Month: July 2021

The Opposite of Congress

“I bear true and an existing witness to this barrel of monkeys.

A self proclaimed immoral success, Perfected by each whereof

Individually deadly and equally so

And spread about the surrendered troops,

For even thousands of miles will not tear apart their communication, or the lack thereof.

Vultures, liars, thieves, each proclaim their innocence

In no suggestion or rhyme, your weapon is contained in the wrecking of the keeping the desired effect.

The breaking of the spirit thwarts the whole being.

Your weapon is guilt, your weapon is guilt, your weapon is guilt.

Guilt.”

-Alice in Chains, “Sludge Factory”

It’s almost time for Congress to go into its annual August recess. If you need to ask why Washington must have a recess in August, you have obviously never visited Washington in August.

Before that can happen, there’s a couple of bits they have to get out of the way. Tuesday they finally started the “1-6” investigation in the House of Representatives, which in its first day gave us the surprising news that the people who attempted to kill black police officers while storming the Capitol were racist, giving MSNBC the opportunity to play the N-Word more times than an episode of The Dave Chappelle Show. The investigation started no thanks to House Republican “leader” Kevin McCarthy, who last week attempted to throw House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a curve by announcing his Party’s picks for the investigation panel would include Gentleman Gym Jordan (BR-Ohio) and a couple others who voted not to certify the 2020 Electoral College results, in effect endorsing the January 6 attack on the process. When Pelosi said she wouldn’t let the election-deniers on the panel, McCarthy said he was withdrawing all Republicans from consideration, including the ones who did vote to certify the election. Basically McCarthy’s posture was that if he can’t get his way and troll the committee with joke picks, then he’s going to take his ball and go home. The joke’s on him, cause he has no ball.

The Democrats, as the party in charge this Congress, offered a “9-11 style” bipartisan commission on January 6, but this was under the impression immediately after the event that Republicans, who were threatened by the attack too, would be willing to investigate it. They are not, for the same reason that Osama bin Laden would not have cooperated with the 9-11 commission, because he knew what they would find. The only threat McCarthy could make was to withdraw his party’s endorsement and thus the appearance of bipartisanship. But having already given up on bipartisanship, and conceding his Party’s identification with the rioters, McCarthy had only the pretense of legitimacy in the debate, and since everyone knew it was not sincere, he gained nothing by refusing to cooperate.

And in what is allegedly not a related event, Democrats in the Senate are having trouble passing a $600 billion dollar infrastructure bill, which apparently cannot be passed as a simple-majority budget bill because West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin (of course) wanted it done on a bipartisan basis. Which of course requires negotiating with Republicans, who since Bill Clinton have decided that giving Democrats any help doesn’t help them.

It also didn’t help that Donald Trump, He Be King Dick Who Got Biggest Of All Dicks, ordered his subordinate microdicks in what used to be a political party to not cooperate with the Democrats.

Trump Calls Republicans “Weak Fools and Losers” for Negotiating Infrastructure

I am not so sure that this is a brilliant Machiavellian strategy so much as Trump’s usual reactive emotion when the grownups are doing something serious without him in the room: “WAAAAAAAAAAAAAA nobody’s payin’ ATTENTION t’ MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”

But as I keep saying, not like it really matters, cause even when the Crybaby Caudillo does the right thing – like getting the COVID vaccine and telling other people to do so – it’s with a lot less emphasis than when he tells people to do the wrong thing, cause he is at least as much follower as leader. Trump is the leader of the former Party of Lincoln because he is what they want. He personifies the attitude they already had even before he became a presidential candidate.

To a very limited extent, very far back in time, this intransigence was understandable. If you saw much of American history after FDR (after Wilson, really) as less “progress” and more an entropic slide towards more and more statism and unnecessary government controls, even compromise that gained some of your goals was a defeat in that the other side got further toward what they wanted, especially since victory by gradualism is an explicit strategy of democratic socialists.

But even if you favor socialism over evil “selfishness”, the real problem with the Right these days (including a lot of libertarianism, sadly) is that reliance on talk show hosts as intellectual role models has rotted their former reputation in philosophy. This was made that much worse by the fact that radio hosts and their descendants on basic cable were able to monetize politics, and that meant telling people what they wanted to hear, not the hard facts. They never put their ideas up for test and debate; rather Republicans used “safe” districts to maintain their place in national government, and since certain seats were safe, primaries were really a contest of the biggest whacko ideologue. This created a party where appraisal of facts was not only not a priority, it was actually unwelcome. This was BEFORE Trump. The Right got lazy, basically. So Trump is just the logical extension of that. He can tell the redcaps to hate science and hate eggheads and not cooperate with the Beltway establishment. That’s what they want to do. If he tried to push people towards vaccinating to stop the Delta virus, that wouldn’t be popular, and you can’t be a leader if you don’t follow the crowd.

The stubbornness of the NotDemocrats is not a Randian refusal to compromise with evil. It is a five-year-old who refuses to have peas for dinner. (And yes, liberals, there IS a difference, not that Republicans care to acknowledge it.)

Regarding the infrastructure bill, Jonathan Chait wrote in New York Magazine, “As it turns out, the (bill’s) sheer size creates a kind of protection by reducing Biden’s agenda to a single vote. Some moderate Democrats from conservative states or districts might wish to position themselves to the administration’s right, but none of them can afford to let Biden’s presidency come crashing down in Congress. Perhaps the most important clue to the president’s fate came from Joe Manchin, the most conservative Democrat in Congress, who said in January, “We’re going to make Joe Biden successful.” The worst possible outcome for any Democrat — the opening that will let the Republican Party back into power — would be for their party to be seen as having failed at governing. They can and will negotiate the parameters, but the only leverage they hold is mutually assured destruction.”
Which is of course the same reason Republicans have to stick together: to make Joe Biden unsuccessful. Which is basically the same motive as making Barack Obama unsuccessful. Blame the other party for not being able to keep its promises (eliding the role you had in that result) and say that you’ll do a better job if you get elected to Congress. The problem of course is that they did that with Obama, it didn’t work, they tried it again and that time it did work (cause Obama’s successor was Hillary Clinton) but then Republicans had to spend the next four years proving they would do a better job than Obama Democrats, and absolutely failed. Not that Trump’s (sorta) fiscal conservative policy didn’t have real benefits for the economy, which was the main reason he had as much popularity with serious people as he did, but the crash in face-to-face business thanks to Trump Virus (TM) followed by the rapid recovery of the Wall Street sector made it clear to a lot of people that Wall Street is not the entire economy and should not be treated as such. This also means that middle class Americans are becoming less sympathetic to the idea that whatever is good for Big Business is automatically good for them and should be promoted at their expense.

What is happening is that each party is doing what makes sense for them, and many Democrats (namely Joe Manchin) can’t understand that what makes sense for Republicans is not what Democrats think makes sense for the country, and they ought to give up assuming good faith from them, since Republicans have already decided to assume the worst about Democrats. The two ruling factions have been a state of cold war (not competition) for a while, and Democrats are finally starting to realize it.

The architects of duopoly are now becoming victims of the system they sought to create. Democrats have painted themselves in a corner with duopoly – however much they claim they need two parties to have a political debate, it’s not something they really seem to believe. Well, now they’ve gotten their wish because now all of the centrist non-progressives are basically on their side, but that means, as with the Affordable Care Act, that all political debate is within the Democratic Party, because Republicans refuse to offer any ideas. And that means that despite their technical majority in numbers, Democrats can’t get anything done because they aren’t one movement, they’re just a coalition of NotRepublicans. The altruist-socialist Left that claims to be the real Democratic Party has never really been a majority of public opinion, and if I do find myself voting with the “progressives” more, that’s only because the last two years of Trump Virus (TM) has made it clear that this country’s lack of support systems is an outright national security issue that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. (And if those leftists sneer that the virus proves people can’t be trusted to do the right thing without being forced, it also proves that government can’t make them do the right thing, either.)

Meanwhile, if it seems odd that Republicans are only enacting the Trump agenda of voter suppression and vote nullification after he lost (as opposed to succumbing to his demands in the moment, like he wanted) it’s because the aftermath of January 6 has made two things clear: However much the sensible Republicans wished Trump would go away after Biden’s inauguration, the “base” will not give up Trump no matter what, and the factors that caused Republicans to lose the suburbs and critical Electoral College battles will only get worse as sane people realize that electing Republicans would mean electing Trump and electing Trump would mean January 6 every damn day. It was all the Party could do to get swing states with white people and Hispanics and now they have to worry that not even a majority of white people are on board anymore.

Republicans have basically painted themselves in a corner with duopoly: they survived mainly by suppressing any competition for the not-Democrat vote, just as Democrats suppress any competition for the not-Republican vote. And just as Democrats scare their people into voting for them on the premise that if they don’t, America is going to become a fascist hellhole, Republicans scare their people into thinking if Democrats win, America will become a socialist hellhole. But Republicans were starting to gain the advantage in that, one, Republican presidencies may have been disagreeable to liberals but were not Hell on Earth to the rest of us, and two, the Democrats’ main constituencies were sick of waiting for that party to keep their promises, and despite outnumbering Republicans on paper, didn’t vote in enough numbers to throw Republican governments out. Meanwhile Republicans did have voter loyalty because their main constituencies were convinced that the evil Demonrats were going to have all the white babies aborted and then turn them gay. The difference is that Democrats are starting to listen to people outside their inner circle and are trying to get a majority of votes, and however haphazardly, are starting to do so. Republicans however are only listening to their biggest fanatics, which is how we got Trump, who may not have believed in all the birther-Tea Party-Q nonsense at first, but told the suckers what they wanted to hear, to such an extent that he bought into it. Basically, Trump is to lying what Al Pacino in Scarface was to cocaine: He used to just be a dealer then he became his own biggest customer.

And just as Trump single-handedly killed Atlantic City by putting his casinos in competition with each other so that they cannibalized each others’ business, he eventually created a situation where his continued lying and incompetence meant that his fortunes as president were at odds with his Party’s generally strong performance in the 2020 elections. The short term results of that became clear as Trump sabotaged his own Party in the Georgia US Senate runoffs by saying that his loss could only happen cause the system was rigged, therefore the whole thing was rigged, by implication meaning the same system by which other Republicans won. In that runoff, the dynamic started to reverse: Now that people besides leftists saw America as turning into a fascist hellhole, it was the Democrats who were turning out to vote no matter what, and it was Republican constituencies who stayed home cause they felt like they were being lied to. And then the day after Kelly Loeffler lost her Georgia Senate seat, the Congress had to certify the Electoral College result, so Trump, his family and his stooges came out to the mob of thugs who’d been organizing for weeks and implied that it sure would be a shame if Mike Pence and the other Republicans didn’t throw out that whole “Electoral College” thing and declare God-Emperor Trump our immortal Lord and Savior. And for some reason the guys who had been bitching about the election online for two months, coordinated over social media, and came to DC with zip ties, riot gear and scaffolding for a hanging suddenly decided to get violent.

And as amazing as Democrats find it that the senior Republicans haven’t run Trump out of their Party by now, if not voting with them on impeachment (given that he tried to KILL them and all), you have to look at it from their side. I’m sure Mitch McConnell would want to make sure Trump can’t run for President again, even if he wasn’t going to let his perfect little boy get convicted on impeachment, but Mitch knows that if the Party did what it should have done a while ago – kicked out Trump and any other politician who supports his lies – then all the registered Republicans who believe those lies will quit voting Republican and either stay home or vote for whatever clown car of a political organization Trump wants to put together. At that point, Republicans might still have a few places where they could win, but most of the places where their seats are safe are only safe because of Trumpniks. Kicking out Trump would mean the end of the Republicans as a competitive national party, and if Republicans won’t openly admit this, Democrats are too polite to bring it up. In any case, Republicans are clearly less afraid of a permanent dictatorship of Trumpism than a permanent dictatorship of the Democratic Party, because in effect, that is what abandoning Trump would accomplish.

However much I might not want a one-party state, even under the Democrats, I still have to ask Republicans: whose fault is that? Your whole attitude is “You HAVE to vote for us, no matter how horrible we are, cause you don’t want those OTHER people taking over, do you??” Dudes, ask yourselves: How well did that work for Hillary Clinton?

Because going into the 2022 elections, the question is not whether Republican strategy makes sense for their priorities but whether their priorities are good strategy. In his orders to the troops, Trump said, “Don’t do the infrastructure deal, wait until after we get proper election results in 2022 or otherwise (Hmm?), and regain a strong negotiating stance”. Now, given the strength of Republican performance in November 2020, and the usual weakness of the president’s party in a midterm elections, Republicans would have reason to believe that they can just hold out and be “strong” and end up getting what they want if they just wait out the election cycle. It’s what they’re inclined to do anyway. But then again there was every reason to believe the incumbent US Senators of Georgia would win their runoffs and keep Mitch McConnell as Majority Leader. And then somebody had to open his mouth and cause problems. And THEN January 6 happened.

To say that this “conservative” movement is evil would be true, but it avoids the point. Because whether you want to admit this or not, Americans like evil. We like Nazis. We like Confederates. We like rooting for the Empire in Star Wars and the Klingons in Star Trek.

But to paraphrase General Patton, one thing Americans absolutely will not tolerate is a loser.

And while real Christians might have been waiting over 2000 years for Christ to come back to life and regain dominion over the universe, I don’t think even Republicans can afford to give Cheeto Jesus that much benefit of the doubt.

REVIEW: Black Widow

Given that we all know what happened to Natasha Romanoff in Avengers: Endgame, and (SPOILER ALERT)

nothing happens in the Black Widow movie that changes that fate, Black Widow is just as it was presented: a solo story taking place between Captain America: Civil War and Avengers: Infinity War. It’s sort of like Marvel’s version of Rogue One: a side story that fills in the existing background but doesn’t actually change the timeline. Which is kind of interesting for the Marvel Cinematic Universe given that they’ve created a whole machine out of having a series of stories that add on to each other one by one, although ultimately the after-credits scene of this movie does do that.

One thing about Black Widow is that she has something in common with Hawkeye, which may be why they were such close partners. Both Scarlett Johansson and Jeremy Renner have natural charisma (Johansson’s being more obvious than Renner’s) but neither Black Widow or Hawkeye really seeks the spotlight the way Tony Stark does, or naturally attracts it like Steve Rogers does. Both of them are sort of like the super-world’s version of Jason Bourne: basically human operatives who just perform at a higher level than everybody else and whose general behavior is just ‘do the mission and move on.’ So even though there are movies like Jojo Rabbit where Johansson dominates the scene without being the lead character, Black Widow has usually been a support character in other heroes’ movies, and that seems to be the case even in her own film.

Here, Natasha, on the run after helping Captain America escape from General Ross, gets hunted by a masked super-agent who seems to have all the Avengers’ combat skills, and then is contacted by her “little sister” Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) who has broken her own conditioning and needs Natasha’s help to liberate a whole host of widows that the director of the “Red Room” kept kidnapping and brainwashing even after the fall of the Soviet Union. To do this they decide they need the help of their foster parents who raised them in a Soviet sleeper cell in Ohio, senior Widow Melina (Rachel Weisz) and ex-superhero “Red Guardian,” (David Harbour) who nearly steals the movie.

I agree with the one Pajiba reviewer who said that Black Widow is kinda like ordering a meal at a Michelin restaurant and taking it home in a doggie bag: the ingredients and preparation are first class, but the result tasted like reheated leftovers. I think this is actually because it’s “out of order” in the chronology. It’s clear that Yelena is being set up to take Natasha’s role, but nobody in the setting knows that yet, of course. Pugh has a good acting scene at the family reunion dinner but otherwise we don’t get much insight into her character. The whole movie is basically a blow-shit-up fest, although it is pretty good at that. But the fact that there is a real resolution to some critical aspects of Natasha’s past just makes it that much more of a bummer that she died.

My friend Don pointed out there’s really no reason they can’t bring Natasha back. I mean, Thanos sacrificed Gamora to get the original Soul Stone in Infinity War, and in the next film the Guardians of the Galaxy encountered the alternate-past Gamora before the final battle and are currently chasing her into a yet-to-be-released movie. Maybe Johansson, like Chris Evans, just decided it was time to move on. Or maybe Johansson, as an executive producer on this movie, got sick of Marvel Studios yanking her chain with delaying the release date several times. Which considering this movie’s female empowerment theme would be a bit ironic.

Which gets to that after-credits scene. Confirming that Florence Pugh’s character is supposed to be taking the place of Johansson in the MCU, Yelena goes to visit a gravestone someone placed for Natasha and is visited by Julia-Louis Dreyfus’ character, who seems to know her already. Fans of course know that Louis-Dreyfus previously appeared in Disney Plus’ The Falcon and the Winter Soldier as the mysterious benefactor of John Walker after he disgraced himself, eventually giving him new equipment under the ID of “the USAgent”. So clearly she’s being presented as this sort of anti-Nick Fury who is assembling her own group of operatives for a sinister project. Personally I’m thinking that “the Contessa” is an alias and this is really just Selina Meyer plotting her revenge against the Washington DC establishment for that one election she lost.

Capitalist Pigs… In… SPACE!!!

So the latest uproar being generated on social media is the left-wing attempt to cancel the capitalist space race in which Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Virgin’s Richard Branson and Elon Musk seem to be in some kind of competition to get themselves in orbit with various private space programs. The Left’s opposition to this is almost as superficial and useless as the billionaires’ own publicity efforts, though to be sure, bitching about them on Twitter costs a lot less. And that is kind of the point. Robert Reich on Twitter: “With just their increased wealth during the pandemic, America’s billionaires could pay for 10 years of the Child Tax Credit that goes into effect today for one year, cutting child poverty by half. And they’d still be as wealthy as they were before the pandemic. “

Ha Ha Ha. Right.

The budget bill for fiscal year 2021 – passed under a Republican president, mind you – was 4.829 trillion dollars. Now never mind the deficit this causes, because deficits clearly don’t matter to either ruling faction. A trillion is a million million. As in, one trillion of a quantity is one followed by twelve zeroes. A billion is a thousand million. As in, one billion is one followed by nine zeroes. A trillion is a thousand billion. As Nathan Lane might say, “do the math.”

The level of money that government, specifically the US federal government, operates with is an actual exponent of what most billionaires get to work with. Even the richest guy on earth, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, is worth $214 billion, at least according to USA Today. Forbes puts it at “only” $193.5 billion. Let’s say we round to $200 billion. Jeff Bezos, who has more money than God (and probably more than the Catholic Church) would need to multiply his wealth almost by 25 to get as much as Washington already has.

So if we’re not feeding the hungry and housing the homeless and solving climate change and all the other stuff, it’s because of the government we have now, because that government could be doing all those things right now cause it already has more money than Jeff Bezos will ever have, and if for some reason it actually needs more it can just rocket the deficit farther past the stratosphere than Richard Branson will ever get. And that would be the case whether we had a 90 percent tax rate on the upper class or not.

I had mentioned a while ago that there was one event in my life that had as much to do with me becoming a right-libertarian as anything Ayn Rand ever wrote. Believe it or not, it was Live Aid. To briefly recap: I like a lot of young adults at that time contributed to the Live Aid fundraising campaign to get food and support to the starving in Ethiopia, because Bob Geldof and the other organizers of the Live Aid campaign did make a convincing case that enough people working together could solve the world’s problems. But then after the money was raised and the food was delivered to the Horn of Africa, Geldof and his people found that a lot of it was left to rot on the docks while some of it was actually confiscated by the Ethiopian government to use as leverage against its own people.

The lesson I got is that even when there is collective action from private actors, and even when that is backed up by some governments, the government on the ground can burn all that altruism and effort to dust. Because if government has far more scale to do good than any one philanthropist, it has far more scale to do evil than any individual criminal.

In the case I mentioned, the people getting in the way of feeding the world were the Communists running Ethiopia, but in the modern day the obstacle is a faction that is even more vicious, collectivist and devoted to Russian ideology: The Republican Party.

This is especially obvious in regard to their state voter suppression efforts, but I have already touched on those to some extent. With regard to the subject at hand, it was indeed a liberal (Jack Kennedy) initiative that got America first to the moon. It was the government, under NASA, that first had to get us to space. According to Wikipedia, NASA’s share of the total federal budget peaked at around 4.41 percent during the Apollo project, but by 1975 (after we’d reached the moon more than once) it declined to 1 percent and actually decreased from there. “Despite this, public perception of NASA’s budget differs significantly: a 1997 poll indicated that most Americans believed that 20% of the federal budget went to NASA.” In a March 2012 hearing of the United States Senate Science Committee, science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson testified that “Right now, NASA’s annual budget is half a penny on your tax dollar. For twice that—a penny on a dollar—we can transform the country from a sullen, dispirited nation, weary of economic struggle, to one where it has reclaimed its 20th century birthright to dream of tomorrow.”

But for practical purposes, our government doesn’t really have a space program.

Oh, but it has Space Force. Yes. Cheeto Jesus himself, our small-government, tax cutting, regulation cutting Greatest President Capitalism Ever Had decided to add a bureaucracy to our already bloated government for reasons I still cannot explain. It’s not like Trump seems to grasp Gene Roddenberry’s message of peace, reason and infinite diversity, much less George Lucas’ moral that maybe turning a flawed Republic into a blatantly evil Empire isn’t such a good move in the long run. But in any event, we now have a Space Force, even though in five years no one has told me what the fuck it does.

What, are we handing out parking tickets to Martians? Are we busting the illegal smuggling trade in Green Orion Slave Women? What is this?

Now given that there is a real national security interest in protecting our satellite network and responding to any Russian or Chinese attempts to weaponize space, you would think this alleged branch of our military would have some kind of military shuttle program. A monitoring system. But have they explained what we’re actually spending the money on? As far as I can tell the US Space Force’s only official expenditure is for the field uniforms that are done in standard BDU/desert camo, y’know, cause apparently that’s the color pattern you need to camouflage yourself IN FUCKING SPACE.

If you wonder why these nose-in-the-air billionaires are investing their wherewithal in space exploration, well, it’s because we used to have a government that did that for the country, and we don’t any more. So why not them?

Now, there is one aspect to this leftist complaining that is completely legitimate. To such extent as NASA actually exists, it seems to exist to outsource its former charter to these guys for their space side projects. NASA provided $2.9 billion to Musk’s Space X to build a moon lander. New Mexico, “one of the poorest states in the US”, paid $220 million to build “Spaceport America” for Branson.

However, I don’t see government spending taxpayer money for billionaires who could pay their own way as a big endorsement for more government spending. It does however help explain why things are the way they are. Libertarians have been pointing out for years that the problem with our government being as big as it is is that its power and money makes it a more attractive target for business to manipulate. But the other side of the matter is that government would rather hand out money to billionaires and corporations than homeless and powerless people because the corporations and rich guys can actually do something for them. In the Business Insider article, they focus on the small town of Truth or Consequences (which, ironically, took its name to attract publicity from the audience of a then-famous game show that has long ago left the air) which has yet to see much trickle-down from Virgin’s use of the area, even as the town’s mayor assumes that the town will get more business once Virgin’s commercial space travel service becomes fully operational.

Personally, I would think that a real laissez-faire policy wouldn’t punish businesses and rich people just for being rich, but neither should it give them unearned rewards when they already have natural advantages and the resources to develop their companies without government help.

It’s not that there aren’t infrastructure and other projects that need a government to execute, and it’s not as though those shouldn’t be under a public authority as opposed to an individual, otherwise Elon Musk could just buy I-95, call it private property and then charge a subscription fee to drive on it. But on the other hand, if he did that, there might actually be road maintenance.

If you want to avoid that state of affairs and actually have an activist government, you need to get involved and be an active watchdog on that government. Billionaires or no billionaires (which is what most socialists want), you’re not going to have that activist government unless you consider that the Democratic Party is failing to apply even the technical majority in the Senate that they currently have, and maybe you should start investigating exactly why that is.

Not like any of these billionaires need me to defend them, and not like they’re really going to be hurting if we rolled back most of the Trump-Ryan tax laws. But if you really think we can solve all our problems by soaking the rich, first you’re going to have to convince me that government at all levels is not lazier and piggier than any zillionaire in this week’s Two Minutes Hate. And when the government includes people like Matt Gaetz and Louie Gohmert, that’s gonna be pretty hard.

Tough Shit, Readers!

Well, for those who don’t like me talking about politics or role-playing games, here’s a subject that touches on both.

The role-playing hobby had several antecedents, but most people credit its start with the Medieval Fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons in the mid-70s. “D&D” was published out of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin by Tactical Studies Rules, which (like MTV or KFC) eventually just became its initials, TSR. It ended up producing several other examples of geek culture like the 70’s apocalypse game Gamma World and the Space Opera game Star Frontiers. They even managed to license D&D as a Saturday morning cartoon, which like most Saturday morning cartoons of the time can only be appreciated ironically.

At the head of this game empire was designer Ernest Gary Gygax. E. Gary Gygax. EGG. Saying that Gygax created D&D is a bit like saying Stan Lee created Marvel Comics (and let’s not get into that right now). He certainly did promote himself like Lee. Like Lee, he was fond of a greatly expanded intellectual vocabulary and a salesman’s approach to his business. If there is an image of the typical role-player as a know-it-all, do-it-my-way male who might be a bit sexist and involved with macho Conan-type Fantasy, Gygax was a pretty big reason for that. He was very good at promoting the idea that Dungeons & Dragons – or his “Advanced” trademark of it – was the epitome of the hobby his company had created and if you were using some other system, you were doing it wrong. But to people like me who had our heads expanded with the very concept of role-playing in the 70s and early 80s, Gygax really was the standard for how to think and how to approach the game. A lot of us thought so. And then we grew up.

We started asking questions like, “why does armor make you harder to hit when it should make you easier to hit but harder to hurt?”, “Is it Good alignment to kill Goblin children, even if they are Goblins?” and “Why does my 1st-level Magic-User have less hit points than his housecat familiar?” Other people started making games with different rules, and in other genres that D&D didn’t simulate well. (For example, TSR’s licensed Marvel Super Heroes, where you actually lost hero points by killing people.)

At the same time, in the process of expanding TSR’s business profile (such as the cartoon deal), Gygax moved to Los Angeles and sort of “went Hollywood.” According to Wikipedia, “Hearing rumors that the Blumes (his charter financial partners) were trying to sell TSR, Gygax returned from Hollywood and discovered the company was in bad financial shape despite healthy sales. Gygax, who at that time owned only about 30% of the stock, requested that the board of directors remove the Blumes as a way of restoring financial health to the company. The Blumes were forced to leave the company after being accused of misusing corporate funds and accumulating large debts in the pursuit of acquisitions such as latchhook rug kits that were thought to be too broadly targeted. Within a year of the departure of the Blumes, the company was forced to post a net loss of US$1.5 million, resulting in layoffs of approximately 75% of the staff.” However Brian Blume and his brother sold their stock to businesswoman Lorraine Williams who eventually took over TSR and nudged Gygax into selling his stock and leaving the company.

All that financial maneuvering didn’t change the fact that the company had diversified into areas that weren’t panning out, and they were no longer the only game in town for RPGs. In 1996 they were put in a cash crunch when publisher Random House returned large numbers of unsold books and demanded fees, and despite having high sales, TSR again laid off staff and by 1997 Williams decided to sell the company to competitor Wizards of the Coast, most famous for the card game Magic: The Gathering. And while Wizards kept the brand going until about 1999, they released a third edition of Dungeons & Dragons under the WotC brand, as every edition has been since. And they’ve had ups and downs but have solved some of the problems with old AD&D. (Like, 1st-level characters have more hit points than a housecat.) Notably the fifth edition of D&D stated that in creating character background, “You don’t have to be confined to binary notions of sex and gender.” Despite having at least one example non-binary character in the old source material, this declaration was not popular with some people.

Jayson Elliott registered a new TSR in 2011, since the previous trademark had expired, and under this brand published Gygax Magazine with the cooperation of Gary’s sons, Ernie and Luke, but not that of Gygax’s second wife and widow Gail (and that’s its own big kettle of fish) so that project discontinued along with the involvement of the Gygax brothers, although Elliott continued to hold the trademark and publish Top Secret: New World Order, a contemporary edition of an old TSR espionage game. But then this year Ernie and a couple of business partners relaunched TSR as their own thing apparently over Elliott; as he told it on Twitter, “last year, we missed a filing date, and another company registered it, though we are still using it in commerce. While we could win a lawsuit, we frankly don’t have the money to litigate. So we’re licensing it back from them.” The social media accounts of TSR confirmed that they were charging a nominal fee of about 10 dollars for Elliott’s company to use the name. Although that has just changed.

Basically if you are not already familiar with the flaming shitshow, and I can’t blame you if you aren’t, the new company, TSR3 or as a lot of us call it, “nuTSR” started off by saying they were going to be producing a new Star Frontiers despite not having a timetable for that and the minor detail that Wizards still has the rights to that trademark. Then Ernie Gygax did a tape interview where he said “There’s a ton of artists and game designers and people that played TSR, and recently they were dissed for being old-fashioned, possibly anti-modern trends, and enforcing or even having the concepts of gender identity”. (I am not sure why the concept of gender fluidity is so radical when Gary Gygax himself created a Dungeon Master’s Guide item called “Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity”, but here we are.) The company is (in its spare time, I guess) trying to promote a game by TSR veteran Jim Ward called Giantlands which looks like a Gamma World-type project, but the details are sketchy on that too. Family drama got pulled in when Luke Gygax supported TSR’s critics and the TSR Twitter account basically dissed him by saying he was never part of the company and Luke said that was a good thing. Whoever is running that account (apparently someone other than Ernie Gygax) announced that they were going to deny right to the TSR name to any old-TSR Facebook fan page that didn’t take their side. In this, at least, they resemble the classic TSR, whose competitors liked to joke that the initials stood for “They Sue Regularly.” (In the midst of all this, Jayson Elliott announced before the 4th of July weekend that he was changing his TSR Games to Solarian Games, apparently because the brand association is no longer an asset.)

And at one point one of the Twitter trans activists asked the company to publicly state “we here at TSR think that trans women are women, trans men are men and trans lives matter.” And the Twitter account for Giantlands just responded: “Disgusting.”

I mean, I guess I understand why these guys are so defensive. They’re trying to dig themselves out of a hole they created and the only way they can is to do what the Left wants them to do. You’re basically asked to make a ritual statement of your good intentions. So: Do I believe trans men are men and trans women are women?
Well… I’m reminded of that Tim Burton movie where Ed Wood and his crew had to get baptized by a local church to get funding for a film and Wood’s agent is played by Bill Murray and when the preacher asks him “Do you reject Satan and all his evils?” Bill goes, “Sure.”

Frankly all this “critical race theory” and “gender identity” stuff doesn’t matter much to me, but I AM a cishet white guy, and you can’t expect it to matter much to me. I CAN see why it matters to other people. I CAN see why diversity and visibility are important.
I understand that the way I grew up viewing the world has already passed by and other people are taking the stage. And my only advice to the Left in that regard is that one day the same thing will happen to you, and sooner than you think. I mean, maybe you assume that you have a social enlightenment that has eluded your forbears, but I’ve been around long enough to see how my siblings’ generation thought they were going to create The Age of Aquarius and then they grew up, and they had to support families, so they had to get jobs, and then they started asking questions like “Who is this guy FICA, and why is he getting 18 percent of my paycheck?”

Just as most of those people who seem so reactionary now probably thought of themselves as hippies or freethinkers about the time D&D first started. And here’s the thing, I’m one of those guys. Ten years ago, maybe even six years ago, I would have been more aligned with the Trumpniks than the vegan trans people who think the Democratic Party isn’t socialist enough. So why am I not a Trumpnik?

Well, ultimately my greatest loyalty has to be to the truth. That requires preserving a government that preserves the freedom to find the truth. You know, like America, ostensibly. And in the 1980s, the best way to do that was to be a right-winger. I don’t care if the Russians love their children too, it doesn’t matter what they want as long as they have no say in their own government and the thugs in charge just care about their own power. That’s still the case, by the way. It’s just that since the thugs changed their military uniforms for business suits and Marxism for the Orthodox Church, the Party of Reagan has decided they’re okay now. More than okay, they see them as role models.

Whatever I might think about the Left, they’re not nearly as much of a threat to the American way of life as what passes for the Right, especially given the Democrats’ lack of ability to consolidate the government as well as Republicans do even when they’re not in charge. But given their general unpopularity, reinforced by the incompetence they display when they are in charge, one of the few things the Right has going for it is general dislike for the Left.

So in terms of the subject at hand, there may be a lot of people in the gaming hobby who don’t like how “woke” Wizards of the Coast and other companies are getting, or “wish we could just ditch politics and get back to games.” Well look, nothing says you can’t. Nothing says you have to buy Wizards’ D&D or quit playing AD&D Second Edition, one of my gaming groups still uses it. I doubt the people who protest the visibility of people of color (as in, green) or nonbinary characters in the game would be using such characters themselves or have dealt with too many ethnic or sexual minorities in real life. This is the kind of thing that sorts itself: Those who are comfortable with a large variety of people seek each other out; those who aren’t, don’t.

But the kind of people who actually get exercised about that sort of thing – to the extent that they’re willing to use it as a selling point – are generally not politically neutral but trying to signal people who aren’t just politically incorrect but who are unsavory or even criminal.

For example:

Somebody following the nuTSR account noted that that Twitter account is following a “Vargr i’ ve’um” or “Thulean Perspective” whose first profile lists him as “Dissident, gentile, game-designer” and whose second profile claims he is “Officially labeled ‘a disturber of the peace’ by NPCs.”

(Just to bring the meta-commentary full circle, ‘NPC’ is a game term for non-player character, as in, any character or monster run by the game master in an RPG or the engine of a video game, and used as a pejorative by the alternative-to-being-right who think that anybody who disagrees with them is basically getting all their opinions programmed into them by Teh Librul Media. Just as they attack empty-headed media celebrities while worshipping a fake billionaire whose profile was largely a result of the mainstream media pushing him as a celebrity.)

“Thulean Perspective” (sorry, I haven’t bothered to put in all the little Scandinavian accent marks) is a social media profile for Varg Vikernes, who has produced “MYFAROG”, or Mythic Fantasy Role-playing Game, which for some reason he thinks sounds cooler in abbreviation. He was much more famous as a pioneer of Scandinavian Black Metal music, endorsing anti-Christianity and Norse paganism, laced with Nazi-adjacent views including what he calls “racialism.” He became most notorious after endorsing the burning of historic churches in Norway and finally killing “Euronymous”, a former Black Metal colleague. Vikernes was tried and given a 21-year sentence (the maximum possible in Norwegian law) and served 15 years.

Say what you will, he walks the walk.

So if you’re that disgusted with the cosmopolitan leftist agenda, there is certainly a means of rebellion, but how far do you want to go with it?

Certainly both sides have escalated the culture war in this country, but it wasn’t Hillary Clinton’s people who tried to hang the Vice President in 2016 cause the Electoral College didn’t go their way. If the Right wants to know why the Left is so oversensitive and so willing to assume that everyone they don’t like is a fascist, well, it’s because so many of them want to give that impression, saying that they aren’t bigoted while at the same time using Republican state legislatures to pass laws against trans people and some minority voting blocs, while also saying the January 6 Beer Belly Putsch was just a bunch of Trump-loving tourists engaging in free speech and certainly nothing warranting an investigation. It’s the sort of disingenuousness that the Left calls “gaslighting” and I call “don’t piss on my head and tell me it’s raining.”

My take:
Why is D&D under the Wizards label instead of Wizards using the TSR label or Hasbro (WotC’s owner) using the Hasbro label?
Cause Wizards of the Coast, due to Magic and their previous RPG efforts, still had a positive reputation in the industry. A reputation that TSR had by that point squandered.
Whereas Hasbro has a mixed reputation but is mainly associated with family board games.
WotC could have kept the TSR brand to sell D&D along with their Magic product under Wizards, and when Hasbro bought them out, they could have put everything under the Hasbro label. There are reasons why they didn’t. The reputation of D&D is what Wizards and Hasbro are trying to preserve, and it is now associated with them. The reputation of TSR as a business is in hindsight mostly negative.

“nuTSR” isn’t bringing back the E. Gary Gygax tradition of intellectual depth in gaming, it’s bringing back the Gygaxian tradition of presumption and bad business decisions, and only in the latter does it exceed the old master.

The politics aren’t so much the issue, or wouldn’t be if EVERYthing wasn’t a political football these days.
The salient issues are:
A TSR that existed in conjunction with a more established TSR whose holder accidentally let the rights to the IP lapse
Said second TSR basically paying the first (TS:NWO) company a token sum so that they didn’t challenge their IP, cause as the guy said, he didn’t have enough money to sue even if he wanted to
Second TSR trying to promote itself as an old-school successor to classic TSR when they don’t have that company’s most famous property
Not having the other properties (like Star Frontiers) under complete development – or confirmed copyright
Trying to launch a Kickstarter for their Gamma World-type game under dubious circumstances including all of the above

All that, given that everything is a political football, combined with the dubious political tastes of E. Gygax and his business partner just make the thing more skeezy.

And in the meantime this company basically leans into its political incorrectness and victimhood in order to get a customer base without actually delivering anything concrete, which as the alternative-to-being-right goes, is pretty much on brand.

The main lesson I take from all this – other than, Twitter is too aptly named – is that you don’t ever give up your intellectual property, no matter how little money it’s making. Cause some things cost a lot more in the long run.