December 2017 – James Gillen

REVIEW: Bright

The latest Will Smith vehicle, the “buddy-cop movie with a twist” Bright, is produced by Netflix for their streaming service. It got a lot of critical attention, mostly for the wrong reasons. Karen Han at The Daily Beast memorably referred to the LAPD-meets-monsters film as “a $90 Million Steaming Pile of Orc Sh*t“. Even more memorably, IndieWire critic David Ehrlich started his review by saying the movie was “so profoundly awful that Republicans will probably try to pass it into law over Christmas break.”

The idea of mixing Tolkien-style fantasy with the modern world seems to be a weird idea to a lot of this movie’s critics, but it’s already a well-established literary genre called Urban Fantasy. In fact one of the older manifestations of this in media was the role-playing game Shadowrun, which not only had Urban Fantasy but combined it with the then-popular genre of Cyberpunk, in which the environment is collapsing, corporations ignore civil law and anybody who can’t make it in the wageslave world ends up taking quasi-legal mercenary jobs for said corporations because that’s the only way they can make a living. (Back in 1989 when the game was first released, that premise was called ‘science fiction.’)

If you, like me, grew up with that background, then the premises of Bright are a lot easier to accept. Perhaps the creative team (Suicide Squad director David Ayer and Hollywood writer Max Landis) grew up with that material too. The setting does seem to parallel Shadowrun in certain respects. For one thing, law enforcement is as corrupt As Fuck. Smith’s cop is pressured by his peers, sergeant and even Internal Affairs into getting his Orc partner fired, and when they get the opportunity, they even tell him to kill the guy while plotting to double-cross him and call the two of them casualties in a gang fight. OK, maybe that’s not as bad as the real LAPD, but it’s up there.

One difference between Bright and much of Urban Fantasy is that it’s assumed that fantasy races and magic have been around for at least 2000 years, ever since humans, Elves and other races fought against Orcs under control of “the Dark Lord” and all those races have been around ever since. By contrast, in Shadowrun, the return of magic to the world is a phenomenon less than a century old, and the resulting culture clash is a little more believable. One valid point that the critics do have is that the movie doesn’t do a good job of integrating this new element of “just like the real world only with Elves and Orcs.” Orcs are obviously second-class, but there are neighborhoods actually marked “Elves Only” in a way that ought to be illegal discrimination under American law. Again, it’s not well explained. One aspect that is similar to Shadowrun is that with the obvious species differences, human racial differences, while real, are not nearly as meaningful. I don’t know if they deliberately cast Will Smith’s wife as a white woman, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

There also seems to be a certain hate in the fan community for Landis that set up a negative perception of this movie. Max Landis is an opinionated and volatile figure in Hollywood, who by his own admission, “had a lot of behavioral and emotional issues” and is not prone to make friends with his behavior. His usual subject matter as a writer is the sort of fanboy stuff that turns off a lot of younger writers, with Landis coming off as the Daily Beast critic puts it, “a privileged white man (the son of John Landis) lacking any grasp of race relations.”

Of course that was all before accusations of misogyny over social media debates gave way to deeper accusations that Landis was a “ritual sex abuser.” As it happens, Landis is the main producer of the BBC America series Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, and the second season of that show, like Bright, includes a team of heroes who have to keep a magic wand out of the hands of an evil psycho-bitch.

Like David Ayer’s previous work, the movie Bright is (literally) dark, ultra-violent, and foul-mouthed. The use of actors in funny makeup to comment on racial intolerance is a trick that’s been used many, many times before by the Star Trek franchise, and usually better. It’s especially egregious when you have a black protagonist being obliged to dispose of an enchanted creature as a pest, saying “fairy lives don’t matter today.”

So yeah, this movie has problems. But there are a lot of movies that aren’t technically “good” that I end up liking anyway. This was one of them. If you like lots of gunfire, this definitely scratches that itch. And as mismatched buddy cop movies go, this is at least as good as Alien Nation.

This is because, as uneven and incomplete as Bright is in presenting the setting, overall it is much better than one would expect from a straight-to-Netflix production in terms of both production values and acting. Costuming and vehicles are appropriately gritty, and the makeup on the Orcs is very impressive, with Joel Edgerton as Jakoby the Orc having an amazing range of expression given that he is completely unrecognizable. And while the Fantasy elements are flawed for the reasons I described, they are still fascinating, with a lot deliberately unrevealed. In particular, the climactic battle where the evil cult leader tries to persuade the Elf girl to return to the fold is the most intense and best-acted scene in the movie, even considering that most of the dialogue is in a constructed language. It makes one wonder how this background would have been handled with a little more development.

Given that Netflix has already announced a sequel to this movie, it’s possible that there may be a deeper exploration of the setting. Presumably without Landis as the scriptwriter.

This investment in the subject is why I ultimately give Bright a recommendation, along with two other reasons: One, it was an inspired move to cast Margaret Cho as a police sergeant; two, it introduces the phrase “tittybar gunfight”.

Merry Christmas, Mr. Grinch

“Y’ever feel like ya been cheated? HA haha.”

-Johnny Rotten

This Friday, almost as an afterthought, Viceroy Donald Trump signed the tax bill that was just passed by the Republican Congress, marking the only time this entire year that he and his party had managed a legislative accomplishment. The passage of the bill inspired a lot of conservative columnists, insisting (despite holding their nose at Donald Trump himself) that this tax bill might do some good.

Indeed it might. The tax bill does accomplish a few things that economists on all sides had wanted. For one, it reduces the corporate rate from 35 to 21 percent, which is a lot closer to where most developed countries have it. Likewise, most countries don’t insist on taxing business income in the US, whereas this country insists on taxing all income regardless of whether you live here. Changing to a territorial tax system eliminates this unfairness (at least for a corporation) and the unfairness of being double taxed. Most of the liberal commentary on the bill is comparing it negatively to previous reforms such as Reagan’s 1986 tax reform. In other words, using an example of supply-side policy that they hated at the time as a successful example of tax policy, in order to explain why THIS supply-side proposal isn’t going to work.

But given these facts, it is testimony to Republican incompetence and disorganization that the tax bill is more unpopular with the public than previous tax hikes. These guys could manage to screw up a Free Hookers and Blow Act. Part of it is that contrary to Paul Ryan’s cheerleading, the scheme does the opposite of simplifying the tax code. And the layers of the legislation continue to reveal their flaws. In New York Magazine, liberal Eric Levitz points out that the Right actually did the Left’s dirty work for it in removing deductions for the middle class and thus forcing them to pay more of the burdens of Big Government. Moreover, the removal of state-and-local tax deduction (SALT) could have unintended consequences. Levitz quotes another source saying that state governments could compensate for the loss of revenue by allowing residents to make charitable gifts to the state instead of paying state income tax, said gifts being eligible for federal tax deduction.

This is what conservatives and libertarians have been saying all along. If you are rich, altruistic and civic-minded, and you think that the government should be doing such-and-such because they have the resources and wherewithal to do so, then YOU should fund that project yourself. I don’t believe that “taxation is theft” because a purely voluntary system would leave many public necessities unfunded. The problem now is that the definition of “necessities” has become politicized. But in the age of Kickstarter, we should be able to come up with a better way to do things.

But as conservative Pat Buchanan admits in his column, Republicans “bet the farm.” And they did so because they had a belief system: “The mission of Democrats is to (reduce) inequalities. And as the very rich are also the very few, in a one-man, one-vote democracy the Democratic Party will always have a following. Winston Churchill called this the philosophy of failure and the gospel of envy. Republicans see themselves as the party of free enterprise, of the private not the public sector. They believe that alleviating the burden of regulation and taxation on business will unleash that sector, growing the economy and producing broader prosperity.”

The fact that this assertion avoids is that a system where the rules are ginned to the benefit of speculators, financiers and real estate developers is no more “free enterprise” than a Chavista system where the producers are looted in order to bribe the lower-class support base of the ruling party.

And insofar as the ruling party is using the heavy hand of government to benefit one class of people over another, ultimately at the expense of the majority, then that IS socialism for the rich. And not even all the rich, just the ones who support the ruling party.

It’s of a piece with the Trump Administration’s similarly unpopular foist, killing net neutrality, which according to conservatives and Devil’s Advocate-libertarians like Reason magazine is only getting rid of a 2015 FCC ruling that we had all managed to live without, blanking out the reasons why the commission had imposed that ruling to begin with. Given that FCC attempts to regulate internet providers prior to 2015 had been denied by the courts, the law ought to be on the side of the free-market Right anyway. That being the case, it is suspicious that the anti-net neutrality push was spearheaded by Trump-appointed FCC chair Ajit Pai (a former Verizon associate), reversing many FCC positions toward net neutrality under the Obama Administration, leading to organized protests and Internet action including major companies that rely on the net neutrality standard like Amazon, Google, and of course Pornhub. Over 1000 investors and startups signed an open letter to Pai against the proposal. Despite protest from the community, and millions of online comments against the policy, Pai and his FCC majority not only ignored the protests, there were reports that someone was stealing the names of real people, including some of the protestors, to make anti-net neutrality statements mirroring the language of conservative centers. If the government, specifically Pai’s majority at the FCC, were so confident that their policy was encouraging consumer freedom and capitalism, they would be more open about the process and less eager to change from a consumer driven standard than a standard favoring large providers.

There are several reasons that a right-winger like myself would favor a review of the previous tax code, FCC standards and other pre-Trump standards of federal governance. The problem, certainly from a “progressive” standpoint and ultimately from a right-wing standpoint, is that current policy is not motivated by libertarian or conservative philosophy so much as shameless deal making to benefit Congressional Republican donors, and even representatives themselves. The clearest evidence for this is how Senator Bob Corker (R.-Tennessee), who had previously posed as a budget hawk in opposition to the tax bill, ultimately went along with all the other Republicans and voted for it for some reason.

And if you want to believe one more lie- that the tax cuts for individuals are only temporary because they had to get the bill done on time and that they’ll (supposedly) be made permanent in future negotiations- then even that is an admission that tax cuts for the donor class take priority over tax cuts for the majority of voters.

This is the exact opposite of the “drain the swamp” populism Trump campaigned on, and the exact opposite of what “the base” said they wanted. The Trump Administration is to Republicans what The Last Jedi was to Luke Skywalker fans. The difference being that The Last Jedi didn’t suck.

Given that much of Republican losses in Virginia and the Alabama special race were a combination of not-Republican anger and Republicans staying home, I have to conclude that even Republicans are starting to notice they’ve been cheated.

That would explain why statisticians like FiveThirtyEight are projecting that the typical ruling-party losses in a midterm cycle have the potential to become a “flood.” That’s why internal Republican National Committee sources have told the Trump Administration that their policies, including the endorsement of Roy Moore in Alabama, would erode the party’s support base among women.

You’ve got a party that is not merely misunderstood or misinterpreted by liberal media, you’ve got a party that is doing its utmost to antagonize the general public, a ruling party whose only legislative accomplishment this year was because they had the most unpopular president of all time in power to sign it into law.

The same president who just this weekend was quoted as telling his staff that Haitians “all have AIDS” and that Nigerian nationals would “never go back to their huts” once they were allowed to stay here on visa.

And just think, Republicans: You’ve got TEN more months, over FORTY more weeks, of the same thing, every week, taking its toll until the Congressional election.

What are the chances that your party will hold both houses of Congress in this atmosphere? And what happens to your precious little angel if they don’t?

And on that note, Republicans:
Have a Merry Christmas, and look forward to 2018.

I know I will.

Now That’s Comedy

The other day I saw this thing on Facebook that I thought was funny enough to Share. It was a picture of Cleavon Little and Gene Wilder in Blazing Saddles, captioned “instead of trying to not offend anyone, can we just get back to offending everyone again?”

And I got this response from one of my FB friends (name omitted to protect the guilty): “Meh. The youngins who keep saying this kind of stuff about things like ‘Blazing Saddles’ and George Carlin don’t seem able to grasp that their strength did not rely in ‘offending everyone’. It was about the way they unflinchingly told the truth with humor while PUNCHING UP. It pisses me off when people want to pretend the milquetoast bothsiderism of South Park and some dumbass ironic/not-ironic comedians like Daniel Tosh or the verbal diarrhea of the alt-right are heirs to the legacy of ‘offensive’ classics. ‘Blazing Saddles’ and George Carlin had no problem taking sides. They specifically took the side of the oppressed against the privileged. They just did it with self aware humor. Any idiot could see what their point was. Unlike some of today’s ‘satirists’ that can’t figure out (that) part of satire is actually having a fucking point. ‘Offending everyone’ as a goal in itself is weak bullshit.”

Well, point taken about Daniel Tosh.

But I wanted to respond in depth, and in doing so, I realized I would be committing the same error as my interlocutor: Namely, if you have to explain the joke, it isn’t funny. But that’s part of why I have a blog in addition to Facebook. Going into depth on Facebook would be that much more defeating the point, but as long as I’m going to explain a joke, I might as well do so on a blog nobody is reading.

The reason humor works is because of thwarted expectations. One expects a certain thing and then something else happens, sometimes something embarrassing to the subject. There is not much funny about pretty or privileged people humiliating the ugly and powerless. After all that is too much the norm in many places. But the reverse offers some potential for humor. As Krusty the Clown said when he hired Sideshow Bob, “the gag only works when the sap’s got dignity!”

For instance, there’s this verse, which is (I think) from the legendary Steve Allen:

Roses are red / And violets are blue / You think this will rhyme / But it ain’t gonna

And then there’s the following: “Before I post something on social media, I ask myself three questions: Is it necessary? Is it helpful? Is it kind? And if the answer to any of these is No, I go ahead and post.”

These are examples of thwarting expectations.

These points are not inherently opposed to the social message of Blazing Saddles, which was very real. It’s just that in addition to the social message, that film was also a platform for extremely vulgar jokes. Thinking that your piece is supposed to be a vehicle for class consciousness before it is a vehicle for humor is the comedy equivalent of producing Christian rock. And nobody wants that. Although Mel Brooks actually did produce a farce about the period of the Bolshevik Revolution. It wasn’t as funny as the real thing, but there weren’t nearly as many casualties.

By the same token, sensitivity and political correctness sometimes intersect with the point that “punching down” usually isn’t funny. But sometimes they’re just a different standard of funny, in the same way that veganism is a standard of cuisine that dispenses with elements that were based on cruelty and power relationships. Elements like “fat”, “sugar” and “taste.”

For instance, take “the dozens.” A.K.A. “Yo Mama.” Like, “Your mom is so stupid, she stares at the can of orange juice cause it says ‘Concentrate’.” Or “your mama’s so lazy, she thinks manual labor is the president of Mexico.” What did your mom ever do to deserve this? Isn’t this sexist?

By contrast, back when I was growing up, you had a lot of ethnic jokes. Some of these were only told within the ethnic community, as with Jewish jokes in the Borscht Belt or the material black comedians still use. But I remember seeing several joke books with stuff like “Polack jokes.” As Wikipedia points out, the problem is that such ethnic jokes are “conditional jokes” in that they require accepting some stereotype that may or may not be accurate. It seemed as though a lot of the joke writers were World War II vets. Most of the Italian jokes ridiculed Italian military performance (‘did you hear of the Italian tank with seven gears? One forward, six in reverse’) or cowardice (‘the reason it was called the Six Day War is because in 1967, the Arabs fought the Israelis and six days later the Italian Army surrendered’).

Such jokes discount the point that part of Italian reluctance to fight in World War II was because most soldiers were poorly paid, poorly trained, poorly equipped and poorly led, fighting for a Fascist government that since 1922 had led Italians to a steady decline in living standards.

Meanwhile the Poles of World War II fought valiantly, but usually in exile, because Poland was a country carved up between a brainwashed leftist collective and a racist war machine. Sort of like the 2016 election, only with tanks.

The point being, at one point in history, nobody got the memo that “punching down” isn’t funny, because that sort of thing was a lot more popular. But it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense now.

So to test the efficacy of “punch up” vs. “punch down” humor, I decided to engage in a little thought experiment, which I think both Left and Right will enjoy.

Basically, take any one of those generic ethnic/insult jokes, and substitute the target (Mexican, Italian, blonde, etc.) with the word “Republican.”

For instance:
Q: How do you know a Republican has used your computer?
A: There’s white-out all over the screen.

Q: How many Mexicans will it take to pay for Trump’s wall?
A: None, Republicans. You are.

Q: What’s the difference between a prostitute and a Republican?
A: A prostitute won’t fuck her own kids for a tax cut.

See, now THAT’s comedy.

Jones vs. Moore

“There’s a special place in Hell for Republicans who should know better.”

-Steve Bannon

“Republicans did not win elections because they were popular, because they had good ideas, or because they had a mandate. They won because voters hated their opponent more, or did not hate them enough to come out and vote. They fail to consider that if you get voters sufficiently pissed off, that dynamic may reverse. ”

–Me

The Alabama special election that ended up pitting Democrat and former prosecutor Doug Jones against Republican Judge Roy Moore (that’s his first name, Judge) for the Alabama US Senate seat picked up a great deal of significance because of the thin Republican margin in the Senate, and over the course of time because of Judge Moore’s prior history of reactionary opinions and the bombshell revelations of his pursuit of teenage girls in his thirties. Jones won the election with 51 percent of the vote, very close but with a wide enough margin to avoid a recount. This doesn’t mean that Roy Moore is conceding the results. In statements after the election, he claimed that big money from the establishment prejudiced the results. If he really wants to get attention, he should blame the result on Russian hackers.

It is testimony to where American politics is at this point that when the racist theocrat with a rumored thing for young girls lost an election, it came as a surprise. It probably shouldn’t have, though. While Doug Jones was canvassing neighborhoods last weekend in the company of (mostly black) celebrities and Democratic Party figures like Cory Booker, Moore was conspicuously absent from Alabama, choosing to watch his son in this year’s Army-Navy game instead. Even before that he was refusing to make appearances in the state, almost as if he were embarrassed about something. Then, the very Monday before the election, Alabama’s senior Senator Richard Shelby – who had been a Democrat before joining the Republican Party during the Clinton Administration – told the press that he could not vote for Roy Moore, and instead cast a write-in vote for a different Republican. As it turned out, about 22,800 write-in votes were cast, exceeding the gap between the votes cast for Moore and Jones.

So, third-party protest votes saved the day. That’s not a phrase you see very often!

The election result is a critical blow to the Republican Party, and in retrospect it is a blow that is completely self-inflicted. Not only that, it is a catastrophe that could have been averted at several points. It started when Viceroy Donald Trump decided to reward Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions for his early support by making him US Attorney General. (A decision he now has other reasons to regret.) Sessions’ seat was safe for Republicans, because the governor of Alabama was a Republican. However Governor Robert Bentley appointed state Attorney General Luther Strange to the post in February, despite or maybe because of the fact that Strange was prosecuting an impeachment case against the governor and had recommended that it be delayed. At this point, Strange was to serve out the remainder of Sessions’ term which would have ended with the 2018 election cycle. However, Bentley ended up resigning over his various scandals in April and was replaced by Lieutenant Governor Kay Ivey. She then decided to hold a special election for the Senate seat this year. Bentley had ruled against a special election as Governor citing costs, but Ivey made the decision for an immediate election citing state law. Again, at this point the seat was still assumed to be safe for the Republican Party. But then Roy Moore showed up. Despite Strange being supported by the national Republican establishment (including Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell), he was challenged by Moore and conservative Mo Brooks in the Republican primary. Strange won the first round of votes but failed to clear the margin for a runoff, which Moore subsequently won in August.

Even then, the expectation was that Moore would win easily. The last time a Democrat won a Senate seat in Alabama was with Richard Shelby in 1996, who again ended up turning Republican. Initial polls after the primaries had Moore leading. Even after the Washington Post article about Moore’s sexual history came out, Republicans rushed to defend him, including both Trump and former president Steve Bannon, both of whom liked Moore better than Strange to begin with. And Moore and his supporters continued to make statements that rallied the Trump Right and appalled everyone else. It culminated shortly before the election when a group identified as a “pro-Trump super PAC” got a 12-year old girl to interview him for a campaign video.

I enjoy a sick joke as much as anyone else, but there is such a thing as taking it too far.

It became clear long before the Moore campaign that the only reason one would have to vote for the current Republican Party is to flip off the liberals. And if that is all they have to offer, tweaking the liberals is a valid tactic only up to the point that it alienates the people who don’t identify with either team but may hold the balance in a close election.

I’ve often thought that the lesson of the 2016 election was that if making liberals cry was the only thing that mattered, then Donald Trump would have won the popular vote. And a lot of the Democrats’ problem is that they haven’t grasped this. But what Republicans refuse to get is that Hillary Clinton did win the popular vote because most voters realized that making liberals cry was not the only thing that mattered.

In his Politico column, conservative Rich Lowry offers a theory: “We don’t know if Trump will experience a midterm shellacking on par with Obama’s in 2010, or, getting more speculative, go on to win reelection anyway. But every indication is that Obama and Trump are similar in that their signature politics work much better for them than their parties.” He observes that Obama’s charisma failed to attach to Democrats in the midterms (though the unpopular health care bill might have had something to do with that) and “(Obama’s) party felt the full fury of the backlash against his agenda, while he, winning reelection handily on the strength of his core voters, was held harmless.” Similarly with the current Republican ascendance, “all the people stirred up into a lather of anti-Trump loathing might want to do something with all their pent-up energy — like vote. With Trump nowhere near a ballot for the next three years, the only alternative is to take it out on the nearest person with an “R” next to his name.”

What that means is that just because the Republicans got one retarded howler monkey in a suit elected, that doesn’t mean the trick will work twice now that the novelty has worn off. Especially now that people have seen what the monkey will do with an executive order.

Yet, if protest votes (or abstentions) made a difference, the fact remains that for a large part of election night Moore held the lead in the vote tallies, and it was still possible that Moore was going to win the election because enough people saw his vices as virtues. What really tipped the balance, after 10 pm Eastern Time on Tuesday, was when the final reports for Jefferson County (Birmingham area) came in, giving Doug Jones his final lead. Jones won the most urban counties and got 96 percent of the black vote, and 61 percent of votes from voters under age 45. While Roy Moore did not receive the same level of Republican turnout that Donald Trump did in 2016, this election was determined by black voters.

If state laws – and their enforcement by Alabama government – are being skewed in such a way as to making voting at least inconvenient for black neighborhoods, and their votes still made the difference in this race, that indicates just how motivated the black community was.

Even then, it wasn’t necessarily because Doug Jones was offering anything. The Washington Post had an article covering the opinions of black voters in the state, with one woman saying “I obviously know what he did to prosecute white supremacists years ago, but I don’t know what he has done for the black community lately”. Another man went on Twitter saying: “”Today I voted to defeat Roy Moore because he’s horrible, not because I felt encouraged by Doug Jones. I still think Jones’ campaign was a mess that disrespected the Black community. I know other Black Alabamians felt the same too, but we did what was needed.” Certainly the fact that Doug Jones successfully prosecuted the two Alabama church bombers didn’t hurt, but the conviction was in 2000 for a crime that happened in 1963. Jones actually did the work and campaigned hard while Moore assumed he could coast on the votes of his base, but if the lesson for Republicans is that the base would vote for Moore anyway, the lesson for Democrats is that there were still almost enough Moore voters for him to win. In both cases, the potential for error was in taking the voter base for granted, as Democrats have been doing for quite some time. It remains to be seen whether either party will learn that point.

In retrospect, it turns out I was right in another column:

“You might remember that in 2012, after Mitt Romney lost a presidential run to incumbent Barack Obama, the Republican National Committee commissioned a “growth and opportunity project” – more commonly referred to in the press as their post-election ‘autopsy’ – in which the feedback they got in surveys, focus groups and other methods indicated that the GOP was faulty at ‘messaging’, that young people in particular ‘are rolling their eyes at what the Party represents’ and ‘many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country.’ The proposed solution was for the party to ‘stop talking to itself,’ basically meaning outreach to other people who don’t already agree with the doctrinaire Republican position, as opposed to catering to the stupid bigots fortified by talk radio and alternative media. And the response from the ‘base’ and Republican organizers in the 2014 midterms was ‘we SHOULD TOO cater to the stupid bigots, because they’re the ones who show up and VOTE, and vote for the hardcore conservatives who fight for us.”

“…Now, as with the Romney Autopsy, Democrats ought to do the opposite of what they’re being told. That doesn’t mean (you) should nominate another dull party hack who has no grasp of the victory conditions for a presidential election. It also doesn’t mean you should emulate Republican psychology. You will never top Republicans when it comes to tribal, us-versus-them, persecution-complex, ‘the only way to stop Satan is to self-lobotomize and vote for the lesser asshole’ mentality, and if you try, you will defeat the purpose of claiming to be different from them. But you can learn what they learned from their defeat: First, find the people who will vote for you no matter what, and cater to them. Second, wait for their leader to show up.”

REVIEW: The Last Jedi

The main knock that critics had on The Force Awakens (Star Wars Episode VII) was that it too closely paralleled the original Star Wars (Episode IV). To me, that similarity should have been the main subject of the storyline. How is it, that after more than thirty years (real time and in-setting), the Star Wars universe is back to square one? Why did Han Solo leave Leia and return to smuggling? Was it grief over the loss of their son, or was it just Han being Han? Who is Snoke, what is the First Order, and how did they take over from the Empire? Why did Luke not rebuild the Jedi Academy after it was destroyed by the Knights of Ren, and how did they seduce Ben Solo to the dark side? And what does Rey have to do with all this?

SPOILER ALERT: Not all of those questions are answered in The Last Jedi.

In addition to the primary Skywalker/Rey saga, there’s a mission where the cowardly-yet-brave Finn (John Boyega) tries to save the Resistance, or what’s left of it, with the help of two new characters, a plucky engineer (Kelly Marie Tran) and a stuttering scoundrel (Benicio Del Toro, in what may be his most Benicio Del Toro performance to date). Otherwise, fans have been telling people to not spoil the movie. So I won’t. I will just say: GO SEE IT. The Last Jedi offers everything you want to see in a Star Wars movie. Including hope.

Note: This is also a very long movie, about two and a half hours. Yet, I did not feel any bladder urges until the credits started to roll.

The Force was with me.

The Whisper Network, Continued

In the wake of both John Conyers and Al Franken being forced to resign from Congress over their “inappropriate sexual behavior”, there does indeed seem to be a backlash against the #metoo anti-harassment movement, although not from the Right. Dahlia Lithwick in Slate says, “Is this the principled solution? By every metric I can think of, it’s correct. But it’s also wrong. It’s wrong because we no longer inhabit a closed ethical system, in which morality and norm preservation are their own rewards. We live in a broken and corroded system in which unilateral disarmament is going to destroy the very things we want to preserve. ”

It’s often pointed out that Franken’s main accuser, Leann Tweeden is a conservative Fox (Sports) alumna and allegedly an associate of Trump family members. Celebrity Tom Arnold accused her of being coached by a “Roger Stone pal” at her radio station. And some Democrats have gone much further in bemoaning their party’s policy toward one of their own. In the Washington Post, feminist author Kate Harding said “I don’t believe (that Franken) resigning from his position is the only possible consequence, or the one that’s best for American women.” But she elaborates: “When you combine these things — an awareness that the Democratic Party is no more or less than best of two, and an understanding that men in power frequently exploit women — it becomes difficult to believe that Franken is the only sitting Democrat with a history of harassment, abuse or assault… Isn’t that hypocritical? I hear you asking, Because Republicans won’t do the right thing, we shouldn’t, either? But if the short-term ‘right thing’ leads to long-term political catastrophe for American women, I think we need to reconsider our definition of the right thing.”

So Democrats should go back to saying “it’s okay when it’s our guy?” That would indeed solve the double standard problem. If both parties are going to roast the enemy for the same thing that they forgive on their side, there’s one standard that is being applied equally.

The problem is that the Democratic liberal base won’t go for it anymore. More specifically, the women in the Democratic hierarchy won’t go for it anymore. It was Democratic women Senators who led the demand that Franken resign. Recall that whatever one thinks of Donald Trump, this whole #metoo thing erupted after the first allegations came out concerning Harvey Weinstein. Snap quiz, who was a bigger fundraiser for Hillary Clinton, Harvey Weinstein or Charles Koch? It’s Franken who’s expected to fall on his sword for the good of the Party, not the feminist contingent of the Party that’s expected to put up with him for the sake of not letting Republicans “get” one.

What all this proves to me is that liberals need to find a happy medium between retroactively crucifying Al Franken – who was never accused of adultery, let alone rape – for sleazy behavior that occurred before he ever ran for office, versus “it’s not perjury if it was over a blowjob, and even if it was, it’s just a Republican witch hunt.” Maybe we should acknowledge that if “believe the women” is not as bad an extreme as “always believe the accused”, it is still an extreme. Maybe rather than uncritically dismissing or believing the accuser, we should take the accuser seriously, seriously enough to give the claims proper investigation.

Because even in the olden days, it was sometimes more likely that allegations of sexual misbehavior from a politician would be taken seriously, and a politician’s career could be destroyed over allegations that were both less substantial and more substantial than the charges against Franken. In 1988, Democrat Gary Hart was preparing a run for the presidency until the press started covering his relationship with a young woman named Donna Rice, a relationship that both Rice and Hart have maintained to this day was not sexual. Then after the 1992 campaign, Republican Senator Bob Packwood was shadowed by continuing allegations of sexual assault, allegations which intensified after the Senate Ethics Committee requested his diary and found out that he had altered the diary passages. Eventually Packwood resigned in 1995. Incidentally, the Wikipedia article on this points out that the head of the Committee at the time was Senator Mitch McConnell, who had said afterward in regard to President Clinton’s impeachment: “As most of you will recall, the Senate faced a similar choice just a few short years ago. It was one of our own who had clearly crossed the line. It was one of our own who had engaged in sexual misconduct and obstruction of justice… During the Packwood debate, we made the tough choice. And, I have to say, that decision was one of the most difficult things I have ever had to do in my career in public service. To recommend expelling from the United States Senate a colleague, a member of my own party, and most importantly, a friend with whom I had served in the Senate for over a decade. We sent a clear message to the nation that no man is above the law.”

What caused the standard to change all of a sudden?

What happened was that a certain politician in the duopoly decided that winning was more important than shame. Packwood and Hart could be shamed out of the system. Bill Clinton could not. And while I’m sure Hillary Clinton didn’t plan on things turning out this way, the fact that she was First Enabler in 1998 meant that in 2016 she was the only person in either major party who was not in position to take on Donald Trump over his history of sexism. It’s not as though she didn’t get some good licks in, especially with invoking Alicia Machado in a debate, but the fact that Trump got as many white female voters as he did indicated that Clinton had a critical problem with her core audience.

Democratic ambivalence on this issue is precisely because Republicans have embraced Bill Clinton’s approach more thoroughly than they have. Not only that, this allowed Trump to disarm the whole premise of enforcing moral standards. He has also shown right-wingers the path to counter left-wing virtue signaling: Don’t let them shame you. Don’t let them crybully you. Don’t apologize for what you are. The problem occurs when what you are is not just objectively evil but belligerently stupid.

The other day, (Dec. 6) Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic wrote a piece called “Embracing Depravity,” which is exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a pretty good analysis of where the Republican groupthink is now. It explains why the “conservative” movement, in all its contradictions, has one consistent factor: what Friedersdorf calls ressentiment.

“Culture-war conflict now dominates their political identity.

“And to watch them embrace the label ‘deplorable’ even as they elevate a man like (Roy) Moore is to suspect (Julian) Sanchez was right in seeing ressentiment as ‘a resignation to impotence on the cultural front where the real conflict lies. It effectively says: We cede to the bogeyman cultural elites the power of stereotypical definition, so becoming the stereotype more fully and grotesquely is our only means of empowerment.”

This is why it doesn’t do good to whine that it’s not fair that Democrats are being held to a standard that Republicans don’t respect. When you’re a Democrat, you find excuses for why you can’t win elections. It’s what you do. But more importantly, liberals, you are never going to be more punk rock than the Republicans. You are never going to be more transgressive. You are always going to be under the self-imposed double standard, if only because you have any standards at all. Because unlike Republicans, who have discarded all standards except winning, you are still under the delusion that you have morals. That your political calculus is based on a higher standard. That you’re here to fight for something.

So here’s a radical Communist idea, liberals: Why not FIGHT for something?

If the game of moral superiority is, if not a wash, ultimately meaningless in winning elections, if it ultimately comes down to voter turnout, and if Republican tax “reform” is doing more to cement their Snidely Whiplash image than anything leftists could imagine, then Democrats ought to spend this next year concentrating on the very “flyover” counties that won Trump the election in 2016, the very places that will be hardest hit by Republican policy, and convince those voters that their party is able to help them out. But that would require having both a message and a plan.

…Naahh, that’s too hard, isn’t it?

We Are So Screwed

When the Republican Senate passed its tax “reform” bill just after midnight on December 2, journalist Kurt Eichenwald sent this tweet: “America died tonight. Economic suicide adopted to feed the insatiable greed of donors, who have been refusing to dole out $ to GOP until they got their tax cuts. Voters fooled by propaganda and tribal hatred. Millenials: move away if you can. USA is over. We killed it.”

I wouldn’t be quite THAT pessimistic, but we are seriously running out of options, given that one ruling party (the Democrats) are not currently in power and doesn’t have any ideas for how to turn things around if they were, while the current majority (Republicans) are not merely mistaken but outright destructive.

The actual tax reform bill as passed by the Senate still included several points amended on the copies with markers. This is going to come back and bite Republicans in the ass when they find out the (“) symbol means inches and not feet.

What we have is being passed off by liberals as “economic libertarianism.” Which is BS. Of course I’m going to say that because I’m a Libertarian. But assume that economic libertarianism is based on the axiom “taxation is theft.” (Not like liberals have given a better definition of it.) You can say that that attitude is blinkered and just plain wrong. But even taking it at face value, it would mean that we should tax as few people as possible, and as little as possible. What this bill is is a scheme to have as few people as possible pay as little as possible while in many areas, we are maintaining or even expanding government spending on the backs of the other income levels by removing the exemptions and services that will be given to the upper income levels. In other words, it would be a tax increase on many of us. Hardly libertarian.

The thing that neither the Left nor the Right are willing to admit is that if you already have wealth and power, you don’t need the government to give you more. That is not why a (classically) liberal democratic republic exists. In fact, the Founders created this country to rebel against the previous paradigm where a government was set up specifically to take the resources of the majority and use them solely for the benefit of the hereditary elite. This idea may stick in the craw of America’s “conservatives”, but then the idea that “all men are created equal” offended a lot of people, too.

But if it’s easy for liberals to say that libertarianism (whether of the Republican or Libertarian Party variety) is just a giveaway to the rich, and if the rest of the country more or less accepts that, that’s because the primary promotion of an economically libertarian or “fiscally conservative” platform is that of Paul Ryan and his ilk. And the result does more to promote socialism than anything the Left could come up with on their own merits.

What’s really sad is that the reason for pushing so hard on a bill that practically nobody wants is that the Republicans care more about their wealthy donor class than voters (given how much they gin the election system to keep safe seats, and how little Republicans care about what their own party does to them). There’s just one problem. The “fiscally conservative” Republicans were so eager to stick it to blue states with their plan that they alienated wealthy donors in those states, since the tax “reform” eliminates a lot of the previous deductions that were given to residents of high-tax states like New York, where a lot the richest Republicans live. So according to the Washington Examiner: “I think checkbooks stay closed until they see how it plays out,” said Eric R. Levine, a Manhattan attorney and Republican donor who bundled contributions for Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., in 2016. “I’m not even trying to raise money in the fourth quarter.” Because donors “foresee higher personal taxes under a plan that axes deductions for state and local taxes without offering what they consider compensatory reductions in marginal income rates, even with the repeal of the Alternative Minimum Tax that hits many upper-middle-class Americans. They resent that the bill excludes their white-collar service professions — think law, finance, and consulting — from the bill’s lower small-business rate, even as it shrinks the corporate levy to 20 percent from 35 percent. ”

Oh, and it gets even gooder. Just today (Dec. 4) nymag.com had an article from Eric Levitz clarifying just one case of how Republican hastiness on the tax scam is already biting them in the ass. In order to get all the cuts the Senate bill needed while still adding only so much (just $1.5 trillion) to the deficit, McConnell had to scramble for other means of making up revenue. At present, the country has a corporate tax of 35 percent- which is subject to modification by various deductions, down to a minimum tax of 20 percent. The alternative minimum tax was supposed to have been removed in the first Senate bill, but in order to help make up the gap, they put it back in as part of the last round of wheeler-dealing. However, they forgot to lower the absolute minimum below 20% – which is where the base corporate tax rate is in the new bill. This makes all the various deductions and investments hitherto used to lower corporate taxes useless. Levitz quotes a Wall Street Journal article (paywall) in which the head of Murray Energy Corp spoke: ““What the Senate did, in their befuddled mess, is drove me out of business and then bragged about the fact that they got some tax reform passed,” Mr. Murray said in an interview Sunday. “This is not job creation. This is not stimulating income. This is driving a whole sector of our community into nonexistence.” Murray Energy, by the way, is a coal company.

All of which means that, given that Big Money is all that Republicans have going for them, dissension in the ranks makes it that much harder for Republicans to maintain the support they need going into the 2018 midterms. Midterms usually are a hostile environment for the ruling party, but Republicans made things that much worse for themselves with their legislation this year. Of course they felt the need to pass all the things on their agenda now that they finally had the opportunity to do so. Because they finally had a Republican president in the White House who would sign their dream bills and help them make America great again.

Yeah, about that.

On Friday December 1, former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn – who had already left his joint defense agreement with Donald Trump’s legal team – pleaded guilty to a charge of lying to the FBI in regard to communications made with then-Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak before Trump’s inauguration. And as predicted, later in the day it was stated that Flynn was in agreement to testify about his knowledge of communications between “senior administration officials” on this matter, the current rumor being that the main “senior official” being implicated was Trump’s son-in-law and Schmuck Without Portfolio Jared Kushner.

And in response, on Saturday December 3, Trump tweeted:

“I had to fire General Flynn because he lied to the Vice President and the FBI. He has pled guilty to those lies. It is a shame because his actions during the transition were lawful. There was nothing to hide!”

9:14 AM – 2 Dec 2017

Raising, among other questions, how did he know Flynn had lied to the FBI at that time?

To paraphrase Dr. King’s Bible quote, the arc of the moral universe is long, but Trump won’t shut his fucking mouth.

But later that day, the Trump team announced that Trump’s personal lawyer, John Dowd, was the one who drafted the tweet. Oh, so that wasn’t Trump that posted that incriminating tweet, now that he realizes what he did. It was his lawyer. His PROFESSIONAL LAWYER. Who posted something that would tie Trump to the Flynn case. In Trump’s name.

Well, I guess that completely exonerates Trump. I mean, if this is what the White House sends out after consulting with a lawyer, imagine what Trump would have revealed if he’d just shot his mouth off.

(Dowd, by the way, was noted in Wikipedia as a Trump staffer who forwarded an email from a conspiracy theorist to conservative media saying that Black Lives Matter was infiltrated by terrorists and that there was no difference between George Washington and Robert E. Lee.)

I sincerely doubt that Trump’s lawyer posted that tweet. If only because a real lawyer, when asked to vet that statement, would respond by yanking Trump’s smartphone out of his hand, throwing it against the wall and then stomping it to a million bits while Trump watched, as a professional opinion on why that statement should not be made on Twitter.

In any case, this would beg the question, “just how fucking stupid do you have to be to believe this slimy criminal?” but this is the Republican Party we’re dealing with. Ultimately I have to attribute Trump’s motive in making that post to one of two thoughts:

“I can admit to anything because Paul ‘Paulie Numbnuts’ Ryan and Mitch ‘the Bitch’ McConnell will always be there to protect me”

“Somebody stop me. Somebody please stop me.”

Unfortunately it’s not that simple. A lot of Republicans might be willing to toss Trump to get Vice President Pence to take over, since he’s a more sincerely conservative Republican than Trump and would be less likely to incriminate himself on Twitter. However it may already be too late. See, the stated reason that Trump fired Flynn was because Flynn had lied to Vice President Mike Pence (who was running the pre-inaugural transition) about contacts with Russia. If Flynn lied to Congress about this, and this lie was the same thing he told Pence (according to big-mouth Trump) then if Trump knew it was a lie at the time and this incriminates him it is hard to see how it doesn’t incriminate Mike Pence. Thus, any charge that is substantial enough to incriminate Trump could also incriminate Pence for the same reason. If the President is removed from office and the Vice President is also not able to serve, the law states that succession falls to the Speaker of the House.

Which means that the acting president would be Paul Ryan. AKA “Paulie Numbnuts.”

Unless of course Mueller is allowed to drag this thing out past the point of the 2018 midterms, and in the perhaps 50-50 chance that Democrats can actually capitalize on Republicans’ unpopularity, then the third in line after Pence would most likely be House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi.

You know, the liberal feminist who at first defended John Conyers against sexual harassment charges and called him an icon of Congress.

Nancy “we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it” Pelosi.

We really are screwed, aren’t we?

The Whisper Network

“I wish to argue that none of you possibly have enough evidence to jump to this conclusion, but experience has taught me that only guarantees it to be the case.”

-Vaarsuvius, Order of the Stick #1106

I had almost thought the issue of powerful men getting taken down by a history of sexual harassment was starting to lose currency. But last week the big news was that Today show lead anchor Matt Lauer was “suddenly” fired after NBC News received a detailed complaint, NBC News chairman Andrew Lack saying “While it is the first complaint about his behavior in the over 20 years he’s been at NBC News, we were also presented with reason to believe this may not have been an isolated incident.” As it turned out, both Variety and the New York Times had been investigating an extensive history of misbehavior on Lauer’s part. Less publicized that week was the news that hip-hop mogul and producer Russell Simmons was stepping down from his companies after he was accused of sexual assault.

This phenomenon is in fact so widespread and happening so fast that a lot of observers are worried about it. For one thing, the idea that we should believe all women who accuse men of abuse is getting challenged. Professional feminist Lena Dunham defended a writer from her show Girls after he was accused of rape by actress Aurora Perrineau, saying he was one of the just “3% of assault cases that are misrepresented every year.” More relevant to politics, Minnesota Democratic Senator Al Franken was accused of groping one woman on a USO tour, and then another. Now it’s up to six. Not only that, veteran Congressman John Conyers (D.-Michigan) was accused of a long history of improper sexual behavior. Yet another Congressman, Ruben Kihuen (D.-Nevada) was just accused of repeated sexual advances and improper touching by an aide. But it wasn’t until fairly recently that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called upon Conyers to resign. (Perhaps for that reason, she was a lot quicker to go after Kihuen.)

So what? The story now is, we “believe all women” unless the accused is a friend of ours? Or if it’s politically inconvenient?

To their credit, a lot of liberals are saying politics be damned, such men need to be out of Congress, even if they’re Democrats. But it’s not that simple. Conyers’ seat (in the Detroit area) is safe, and in any case he’s very old and may need to retire anyway. However, if Kihuen resigns, the Governor of Nevada (who would appoint his replacement) is a Republican. And Franken has been a serious asset to the Democrats in the Senate, and even if Minnesota’s Democratic governor replaced him, that party needs all the seats it can get.

Not that Republicans are any more pure. As more documented stories of Roy Moore’s predilection for younger girls came up in Alabama, that just increased the desire of Alabama Republicans to get him elected Senator. But that’s what they are. All that matters to them is winning. “Conservatives” would vote for Bill Clinton himself if he said he was a Republican. But as I keep telling Republicans, they kinda did.

In large part, a lot of liberals are worried that there’s going to be some sort of right-wing backlash once somebody gets the idea that they can make a false claim. When Rolling Stone published a “searing expose'” on a gang rape at the University of Virginia campus, the story turned out to be unverifiable and was later retracted. This critically undermined Rolling Stone’s journalistic reputation (to the extent that it had one) and set back feminist attempts to target “rape culture.”

More recently, Bari Weiss in the New York Times worried that the current ascendancy of #metoo feminism is going to set up its own downfall, citing the Teen Vogue writer Emily Linden who had to shut down her Twitter account after posting ““If some innocent men’s reputations have to take a hit in the process of undoing the patriarchy, that is a price I am absolutely willing to pay.” Weiss says that while she sympathizes with that attitude, “I think that ‘believing all women’ can rapidly be transmogrified into an ideological orthodoxy that will not serve women at all. ”

There is of course a danger of backlash with all the sexual harassment stories, but the reason that hasn’t happened yet in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein case is because when an individual is accused of sexual abuse, it’s not just one case that can’t be verified. There always turns out to be more behind it.

When Anthony Rapp made his accusation against Kevin Spacey, at the time I thought it was just an isolated case of Spacey being drunk quite a few years ago. (Though it still reflected badly on him that he would let himself get so out of control.) But according to producers on House of Cards, Spacey had been engaging in harassment fairly recently, and often enough to where it was brought up as a problem. When an accusation gets in the news, it stays in the news if it turns out to be a pattern.

There is now actually a term for how this works. Feminists Valerie Aurora and Leigh Blackwood came up with an observation they call “the Al Capone Theory.” The basis is that Al Capone had a major organized crime ring going with alcohol smuggling, but the Federal government couldn’t get him on those grounds, but they could trace his income and prosecute him for tax evasion on his assets. Aurora and Blackwood said: “We noticed a similar pattern in reports of sexual harassment and assault: often people who engage in sexually predatory behavior also faked expense reports, plagiarized writing, or stole credit for other people’s work.” In other words, even where (say) sexual harassment is hard to prove or prosecute, it may be possible to prosecute an offender for other more easily-established criminal offenses – because the kind of person who engages in sexual harassment is the kind of person who is likely to commit other crimes. “Ask around about the person who gets handsy with the receptionist, or makes sex jokes when they get drunk, and you’ll often find out that they also violated the company expense policy, or exaggerated on their résumé, or took credit for a colleague’s project.” Whether companies know the “Al Capone Theory” term or not, they are becoming more cognizant of this pattern in order to guard against it, given that such personality types can cost money for reasons other than public harrassment suits.

More directly, a lot of these sexual harassment cases gain traction because they’re not isolated incidents. When the first accusations came out against Harvey Weinstein, they destroyed his reputation, but they couldn’t be prosecuted because they were past the statute of limitations for assault. But recently the NYPD announced that it has at least one rape case that is recent enough to investigate.

The approach taken by the authors of the Al Capone Theory points towards a critical standard that addresses the serious possibility of treating men unfairly. One of the concerns of men is that the “whisper network” has the potential to destroy men over isolated, consensual encounters when there is no legal standard such as presumption of innocence. But one thing that’s overlooked with that position is that the abuses themselves are a case where men (usually men) are taking advantage of grey areas in the law and in company human resources policies, and in the reaction of the culture to women’s claims. Until recently, when women did try to work within the system, their claims were disregarded by superiors, for example in the case of Lauer. The Variety article said: “Several women told Variety they complained to executives at the network about Lauer’s behavior, which fell on deaf ears given the lucrative advertising surrounding ‘Today.’ NBC declined to comment. For most of Lauer’s tenure at ‘Today,’ the morning news show was No. 1 in the ratings, and executives were eager to keep him happy.” Whereas the standard that Aurora and Blackwood are endorsing obliges companies to review a person’s overall performance record to corroborate accusations of bad behavior, including accusations against women.

It seems as though liberals in the media and politics are taking a look at where politics have gone and then taking a look at the “sophisticated” culture they did so much to enable, at least when Bill Clinton was president. And whether they admit it or not, they’re making a connection.

Consider that however self-conscious and hypocritical liberals might seem about sexual harassment, they are at least taking a look in the mirror and cleaning up their own house.

But then consider that Donald Trump is still president.

And that Roy Moore, at least initially, was leading in the polls after the Washington Post story came out.

And it seems to me that “conservatives” are looking at self-flagellating liberals, and they’ve decided that if it looks embarrassing or hypocritical to develop a conscience too late, then clearly the best course of action is to never develop a conscience at all.