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.

Liberty Or Death? Why Not Both?

“We’ve got to rise above the need for cops and laws”

-Dead Kennedys, “The Stars and Stripes of Corruption”

The Fox News website said that last week, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire “ignited a social media firestorm” when its Twitter account posted: “Legalize child labor. Children will learn more on a job site than in public school.”

First let me say: I actually agree with this. But that is not an endorsement of child labor so much as my assessment of the public school system.

Now, the text of the article indicated that the LP position had a little more nuance: “”Our proposal is that the minimum age requirement be lowered to 16 without school superintendent approval, if a child is homeschooled, this option is difficult for them,” (party chair) Jarvis said. “We also propose that if a minor has graduated high school or obtained a GED, they have already proven themselves and should not be required to obtain permission to be employed. The law in [New Hampshire] currently prohibits these individuals from seeking employment without a signed written document from a parent on file.”

Even so, 2016 Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson went on record saying, “I’m sorry, but no. This isn’t what libertarianism means to millions of Americans – pushing a disturbing and out of touch stance on child labor is entirely detached from what people need in America today. This does not advance liberty, or help change people’s opinions”. Jiletta Jarvis supported his right to an opinion even though she said “I know that there was an emotional reaction to his criticism and we are working internally on that issue.” Personally I think they should take Johnson more seriously. I mean, he’s the leading expert on how to make libertarianism look bad by taking a public position with absolutely no knowledge of the subject.

As far as the “working internally” on the emotional reactions, this whole thing seems to be just one example of an extremely confusing mini-civil war, where other state parties of the national Libertarian Party are having their say, where Jarvis asserts that “I have watched secret plots occurring” and new members wish to discredit the Party and use the same tactics to take over the Republican Party. The LPNH Executive Committee, or “Mises Caucus” (Twitter page ‘Temporarily the home of the @LPNH Executive and Communications committees’) published a tweet from the Connecticut Party saying “There was no convention … that disaffiliated the original LPNH… Jilletta Jarvis’ actions were not authorized by any noticed meeting under any set of bylaws… Our Regional Representative is ORDERED, DIRECTED and COMMANDED TO BRING A MOTION TO THE LNC FOR THE REMOVAL OF THE CHAIR”.

Now here’s the real fucking joke: Nobody else knows this. There are a few newspaper websites covering the story, but you’d have to know to look for them. The only reason I even bring it up is because I know any time I try to advocate for libertarianism against authority, some smart aleck liberal is gonna look up that LPNH child-labor tweet and go “Yeh whaddya thinka THIS, Mr. Glibertarian? Ha? Ha? HA? Oh, I almost forgot: SOMALIA!!!”

Nobody else is gonna CARE, because it doesn’t matter. For all the impact you actually have, the Libertarian Party may as well be a bunch of SciFi geeks arguing over whether the Millennium Falcon could beat the USS Enterprise, and on that score, the Millennium Falcon is to the Enterprise what your uncle’s 1970 VW stoner van is to a modern US Navy guided missile cruiser, the Falcon is using a point-to-point hyperdrive jump system when the Enterprise can operate at faster-than-light warp speed, and in any case, neither of them are real and at the end of the day you’re just debating the minutiae of fictional fantasy BULLSHIT.

Not that fantasy and science fiction are bad. Take the cellphone. A ubiquitous convenience of modern life. A lot of Star Trek fans would say it was inspired by the flip-communicators the Enterprise crew used in the Original Series. I always thought it was derived from Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone. But in any case, it used to be fiction, and now it’s reality. That’s the difference between supernatural fantasy and science fiction, science fiction shows you that there is a path between desire and reality. But you still have to create that path. You still have to have organization and planning and marketing to get the cellphone to be other than just a cool idea or a project in your friend’s basement. And you also have to acknowledge that some cool ideas are more feasible in the present than others. Our science does not yet allow us a feasible path to cold fusion, the atmospheric conversion engine, or immortality technology, let alone a social system that makes government obsolete. And here’s the thing, we’re that much LESS likely to get there if we disregard what science we do have cause the coronavirus or the vaccine or both are some kind of government conspiracy to control the masses. If you know how many people have already died and you don’t want to get vaccinated cause “FREEDOM” then the Science Fiction future you’re most likely to advance is the one where chimpanzees and gorillas on horseback oversee naked humans in labor camps because We, the People have chosen to become inarticulate apes.

Now, any professional libertarian-hater would be telling you all of this and already has, but I AM a libertarian. If you’re a libertarian who thinks I’m NOT one cause I think we should be practical and reform the government we already have rather than pretend it doesn’t exist, well, who cares? Your premise is, “libertarianism means you can’t label me or tell me what to do.” Right back at you, guy.

And why would I still call myself a (L)ibertarian, especially after this shit? Sadly, it’s the same reason I still called myself a Libertarian in 2016 – as sad as the LP is, the Party of Trump is that much worse. As for the Democrats, I already reconciled myself to the practical reality of having to vote Democratic because the greater evil is not simply disagreeable but an active threat to national security. That doesn’t change the fact that while the Democrats may be the only party with any relation to reality, sometimes it’s hard to tell. At times they seem that much more smug and naive in their assumptions about the world than the Libertarians, and it’s that much more irritating because they claim to know better. They’re constantly telling us all the wonderful stuff that they’re going to do now that they’re in charge, and constantly crying about how they can’t do any of it because the Republican bullies are taking their lunch money every day, and only a few of them have figured out that they need to stop wringing their hands and fight back.

According to a 2021 Gallup poll (that President Biden referred to this week) only 25 percent of voters identify as Republican and only 30 percent identified as Democrats. Now, when you add independents who lean to one faction or the other for practical reasons, you have slightly less than half of polled voters (49%) identifying as Democrat or Democrat-leaning, but only 40 percent of people are Republican or lean Republican. Do the math and that’s a 9 percent gap in favor of the Democratic coalition. But this also means you have 19 percent of voters as “left” independents and 15 percent as “right” independents and when you do that math, that total is 34 percent. So we have reached a point at which the largest group of voters, over a third, might not agree on anything else, but agree they can’t align with the duopoly.

But when someone in the Libertarian Party seriously pushes an idea like child labor, that is to the libs what “Drag Queen Story Hour” is to the conservatives: Waving the freak flag in front of Middle Americans that we might have otherwise been able to persuade.

There was this one guy discussing the subject on YouTube who lamented the situation insofar as libertarians almost don’t want to be taken seriously. They do have some real critiques, such as, that our government is too powerful and unaccountable, or our civilian police are too militarized. He also said that what usually happens when he debates a libertarian is that they’re capable of a cogent argument for about 72 seconds, then they go off into the Ether. That clip also led to the usual dopey, sneering arguments like “libertarians are just Republicans who like pot.” It’s a lot harder to argue the point when libertarians concede it. A lot of them seem to be more exercised about taxes and COVID regulations than the fact that a large segment of the society is more oppressed than white people were under COVID, and have been for decades if not centuries.

But that just gets to the point that the problem is not the stupid leftist caricature. The problem, as with their caricature of the former Republican Party, is when right-wingers obsessively seek to live up to and exceed the caricature. Because a lot of these guys are living on social media and think that the main aspiration of life is to be a cartoon. This is why both libertarians and “conservatives” will promote child labor, or reducing the voter franchise or some other innovation from the 19th Century, cause they’re trying to show their punk rock edge.

And that just gets to the point that you’ve already got one party in government that is actively against government and has written itself out of any idea of what they want to do when they get a majority, that thinks asking what voters want is too much of a compromise of the ideal, that as a result, they’re losing voters left and right, and as a result of that, act like majority rule is communist. I am again reminded of that one time where Thomas Massie, a Republican Congressman who claimed to be libertarian when that was still sorta cool with his team, said: “But then when I went to Iowa (in 2016) I saw that the same people that had voted for Ron Paul weren’t voting for Rand Paul, they were voting for Donald Trump. And the same thing happened in Kentucky, the people who were my voters ended up voting for Donald Trump in the primary. And so I was in a funk because how could these people let us down? How could they go from being libertarian ideologues to voting for Donald Trump? And then I realized what it was: They weren’t voting for the libertarian in the race, they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race when they voted for me and Rand and Ron earlier. So Trump just won, you know, that category, but dumped the ideological baggage.”

If all you have to offer is being the craziest son of a bitch in the race, you can’t compete with what the Party of Trump is now. THEY STOLE YOUR ACT.

Maybe try writing some new material?

With what we have misruling the country, there is plenty of room for alternatives. There is plenty of opportunity for Libertarians to take advantage. Which is why it pisses me off that they refuse to do so.

I am sick and tired of my Party and my movement being taken as a joke.

But apparently you’re not.

So maybe I’m getting sick of you.

REVIEW: Loki

In some respects, the return of Tom Hiddleston to the Marvel Cinematic Universe character of Loki was more anticipated than the last two Disney+ Marvel series, WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Except this is and isn’t Loki from the movies. As a recurring foil in the Thor movies, Loki actually experienced a certain amount of character growth, if only because he realized Thor was starting to see through his schemes, so by the end of Thor:Ragnarok he was there to support him in finding a new home for the Asgardians. But then their ship got attacked by Thanos and Loki ended up dying trying to protect Thor. Then in Endgame the heroes had their “time heist” which required the Avengers to go back to just after they’d defeated the Chitauri invasion and captured Loki, but in a moment of confusion, that Loki escaped. So Loki has effectively been “reset” to just after where he was character-wise at the end of Avengers.

Specifically, Loki stole a Tesseract, which I guess is not THE Tesseract the Avengers needed to build their own Infinity Gauntlet, and wound up in Mongolia, where he was immediately arrested by the “Time Variance Authority” and drafted to help hunt other rogue variables under the supervision of Agent Mobius, played by Owen Wilson, which brings to mind the question of what a Marvel movie would look like if it was directed by Wes Anderson.

Loki does have something like that droll sense of humor, but to judge from only the first episode, it’s just setting up the basic premise. Apparently some triad of cosmic beings set up “the sacred timeline” in order to prevent the sort of chaos that happens with a multiverse (for examples of such, try to map the continuity of Star Trek and Doctor Who. Or lack thereof). However Loki‘s main writer, Michael Waldron, is also writing Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, so that title already tells you where things are going. In fact based on the rumors about the crossovers in the next Spider-Man movie, it seems as though this narrative and the end-credits scene of the last WandaVision are moving towards a storyline that will string together the various Marvel projects in Phase 4 the way the Infinity Gauntlet arc did with the prior movies, not to mention using the “multiverse” to justify Marvel finally getting to use all those intellectual properties that they sold to other movie studios and that Disney bought back.

Loki the “variant” plays into this once Agent Mobius puts him face to face with his own evil and causes him to realize that his own desire for control over others stems from a lack of control over life. In his attempts to escape, he ends up playing the reel of his life in the “sacred timeline”, and, realizing he can’t go back and that the TVA basically collects Infinity Stones in their desks, sees that there is no point in continuing as he was. This works mainly because Mr. Shakespearean Actor Hiddleston sells it so well, but also because Owen Wilson is a serious grounding influence, or as serious as Owen Wilson ever gets.

This relationship is clearly going to be the core of the series, and that alone is worth the price of admission, although with Loki, even more than the first two Marvel Disney Plus series, it’s hard to tell how it will play out from just the first episode.

REVIEW: Army of the Dead

I have already gone over how much I don’t like Zack Snyder. More than once. Well, actually 300 was pretty good as a straight translation of Frank Miller’s militarist cartoon, and Watchmen was about as good as you can get making that series as a feature-length movie instead of the 12-part HBO series it should have been. But when Snyder moved his ultraviolence to the realm of actual four color superheroes, especially Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, it was clear that he didn’t get the point of those characters and the limitations of his tropes became that much more obvious. I have been told his remake of George A. Romero’s zombie classic Dawn Of The Dead was actually pretty good (if you like that sort of thing, which I don’t). So there was a certain amount of buzz when Snyder announced his next project was the straight-to-Netflix Army of the Dead.

What I don’t like about some movies is how they rely on what Siskel and Ebert called “the idiot plot” – as in, the plot can only proceed if the characters are idiots. In this case an Army convoy carrying a payload from “you know where” gets derailed by a pair of newlyweds on the road when they perform a maneuver you would know not to try if you’d ever seen The World According to Garp. As a result the “payload”, a zombie who seems as buff and invulnerable as the Hulk gets out, kills the soldiers and infects at least two of them, becoming the ‘patient zero’ who zombifies most of Vegas. At this point, you have another patented Snyder slo-mo montage for the opening credits, and the soundtrack is Richard Cheese singing ‘Viva Las Vegas’ as topless zombie showgirls eat a tourist in his hotel room. So already it’s going pretty good.

The movie stars Dave Bautista (Guardians of the Galaxy), and he’s actually pretty good as a burned-out veteran who lost his wife in the zombie plague then helped another housewife find her daughter in the chaos of Las Vegas only to see both of them get taken down by zombies just as the government literally dropped a barrier around the city (another essential plot point that makes absolutely no sense if you think about it at all). Now his daughter is a volunteer at the refugee camp the government set up outside the barrier, and those people are all supposed to be sent to Barstow before the military nukes the city and gets it over with. But before that, a billionaire casino owner hires Bautista to break into his casino and pull out its cash reserves from the safe, promising 50 million dollars to him and his crew. Naturally it turns out to be not that simple.

I don’t take Zombie Apocalypse shit very seriously, and it’s clear that Snyder doesn’t either, but there are some real moments of pathos within the black humor, such as the old man who finally hits the jackpot at the slot machine just as the zombies are flooding the casino. But overall, I’d say this is the best Zack Snyder movie I’ve seen, in that the ultraviolence actually works with the genre (if you ever wanted to see what a severed head looks like when it hits the ground from a great height, here ya go). And Snyder actually manages to cut down on the muddy shots and slow-motion action. Most of the time. And it comes down to the fact that Army of the Dead is actually fun, and that is not a word I normally associate with zombie movies, and even less with Zack Snyder movies.

It’s also a really good movie about Las Vegas insofar as it teaches the most important lesson about going to Vegas: The trick is not to make the money. The trick is to get out of town with it.

Back To Abnormal

The Sunday before last, I got a rough experience in “the new normal.”

I work evening shift (covering after-hours) for a call center, starting at 5:30 pm. I got in my car at 4:15 pm thinking I could get some fast food from a drive-thru, and then swing back home in time to finish my food before my work-at-home shift started. I forgot that “fast food” is one of those obsolete terms like “theatrical release” or “free and fair elections.”

The McDonald’s nearest my house had at least ten cars rolled around the building and that line didn’t look to be moving any time soon. At 4:30 I flipped around to the Jack In The Box where there was only one car at the drive-thru but had to wait several minutes overhearing the customer and the intercom cashier having some conversation that sounded even more stoned than usual for a Jack In The Box customer and/or employee. So when the girl finally pulled forward I wanted to order just two things and the cashier said, “I’m sorry, but the order ahead of you is literally 250 dollars, and the kitchen is going to be occupied. Can you wait 20 minutes?”

“No.”

(Actually, I wanted to say ‘Fuck You gently with a chainsaw’, but that would have taken too much time.)

If I have to spend more time at a drive-thru waiting for food than I would in a sit-down restaurant, doesn’t that defeat the whole concept of DRIVE-THRU FAST FOOD?!?

By this time it was just about 5, the Mexican drive-thru joint in the neighborhood is closed Sundays, so is the sushi joint, and the only other thing I could think of was this place on East Desert Inn that used to be a Del Taco and is now a fried chicken-soul food joint called Golden Bird Chicken. I was reluctant to do so because they had at best ‘eh’ food and their service was as slow as an arthritic tree on the handful of occasions I had tried them. I went inside because (this is another omen) they didn’t even HAVE drive-thru service the first couple times I went there, that’s how fucking slow they were, they put a garbage can in the drive-thru lane because they knew they couldn’t work that fast. I had to wait behind one guy in line and I ordered two barbeque chicken sandwiches cause I figure all they would need to do is take some chop-parts, sauce them and put them on a bun. There was only the one manager on duty, I didn’t see anybody at the grill for several minutes and it was about 5:15 when I asked if they were getting to my order and the manager asked his one employee on staff if they had the makings for BBQ chicken sandwiches and the guy said “no.” Gee, it would have been nice to know that BEFORE taking my debit card. So I waited a little longer for a transaction cancellation but the manager apparently couldn’t coordinate between the previous customer and the one guy who braved the drive-thru long enough to him to cancel the Goddamn transaction for the food I was NOT getting, and he was making me late for work.

So I said, “Congratulations, I just paid you 8 dollars for nothing” and walked out. I barely had time to get to work and I ended up having to order something delivered from a pizza joint, which of course had to be eaten on the side cause I was at work.

By the way, to anybody who lives in Las Vegas: FUCK Golden Bird Chicken. I am NOT going back there, and if you’re thinking about trying them, DON’T.

But if you look at social media, you might have seen a few other complaints about this issue, but most of them are from the managers of chain restaurants themselves. Several people now have to live on the government’s Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC), a feature of the CARES Act signed by President Biden, where they get $300 a month. Several Republican Senators are asking Biden to reduce or end the benefits even as some states are reviewing their own unemployment benefits.

Apparently in the Chamber of Commerce’s own analysis, “the $300 benefit results in approximately one in four recipients taking home more in unemployment than they earned working.” Divide 300 by 40 hours a week. That’s 7.5 dollars an hour. Gross pay. Just slightly more than the Federal minimum wage, which hasn’t increased since 2009.

If business in this country can’t compete with THAT level of pay, then maybe this Trump economy wasn’t as gangbusters as we all thought.

As I’ve said: All minimum wage means is that if it were legal for the company to pay you less than that, then they would. And that’s because your job, relative to the cost of hiring your replacement, is only worth that much to the company or less. If it was worth more, they would pay more.

As flawed and hypocritical as the Left can be, they have hit on a key hypocrisy of the Right: They don’t want a laissez-faire economy any more than the Left does.

Yeah, maybe a lot of these fast-food places are actually run by franchisees, and maybe the manager at Golden Bird Chicken is running with the money in his till and that’s it, but a lot of the joints that plead poverty are still associated with major chains, and their collective resources are being used to put themselves at priority ahead of the smaller operators. Like, if you wonder why the food at your favorite bar got so expensive all of a sudden, it’s because the shift to delivery and crash in sit-down eating thanks to Trump Virus (TM) meant that the chains with more buying power than the local bar needed more chicken and other meat and were able to snap up the food supply.

Much like how Walmart used its collective resources to drink every local store’s milkshake and make them uncompetitive and now everyone wonders why Walmart is the only store in town and no one can afford to shop anywhere besides Walmart.

What certain business owners are really complaining about is that The Law of Supply and Demand is real, and now it’s finally starting to work both ways. The Left doesn’t like that aspect of capitalism (or capitalism in general) because the worker usually gets the wrong end of the deal, but certain economic principles are called “laws” because they apply and have been proven to exist regardless of culture and place. It used to be that workers had to put up with shit conditions and wages because there were always more workers than jobs, but apparently that’s no longer the case. So of course wages are going up. Not as much as some people would like, but they are. I mean the Speedee Mart gas station near my place is posting for jobs starting at $12 an hour. I never thought I’d see wages like that at a convenience store. That’s close to what I started at with my current job when I joined a few years ago and I’ve had raises since then.

As I said in one of my first posts:
“(C)onservatives and libertarians mostly think that we shouldn’t make the welfare system too “cushy” because that will de-incentivize work since at some level you could get a better standard of living without working. But that policy has two issues: One, given the “Puritan work ethic” of this country, it’s very unlikely that we ever will have a comprehensive welfare state on the level of an EU country, at least not with our current political class. And two, given that fact, the gradual desertion of the workforce is not so much because the benefits of welfare are so great, but because the benefits of work are so meager. Put another way, if you’re going to be just scraping by whether you have a job or not, you might as well be just scraping by with plenty of free time on the government dole as opposed to just scraping by while busting your ass over 40 hours a week. “

This country didn’t suddenly get socialist. On the whole, you’ve still got the same Ayn Rand-meets-Puritanism approach to welfare in America, and the government’s current level of unemployment benefits is actually more stingy than what businesses had been paying, just as our “socialist” minimum wage was already less than what the market would bear even before Trump Virus, when most fast-food joints had to pay at least a dollar over the Federal minimum to hire people. But now that the country has created a situation where many people weren’t allowed to work, the dynamic has tipped.

And just think, this change happened all because of Donald Trump, our most freeist market, capitalest president EVAR!

I mean maybe this isn’t capitalism in the libertarian, laissez-faire sense, but in the sense of “the economy works because actions have consequences”, maybe it is.

All this gets into how the Left can be philosophically wrong yet be on the right side of the political debate. Like how they say “healthcare is a human right,” which is bullshit. Not that we don’t NEED healthcare, I mean that it’s the wrong argument. You have people running certain parts of government who don’t think we HAVE rights, such as the right not to get killed by a cop for a non-capital crime, or the right to vote if it’s not for a Republican, so don’t try to persuade those people with rights you made up. Nobody, even on the Left, thinks that an interstate highway system is a “human right”, but we paid for it – at least we used to – because everyone saw it as a common benefit. That’s how you need to phrase this.

You don’t pay people 300 bucks a week (which is conditional in any case) because you want to encourage mooching. You do it because it would take the economy that much longer to recover if we had that many more able-bodied and gainfully employed people made homeless in less than a year because The Greatest President The Business Community Ever Had decided that coronavirus wasn’t real and therefore we didn’t need to account for face-to-face services having to shut down across the country.

But hey, at least you got that Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, huh? How’s that working out now?

If even $300 a week is more than 25 percent of unemployment recipients got from working, by the CoC’s own estimate, then that shows how much they got from working. As a right-winger, I can conditionally tolerate unemployment supports until we get this country and economy back to normal. The fact that the business community thinks that $300 a week is spoiling people means that the status quo pre-COVID really wasn’t normal.

And as with a lot of other things, the solution is not to go back to normal, but to find something better than normal, because ‘normal’ was how everything got fucked in the first place.

GAME REVIEW: The Hammer and the Stake (Quickstart)

Here’s one from left-field, so to speak.

I was reading Facebook recently and my old gamer friend Jerry Grayson posted a Kickstarter campaign for an indie press role-playing game called The Hammer and the Stake by the company Weaponized Ink. The premise, from the ad: “Following the Great War and the disastrous Treaty of Trianon, Count Dracula engineers a fascist vampire-coup in Hungary and Romania and establishes himself as the autocrat of the newly created Nagy-Magyarország (‘Greater Hungary’).

“Proletariat freedom fighters work to overthrow Dracula’s despotic-aristocratic regime. The threat is very real, Dracula’s magic is powerful enough to make manifest the worst fears of Marx.

“Time is of the essence. If Dracula’s minions are left unchecked, the people will literally lose their identities and become lumpenproles – beaten down degenerate servants of the Dracula regime.

“You play one of the heroic socialists fighting to liberate the people from both the invisible hand of Adam Smith as well as despotic vampire overlords.”

The funny thing is that if you took the whole vampire mythology out of this premise, it’s still fairly similar to what actually happened to Hungary after 1918.

I want to go into that background but if the real-world history doesn’t appeal to you, you can skip over this next part. Of course if a game dealing with Marxism, 1920’s Hungary and vampires doesn’t appeal to you, you probably shouldn’t be reading any of this.

The History

In 1848, Hungary unsuccessfully rebelled against the old-world Austrian Empire, but they were a strong enough plurality in the Empire to where Austria decided to give them autonomy. By 1867, they came up with a compromise: Austria would restore the Kingdom of Hungary (and the historic Crown of St. Stephen) and in exchange the Hungarians would accept Austria’s Emperor as their King. This led to an unusual (and ultimately unworkable) arrangement called the “Dual Monarchy.” Essentially, Austria-Hungary was two nations with one monarch (and even then he had two official titles). The two nations had two capitals, two parliaments, two sets of laws, everything. How did this work when the dual nation had to have one military command and Austria-Hungary ended up starting World War I? Not that well. Austria-Hungary was the main ally of the German Empire (the ‘bad guys’ of World War I) but Germany ended up having to bail out Austria-Hungary in its various campaigns against the Serbs, the Italians, the Romanians and even the Russians.

When Germany’s coalition, the Central Powers, was defeated by the Allies in 1918, the various subject nations of Central Europe, including Poland, rebelled and sought independence. With various peace treaties, not only did Germany lose it’s Polish and French-speaking territory, Austria and Hungary lost everything outside their modern borders. In the case of Austria, that was the Polish province of Galicia, modern Slovenia and Croatia, Tyrolean Italy and the modern Czech Republic. Hungary had controlled Slovakia, a north Serbian province called Novi Sad, and the historic Romanian province of Transylvania. Hungary didn’t want to lose its “Greater” territories any more than Germany did, because there were still large groups of ethnic Hungarians outside the postwar border. The remaining Allied coalition of France, Romania and the south Slavic states tried to advance into Hungary to enforce post-war borders even as Marxist revolution sparked in Russia and other places including Germany and eventually Hungary. Marxists led by Bela Kun and other Jewish intellectuals took over the transition government and in direct communication with Lenin’s Russian government called their state the “Hungarian Soviet Republic.” The Allied land grab made the revolution both easier and more difficult, because the liberal-reformist government that the Marxists overthrew had no plan to defend Hungary’s territory, yet as hostilities continued, the threat of Leninist-style socialism in Central Europe galvanized the Allies even as the Kun government sought to create ethnic Soviet satellites in Slovakia and elsewhere, undermining Hungarian nationalism for the sake of international revolution.

The main fighting occurred between Hungary and Romania with Romania eventually taking the capital of Budapest, with Kun and his comrades being forced to flee. Hungary ended up with a fascist-adjacent government that continued to press for the restoration of “Greater” Hungary and only somewhat succeeded by allying with Nazi Germany after 1940. The right-wing government also persecuted Jews for their disproportionate presence in the Marxist revolt, but they didn’t attack them nearly as much as the Nazis. In fact, it was after the Hungarian fascist regime refused to turn over its Jews to the Nazi death camps that Hitler overthrew the government. Of course by that time the Soviets were on track to take Budapest.

Then there’s the bit where Hungary, Marxism and vampires link up in the real world: Bela Lugosi, the legendary Dracula actor, was not only a Transylvanian Hungarian, he was a union organizer in a film actors’ union in Hungary, which may have been one of the first screen actors’ unions in the world. Since the unions were aligned with the Hungarian Soviet Republic, Lugosi ended up having to flee the country when the revolution was quashed, and he ended up in the States.

And now you know… the rest of… the story.

The System

The product currently available for The Hammer and the Stake (on the DriveThruRPG site) is called The Workers’ Primer. It specifically says “THIS IS THE PLAYTEST!” It also says that to get full rules you would go to the Discord or Facebook pages for Weaponized Ink, which seem to be more update pages than anything else. So keeping all that in mind, the book currently is 53 pages in PDF, very little layout and very little art.

The opening section goes into how the “Greater Hungary” of this fictional world is that much more backward and repressed than historical 1920s Central Europe on purpose. “Dracula, now elevated to lord of Greater Hungary, tears away the structure of progress to permanently keeps the people as his slaves.” Page 8 has a map confirming that this isn’t the only difference. There is still a Soviet Union, but Finland is still owned by Sweden, Ireland is still part of the United Kingdom, and France is called the “United Angevin Kingdom.” In the south, Italy and Albania have cut big chunks out of Yugoslavia. But the Nagy-Magyarország described in the setting isn’t on the map, just the borders of real-world Hungary and Romania. (This territory also has a crayon mark around it, which implies this is something they’re going to correct later.) So clearly this isn’t just “take the real world and add vampires”, it’s a straight-up alternate history, but at this point there isn’t much background or explanation for it.

After page 8, the book goes into the rules. The core mechanic of The Hammer and the Stake is where you take two six-sided dice and bet against a number. In other words, craps. In the game terms glossary, they also refer to this mechanism as The System (‘A shooter is trying to beat The System’). However (also not unlike craps or roulette) only one player at the table rolls the dice. They don’t say how the players decide who this is, or whether the shooter position is allowed to change during a game.

The only input other players have on task resolution is wagering what number comes up on the dice, where the number of wagers a player can make is based on their relevant Attribute (so if Physical is relevant and the character has Physical 2 they can place two wagers on the roll) and the range of numbers they can bet is based on their rating in a relevant Skill (where a Skill rating of 1 means you can only bet on 12, and a Skill rating of 5 means you can bet on any number but 7, which automatically fails). You can also bet banked Experience Points on a wager but this is another one of those bits that needs editing- on page 12 it says a successful wager with XP gets the point back, but page 17 says you get the point back plus an additional XP. But it also says that you can wager on rolling a 7 regardless of your skill level, then says “An XP wager is lost if a 7 comes up the number before the wagered number.” I’m not even sure this is grammatical. And the rules already confirm a 7 is normally a failure, but does it count as a success if you actually bet on it?

Not only that, it’s an unorthodox role-playing system – and not in a good way – because most games assume that every player gets to roll dice. In this system you basically bet that a certain result comes about and then wait to see if the other player succeeds for you. Is this mechanic the game designers’ attempt to simulate democratic centralism?

The system also has some narrative-style modifiers. Pages 20 to 22 go over how one uses Advantages and Hindrances to set up the stakes of a scene and the characters’ end goals. In game, an Advantage allows a player to ignore the results of one roll. A Hindrance expands the range of failure, so that one Hindrance cancels a success on a 3 and four Hindrances would cancel success on 3 through 6. As with other narrative games, the factors are agreed to by the GM and players, and are pretty subjective. A violent crowd might count as an Advantage if a character is trying to slip away from a Vampire’s goons. Cover or poor visibility would be examples of Hindrances in combat.

The game says that The Hammer and the Stake defaults to scene resolution rather than task resolution. The Skill used in the scene should be relevant to the hardest task in the overall goal. Thus, if a player wants their character to sneak into a building and then place a bomb, the GM decides which of the two actions is harder and then has the player roll on that skill. This may be why only one player gets to roll; the game says the GM should only require rolls in high-stakes situations with serious consequences and “in general, scenes are resolved with a single roll that involves multiple characters and multiple actions.” Given that the roll is supposed to be based on the skill deemed relevant for the scene, I assume that the players pick the shooter based on which character in the scene has the best Skill rating, but this isn’t made clear.

Combat in “THATS” is an extension of this concept, with the use of consequences, that is, wounds. Unarmed attacks and most firearms do one Minor Wound, a rifle does two Minor Wounds, a shotgun or sword does a Major Wound and a machine gun or other heavy weapon does a Lethal Wound. “Minor” means that the character suffers one level of Hindrance, where multiple Minor Wounds in excess of Physical Attribute upgrade the Hindrance by one level. Any Minor Wounds after that point increase the Hindrance on a one-for-one basis. A Major Wound acts as a Hindrance but if the character takes Major Wounds in excess of Physical rating, they are taken out by the pain. Regardless of whether the character remains conscious, they must seek medical attention after the battle scene or die within an hour. A Lethal Wound means the character is taken out and will die if they are not attended to in a number of minutes equal to their Physical Attribute. It’s also mentioned that during a combat scene other characters can attempt other actions such as running for cover or rescuing civilians, which I presume is where their wagers come in.

The game also refers to this overall system as the Fides system, which is a bit ironic – I assume this is taken from the Latin for “faith” but it also resembles Fidesz, which is the name of the neo-fascist party that’s actually running Hungary now.

Characters

At page 32, the game details the character creation mechanics that the previous pages alluded to. Before you even go over those, your first step is to pick a faction within the setting’s CRF (Carpathian Revolutionary Front). There are eight of them, including a feminist group that is “no longer formally part of the CRF” and a group of Christian socialists who are considered the group experts on the occult and vampirism. There are a variety of views represented so that you’re not just dealing with The Judean Peoples’ Front versus The Peoples’ Front of Judaea. Each sub-society also has its own game benefit (or Faction Ability) that can be invoked in specific circumstances to either add a bonus wager or give the player a bit of narrative control in the scene.

Character Attributes are simple: Mental, Physical and Social. They are given a 1-2-3 priority such that the primary is rank 3, the secondary is rank 2 and the tertiary is rank 1. Remember, if a roll depends on a raw attribute, the character only gets so many wagers times that Attribute rating. It’s implied that an Attribute can get as high as 5 with XP.

Characters get 15 Skill points that are assigned on a one-for-one basis, with no Skill being no higher than rank 5, where that’s the best you can get in the system above). You can also get a Specialization for any skill of 4 or higher by spending two Skill points. It’s not mentioned here (but is mentioned on page 18) that a Specialization that is relevant to a roll allows the player to spend one XP (that does not come back) to substitute one die on the roll, but the result only applies to your character. You get two Abilities, although one must be the Faction Ability. The general Ability list is on pages 40-41.

“Fifth, and finally, pick a name and a revolutionary handle (code name). Develop a background.”

It’s also mentioned here and earlier on pages 17 and 18 that a character starts with 3 XP and gets 3 XP each game. The character is allowed (or encouraged) to wager them on throws; an XP wager can negate a Hindrance, or allow an additional wager in excess of the character’s Attribute. If the wager is a success the character gets the point back plus an additional point (again, that’s not totally clear). XP can be saved between sessions. An Attribute can be improved at a cost of current rating x 5. Skills can be improved at a cost of current rating x 2 (it’s not mentioned how or if you can buy a Skill you don’t already have). Specializations and Talents can be purchased for 10 XP each. (‘Talents will be explained in the full version of the rules.’)

Setting

Page 43 starts the section “Building The Revolution: Getting Into The Setting”. Marxists are very big on using propaganda to demonize fascists and reactionaries (which often means anyone who disagrees with them) as monsters and bloodsuckers. Since the bad guys in THATS are actual bloodsuckers, this works. Given that this is a world where vampires exist, there is brief speculation on whether Marx in his works referred to the parasite class rhetorically or if he knew the occult truth and was speaking in code. The text refers to a CRF Commissariat that screens cells for internal subversion and potential counter-revolutionary behavior, such as certain underground book clubs selling philosophically fascist material. (‘Those book-clubs no longer exist.’)

The text focuses on Budapest as a setting, even though the CRF knows that Hungary is a front government and Dracula is actually running affairs by proxy from his Transylvanian stronghold, which is why they’re the Carpathian Revolutionary Front and not the Hungarian Revolutionary Front. Budapest is historically two cities, the aristocratic Buda on the left bank of the Danube River and the more industrial Pest on the right. In the real world the two municipalities united ages ago, but in this world the two cities are separated and guarded by the Border Police, as Buda is effectively a “gated community.” Pest is best described as “grey, bleak and industrial” and also “squalid and grim.” Security patrols (and public hangings) are prominent and meant to cow the population into submission. The press is forbidden, the cinema is endangered and radios require a permit. For similar reasons, as mentioned in the introduction, the level of technology is deliberately reduced from the historical norm. “Many middle-class bourgeosies (sic) families who remain comfortable and paid in hard currency think the return of gaslights has made their fair city ‘quaint’ once again. They also gossip that the increase in bicycles has beatified the city, and permitted them to avoid any real traffic while they ride in their petrol-powered cars. These same families also bitterly complain about the homeless workers and their families cluttering up the streets and bridges.”

Then they give you “A Handful of Aristocratic Enemies” – actually two. They are a template for Secret Police and another for a “Nosferatu Human-Thrall” which has some vampire powers although it isn’t clear if this character is an example of a full vampire or merely a “Renfield.” Based simply on Skills the secret policeman is a lot more tough; it’s mentioned that a vampire is vulnerable to holy, magical and wooden weapons but it doesn’t say whether they are any less vulnerable to other weapons.

Conclusion

The premise of The Hammer and the Stake is communist propaganda presented more-or-less straight, amd even though the antagonists are genuine bad guys, I have problems with this approach, because Bela Kun and the other communists of Hungary were bloodthirsty incompetents, they were no less so than the ones in Russia and other countries who had more time to kill the people they didn’t like, and when Marxist revolutionaries did succeed in Russia, China and elsewhere, they created gulags, mass famine, “struggle sessions” and a global death toll that everyone agrees was in tens of millions, and no one can agree on the exact figure of how many tens of millions because of politics and a desire to question exactly how many of those dead were killed accidentally or on purpose, as if it makes a difference.

But that’s just quibbling.

There’s certainly tons of atmosphere and potential in this game’s premise, but the real issue is in the game itself. I mean, if you want to turn people off of capitalism by convincing them it’s a pointless game that can only have one winner, you’ve already got MONOPOLY. If you want to make socialism look like a constructive alternative to the present, you don’t want to communicate to players that they have no agency. Again, having only one person who can roll dice is not only against most people’s assumption of a role-playing game, it works best if you’re already familiar with craps, and the end result of that means the game in play would come off as a lot more Rat Pack than Red Army.

There’s also the point that in its current stage, The Hammer and the Stake is a bit raw; there is an example presented for how The System works from the perspective of the active shooter but it really needs an example of how a player character team places multiple wagers and how they can be used to create multiple successes. The text implies this is possible but it isn’t clear in showing how it works. There are also bits alluded to but not detailed, such as how stress or mystical attacks can spiritually drain a character and turn them into a passive “Lumpenproletariat.” Not to hold this against the authors, since they did explain this is a work in progress. But as such, I’d have to give The Hammer and the Stake a grade of Incomplete.

However, if the concept appeals to you, you can go to DriveThruRPG, buy the Quickstart, and organize to seize the means of platelet production!

If Pro Is The Opposite Of Con, What Is The Opposite Of Progress?

“Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”

-Joe Biden, 2019

Among numerous other bits in the news recently, people are still debating the potential impact of the “election reforms” passed by the Republican government in Georgia. Defenders are telling cynics to “read what it actually says.” The text is here. https://www.legis.ga.gov/api/legislation/document/20212022/201121 It starts off in a fairly defensive manner, Section 2 pointing out that “Many Georgia election processes were challenged in court, including the subjective signature-matching requirements, by Georgians on all sides of the political spectrum”, eliding the point that none of these court challenges produced fruit because the election processes were found valid, and concluding therefore that “changes made in this legislation in 2021 are designed to address the lack of elector confidence in the election system on all sides of the political spectrum”, which is a subjective interpretation at best, given that the lack of successful challenges meant that the only people creating a lack of confidence in the system were Donald Trump and the political party that gives his fingers a reach they would otherwise lack. Many conservative media have pushed their own defenses of the law, and some of them make a little sense. Like, the fact that the runoff period after the general election is now only four weeks. I don’t see why the race had to go into January. A runoff by definition means there are only two candidates left and everyone already knows who they are.

But if you’re criminalizing getting people food and water who are standing in line to vote, and are standing in long lines for extended periods BECAUSE the government has also reduced the number of polling places and hours, then clearly this is the political class picking its voters instead of the other way around, because they saw how a get-out-the-vote campaign shifted the results in Georgia, and they don’t want that happening again.

I am reminded of the old Libertarian joke that government is the guy who breaks your leg and then hands you a crutch and says ‘if it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t be able to walk.’ Well, in this case Republicans are more laissez-faire than the Libertarians, cause they won’t even give you the crutch.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that this is a good-faith position. Cause we know that in Florida, Catholic Cuban and Venezuelan communities came out in a big way to vote for Trump and other Republicans last November. If black communities were the stable base for Republicans that Florida Cubans are, they wouldn’t be pulling this shit. Nevertheless, they are pulling this shit, because black vote turnout was critical in winning Georgia for Democrats. So saying they’re only targeting racial communities for political reasons rather than actual racism is either a chicken-or-the-egg question or a distinction without a difference.

I actually kind of think that for all their flapping of fans, Republicans lean into how much liberals hate the idea of not giving water to voters in (post-summer) Georgia, because that’s what conservatives do these days, embrace their heel status as a sort of punk rock credential. It’s also distracted the press from the real problem with S.B. 202: Section 5 amends existing Code 21-2-30 to create a State Election Board which does not include the Secretary of State (who previously had authority over elections and who was personally leaned on by Trump to conjure votes he did not have) and in Section 6, the bill directs that “After following the procedures set forth in Code Section 21-2-33.2, the State Election Board may suspend county or municipal superintendents and appoint an individual to serve as the temporary superintendent in an election.”

Again, there were existing rules that highly benefited Republicans (for one thing, in the 2018 Governor’s race, Stacey Abrams was defeated by Republican Brian Kemp, who was still serving as the Secretary of State overseeing his own election). These were modified only as necessary last year because there was a global pandemic. Democrats played by Republican rules and still won, and Republican officials and judges determined that the results were indeed valid. So now they’re trying to change the rules so that such a result can never happen again.

Basically these guys had the same goal as Donald Trump, this is just the difference between Lawful Evil and Chaotic Stupid.

Make no mistake: This is how the government works in Russia. This is how the government works in Venezuela. This is how governments worked under the Warsaw Pact: You could say you had a “Democratic Republic” and maybe even have more than one opposition party, but somehow they would never have enough votes to win, or even come close. That’s the goal.

And that is why Democrats and the other NotRepublicans of America are looking to see what Washington is going to do about all this. That and other things. After another round or two of shootings, pardon me if I gloss over the details, President Joe Biden announced on April 8 that he is “trying to limit ‘ghost guns’ and make it easier for people to flag family members who shouldn’t be allowed to purchase firearms with a series of executive actions taken Thursday in the wake of recent mass shootings.” In response, Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott declared that Texas was going to be a “Second Amendment sanctuary state.” Then a few hours later Abbott had to express that he was praying for victims of a shooting in Bryan, Texas.

I actually have to agree with Senator John Kennedy (BR.- Louisiana) when he said, “We don’t need more gun control. We need more idiot control.” The problem is that in both cases, it’s his party that’s getting in the way of that, because if there’s anything they love more than guns, it’s idiots.

New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait quotes Andrew McCarthy in National Review, saying “The conservative movement has argued for decades that the problem with voting is that too many people do it because it’s too convenient. ‘Voting is a privilege,’ National Review’s Andrew McCarthy argues. (A privilege, not a right.) ‘It would be far better if the franchise were not exercised by ignorant, civics-illiterate people, hypnotized by the flimflam that a great nation needs to be fundamentally transformed rather than competently governed.” And I’d agree with that too. And to elaborate on my last paragraph, the problem isn’t the superficial truth of the Republican statement, it’s the deeper truth that they are the problem they claim to be against, since the whole premise of modern Republican politics is preying on civic illiteracy, selling emotionalism and flimflam, teaching people that what we need is not competent government but a transformation away from the Founders’ Republic. The irony being that while the Founders intended counter-majoritarian systems to act as a check on the civic illiterates, this agenda is never going to appeal to a majority and can only work if a gullible plurality is allowed to rule over them.

So since one faction of this “two party system” is so malign that it’s worse than useless, that means everyone is obliged to see what the Democrats are going to do whether we like them or not. And that means Democrats have to consider not only their near-infinite desires but their very limited room to move.

Whereas the Republican platform as of the 2020 convention is literally “we continue to support Donald Trump’s America First agenda” (and we can see exactly how they’re planning to do that), the Democratic platform is basically giving the Federal government that much more control over our affairs, given that certain states are creating supporting evidence that they shouldn’t be running without supervision from Washington. But this unitary agenda, not even considering the social angle, implies a lot more legislation, and a LOT more spending, which really means a lot more taxes, though they’re hoping you won’t notice that part.

I am still basically a Reason Magazine, Niskanen Center, center-right type of guy. I still think that John Maynard Keynes was the worst thing to happen in Western economics last century, although not because his theories were invalid. In fact, the older I get, the more I see how right they were. It’s just that they set the wrong example. The main dynamic of Keynesianism is what he called “countercyclical spending”, or what I might call counterintuitive spending, where the government spends money when there is no money (like in a recession or depression) to “prime the pump” and then cuts back on spending when the private economy is flush. This seems counterintuitive because the government is spending money when there isn’t any revenue from the private sector, but that’s the point: In tough times (like now) there isn’t any other source of money, so it has to be created. The problem is that you take on debt. Which leads to the real problem with Keynesianism, which is that both parties dismiss the other side of the countercycle, cutting spending (and even raising taxes) during a boom period. For obvious reasons, Republicans are loath to raise taxes and even Democrats have become leery of doing so, but neither party is that concerned with cutting spending, which is why the overall size of government increases under Democrats and why the debt increases are even greater under “fiscally conservative” Republicans and especially under the Trump Organization.

Again, this is one of those times when you need to have government spend money that the private sector can’t, so I’m not doctrinaire libertarian on this, but just as the Laffer Curve is a curve and not an a priori axiom that “lower taxes equal more government revenue”, taking on more debt does not automatically lead to greater prosperity. Just ask Italy or Greece. Creditors accept a large debt load only if the party in question has so many assets that it’s more feasible to let them hold the debt than to make them default. In the case of the US government, our assets are such that “the full faith and credit” of the country allows us to take on a debt that would be unimaginable to anyone else. But that assumes we’ll be good for it, and further financial mismanagement and incompetence may change that assumption.

Keynesianism only works because of the ancient principle, “If you owe the bank 100 dollars, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank 100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.”

Come to think of it, that’s pretty much Donald Trump’s whole approach to finance.

Which is why Democrats aren’t going to care about the consequences of taxing and spending, cause they’ve got this thing called MMT, Modern Monetary Theory, or as I call it, Magical Monetary Theory, cause it holds that since government creates money, government is the source of capital, and therefore any degree of desired spending can be justified as necessary and beneficial to the economy. And the laugh is that the best evidence for this “deficits don’t matter” attitude were the Administrations of George W. Bush and Donald J. Trump, the free-marketest, most libertarianist president EVAR.

Like it matters, because there are limits to how much the President can do by executive order, and there are even more limits to how much the House can do without the Senate, because even if Democrats have a technical majority, in practice the chamber operates under a lazy version of the filibuster where the minority party doesn’t even have to hold the floor as long as they announce their attention to vote as a bloc to prevent a three-fifths majority vote. And this is why the liberal media was all aflutter at the announcement that Democrats are able to proceed with one more budget reconciliation bill this year (on the grounds that one was never passed for the 2020 fiscal year), because rather than hash things out with the other party like grownups (because the other party are not grownups), the Democrats who supposedly control the chamber have to wait for the word of the Senate Parliamentarian like she is the Oracle of Delphi.

There was an opinion recently from Jessica Levinson at MSNBC: “Democrats have the power to save democracy. Here’s why they won’t.“

Essentially, the only way Democrats can actually use their majority is to get rid of the filibuster, at least provisionally, but the main reason they don’t is that just as Republicans need it to keep such power as they still have while a minority, some Democrats want to keep the filibuster for the same reason, remembering how Harry Reid changed the cloture rules so that a filibuster is not required for judicial nominees, and then seeing how Mitch McConnell used that new standard to help Donald Trump flood the courts with new conservative appointees.

Perhaps it hasn’t occurred to these unnamed Democrats that the only reason they even have a technical majority is because Raphael Warnock was elected Senator from Georgia, the 2020 runoff election was to fill the last two years of a seat where the previous (Republican) Senator had to retire, Warnock has to run again for a regular six-year term in 2022, and thanks to S.B. 202, it just got a lot harder for Democrats to keep that majority. And then guess what Mitch McConnell is going to do to the Democrats’ filibuster once he’s back in charge?

The Democrats did come up with HR1 (or S.1), the “For the People Act”, which is supposed to address a lot of the issues that Republican states want to create with voting, but that’s another one of the things that ain’t going to pass unless they ditch the filibuster. (Not like anyone who isn’t a Democrat will find it much help in opening up our politics.)

And if anyone ever does try to name those Democrats who are so dead set against actually acting like a majority, the name they usually get to is Joe Manchin, Senator from West Virginia. Manchin is notable in even being an elected Democrat in West Virginia, back from the days when that was the norm and not a blue moon event. He’s big on traditions, like back when he and other Senators could commisserate regardless of party. But however culturally conservative he might be, he’s also an old-time Democrat who believes in big spending, which is hard to see how his priorities as a representative and a Democrat align with his priorities as a Senator.

New York Magazine had this bit about how Manchin is actually keen on promoting an infrastructure bill that could actually be twice as costly as the $1.9 billion American Rescue Plan just passed. Such an expensive bill would seem to be at odds with his desire to maintain the (alleged) tradition of bipartisanship through the filibuster, since anything that expensive likely won’t get passed by Republicans.

“He should want to get rid of the filibuster because he suddenly becomes the most powerful person in this place — he’s the 50th vote on everything,” said Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, sketching out, though not embracing, the argument.

When Senator Manchin wrote a Washington Post op-ed staking his position, including the idea that we shouldn’t even be using reconciliation to pass legislation, leftist blog Lawyers, Guns & Money rendered its interpretation: “The most natural reading of the op-ed is that Joe Manchin is an abject moron who has never paid attention to anything that’s happened in the Senate during his entire tenure there, but I don’t believe this is accurate. Essentially, there are two major possibilities:

  • Manchin is setting up a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger defense when Republicans refuse to compromise on anything and Dems agree to some kind of filibuster reform Manchin can sell as technically maintaining his pledge.
  • Manchin is perfectly fine with total gridlock, and is happy not to accomplish much of anything as long as people have to continually kiss his ass to even get judges and cabinet officials approved.

“Alas, while I used to have optimism about door #1 at this point it seems like the latter is much more likely.”

Problem is, if Manchin either seriously expects good faith from the Party of Trump or is trying to create a position to change his mind when they do not act in good faith, then refusing to endorse filibuster reform even as a negotiating tactic removes the only tool Democrats have to pressure Republicans with. As for gridlock, a Senate with no filibuster and a majority by tiebreaker makes Manchin The Man Whose Ass Must Be Kissed to an even greater degree, for the reason Senator Coons stated. Thus one returns to the rejected theory: That Joe Manchin is an abject moron who, if he ever paid attention to what the Senate was like in his entire tenure, is certainly not aware of what it’s like now.

Which means in the short run at least, the direction that “conservatives” claim to hate so much keeps reinforcing, as we turn more and more powers over to an imperial executive because Congress can’t get anything done. And that direction keeps getting more and more “radical left” because the former Republican Party refuses to act as a moderating influence because it has no more moderate influences within itself, and Democrats now know there is no point in dealing with them.

I used to think of our politics as a situation where the Democrats were Soviet Russia, the Republicans were Nazi Germany and America was Poland. It’s even more sad and absurd than that: It’s more like a fight between two squads of Star Wars Stormtroopers where neither team can hit a target, yet one of them falls down anyway.

REVIEW: The Nevers

In my review of the Zack Snyder Cut of Justice League, in the wake of near-universal hatred for the Joss Whedon-directed theatrical release, I’d said that at least the Snyder Cut would give a chance to determine whether Joss’ version was making the best of bad material or butchering something that otherwise would have worked. (My verdict was ambiguous: the first movie was a dull grey slog, and the Snyder version is twice as much dull grey slog with somewhat more character development.)

But even before demand built up for the Snyder Cut, Whedon was working on a new project for HBO, The Nevers, and ended up leaving that for reasons unexplained but probably related to the avalanche of hits to his backstage reputation in Hollywood. So with the series premiering on April 11, we have a similar question as to whether the remaining production team (including Buffy veterans Jane Espenson and Douglas Petrie) have a good idea that they screwed up or a bad idea that they can only do so much to redeem. However the pilot episode was both written and directed by Whedon himself, so it should convey the intended approach.

One valid critique of Whedon is that he tends to go for the same themes a lot. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, there was only one Slayer per generation, who was always a young girl, but each Slayer was monitored and trained by a mostly male, entirely British order of Watchers. Well, in The Nevers, almost the entire cast is British cause it’s set in London, 1899, where a few thousand people, mostly women, were “touched” by what appears to be fairy dust sprinkled by a passing alien lifeform and/or spaceship. As a result they were altered, some more obviously than others, with what are called “turns.” The main character seems to be the widowed Amalia True (Laura Donnelly), whose main power seems to be psychic visions (or as she calls them, ‘rippling’), but this being a Whedon hero, she also kicks serious ass, and this being the Victorian period, she kicks even more ass when she’s wielding an umbrella. Her much less prim best friend Patience Adair (Ann Skelly) has some command over electricity but uses it to create anachronistic inventions, so yes, there is steamtech.

Actually there are several Touched who are not women, including a black doctor and a white male aristocrat, but for the most part the cases seem to be concentrated outside the ruling class, something that didn’t escape the attention of Lord Massen (Pip Torrens) who wants his mysterious council to protect the British Empire and counter the ambitions “for those whom ambition was never meant.”

This approach is already giving me a sour vibe. One of the reasons people could gravitate to Buffy as a feminist story is actually that it wasn’t such an obvious one. The characters were good characters before they were symbols, and that drew you into the message. You don’t even need to lean too much on the patriarchy vs. women theme in this setting, given that “Victorian” is a modern adjective for “puritanical and repressed.” And yet, Whedon still sees the need. In the words of Willow Rosenberg, The Nevers isn’t dropping hints, it’s dropping anvils.

Otherwise this show has a young decadent who’s a friend of Amalia’s wealthy patron, a truly nasty surgeon (with an American accent), a street detective who’s already doing a better job playing Mister Vimes than the guy on AMC’s The Watch, and an insane (or at least extremely irritating) serial killer who has assembled her own little team of supervillains. Indeed, this show seems to allude to superhero comics a lot more than Buffy or Firefly did, with Amalia being more civic-minded than the early Buffy, with her and her patron creating a little urban “orphanage” where people like her can have sanctuary and support.

This show has some potential (so to speak) and a lot of stuff that could work very well, and it certainly appeals to the premise of “What if you had Buffy, but Steampunk and with cool British accents?” Plus which, it’s HBO, so you get at least one shot of tits and people say “Fuck” more than once. The problem is that while all the critics seem to think The Nevers borrows too much from Whedon’s previous tropes, to me it doesn’t feel enough like a Whedon show. The dialogue and action don’t have the snap, crackle and pop I’ve come to expect from his best work. With the notable exception of Amalia and Patience, the warm character relationships aren’t there and it’s a lot harder to care.

In fact The Nevers is almost as much of a dull grey slog as either Justice League, which means either the Victorian Era is too depressing for some people, or Whedon learned the wrong things from Snyder. Even when Buffy, Angel and Firefly were handling very serious subjects, they didn’t usually take themselves too seriously (and with Buffy, they started to suck once they did). If one is going to take a fantastical approach to the 19th Century, one might be better off starting with the tongue-in-cheek approach of The Wild, Wild West. (the 60’s TV show, not the Will Smith movie, for Gad’s sakes)

REVIEW: WW84

(This was something I’d written most of closer to the original release date but never got around to finishing. But given the release of Zack Snyder’s Justice League on HBO Max, it seemed worth looking over.)

It was first announced that DC/Warner’s Wonder Woman sequel with Gal Gadot would be released simultaneously in theaters and Warner’s HBO Max streaming on Christmas Day. But then Warner Brothers announced that all their major movies for 2021 would be done primarily in streaming format. In this the movie industry, as in, the production part of it, was simply acknowledging the reality of the world under coronavirus and the fact that people can’t or won’t go to theaters anymore, but in the rest of the industry, as in the theaters that show the movies and the filmmakers who actually create them, some saw the decision as a betrayal. In large respect it’s because filmmakers intend for big-budget movies to be seen on a wide screen, not a TV or desktop, and the budgeting on these movies is such that only major studios like Warner can really produce those Hollywood movies and international blockbusters.

I had intended to do more analysis on this point in terms seeing WW84 on HBO Max, but my friends wanted to wait until we could all get together to see it. I had thought it would be more convenient to see it in my house on streaming (since I’m already paying for it via DIRECTV and wouldn’t have to drive all the way out to the movie theater at my friend’s house) but for some reason the streaming service didn’t seem to be cooperating that week. So we went to one of the local theaters and found (even though new COVID rules mean there are no longer any matinees) that ticket prices have been reduced to six dollars. THAT’s good to see, at least. It may be the theaters’ own survival tactic, but for once the Law of Supply and Demand is working for the consumer.

Which doesn’t answer the question: Is WW84 any good?

Well, I liked it, but that doesn’t make it objectively good.

In this story, Diana Prince the antiquarian is working for the Smithsonian in Washington DC, where she meets an introverted new colleague Barbara Minerva (Saturday Night Live’s Kristen Wiig), who is asked to appraise various smuggled artifacts, including a piece of citrine they call a “dream stone,” which inspires them to make wishes to themselves that only get fulfilled later. But their department receives the patronage of Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal from The Mandalorian) an oil investor who has apparently been searching for this Dream Stone for quite some time. And when Diana goes to Lord’s party in DC to investigate him, along with a suddenly glammed-up Barbara, she is approached by a strange guy only to realize he is her long-dead love, Steve Trevor (Chris Pine). So while Lord continues his quest and Barbara starts to realize she is no longer “normal”, Diana resumes her life with Steve and takes him on an enchanting tour of the city, showing the ex-World War I pilot America’s National Air and Space Museum.

Really, a big part of this movie is just Gal Gadot and Chris Pine being attractive, and happy, and in love with the world and in love with life, and… that’s not the sort of thing you see in modern media, is it?

Unfortunately that state of affairs can’t last, as Lord’s experiment with the Dream Stone causes a downward spiral that makes him more desperate the more powerful he gets even as Barbara and Diana both refuse to accept the drawbacks of their wishes.

Naturally this film gets analyzed from a feminist angle, not just because it’s Wonder Woman, but because it, along with the still-yet-to-be-released Black Widow, is one of the few movies that centers on a superheroine, given how rare they are in movies generally. So there was some critique of the example being set by both Diana and Barbara. WW84 presents two paths to female empowerment: one is to be a born demigoddess who is both powerful and classically feminine. The other is to be a deranged carnivore who attacks people. I think the second option is more realistic.


As for the “problematic” nature of Steve’s second life, I think the movie addressed this in playing out the lesson of the prelude story, where young Diana’s mentor tells her “the truth is all there is – you can’t live by lies.” Yes, Diana had one selfish desire in the world, and its fulfillment was negative in both moral and practical terms, but not AS much as, say, wishing your wife would drop dead, or escalating the arms race towards nuclear war. It’s also noteworthy that Steve himself is quicker to realize the problem and more willing to come to terms with it than Diana is.

The movie is ultimately kind of weak, because it relies so much on a deus ex machina device, but in a way, that’s kind of the point. Even so, and even given that DC movies (as opposed to Marvel Studios) very clearly show that gods and magic are real, a lot of how things develop is just implausible. Not completely though. A few years ago, I would have said that a plot involving a failing TV conman who finagles his way into the White House and causes a global catastrophe would’ve been too much to believe, but for some reason it seems easier to buy into now.

I’ve seen a few reviews that compare 84 to the Richard Donner Superman movies, and I think that’s about right: It’s very ‘four color.’ One of the first scenes of the movie shows Diana doing very “superhero-ey” stuff in public, even if for some reason she doesn’t want to be recorded. With the exception of the scene where Barbara beats up a harasser and it isn’t clear if he’s been killed, lethal violence is played down. This tone extends to the villains – despite the literally fantastical plotline, I found the villains better than in the original movie, in the sense of being better characters.

And yes, the mid-credits scene was a really nice touch.

REVIEW – Zack Snyder’s Justice League

Well, after much time and anticipation, this week HBO Max has released the director’s cut of Zack Snyder’s Justice League, or as I call it, The Butthole Cut.

Because much like The Butthole Cut of the Cats movie, there seems to have been some impression among fandom that there would be a director’s cut that would redeem a fiasco movie, even if it was presented as just a joke. The difference being that the Snyder Cut actually exists.

At this point I need to digress. Whatever the merits of Zack Snyder, the judgment on Justice League is largely tied up with fandom perceptions of both him and the guy who finished the theatrical release, Joss Whedon. Prior to Joss getting involved, Zack Snyder was being called out as a filmmaker for being sexist (Sucker Punch), or fascist and homophobic (specifically 300). But what really caused social media to hate this guy was that he confessed to being an Ayn Rand fan who (still) talks about producing a new version of The Fountainhead. And I’ve already done an extensive analysis on how Batman v Superman proves that if Snyder is a follower of Rand’s aesthetic philosophy, he’s not a very good one.

But Snyder and his production company were called upon to do Wonder Woman (which he did not direct) and Justice League, which proceeds directly from the conclusion of BvS, and midway through the filming of Justice League, his young daughter committed suicide and Zack and his wife Deborah (a co-producer in his company) had to leave the film in order to grieve. And it needs to be said that whatever one thinks of Joss Whedon, he wouldn’t have been hired to complete Justice League if Zack had still been available.

But at the time, Joss had something of a golden boy reputation, being the main creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a character who was his primary example of feminist empowerment. Whedon was also an experienced script doctor and director who did the fast-paced and witty Avengers movie for Marvel as well as the less successful but still blockbuster Avengers: Age of Ultron. So Warner/DC seemed to think he would be the best person to take over for their interrupted project, but even those of us who liked the theatrical release had to concede it was awkwardly pasted together from improvised parts – like when Henry Cavill had to reshoot scenes after taking on a role that obliged him to grow a mustache, so that half of the time Superman’s upper lip looks weird because it had to be CGI’ed.

The mixed reviews on Ultron and negative feedback on Justice League were causing Whedon to lose his luster already, and even before this, his feminist cred was undermined when his wife announced she was divorcing him largely over affairs she accused him of having with his Buffy co-workers. Where this all ties into Justice League and support for The Snyder Cut is that Ray Fisher, who played Cyborg in Justice League, has taken action against Warner Media, including the DC Comics film arm, claiming that Joss Whedon was unprofessional to him and others on the Justice League set, and that higher-ups in production were enabling and covering for this. Fisher, much like Colin Kaepernick, seems willing to speak truth to power even at the risk of his career. But recently Charisma Carpenter, who played Cordelia Chase on Buffy and Angel, agreed to make a statement on Fisher’s behalf and then posted an extended tweet detailing how Whedon had harassed her backstage and pushed her out of the Angel show. (The whole thing had previously been behind the scenes, but the treatment of Cordelia Chase was not popular with Buffyverse fans even at the time.) This caused almost every other actor on the Buffy and Angel shows to make social media posts, some merely in support of Carpenter, others (like Michelle Trachtenberg) corroborating her accusations. More recently Whedon was involved with another HBO project called The Nevers, and announced he was quitting over the perennial “exhaustion.”

So the end result is that Whedon, once considered a feminist hero, is scum, and Snyder, who was once considered scum, is now treated like a heroic auteur who is finally getting to present his work the way he wanted it. This is all a great example of why I do not support “cancel culture” or political correctness in general, because such judgments are superficial, transitory, and based on information that is subject to change. It is why I make no apologies for separating a judgment of an artist’s work from their behavior as a human being. (See also- J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, J.K. Rowling, et cetera, et cetera, ad nauseam.)

Now, given that I am a Whedon fan, I liked the movie Justice League (with reservations) and I didn’t like BvS (although I did like Man of Steel), the main value of the Justice League Snyder Cut is to prove once and for all whether the problems with the theatrical Justice League were Whedon screwing up something that would have worked without him, or Whedon trying to salvage something that wouldn’t have worked anyway.

(And there’s no point in prefacing ‘SPOILERS’ because I know everybody’s seen this movie before me and this post is just giving my impression of it.)

As we know, the Snyder version of Justice League is exactly four hours and two minutes. In theory the whole thing should be easier to digest because Zack divided his narrative into separate chapters (much as producers indicate specific scenes in the DVD release of a movie), but even in pieces the movie goes very slowly because Snyder’s scenes seem to be in slow-motion even when they’re not. His camera has three speeds: Slow, reallllly slow and real fast. In fact, the scenes where Wonder Woman deflects bullets make her look that much faster than The Flash using his superspeed powers, because Snyder, like every other director since The Six Million Dollar Man, indicates a character’s superhuman speed by slowing the camera down.

If nothing else, Snyder’s cut explains why Ray Fisher is so damn pissed at Whedon and the DC execs who approved the 2017 film, because there’s less of his character in that one than there is of Vic Stone’s original body. This film actually shows his backstory and notes, among other things, that Victor Stone was a computer genius even before he got powers. Fisher is very expressive in these scenes and really conveys the pain of his character.

The main improvement on Justice League as a narrative is that where the 2017 cut presented Steppenwolf as the Big Bad (including the Ancient Age flashback scene) and barely mentioned Darkseid, here Steppenwolf is clearly a lieutenant of Darkseid, who is using the Mother Boxes in an attempt to attain the “Anti-Life Equation” that is supposed to grant control over life, although it’s odd that the discovery of the Equation on Earth seems to be kind of an afterthought, but I guess Darkseid’s memory wasn’t so good 6000 years after coming here the last time. And of course some people make comparisons between that character and Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War when in the comics, Darkseid was created first. The real problem is that while Thanos in the movies was mostly CGI, he was still played by Josh Brolin, who gave him a certain gravitas and an understandable (if not sympathetic) motivation. Steppenwolf is just a CGI effect (even if he is shiny and chrome) and Darkseid in this movie isn’t much more than that.

But THEN, after at least three and a half hours of actual movie, they had the after-credits scene now placed before the credits, in which Deathstroke meets Luthor after he escapes the asylum, and it looks much like Whedon’s scene, except that the dialogue is a lot more climactic. Except that scene isn’t the climax. Right after that scene, with no segue, they just go straight to the apocalypse “Knightmare” scenario Bruce Wayne dreamed in BvS, where Batman has to lead a last-chance mission with Cyborg, Flash, Deathstroke, Mera, and Marilyn Manson Jared Leto’s Joker. And that doesn’t get resolved or explained any better than it did in BvS. But after Bruce wakes up, he finally gets to meet the seventh member of the League, and that part was at least a cool geek moment. It’s just that with all the flak The Return of the King movie got for being anti-climax, nobody talks about this thing.

See, in my review of BvS, I’d mentioned that the director’s cut of that movie really was superior – not necessarily good, but a lot better than what came out – and one of the reasons it didn’t come out in general release is that all the extras put over thirty minutes on a movie that was already overlong.

What it comes down to for me is that if you need four hours to make your movie even coherent, then you’re really not that good a filmmaker. And the thing is, in the new media environment, ironically promoted by HBO Max, this sort of thing isn’t even necessary. Streaming services mean you can do long-form storytelling now. WandaVision, for instance, was more a miniseries than a feature movie, but its premise didn’t really provide for more than a single storyline.

Although there was a pretty detailed overview in Pajiba of all places, and one of the things they pointed out is that the need to put the pieces together on Justice League during the spread of coronavirus was in some respect a good thing – Deborah Snyder said, “‘No, this is the right time because our visual effects houses that (we) rely on so much are running out of work, so now is the time to be doing this.” So at least you can say that much for these guys.

But essentially, Zack Snyder’s Justice League is like the BvS director’s cut, only more so. A LOT more so. Whatever people might think of Joss Whedon now, remember when he wasn’t doing his own projects he was a professional script doctor. That was his job here. As with BvS, the studio wanted to get the thing cranked out as a two-hour movie, and he did that. The problem versus the Snyder Cut is that Whedon cut one, most of Ray Fisher’s stuff, and two, the Darkseid background explaining the whole premise. But it’s not like including it helped that much. Snyder at least didn’t keep Whedon’s odd premise that Superman was some mythic inspirational figure like the comic character became over the course of decades, where Snyder’s previous movies presented him as this Iron Age vigilante who was just more powerful than everybody else and who hadn’t been around nearly as long as even Batman. Snyder’s cut just gets straight to the premise of fighting Steppenwolf. Except of course, it’s the radical antithesis of getting straight to the point. So this would work better as a set ’em up action movie than Whedon’s cut, except that it’s four fuckin’ hours, and the reason Whedon had to lop so much was to make Justice League a better action movie. Yeah, Part 6 got to show the heroes blow up a bunch of stuff real good, but the Marvel movies are accused of being a bunch of big-budget scenes to blow stuff up real good, and they work a lot better on other levels. For one thing, Marvel directors can get a story across IN LESS THAN FOUR FUCKIN’ HOURS, and if they can’t (like the Russo brothers) they know to split it into sequels.

But as Batman once said, “Some days, you just can’t get rid of a bomb.”

REVIEW: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

Well, Justice League: The Butthole Cut was released on HBO Max March 18, but I can’t set aside four straight hours, or even non-consecutive hours, to check it out until my next day off, so I waited until midnight to check the first episode of Disney+/Marvel Studios’ The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, especially since, at about 50 minutes, I knew it was going to be less of a slog.

It certainly starts off with a slam-bang action sequence, and it’s noteworthy that in a TV project they’re actually showing more of what Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) can do with his Falcon gadgets than they did in all the movies he was in before. The first episode also shows James “Bucky” Barnes (Sebastian Shaw) trying to get over the assassinations he was brainwashed into performing as the Winter Soldier, and it doesn’t look like he’s holding up that well. However most of the episode centers on Sam, as he first decides to turn in Captain America’s shield after deciding he can’t take up his mantle, then going home to try and save his family fishing business (and his sister’s house), only to find that even if you’re a beloved local hero, you still can’t get a home loan if you’re black. And then Sam sees on TV that the government decided to turn the shield over to a new Captain America. And it’s not a good omen that this new guy looks just like fucking Homelander wearing a mask.

Much like WandaVision, this Disney+ show puts a spotlight on good characters who didn’t get a focus in the Marvel movies. It doesn’t look like it’s going to be as psychological as WandaVision, but the Captain America movies were probably my favorite films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier looks like it’s going to be a good continuation of that action-thriller style.

Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist

The after-the-fact coverage of the Atlanta shootings March 16 just happened to be on Saint Patrick’s Day, and on March 17, and as I was getting up, the buzz on Facebook was largely about how certain people wanted to push an apologist line about how the shooter told police he had a “sex addiction” that compelled his actions. And then as I turned on the TV and went to MSDNC, Nicolle Wallace had a couple of people on, one black, one white Irish guy from Detroit, and they pointed out that if the suspect was going to attack women for “sex addiction” he could have gone to strip clubs or other places associated with sex, rather than attacking two Asian massage parlors and killing eight people, six of them Asian women.

But another thing the panel brought up is how Wallace and one of her guests were both Irish-American, and the white guy brought up that yes, there was some discrimination against Irish people when they first came to this country. It really pales in comparison (so to speak) with the attacks on non-white people today and over history, but it still ought to be addressed.

In more recent times after Catholic Ireland became independent, a lot of Irish moved to ‘the mother country’ in Britain to get work (a pattern that repeated with people from the West Indies, India, Pakistan and other parts of the former Empire) and suffered their own discrimination. Sex Pistols singer John Lydon (son of immigrants) titled his autobiography Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs. Considering that, and again, the later pattern of non-white immigration from other parts of the Commonwealth, it shouldn’t be surprising that one of the other big stories from Britain is the Oprah Winfrey interview with Meghan Markle and her husband Prince Harry about how they were essentially frozen out of the royal family over Harry’s decision to marry and have children with a biracial woman who is darker than the usual Brit but still fairly Caucasian.

Bringing up how Irish were discriminated against shouldn’t be whataboutism or negation of the point in question. It should point out to white people that if even other white people can get hit with prejudice and legal discrimination, that should tell you how bad it is for everybody else who’s not white. For black people, American Indians, Indian Indians, the Chinese during the 19th and early 20th Centuries, the Japanese after Pearl Harbor (for which we created internment camps), the Vietnamese refugees after 1975, all of it.

In this country, anti-Irish prejudice, like our other prejudices, has a longer provenance. Putting up “No Irish Need Apply” signs was enough of a tradition that they wrote songs about it. And in the time leading up to the Civil War, one of the major political movements was the American Party, who were actually called the “Know-Nothing Party” because as was the custom of the day, they organized into societies taking oaths of secrecy, obliging them to say “I know nothing” when asked about the movement. Of course, 19th Century English was also lacking in irony. But the other reason the name fit was because “members supported deportation of foreign beggars and criminals; a 21-year naturalization period for immigrants; mandatory Bible reading in schools; and the elimination of all Catholics from public office. They wanted to restore their vision of what America should look like with temperance, Protestantism, self-reliance, with American nationality and work ethic enshrined as the nation’s highest values.”

Stop me if this seems in any way familiar.

This sort of nativism was eclipsed during the Civil War, because we had other priorities, but the guy who led the Union at that time was also against the Know-Nothing sentiment. Abraham Lincoln had said: “I am not a Know-Nothing. That is certain. How could I be? How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy.”

Again, a surprisingly relevant quote for today.

Now there’s also been some reconstructed history about how Irish indentured servitude in the American colonies meant that we have some claim to being slaves. That isn’t the case. But it ought to demonstrate some need for empathy, not “well, my people had it rough, so don’t complain so much.” Yet you not only have that attitude, you have ‘white separatists’ from Slavic families that would have been killed by the Nazis and Italian families that would have been attacked by the Klan. And then there’s Stephen Miller, and I don’t know what HIS fucking deal is.

Point is, we do have a pretty strong history of immigration (in addition to institutional racism against African Americans and native tribes), and in almost every case they came from countries where even white people couldn’t “pass” because they dressed different, spoke English “wrong”, had the “wrong” religion, whatever. In the days of the Know-Nothing Party the Catholic immigrants were Irish and Germans. Later they were Italians. Now they’re Mexicans and Central Americans.

And yet, the modern Know-Nothing Party, the Donald Trump Fan Club formerly known as the Republican Party, actually increased its share of black and Latino vote in the 2020 presidential election compared to 2016. Which seems odd given that both Republicans and Democrats wanted to brand Trump’s party with a certain form of identity politics, but people who talked about the subject told foreign interviewers that politics weren’t just “black and white.” One Texan told the BBC that while he grew up in a Mexican-Lebanese family, “”Neoliberal expansion has really hurt both Mexico and the US, and when you have family that live there, and you can see how it’s hurt people living, their jobs, their wages, it really has increased the narco-war, and this is one of the things Trump came in saying – ‘hey, we’re going to tear apart these trade deals’ – and then he actually did it.” Others pointed to the Republican stance against abortion, or against socialism, which was critical to the Cuban and Venezuelan communities that helped Trump win Florida.

This fact both undermines and supports the Left’s need to make everything about race. Even for non-white communities, not everything is about race. The recent waves of immigrants were discriminated against, just as the Irish were in their time, and as we see even now, they’re assimilating and voting for regressive politicians. Just as the Irish did. Because they don’t see how this stuff has anything to do with them.

Just ask the Jews who grew up in Germany during the 1930s (if there are any left). You can be a perfectly assimilated member of the society and think you’re just like anybody else only to have your rights taken away because some know-nothing faction took control of the government. That’s why everybody needs to be on guard against it.

May the luck of the Irish be with you.