker is, without a doubt, the worst Star Wars film to have Wedge Antilles in it.

Of course, that still makes it presumptively better than all the films without Wedge Antilles in them. Does it manage to hold that high ground? Here are my quick thoughts (*SPOILERS*):

• I think the movie starts off shaky and improves as it goes.
• The new droid gives off a real Portal vibe to me. Also reminiscent of Portal: the GLaDOS rig-up that Emperor Palpatine is attached to.
• The almost complete omission of Rose felt like the producers were giving in to the most toxic elements of the Star Wars fan base, and I disapprove.
• I was among those who very much liked the idea that Rey really was "no one" descended from nobody of consequence, and so I sharply disagree the decision to make her the Emperor's granddaughter.
• More so than the original trilogy or the prequels, the new trilogy (is that what we're calling it?) feels much more like a fantasy story than a science-fiction story. Ancient artifacts giving rise to eldritch power and all that.
• Even for a Star Wars film, Rise of Skywalker in particular badly fails what I call the "James Bond" test (the James Bond test is how early and/or how often the movie would end if the antagonists were remotely competent at aiming). 
• That said, did you ever notice how many Imperial First Order Last Order(?) troops died because they bother to ask questions before shooting? They're always yelling "freeze" or "show me your identification". Resistance fighters just blast people without giving anyone a chance to surrender.
• The "hyperspace skipping" move in the beginning really strained my suspension of disbelief (even granting that I'm watching a super-futuristic Star Wars film). Much like the "hyperspace Kamikaze" move Admiral Holdo did in The Last Jedi, it feels too useful (even if dangerous) not to have been seen before. Also -- TIE Fighters aren't hyperspace capable, so how are they following the Falcon? And even if they are fitted with hyperdrives, how could they track it? Finally, the whole reason Poe does this desperate tactic in the first place is because they're being followed by a huge swarm of TIEs. But after a few "skips" they've only got two behind them -- they should be able to handle those with regular turret fire.
• Speaking of suspension of disbelief, who exactly is crewing all those Last Order Star Destroyers? This is actually one of my least favorite genre conventions -- the big organization, seemingly all-but-fallen, having a giant secret army/base/fleet in a location completely unknown to everyone (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is positively awful about this). Where does it get logistical support? What were all those crewmen doing back when nobody knew where Exogol was?
• Another genre convention I hate: the big bad villain with hundred/thousands/millions/billions of deaths on his hands gets a redemption arc, while meanwhile, hundreds of random and relatively innocent mooks (indeed, the movie goes to some lengths to note they're mostly conscripts kidnapped as children) are slaughtered without remorse or a second thought.
• On the other hand, great job with gender and racial equality here: I heard plenty of female voices in the random stormtrooper death screams!
• After watching the conclusion of the narrative arc, I have to say: I really wish they had told the story of the Thrawn trilogy from the old Timothy Zahn novels instead.
• This is all adding up to a pretty negative assessment, so I will say that I felt like the movie ends up being greater than the sum of its parts. But I still think it's probably my least favorite of the New Trilogy. And that's with Wedge Antilles in it!

UPDATE: I basically endorse Abigail Nussbaum's take.

Happy Holidays!

I'm off to the Florida panhandle to spend time with my in-laws -- then back to California where my college buddies will come to me for New Year's!

Whatever you're celebrating this season (Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Festivus ....), I hope it is suitably celebratory.

Impeachment

The House of Representatives has voted to impeach President Donald Trump.

I have many feelings competing for primacy about this moment. I'm somber, certainly. I feel shame, by the fact that not a single Republican was willing to put loyalty to America over loyalty to Trump. I feel despair at the fact that Senate Republicans have predetermined their decision, and there's nothing -- no argument, no evidence, no "smoking gun" -- which could ever change their mind.  But I'm also proud of the majority of the House which did its duty under exceptionally trying circumstances. Posterity will remember.

And on that note: Posterity will remember. There will come a time -- and I don't think it will be a very distant time -- where Republicans will race to excuse, overlook, or plead forgiveness for what they have done these past few years. They will say they never liked Trump, that they were trying to be the adults, that they were caught in a tough situation, that hindsight is 20-20, that they managed the best they could. They will want history to, if not absolve them, then at least overlook them.

It is my sincere hope that this, at least, they do not receive. History should remember them, and it should remember them with opprobrium. Their legacies should be forever tarnished. Their grandchildren, who might have been proud to say they descend from a U.S. Congressman, should be ashamed to admit the relation. They should take their place as villains.

There is no argument, no leverage, no pressure that can compel Republicans to do the right thing. History will be their only consequence. They should be forced to endure it.