Rov_Scam
1yr ago
Well, it finally happened. Last Saturday San Jose Sharks goaltender James Reimer, citing religious beliefs, refused to wear the Pride-themed warmup jersey in honor of Pride night, and accordingly sat out warmups. Reimer has started most of San Jose's games this season but has mostly been splitting time with Kaapo Kahkonen, but he did not start Saturday and instead was Kahkonen's backup. This isn't the first time this season that the Pride jerseys have led to controversy—Ivan Provorov of the Philadelphia Flyers declined to wear it back in January, citing his Russian Orthodox faith, and Pride nights were cancelled in New York and Minnesota (presumably because the refusals would be conspicuous enough to cause undue controversy, but I have no evidence of this). So it's been simmering for a while, but this was the first real big blowup. Getting mad at Russians for having "incorrect" beliefs doesn't get much traction (Ovechkin's support of Putin was never that big a deal) because it's presumed that they aren't exactly the most enlightened people. And individual teams cancelling events seems suspect but teams are already too easy to get mad at for a variety of reasons, though people certainly took advantage of the opportunity. But now, with Reimer, and Anglo Protestant. conservatives finally have their Colin Kaepernick.
Reaction was predictable. The Fox News comment section duly praised Reimer for his courage to stand up against the wokeness that has come to infect professional sports. Reddit, meanwhile, seemed disgusted that the NHL would allow one of its players to openly flaunt the ideals of inclusiveness. There was also a quite a bit of armchair theologizing, with people who almost assuredly aren't religious either making fun of religion wholesale or claiming that, actually, Reimer's faith should make him an LGBT ally. Nearly absent from this conversation, though, is Kaepernick, despite the obvious parallels. Conservatives had previously argued that "politics should be kept out of sports", and that Kaepernick's nonparticipation in a team-oriented civic ritual was tantamount to injecting his own politics into the game. Even Mike Tomlin's decision to keep the Steelers in the tunnel in an attempt to avoid controversy that may have resulted from a player kneeling backfired; participation was mandatory, and Alejandro Villenueva was praised as a folk hero for conspicuously entering the field anyway to stand for the anthem. Ditto liberals, who also failed to see that the idea of punishing a player for refusing to participate in a pregame activity because it was against his religious or political beliefs is something that extends across the board; we can't pick and choose which beliefs are okay to protest and which aren't. The only real difference is that conservatives seem to believe that Pride nights are an abomination that has to go, while I never heard any serious Kaepernick supporters suggest that the NFL should do away with the anthem.
What's surprising is the lack of self-awareness. It's not that people in these comments sections don't challenge people with the obvious Kaepernick comparisons, it's that no one seems willing to even engage. I have yet to see anyone on either side make a statement about consistency (i.e. I defended Kaepernick and I defend Reimer/I criticized Kaepernick and I'm criticizing Reimer) or attempt to differentiate the situations. People usually try to differentiate because they want to appear principled and not just reacting based on their own biases, but most controversies give a little room for it. The Kaepernick case is so familiar and so alike that it's almost as if the cognitive dissonance actively prevents people from engaging. I'd like to see one person try to justify their position in light of this argument. Just one.
Rov_Scam
8mo ago
And if they get Trump they're toast. That's the problem. And if they can't find him off now they won't be able to in 2028 either, regardless of how old he is. The GOP has underperformed for three straight election cycles, and they're barreling into four with abandon. The only way they're going to win back the voters who have abandoned them is to convince them that this party is a different one than the one they voted against in 2020. Instead we get a full-throated embrace of election denial/ January 6th nonsense that won't go away. They need to pull off the bandaid but are incapable of doing so. It's like an episode of Bar Rescue where the owner is going down with the ship because he's worried about alienating regulars. That's usually good advice, but when the regulars can't keep you in business then something's got to give.
The argument that the election was inherently flawed because mail-in voting somehow violated the principle of a secret ballot doesn't hold water and is made in bad faith by those who didn't like the outcome in 2020. Mail-in voting has existed in various states for somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 years, absentee voting has existed for longer, and no one I'm aware of made the argument that it was inherently flawed prior to 2020. Indeed, as late as the fall of 2019 PA's mail-in voting bill sailed through the state legislature with unanimous Republican support.
Claiming that mail-ins are suddenly unconstitutional to the point that we need a redo is a convenient argument to make if your guy loses the election and you're grasping at straws for some excuse undo the result, but let's not pretend that this is an argument based on principle. Would you be making this argument if Trump won?
It's also telling that 2020 is apparently the only election they care about. No one was protesting the 2021 off year elections for local judges and clerks, no one was protesting the midterms, no one was protesting the various special elections that have been held over the past few years, and I doubt anyone will protest this year's elections. Hell, there doesn't even seem to be much of a legislative push in red states to completely do away with mail voting, or any serious court challenges raising the secret ballot issue. It all comes back to Trump—shit only matters when he's involved. The entire system is rigged against him and him alone. I've always thought he was a narcissist but at this point I can't really blame him giving the number of people who do act like the world revolves around him.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
I remember back in 2016 I was sitting on my cousin's deck for one of his kid's first birthday parties, and my uncle posed a question to the group of whether the kid in question would ever get a driver's license. Now, he has a habit of going out on certain limbs when arguing, but he seemed utterly convinced that fifteen years hence autonomous vehicles would be so ubiquitous as to obviate the need for any driver training among normal people. I argued against the idea, but only to the extent that the regulatory landscape wouldn't change that fast—I certainly thought the technology would be there, but I doubted that regulators and insurance companies would have the stomach to turn all operations over to computers. OF course, that was around the time where everyone was talking about AVs. A guy near me trying to win the Democratic nomination for state rep was basing his entire campaign on handling the disruption that would soon wreak havoc on the trucking industry. I saw Uber's AVs on an almost daily basis near my office in Pittsburgh. CGP Grey was making videos about how full autonomy would basically solve traffic congestion, at least as long as you don't give a fuck about pedestrians.
This summer, that kid will be halfway toward qualifying for a learner's permit, and autonomous vehicles seem further away now than they did when he was one. Less than two years after that party, a woman in Arizona was killed after being hit by an Uber self-driving car. From the evidence available, it didn't look to me like the accident was avoidable, and had it involved a standard car it would have made the local news for a couple days but probably wouldn't have even resulted in charges being filed. But since it was an AV the story went national, and the public's trust had eroded. It would be easy to blame this incident for the downfall of enthusiasm over EVs, but let's face it; something like this happening was only a matter of time, and the public response was entirely predictable. So the industry plugged along, and keeps plugging along, though fewer and fewer people seem to care. Uber's out, Ford's out, Volkswagen's out, GM is under investigation, Apple seems directionless and indifferent, and a recent Washington Post article claims that Tesla cut quite a few corners in its pursuit of offering its customers something that could be marketed as progress.
Hype for AVs started picking up in earnest among the tech horny around 2012. Three years later the buzz was mainstream. All throughout this period various industry leaders kept making bold predictions about truly autonomous products being only a few years away. Okay, maybe with some caveats, like only on the highway, or in geofenced areas, or whatever, but still, you'd at least be able to get something that had some degree of real autonomy. The enthusiasm seemed justified, though, since, practically overnight, self-driving cars went from something that you'd occasionally hear about in science magazines when some university was doing basic research to something that major tech and auto companies were sinking billions of dollars into. Around the same time, regular cars started getting features like adaptive cruise control and lane keep assist that seemed like self-driving under another name, and Tesla's autopilot feature seemed like a huge leap. With the normal acceleration of technology plus the loads of money that were being dumped into any number of competing companies, it was only a matter of time. Now, ten years and 100 billion dollars later, the only products that are available to an average consumer are a few unreliable ridesharing services in cities that don't have weather.
I'm bringing this up because there are a lot of parallels between AVs and GPT-4. This is a huge, disruptive technology that relies on AI, and, while it may have some critical flaws in its current implementation, technology is constantly improving, often exponentially, as processing power increases. And while I don't have access to GPT-4 myself, I'm sure it's as impressive as everyone claims it is. The trouble is, impressing people with no skin in the game is easy. Convincing people to rely on it is a whole different animal. Most people found AVs pretty impressive when they first came out. But being impressive doesn't cut it when you're looking to replace human drivers; you actually have to be better than human drivers, or at least as good as human drivers. And human drivers are pretty damn good. In 2021 there were around 5.2 million reportable accidents in nearly 3 trillion miles driven (in PA an accident is reportable if one of the cars is inoperable or there is injury or death, though other states may vary). This means that, in any given mile of driving, one's chances of getting into an accident more serious than a fender bender is .000181%. If you drive 15,000 miles a year, you'll get into an accident about once every 30 years. If Elon Musk or whoever announced that they had developed a system that avoided accidents 99.9% of the time, that would sound impressive. But it wouldn't be; at that rate, the average driver would be getting into about 15 crashes per year! Even if it were 99.99% of the time you'd still be getting into more than a crash a year, 3 in a 2 year period. Imagine what your insurance rates would be like if you got into a crash a year.
And that doesn't even take into account all the miscellaneous bullshit that AVs do that doesn't cause accidents but nonetheless makes them untenable. They have trouble with unprotected left turns (aka most left turns), and they'll take circuitous routes to avoid them. They don't like construction, even minor construction like a lane being blocked off with cones. They get confused when, say, a landscaper has mulch bags hanging into the street a little bit. Or when driving down a narrow street with cars parked on both sides. And when this happens they just stop and call home. The people who use these ride sharing services are then forced to wait while a tech shows up to deal with the problem, traffic being disrupted in the meantime. And I won't even mention inclement weather. Making something look impressive during early testing is easy, but convincing someone to rely on it when safety, or money, or anything else that actually matters is at stake is a much harder sell, as the accuracy has to be pretty damn near close to 100% before anyone will actually trust it. And if AVs are any indication, it's really hard to get to 100%. Which is why I wouldn't be surprised if AI right now is at about the same stage AVs were in 2016. Impressive, but far from ready for prime time. Everyone keeps saying that the next iteration is going to be a game changer, and everyone is increasingly impressed, but not impressed enough to trust their business to it. And eventually it gets to the point where research is so expensive and the returns are so little that no one in their right mind would invest in it, and smaller firms go bust while larger ones scale back considerably, or at least try to direct their AI research towards applications where it might actually be used commercially. Then we're all sitting here in 2030 asking ourselves what happened to the AI revolution that seemed right around the corner. I could be wrong, but if that's the case, then hey, we should at least have some operable self-driving cars.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
Apropo of the discussion below, I decided to look into these oft-repeated claims about Jewish overrepresentation in certain sectors of the economy. So I decided to look at the banking industry. I looked at the top executives of the 25 largest US banks by total assets; anyone listed on the bank's website under "leadership team" or some other such designation counts as a top executive, usually between 10 and 25 people for each bank. As far as determining who's Jewish, I mostly went by last names, although if someone was obviously black or Asian I skipped the name entirely. The results? Of 414 total executives, I found 19 Jews, or about 4.3%. Considering that only a little over 2% of the country is Jewish, this is significant overrepresentation. Or is it?
The first problem is that I had to rely on names to determine if someone was Jewish as that isn't the kind of information included in most corporate bios. And most of the names I came across weren't Cohen and Leibowitz but generic names like Weiss and Stein or something else that's German or Russian-sounding. For my purposes I assumed all these people were Jewish unless their bio specifically mentioned working for a Christian charity or something (like Jason Schugel), so I probably overestimated the total number of Jews by a few, though on the flip side there are Jews with gentile names I may have missed. And then there's the fact that a significant number of these Jews were women. In addition to the whole problem of married names, the stereotypical image of a Jewish banker is not a woman. Additionally, a lot of these executives were general counsel, or HR execs, or were involved in some other aspect of the business not directly related to banking, but I didn't bother to account for this because they're still obviously influential and are top executives at large banks, but one could make the argument that they shouldn't be counted.
Methodological issues aside, though, the more salient point is that while 4.3% may be a significant overrepresentation in a strict statistical sense (it's about double the expected number), this isn't the kind of overrepresentation most people have in mind when they talk about Jews and banking. It's hard to make the argument that at 4.5% Jews in any way control the industry, or even have any significant impact on it as a group. Relatively speaking, this is about half the number of Christians in Egypt. When you look at the individual banks, 11 of them, or nearly half, don't have any Jews in top leadership positions. An additional 10 have 1, and the remaining 4 have 2. The most Jewish bank on the list is Goldman Sachs at number 5, with 2 of 9 top executives, including the CEO, being Jewish. In other words, even the most obviously Jewish big bank in the country still has 80% gentiles in top leadership positions.
Is my methodology off? Probably. I limited myself to the top 25 banks because that's what I had time for, but I doubt that including the top 100 would have made much difference considering that below that you start getting into regional banks from areas where the Jewish population isn't particularly high and US divisions of foreign banks. But it's still something to look at. I could have included more people than the top executives, though any cutoff is arbitrary; I'm sure if you go all the way down to including branch employees the number of Jews would thin considerably. You could use boards of directors instead of executives. I don't know what kind of effect this would have but I avoided boards because they don't concern themselves with the day-to-day operations of the company and their members aren't necessarily in the banking industry at all, but you can make the argument. Whatever you think about my methodology, though, if you're going to challenge it, at least do the work. Don't just tell me my methodology is bad and you're just sure if I had used a different methodology I would have found that the whole industry is totally dominated by Jews. Because this is what people have been doing for years, and it's obviously bullshit. People have been talking about Jewish domination of various industries in the United States for years, but as soon as I take a cursory look at the most stereotypical Jewish business this "dominance" doesn't even crack 5%.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
Saying that society should recognize that these people are garbage and not give a damn about them is a position that can only be taken if one is very selective about whom this categorization refers to, and this selectivity is why activists protest and call opinions such as yours inherently racist, or classist, or whatever. When Mr. Penny decided to put Mr. Neely in a chokehold, his information was limited to what he could tell from the approximately 30 seconds or whatever it was that Penny observed him in public. He didn't have a copy of the guy's criminal record to know that he was a general homeless scofflaw who had been arrested 42 times previously, mostly for turnstile jumping and public drunkenness but at least four times for assault. All he knew was that the guy was ranting and raving about being hungry and not caring if he went to jail and that this behavior made some (most?) people around him uncomfortable so he decided to do something about it, or, more accurately, assist in a group effort to do something about it.
Giving him a free pass on this seems reasonable enough, but only because we have the additional context that this was a black, homeless, schizo, ne'er do well. Suppose, on the other hand, a white, middle-class, student at a prestigious university (possibly your son) got drunk and started making a scene on public transit. A group of black passengers were made uncomfortable by his behavior and the young man died after on of these passengers put him in a choke hold. When I was in my early 20s being drunk, loud, and obnoxious on public transit was a regular occurrence, as we could go to the club in the city on 50 cent drink night without having to drive or park. Just a few years ago a friend of mine went into a similar rant about Taco Bell on the train back to the hotel after the 2018 ACC Championship Game in Charlotte. And if the counterargument is that Neely was obviously a dangerous hobo then that just confirms the suspicions of all the social justice do-gooders that you expect the rules to be different for certain people, and we're supposed to expect people to be able to tell the difference based on the way a guy's dressed or whether we think he's mentally ill or homeless or, mast damningly, whether he's white.
I remember a similar storyline back when black guys getting shot by cops was in the news more often, and most of the conservatives I know kept pointing out that one has an obligation to obey when a police officer tells you to do something. As a guy in his '30s this seemed reasonable, until I looked back at my own life and realized that by these people's standards I'd have been dead a long time ago. Yes, I agree generally with the argument that if a police officer decides to arrest you then what happens afterward happens on his terms, not yours, and if you have a problem with that you can bring it up in court. On the other hand, any teenager who is told to stop by police is going to start running. I wasn't a bad kid by a long-shot—I only got two write-ups in four years of high school, and one was for a class cut—but I still liked to occasionally indulge in the kind of mischief kids indulge in, like drinking in woods of indeterminate ownership or stealing pumpkins from farm fields and shit like that, and this would sometimes end with a fat, black cop chasing a bunch of spry kids through fields and woods. I once got away because I crawled under a fence that the guy couldn't fit under. If we took these statements about a duty of compliance to their logical conclusion, the officer had every right to shoot me. After all, I had clearly committed a crime, ignored his orders and fled. And it was clear that he wasn't going to catch me unless he could stop me from a distance. And this was for the same type of "quality of life" shit a lot of law and order types are complaining about. How would you like it if property you paid for was being used without permission by people on quads and dirt bikes during the day, cutting trails you don't want, contributing to erosion, and scaring away huntable animals, and then at night the same kids would come back and build fires and leve beer cans and fast food wrappers everywhere? People in rural areas have gotten in trouble for putting up tripwires and spike strips and other kinds of booby traps to keep people from trespassing, and while there's some pushback it's understandable that parents get pissed when criminal trespass results in serious premeditated injury. If we develop standards they have to apply to everybody, and few people realize what the implications of this would be.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
Those political entities (the city and state of New York) have chosen to do otherwise. That means the locals either must put up with the subway-screaming bums no matter what they do, or they must use less-measured force.
Or, alternatively, they can empower the city and the state to use such necessary force to lock them up. The fact that they haven't suggests that the people would prefer to deal with the occasional nuisance of subway bums than subject them to what they feel are the deleterious effects of "the system". To suggest that individuals should have the power to unilaterally decide to take matters into their own hands makes a mockery of any pretense to having a rule of law. What if a similar mob thought that certain posts on The Motte were inherently racist and not appropriate for civilized society and therefore, since the state and national legislatures have chosen to do nothing, track down the authors of those posts and beat them within an inch of their lives? Would you find this behavior opprobrious? Once you come to the conclusion that individuals and mobs should trump the laws of political entities you disagree with, you empower all such people to act as they will, not just the ones you happen to agree with.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
A couple weeks ago I dropped a couple of names on some people whose ages ranged between mid-30s and mid-60s and I was met with blank stares. Even after explaining who the people were, everyone was still drawing a blank. The names were Chandra Levy and Gary Condit. For those who are unaware, Chandra Levy was a US Department of Corrections employee who disappeared in the spring of 2001. Her disappearance made national news when it was revealed that she had previously been an intern for California Congressman Gary Condit, and there was evidence that they had had an affair. There was never anything approaching evidence that he was involved in her disappearance, but his continued denial of any intimate relationship in the face of nearly overwhelming evidence gave him the aura of a man who wasn't telling the truth, and speculation ensued.
If you're too young to remember the case, I'm bringing it up because it was huge at the time. The New York Times ran over 50 stories about it between May and September. To put this in context, the other big news stories during that period were the Microsoft antitrust suit, the Bush tax cuts, the Andrea Yates child-drowning case, and the president's monthlong August vacation. It's hard to gauge the coverage of most of these, but Yates merited fewer than 20 articles, and the rest of these weren't exactly corkers. The Levy disappearance was easily the biggest news story of that summer, until 9/11 pushed it off of the front page. Even then, it had enough staying power to remain in the background for years afterward, as new developments arose. Condit sought reelection but lost the primary in March. The body was found in May. A man who had previously been convicted of attacking other women in the area where the body was found was convicted in 2006, but was released ten years later after appeals revealed that the prosecution's case was terrible. As recently as last year, the Times was still following the case, this time about how the prosecutors are facing malicious prosecution charges.
It was a big story. It may have only dominated the public consciousness because it was the only interesting thing in an otherwise uninteresting time, but it dominated nonetheless. It's no longer front-page news, but developments still merit mention by the Newspaper of Record. And yet plenty of people who were certainly old enough to remember draw a blank 20 years later. The same is true of the 1979 Ogaden War, or the Bhopal disaster; it seems to have vanished from the collective consciousness, apart from the aforementioned updates and the occasional podcast dedicated to these sorts of things. Now imagine trying to explain to someone how big a news story was a hundred years after the fact. Are you familiar with the Hall-Mills murder? It was easily the biggest murder story in American history until the Lindbergh Kidnapping, and was much bigger than any popular crime story since the OJ Trial. Yet today it only gets a mention in true crime books and podcasts and such. If someone frozen in 1922 were to wake up today and asked about the resolution of the case, he may be incredulous to find out that no one has any idea what he's talking about. Even big political events barely merit discussion. Teapot Dome may be mentioned in every US history book, but good luck finding anyone who can explain what the scandal was (and it was one that jeopardized Harding's presidency, though he would die before it was resolved). So no, there's no one article you can point to that will fully express the magnitude of an issue to someone 100 years in the future.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
So I guess then you're of the opinion that the ex-Marine whose actions led to Mr. Neely's untimely demise should be charged to the full extent of the law? After all, Neely was merely ranting, and while it's a common feature of schizophrenics, isn't inherently dangerous. To assume that such behavior was indicative of a violent tendency was unreasonable. Neely did have a violent past, but unless Penny can demonstrate that he had prior knowledge of this violence (and he almost certainly can't), his actions weren't justified any more than if he had perpetrated them upon an arbitrary person.
Rov_Scam
8mo ago
There was no indication in any of the laptop data that Joe Biden took bribes from anyone. There was evidence that he was once briefly in the same room as one of the Burisma guys (and witnesses to that exchange confirmed that the conversation was limited to pleasantries), and there's some China stuff that took place when Biden was out of office. Any suggestion that Joe Biden was influenced by any of his son's business dealings is nothing more than conjecture at this point.
Rov_Scam
7mo ago
The problem is that it isn't clear that the Republicans will have the votes for impeachment, and a failed impeachment attempt could be more detrimental than no attempt at all. With Trump's first impeachment, the evidence that he did what he did was conclusive; the only question was whether such behavior merited removal from office. With a Biden impeachment, the question is whether he did anything at all, and there are serious questions as to whether the Republicans have any real evidence. I'm reminded of the famous Lionel Hutz line: "We have plenty of hearsay and conjecture, those are... kinds of evidence". This is actually a true statement, but hearsay and conjecture aren't generally admissible in a court of law, and even with the relaxed standards of an impeachment hearing, it's still pretty shitty evidence. Let's look at the Burisma evidence:
-Hunter Biden, Joe's fuckup son, gets a seat on the Burisma board despite being unqualified
First, Hunter wasn't publicly known as a fuckup when he got that seat; his personal problems wouldn't become common knowledge until years later. And while Hunter didn't have any oil and gas experience, his resume wasn't horrible. Board seats aren't necessarily given to people within an industry; just look at Exxon Mobil's board. He was on the Amtrak board, owned a lobbying firm, worked as a consultant for MBNA, worked for the Department of Commerce, served on the board of the World Food Program, and co-founded a number of investment and venture capital firms. Not the greatest resume, but it's not like they picked him out of the gutter.
-He was selected because of his political connections
This is probably true, but it's still conjecture. Unless you can get former Burisma insiders to testify that this was the case or find documents to that effect, you're jumping to conclusions. Without this kind of evidence, you'd have to lay your foundation very carefully to have a 50/50 shot at being permitted to ask a jury to reach this conclusion in a real trial.
-Joe's ultimatum was the result of pressure from his son
Now you're not only past the point where any judge would let you ask a jury to draw that conclusion, but Joe can counter pretty easily. the prosecutor in question was notoriously corrupt, and had been the subject of calls for action for months from half of Europe. To suggest that the factor that tipped the scales toward Joe's involvement was motivation from his son being able to keep his cushy paycheck is a stretch. Biden's actions were public, and he would have needed the backing of the rest of the executive branch. You're going to have Obama administration officials up there outlining the entire process by which it was determined that this ultimatum should be made, and it's highly unlikely that any of them are going to testify that Hunter Biden had anything to do with it. Then you add in the fact that the Hunter's selection predated Shokin and the investigation predated Hunter and that the Obama Administration was supposedly concerned that Shokin was deliberately slow-walking the investigation to extract bribes and were frustrated to the point they considered launching their own investigation.
You're going to have weeks of this on TV, witness after witness who has direct knowledge of what really went on with the Shokin debacle while McCarthy is going to call who, exactly? Some of Hunter's old drinking buddies who say that he definitely gestured toward the fact that this whole international debacle was really about Hunter's salary? It won't convince the MTGs of the world, but it may convince a dozen or so guys from swing districts who are up for reelection and can't be seen as in the thrall of the MAGA wing of the party. I'm not saying this is how it plays out but it's damn risky. At least the Dems knew they could get an impeachment.
Rov_Scam
8mo ago
One of the arguments of the fat acceptance people is that shame doesn't work. Being fat isn't exactly desirable in our society, and they regularly get badgered to lose weight by doctors and skinny relatives. The whole point of the fat acceptance movement is to remove what they see as an unfair stigma.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
The Anatomy of an NFL Holdout
When a star NFL player enters the final year of his contract, it's customary for his team to negotiate a deal that will keep the player with the club long-term and usually compensate him handsomely for it. Occasionally, however, the player and the team can't come to terms. Sometimes the player will bide his time until he can become a free agent and see if the market is willing to give him the deal he thinks he deserves. But other times the player feels an emotional connection to his team and wants to stay, but on his terms, not the team's. And sometimes the team doesn't even attempt to negotiate a new contract when the player wants one. In times past, these second two scenarios would occasionally lead to a training camp holdout, when a player would stay home from team practices in an attempt to gain leverage in negotiations. Theoretically, any player unhappy with his current contract could hold out, but it was more common when players were entering the final year of a deal and wanted to renegotiate early, since that would usually result in a higher salary for the current year. The 2020 Collective Bargaining Agreement (the master deal between the league and the players union), put an end to this practice, imposing ruinous fines on players for not performing in accordance with their contracts. But there are exceptions.
Lamar Jackson was drafted by the Baltimore Ravens near the end of the first round of the 2018 NFL draft. He took over for injured starter Joe Flacco in November of his rookie season, became the youngest QB to start a playoff game, and quickly made a name for himself as one of the league's most exciting young players. In 2019 he was unanimously selected as league MVP, and in 2020 he had another great season and recorded his first playoff win. Jackson's value comes from a unique combination of arm strength and mobility. There had been mobile quarterbacks before, but for most of them their mobility was their only real strength; if they were forced to beat you with their arm, they couldn't do it. So guys like Michael Vick, Colin Kaepernick, and RGIII would give defenses fits—there's one less linebacker to blitz or drop into coverage if you have to assign one to spy the QB on every play—but these defenses soon found out that their strength could be mitigated by neutralizing the ground game and forcing them to throw. Jackson, for all his running talent, was a traditional pocket passer in college, and was as comfortable throwing the ball as he was running it. He could roll out on what appeared to be a designed run play, bait the defense in, then stop and throw a perfect over-the-shoulder fade. It was incredible.
Jackson entered 2022 on the final year of his rookie contract, and it was widely expected that the Ravens would sign him to a long-term deal. That didn't happen, but both sides seemed optimistic, and the year passed mostly uneventfully. But, as the season wound down, it became clear that trouble was afoot. The NFL is unique among sports leagues in that most contracts aren't fully guaranteed; the team can, subject to certain constraints in the CBA, cut a player without paying them. Often teams will guarantee part of the contract, and these terms get too complicated to describe here, but the amount of guaranteed money is usually the biggest sticking point in negotiations involving superstars. It was assumed that, though the Ravens were probably willing to give Lamar Jackson a ton of money, they probably weren't willing to guarantee all of it. The NFL salary cap prevents teams from just eating bad deals; it's hard to bring in good players to improve your team when one player is responsible for a huge cap hit, and doubly hard if that player is no longer a key contributor.
This unwillingness to guarantee became more salient as 2022 unfolded. The 2022 offseason was marked by two big deals. The first was the Cleveland Browns giving the Houston Texans a king's ransom for QB DeShaun Watson, and then immediately resigning Watson to a fully guaranteed $250 million deal. Watson had been the subject of lawsuits and a criminal investigation for sexual misconduct toward massage therapists. He was very good, but the Texans wanted nothing to do with him, and benched him for the entirety of the 2021 season. The legal issues went away, but the NFL still suspended him for the first 12 games of the 2022 season. So Watson entered the Browns on a monster contract but hadn't played a game in over a season and a half, and when he finally took the field in November, it showed. The jury's still out on whether Watson can shake off the rust, but the move seemed questionable when it was made and seems incredibly foolish in hindsight. The other big move was the Denver Broncos sending a similar haul to Seattle for veteran QB Russell Wilson, and similarly renegotiating his contract to one with a lot of guaranteed money. Wilson won a Super Bowl in Seattle and was one of the better players in the league for a long time, but the Seahawks struggled in 2021, and with the team entering the rebuild stage, and Wilson being their obvious best player, it made sense to move him. When he got to Denver, however, it became clear that Wilson was a large part of the reason why Seattle had been underperforming. Wilson was awful in Denver, a team that was supposedly a quarterback away from greatness, and Seattle almost made the playoffs with Geno Smith, a journeyman who was a bust with the Jets, under center. If the jury is still out on the Watson deal, most pundits agree that the Wilson deal screwed over Denver for a long time.
The Browns deal surprised no one since the Browns are notorious for being the most incompetent team in the league. But a lot of people thought that the Broncos got a fair price for a player of Wilson's caliber. Either way, the Ravens are known as one of the more competent teams in the league when it comes to personnel decisions, so it's certainly in character that they wouldn't want to commit to guaranteed cash, even for their undisputed best player. After these two fiascos, though, it makes it seem insane that any team would be willing to commit so much money, let alone the Ravens. Furthermore, Jackson has not proven himself immune to the other big weakness of mobile QBs: Injuries. Mobile quarterbacks take more hits than pocket passers, and as such tend to get injured more. Jackson sat out the last several weeks of both the 2021 and 2022 seasons injured. So it's clear that Jackson's bargaining power is greatly diminished compared to last year.
Technically, Jackson is a free agent. But the Ravens weren't willing to let him walk just yet. In an effort to keep teams from losing key players in free agency, the CBA has a Franchise Tag. What this means is that each team can select one player to tag, and the league will essentially write a one year contract for them. The Franchise Tag comes in two flavors. More common is the exclusive franchise tag. This simply says that the team keeps the player for one additional year at the average salary of the top 5 players at the position. Less common is the non-exclusive tag. This comes with a lower salary number, but allows the player to negotiate with other teams. If the player can reach a deal with another team, the original team has the option of matching the offer. If the original team decides not to match, they get two compensatory draft picks from the new team. Earlier this month, the Ravens announced their intention on giving Jackson the non-exclusive tag. This is normally a risky move, since the compensation provided is less than what the team could get than from simply trading the player. But it's genius in this case: Baltimore knows that after the Watson and Wilson fiascoes there won't be too many teams looking to sign a guy who wants a fully-guaranteed contract. And indeed, so far no other team has shown any interest. Things have become more contentious in light of recent reports that, prior to last season, Jackson turned down a five-year, $250 million deal with $133 million guaranteed. The message from the Ravens is clear: Your demands are unreasonable. We offered you a fair deal, and you won't get that deal anywhere else. If you don't believe us, we'll let you test the market and see for yourself, and if you don't like it, you can play here for another year for $30 million.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
My guess is when men's sex toys start selling a the rate women's sex toys sell. How many men on here own sex toys they bought strictly for themselves? I know I don't and I'm unaware of any of my IRL friends who own them. Meanwhile, almost every woman I know owns a vibrator and isn't afraid to let you know about it if the topic comes up in conversation. A bar I used to frequent hosted a sex toy party once and all the men who were regulars were asking when it was going to end so they wouldn't show up while it was going on. The bartender said that there was no need to wait because the lady hosting the thing had a few items for men they might be interested in, and everyone took this as a joke. The truth is, the reason men's sex toys don't sell has nothing to do with status, or feminism, or any other culture war topic, it's because men generally don't need help getting off. Most guys learn to rub one out in 15 minutes at the age of 12 and though it may take longer in later years, the basic technique remains the same. Women, on the other hand, don't reach orgasm as easily and it can take quite a bit of self-exploration to figure out what they like.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
New Hampshire governor Chris Sununu told CNN that he's [considering running for president] (https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/29/politics/chris-sununu-2024-president-cnntv/index.html). Although this isn't an announcement, I'd put Sununu's chances of running at >50% since the usual playbook is for suspected candidates to deny that they have any interest in the job at all right up until they make a formal announcement. For those unfamiliar, Chris Sununu is among a group of moderate Republican governors from liberal northeastern states, which group also includes Phil Scott of Vermont, Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, and Larry Hogan of Maryland. Unlike the others, though, Sununu didn't waffle as much over support of Trump.
Will Sununu win the nomination?
Not a chance. While firmly anti-MAGA sentiment exists within the Republican party, it isn't wide enough or concentrated enough to have the necessary impact. If that sounds contradictory, that's because the unusual nature of our primary system makes it difficult for someone like Sununu to win. If his ideas were more widely popular then he'd be able to run a national campaign where he was competitive in every state, or at least most states. If his appeal were concentrated enough he could make enough of an impact in a few key states to gain an advantage. Sununu's base of support is in the Northeast, and it's hard to see him doing well outside of there and maybe the Upper Midwest or the West Coast, but those are stretches. He also might get some support from Independents and Democrats in states with open primaries if Biden is the nominee and there aren't any interesting downballot races, but I doubt this will have a significant effect. Even in the northeast, support outside of New Hampshire is far from certain. I live in Pennsylvania and I kind of doubt his chances here, even though this is probably one of his better states.
So then why do we care?
Because he's from New Hampshire, and while his lane isn't exactly a large one, it's still a mainstream one (i.e. he's not running as the fringe hippie or the tax protestor or the craziest motherfucker in the room). He also at least has a lane; at least John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennett were going for the sensible moderate at a time when there was no obvious frontrunner there. I'm not sure why people like Nikki Haley and Tom Steyer try to run for president. They aren't beloved enough personally for there to be a groundswell of popular support based on name alone, and they aren't really proposing anything significantly different from more established candidates. They also aren't horning in on a competitive lane. I digress, but my point is that being from New Hampshire wouldn't be enough if Sununu were merely a fringe candidate or a guy stepping into an overcrowded field. Additionally, it should be noted that Sununu isn't merely from New Hampshire but is an extremely popular governor from a political family that includes his father, who was also governor, and his brother, a former Senator.
So why is being from New Hampshire important? For those of you not familiar with the American presidential nomination system, New Hampshire plays an outsized role in the process, by virtue of being first. Okay, technically it's second but it's the first primary and ultimately more important than the Iowa Caucuses. Candidates who are able to win in New Hampshire don't always go on to win the nomination, but they do stick around long enough to make a difference in the primary. Let's look at every competitive primary since 1992 where the winner didn't get the nomination:
1992 Democratic: Paul Tsongas wins but ties Bill Clinton in the delegate count. Tsongas remained competitive until Clinton swept all of the Southern primaries on Super Tuesday, and dropped out of the race on March 19 after losing a couple non-Southern primaries to Clinton by wide margins. Jerry Brown would later rally but Tsongas was the clear second at the time he dropped out of the race.
1996 Republican: Pat Buchanan wins a surprising victory. Buchanan was (and still is) a fairly extreme right-winger who's taken a few unorthodox positions and is widely regarded as anti-semitic. Bob Dole was the expected front-runner but Buchanan and Steve Forbes gave him a run for his money, and made it a three-way race early. Dole eventually bounced back and won every subsequent primary (and Buchanan never won another one after New Hampshire, though he won the Missouri Caucus), but Buchanan was still the number two man, to the extent that a number two existed. This was a weird race in that Dole was a foregone conclusion and it was surprising that he had any real competition at all.
2000 Republican: John McCain was the "maverick" moderate (in places) alternative to George W. Bush's more traditional family values conservatism. Probably the closest analogy to Sununu (though McCain is much more conservative overall). McCain wins his home state of Arizona plus New Hampshire, Michigan, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont. The crux of his campaign came in South Carolina, where he aggressively campaigned in an attempt to show that he win in the heart of Bush Country, and for a while it looked like he could pull it off. He dropped out of the race March 9th after losing California, New York, Ohio, and other states he needed and were realistic for him to win. He was still the only credible challenger to Bush that year.
2008 Democratic: Hillary Clinton won, but she was expected to win the nomination. She obviously didn't, but she hung in and the race was competitive up until the final primary in June.
2016 Democratic: Bernie Sanders actually was a fringe candidate, or at least he would have been if the Democratic Party hadn't cleared the field to ensure her nomination. Instead he wins New Hampshire and is able to stay into the race up until the convention, again making June primaries relevant.
2020 Democratic: Bernie Sanders narrowly wins the vote total, but ties Mayor Pete in the delegate count. Sanders will be the last credible candidate to drop out, exiting on April 8. Pete would leave ahead of Super Tuesday, but this wasn't so much because his campaign was doing poorly but was political gamesmanship in cooperation with Amy Klobuchar; both were running in the moderate lane and Pete was leading there for a while, but it became clear after South Carolina that Joe Biden was the moderate with the best shot of boxing out Sanders and Warren.
So in 30 years of primaries we have yet to see a New Hampshire winner who doesn't play a major role in the nomination. The state has a legitimizing effect that other states don't; Sununu winning New Hampshire won't be like Wesley Clark winning Oklahoma in 2004 or Marco Rubio winning Minnesota in 2016. Additionally, the schedule in 2024 is favorable to whoever wins New Hampshire. The New Hampshire primary is January 30, and there are no further primaries until Super Tuesday on March 5. Even if the media discounts Sununu's win as a fluke of his being the beloved native son, that's still more than a month where he is technically in the lead and can clearly establish himself as the moderate to beat.
The upshot of all of this is that it's bad for DeSantis. If Desantis decides to run, his bases of support are in Florida and other more moderate parts of the South, and in left-leaning states. If Sununu establishes himself as a legitimate candidate, he's going to siphon DeSantis votes from more moderate areas. This doesn't mean that Sununu is going to win these areas, but the vote split might be enough for Trump to come out ahead. And that's important due to the winner take all nature of a lot of the GOP primaries. And this is not merely splitting the moderate vote; Sununu's strategy would revolve around pointing out that while DeSantis isn't exactly Trump, he's far from moderate. Sununu hangs his hat on Republicans getting away from culture warring and back to responsible governance, and DeSantis made a name for himself by waging the culture war. Hence, to Sununu, DeSantis is simply a more refined version of Trump. Culture War without the tweets and incompetence. But if you want to get away from MAGA DeSantis won't do it. Additionally, I wrote a while back about how DeSantisn's real weakness is that at some point he's going to have to comment on the 2020 election and Jan 6—go full MAGA and he's just another Trump, say Biden was legitimately elected and alienate a large part of your electorate, equivocate and look like a coward. He'd already have Trump criticizing him if he doesn't offer anything other than an unequivocal endorsement of MASSIVE FRAUD. Now he could have Sununu on the other side using his equivocations as proof that he was still to beholden to MAGA and the MTGs of the world to be anything other than a Trump clone.
To get back to the calendar, it doesn't look great for DeSantis. On Super Tuesday, Alabama, South Carolina, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Utah are going to be Trump blowouts. DeSantis has a chance in Texas, North Carolina, and Tennessee, but it's going to be a two horse race with Trump that's going to be close. DeSantis would normally have a chance of winning California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Vermont, and Virginia, but he'd have to contend with substantial support for Sununu, and Trump isn't exactly going to have a poor showing. He isn't going to get a blowout win in an important state until Florida votes on March 19, and by that time the momentum advantage of winning early isn't as pronounced. His situation up to that point is Trump getting blowouts in most of the states he wins while he's splitting votes with Trump or Trump and Sununu in states he wins. If Desantis could go into blue and purple states and blow Trump out of the water he could campaign on being able to attract voters outside of MAGA Country who will be necessary to win the
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
There Are No Machines
Over the past 2 years, I’ve heard a number of election denialists, both online and in the media, that suggest that “machine politics” were somehow involved in rigging the 2020 election. What these theories all have in common is that they simply take for granted the existence of political machines in large cities, mostly in the Northeast and Upper Midwest; indeed, in some cases the city is simply mentioned as if it were understood that a corrupt political machine had its finger on every vote. This post originated as a response to @jkf from the other night, where he said:
I'm not sure why you would think anybody would be able to name people in these machines -- the whole point of these is that the functionaries are faceless and anonymous.
The mechanism is the same as always: sneak some fraudulent ballots into the system via machine aligned poll workers, who simply neglect to perform the usual checks that make this more difficult.
What Is a Machine?
The first part of the quote betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what a machine actually is, so it’s worth exploring that. Political machines maintain their power through a system of patronage. An example of how this could have been done would be that the machine boss makes sure a crony gets appointed to chair the parks department. The crony’s appointment is not based on his qualifications as an administrator as much as it is based in his ability to use his position to obtain votes for machine candidates. So he coordinates with the boss of a ward full of poor Italian immigrants to get them all maintenance jobs. He coordinates with another ward boss to make sure that a prominent and loyal contractor in his ward gets a no-bid contract for facility renovation that will provide a ton of work to the Polish and Hungarian immigrants in his ward. And then when election time rolls around the ward boss makes sure everybody knows who they have to thank for all of this largesse and that if the machine loses control to the reformers the first thing that will happen is that they’ll get cut off. That’s just one example but there are all kinds of favors politicians can do to help normal people, down to anodyne stuff like helping them navigate bureaucracy through a few well-placed phone calls; stuff that’s so anodyne that (good) politicians still do it today. And it goes without saying that if you dare elect an opponent to lead your ward, all those services get cut off, and in the next election the machine pick will point to his inability to get anything done, even though that inability is machine-driven.
Of course, something has to give in a system like this, and it’s that problems never actually get solved. Richard Daley may not have been able to deal with poverty, but he was good enough at helping individual poor people that the machine never paid an electoral price for it. But the Chicago machine was an outlier in terms of longevity; machine politics started to die out in the 1930s, and the decline accelerated after the war. Historically, machines would get voted out of power during times of economic hardship in favor of reformers, as there wasn’t enough largess to distribute to keep the machine going. But the machine would normally make a comeback when things got better. The Depression meant that things didn’t get better for a long time. A lot of people needed help, there wasn’t much to go around, and local government was forced to focus on structural changes rather than individual favors. Some individual machines weren’t directly affected, but reforms at the state and Federal level in areas like the civil service and contract requirements gradually eroded away the machines’ ability to operate.
The upshot of all of this is that machines aren’t “faceless and anonymous” entities. Their very nature prevents them from being so. Handing out anonymous favors may be good as an act of charity, but it’s a terrible way to buy votes for your party. And when somebody sees that the town has gone to shit and wants to challenge the status quo, what do you do? Send them an anonymous threat? No; anyone trying to challenge a political machine must be aware of the fact that the machine runs the town and the machine will crush them if they try to interfere and if they’re smart enough to run the town then they’re smart enough to geta nice sinecure and maybe someday they’ll get the keys to the executive washroom. From Boss Tweed in the early days to Richard Daly at the tail end of the machine era, everyone knew who was in charge, and if they didn’t, the boss wouldn’t hesitate to let them know.
The Pittsburgh Machine
I can’t speak to every city in which fraud was alleged, but I live in SWPA and can provide a pretty detailed picture of how Pittsburgh’s government works. First, unless otherwise stated, everyone named here is a Democrat; the city hasn’t had a Republican mayor since the 1930s and that’s just the way it is. It’s also what gives rise to accusations of machine politics. But hear me out. There are 3 big players in Pittsburgh politics: The mayor, the Allegheny County Executive, and the Allegheny County Democratic Committee. The current mayor is Ed Gainey, a former state rep who beat incumbent Bill Peduto in the 2021 primary. Peduto didn’t seek the committee’s nomination and he accordingly didn’t get it; Gainey won it over Tony Moreno, a MAGA Democrat and former cop who thought Peduto was too soft on the 2020 protestors (of which we had relatively few that became problematic). Peduto also didn’t campaign, but nonetheless managed to win 39% of the vote to Gainey’s 46%, a testament to either the cluelessness of the electorate or the unwillingness of Peduto’s white, upper middle class base to support a black progressive reformer like Gainey or a cretin like Moreno. Gainey’s election was both surprising and not surprising at the same time. Had Peduto done anything to indicate that he actually wanted to be mayor he would have easily won. Before becoming mayor himself, Peduto made a name for himself by mercilessly criticizing the two previous mayors from his position on city council representing the wealthiest part of town.
Peduto was mayor during the 2020 election, but that is of little consequence since the city doesn’t run elections, the county does. The County Executive is (and was) Rich Fitzgerald. He was elected in 2011 after beating Mark Patrick Flaherty in the primary and Republican D. Raja in the general. Flaherty was County Controller, the son of a judge, nephew of a former mayor, and that isn’t the half of it. Fitzgerald was a county councilman. Fitzgerald won by about ten points. Allegheny County operates differently than other counties. Most counties in PA are run by three elected commissioners and there are a slew of row offices like prothonotary, register of wills, etc. Allegheny County’s system was dysfunctional and dominated by city interests so a home rule charter was adopted in 1999 that would put power in the hands of a unified executive and a geographically-based council. Most row offices were eliminated and replaced by civil service employees. The county runs the elections.
Finally, there’s the Democratic Committee. In theory this has over 2600 members (one man and one woman from each precinct), but in reality many of these seats are vacant since not all precincts can find enough people to fill their allotment. Most committee elections involve fewer than 1000 participants, and if you live in a precinct with a vacant spot, they’ll pretty much give it to you. The committee’s main job is (obviously) to get Democrats elected, but they also endorse primary candidates. And it’s currently a mess. Ahead of the 2020 election, there were a number of stories about how the committee had a MAGA problem; some committee members were making Facebook posts supporting right-wing policies, and committee leadership was ambivalent. Then the committee went on to endorse some of these MAGA sympathizers in local races over progressive candidates. With Peduto not seeking their endorsement, nearly 40% of the committee voted to endorse former cop and current asshole Tony Moreno for mayor. With Fitzgerald’s time as executive coming to a close, the committee is endorsing moderate and longtime county Treasurer John Weinstein. Mayor Gainey, however, has endorsed progressive state legislator Sara Innamorato. But the board failed to endorse incumbent DA Stephen Zappala in favor of the more progressive Matt Dugan. And no one has yet endorsed longtime city Controller Michael Lamb for County Executive, even though he’s from a prominent political family that includes his nephew, former US Rep Conor Lamb.
If this is supposed to be some kind of machine, it’s a pretty dysfunctional one. Politicians with long pedigrees can’t get endorsements. Politicians who endorse views antithetical to the party platform do get endorsements. Politicians with endorsements lose primary elections. Prominent figures in the party can’t agree on whom to endorse. Mayors tend to be replaced by their strongest critics. This group was supposed to have participated in the rigging of a presidential election? They couldn’t rig an election for dogcatcher. This isn’t because they’re incompetent, it’s because this is the way the system is supposed to operate.
Rov_Scam
11mo ago
From what I've read so far, Neely was walking back and forth yelling at nobody in particular that he was hungry and thirsty and that he didn't care if he went to prison and he was ready to die. He then aggressively threw his jacket onto the floor. I could be mistaken, but I was under the impression that that this is the kind of behavior that is usually reserved for the mentally ill and intoxicated. You can call it ranting, raving, or whatever, but it's certainly not normal and is certainly distinct from going off on tangents in a space specifically dedicated for the purpose. News reports indicated that Neely was schizophrenic and I'm assuming that that influenced his behavior, but I'm no psychiatrist.
Rov_Scam
8mo ago
If Musk had simply gone to the DoD and told them that his company couldn't afford to keep providing this service free of charge, he probably could have reached a deal similar to the one he got much earlier. Instead, he started messing around with the service itself, and if that wasn't bad enough, he is alleged to have engaged in a little amateur diplomacy that resulted in his publicly proposing a settlement to the war that he had to have known the people he was ostensibly helping would find unacceptable.
I sit on the board of a nonprofit that relies heavily on volunteers. While I don't expect these volunteers to have the kind of dedication an employee would, nothing irritates me more than when someone volunteers to do something and then doesn't do it. No, you're under no obligation to help me. But keep in mind that if you tell me you're going to come and then don't show up it complicates things because now I have to rearrange my plans on the fly, and your absence may be the difference between finishing the job in one day and having to dedicate more time. If I know this in advance I can work around it, but I don't like surprises. Even worse is when a vendor reneges on a deal. Yes, I'm grateful that you're providing goods or services for free or at a reduced price, but when you change the terms a week before the event I either have to come up with money that's not in the budget or find someone else on short notice. It's probably not the best analogy, but the point is that just because you're doing something nice at your own expense doesn't mean people don't have a legitimate reason to be pissed if they get cut off before they've accomplished the goal you're ostensibly helping them with.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
Given that the Reedy Creek matter isn't over yet I'm not sure that's an example you want to be giving. I'd be willing to bet a decent sum that come next July, it's still in existence.
Rov_Scam
8mo ago
Joe Biden had been out of office for months at the time that email was sent. You can't bribe a private citizen.
Rov_Scam
10mo ago
This is the exact kind of "gotcha" politics that I can't stand regardless of which side does it. What's the conservative takeaway supposed to be here? That we should restrict Muslim immigration because it's a threat to the LGBT agenda? Or that we should encourage more Muslims to come because they're natural social conservatives?
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
You think that in a liberal society it's the proper role of government to threaten legal consequences for exercise of free speech rights?
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
I have previously discussed Ron DeSantis's prospects of becoming GOP nominee here and probably back on the old sub as well, but events of the past few weeks make me want to revisit the topic. During this period, several op-eds appeared suggesting that DeSantis is already flaming out. The biggest evidence for this is polling, which shows him losing ground to Donald Trump. While I think these reports are a bit premature—after all, polls from a year out aren't exactly the most reliable, especially concerning a candidate who hasn't even announced yet—they seem to underscore a point I had made previously. Ron DeSantis is a great candidate if the goal is to wed the Trump spirit to a candidate that doesn't want to directly invoke Trump. Some call him Trump-lite but that's not really an accurate description. He knows that the Republican party desperately needs to move on from Trump if they want to win national elections, as most Americans find direct MAGA invocations and claims of rigged elections to be distasteful at best and dangerous at worst. There's value in appearing to be the reasonable Republican who might have a shot at winning the general election in the face of an unpopular octogenarian. On the other hand, he knows that Trump has a large base that is now well-integrated in the party and is distrustful of Romney-type moderates who will sell them out to wealthy elites if it puts an extra nickel in their pockets and will play dead in the face of woke excess. RINOs, in other words. The Tea Party and later Trump reinvigorated a Republican party that had been moribund in the wake of Bush's disastrous second term, and the voters who made 2016 possible won't stand for some squish. They need someone who will fight.
DeSantis sought to split this difference. He balanced effective, bland government with culture-war ostentation. He refused to kowtow to Trump but was reluctant to criticize him. He built up plenty of media buzz. The thought among his supporters was that he would have the upper hand on both Trump wannabes and boring moderates in the primary. And then Trump himself announced his candidacy, and started attacking DeSantis directly, even though DeSantis hadn't (and still hasn't) declared. When he finally announces (probably in June), the primary fight will be a bloodbath. And no, DeSantis can't wait until 2028 because his buzz is solely based around his supposed candidacy. If he sits this one out he's a popular governor who no one outside of Florida gives a fuck about, at least not until 2027, when he'll have to compete with whoever the next wunderkind is, assuming Trump isn't running yet again.
The smart money says that DeSantis would have a shot in the general but is hamstrung by the fact that, having to go against Trump directly, he'll have to run further to the right than a general electorate will find acceptable, and will come out of the primary looking like another MAGA extremist. This is the conventional wisdom but I think this wisdom is wrong. First, DeSantis would have a tough row to hoe in the general even if the GOP handed him the nomination on a silver platter. What's the man know for so far? His COVID response put him on the map, but COVID isn't going to be an issue in 2024, and he'll have to do better than pointing out an isolated glory from four years ago. Everything else he's been in the news for has been culture war bait that is of dubious effectiveness, has nearly no national relevance, and is distasteful to moderates in any event. Part of the reason why Republicans were so disappointing in last year's midterms is because they failed to address things voters actually cared about. As much as the GOP would rag on Biden for inflation, they never presented a coherent plan for how to deal with it. No one knows what Ron DeSantis thinks about inflation. No one knows what the thinks about healthcare. No one knows what he thinks about crime, or how he plans to explain how Florida's crime rate is worse than both New York's and California's. When he's on the debate stage with Biden, what's he going to do, talk about the STOP WOKE act and the Don't Say Gay bill?
But then, he had an opening. Earlier this month, "Justice for All", a new single by Donald Trump and the J6 choir, went to No. 1 on iTunes. The single features president Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance over a choir of heavily autotuned January 6th prisoners singing "The Star Spangled Banner" over prison phones. To most people on the left, this was just a hilarious example of how nutty the right is. But it gives DeSantis a chance. This is, for once, proof positive that there's no outflanking Trump on the right. No amount of MAGA-adjacentness is going to cut it here, when Trump represents the platonic ideal of MAGA. DeSantis's culture warring has proven that he's no RINO squish; now he can use this credibility to fight Trump directly. Come out directly and say that Trump's implicit support of the J6 prisoners, most of whom were convicted of assaulting law enforcement, is a disgrace to the idea of law and order and legitimizes left-wing violence. Come out and say that the 2020 election wasn't rigged. Come out and directly attack every MAGA conspiracy theory out there. Run on all the good, boring things he's done in Florida that no one has paid attention to, like environmental legislation, which has greater GOP interest in the wake of the East Palestine debacle. There's little doubt that if he wins Iowa, or New Hampshire, or wherever else, Trump will claim that the election was rigged, so get out ahead of it. He'll lose the Trump faithful but he wasn't winning with them anyway, and the rest of the party will be able to get back to some semblance of normal.
Of course. I wrote all this before I saw the news last night of the latest developments in the Disney scandal. I thought his move against Disney was stupid at the time, and said so here, but all of the DeSantis supporters assured me that this was the right move. It was clear almost immediately that simply ending the special district wasn't going to work, and I wasn't surprised when he said that the legislature would be dealing with the issue at a date that was conveniently after the election. Around this time, Bob Iger came back as Disney CEO, and apparently realized that a drawn-out court battle wasn't in the company's best interests, and it looked like the two sides had reached the kind of compromise that allowed both parties to save face: The state would get a couple token board members and everyone would forget about the whole thing. Then, at some point, DeSantis got greedy and made a deal that looked too good to be true—the entire district would be replaced with a new one whose board would consist entirely of political appointees, including a self-described children's activist and a self-described Christian nationalist, along with some wealthy donors for good measure. Some even went so far as to suggest that the board could monitor the content of Disney's theme park programs. The new board took over last month with relatively little fanfare.
And then, yesterday, weeks after the crucial documents had been signed, it became clear that the whole thing was one big setup, and that Disney had completely outfoxed DeSantis. It turns out that, back in February, the existing RCID board had entered into an agreement with Disney that devolved almost all of its powers. At least the powers that would have given DeSantis any leverage over the company. The board will still oversee infrastructure, but won't have any ability to influence development. Florida officials are obviously livid and the new board is seeking legal redress. I won't comment on the legality of the whole mess because I don't know, but even if the state has a good case against Disney, it doesn't really matter. First, the RCID was a public body and thus subject to sunshine laws. The whole thing was done out in the open—the agreement was posted online so you didn't even need a records request, the meeting adopting the agreement was public, etc.—so the only excuse DeSantis has for getting into this mess was not anticipating some kind of funny business and not noticing that anything was wrong until weeks after the deal was done. Second, it doesn't matter because any litigation won't be resolved until well after the election is over, and I doubt anyone will be issuing preliminary injunctions enabling the board to operate as it desires. One of the centerpieces of DeSantis's culture war has been delayed significantly due almost exclusively to the incompetence of public officials. Who knows, maybe this will blow over, but it significantly damages any attempt by DeSantis to run on competent administration.
Rov_Scam
1yr ago
I may have mentioned this before, but for those of you don’t know, I’m an unapologetic music junkie. Since 2010 or so, I’ve been making my way through the corpus of music history in a semi-systematic way that makes sense only to me, and rating albums as I go through it using a scale of 0 to 5 stars, half stars included. To date, I have awarded 186 albums the highest ranking the criteria for which are as follows:
The crème de la crème. Albums that have no serious weak moments and many transcendent ones. Any weak spots or less than captivating songs are overshadowed by the splendor of the glorious majority. In any event, these are minor enough that pointing them out is the kind of petty nitpicking that even fans of the work in question will argue over. Nearly all of these records defined either the genre which they belong to or the era in which they were recorded.
I don’t normally rank the albums as I rate them, but I’ve done so for the top tier. As a sort of personal indulgence, I will include capsule reviews for all the albums on this list over the next several Fridays, including as many reviews as character limits allow. Without further ado:
186 Lynyrd Skynyrd – One More from the Road (1977)
Most live albums are superfluous—they include pleasant live renditions of the familiar studio material but rarely offer anything essential. The best live albums are usually the shorter ones that highlight a few key performances rather than attempting to provide the full concert experience. Unfortunately, there was a trend in the 1970s where any artist nearing the end of its contract would release an obligatory double live album that clocked in at over an hour and contained everything a fan could want in a live release. Most of these are decent, but inessential. This record is one of the few exceptions. Lead guitarist Steve Gaines had recently joined the band and would only be present for one studio album, but the performances he gives here are nonpareil, giving the familiar classics a level of sophistication they hadn’t had previously. And the performance of "Freebird" that ends the album makes it abundantly clear why calling for it at the end of unrelated concerts became such a cliché 20 years later.
185 Strawbs – Ghosts (1975)
Strawbs were about as undistinguished a Progressive Rock band as you could get, never having any commercial success, always showing flashes of brilliance but never making a truly great album (though Hero and Heroine came close). Then, in 1975, as Progressive Rock was in its death throes, everything finally came together. There’s nothing particularly noteworthy about the album, just that it combines great songs with enough of the usual progressive elements to keep things interesting.
184 Organized Konfusion – Organized Konfusion (1991)
Most rap albums—even the important ones—suffer from some critical flaw that prevents them from achieving the highest ranking. I’d be remiss if I claimed that this album held any particular degree of importance in the history of rap music, but it manages to run for nearly an hour without a bum track in sight. The liberal Steely Dan samples don’t hurt, either.
183 Thievery Corporation – Sound from the Thievery Hi-Fi (1997)
Downtempo albums can be difficult to judge because they are, at some level, supposed to exist in the background as much as the foreground. Ones that emphasize the former tend to be generic and unmemorable. Ones that emphasize the latter can be good albums, but they aren’t really effective as Downtempo albums. Not only does Thievery Corporation manage to strike this balance perfectly, they also manage to strike a similar balance between Hip-Hop and Easy Listening, making this album equally suited for smoking a joint as it is to being played in a department store. And, of course, the individual cuts are great as well.
182 The Byrds – The Notorious Byrd Brothers (1968)
It seems odd looking back at the catalog of one of the most significant bands in Rock history that this was the only album they released that makes this list. There are at least five other Byrds albums that probably have better critical reputations than this, and they are very good albums, but all suffered from pretty significant flaws. What makes it all the more unusual is that this album was recorded at an uncertain point in the band’s history; personnel changes were rampant, with the only constants being Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman, and session musicians were used to complete the songs. Nonetheless, this album manages to encapsulate everything that was great about the Byrds: “Goin’ Back” echoes back to their early Folk-Rock period, “Wasn’t Born to Follow” looks ahead to their Country-Rock future, and there’s plenty of psychedelic weirdness thrown in for good measure.
181 Bob Seger – Night Moves (1976)
While Bruce Springsteen has always fashioned himself as the working-class Heartland Rocker par excellence, Bob Seger is a much better choice for that distinction. He’d spent the past decade as a true working musician, putting out albums regularly, touring constantly, and getting little recognition outside of Michigan for it. His breakthrough album was the typical double-live Live Bullet, but this was his first real studio success, containing great songs that encapsulate the heartland approach without resorting to the theatrical bombast of Bruce Springsteen or the overearnestness of John Mellencamp.
180 Roy Harper – Stormcock (1971)
Roy Harper’s claim to fame among most Rock fans is as the namesake of the Led Zeppelin song “Hats Off to (Roy) Harper” and as the lead vocalist on Pink Floyd’s “Have a Cigar”. He was always bound to be the kind of guy that was more popular among musicians than among the general public. This is certainly an unusual album in the Rock canon—only four tracks, two per side, just acoustic guitar and vocals. But the length of the songs works to their advantage, as Harper is talented enough to make them seem epic rather than overlong, and his guitar playing is intricate enough that the spare instrumentation never seems inadequate.
179 Boards of Canada – The Campfire Headphase (2005)
The critical consensus may be that Music Has the Right to Children is the best Boards of Canada album, and while that record was more influential, it had to much weirdness for the sake of weirdness to make it into the top tier. By the time The Campfire Headphase was released, the band was no longer on the cutting edge, but the more deliberate composition and integration of acoustic instruments made this the better album.
178 Donovan – A Gift from a Flower to a Garden (1967)
Donovan was by far the dippiest member of the British Folk-Rock scene (he went to India with the Beatles and actually took the whole trip seriously), so it’s no surprise that he recorded a children’s album that was more than a lazy cash-in. While the individual songs are relatively short, the album is a double, and it’s clear that he was contributing A material. The dippiness actually works to this album’s advantage, as Donovan can parlay that into a sense of whimsy rather than simply dumbing-down the music, as so many other musicians are wont to do when playing for children. The end result is a kid’s album that you wouldn’t even know is a kid’s album unless someone told you.
177 Fleetwood Mac – Tusk (1979)
Lindsey Buckingham abandons the tight pop songs that made Fleetwood Mac icons in favor of his own eccentric weirdness, which isn’t merely limited to his contributions but to the arrangements he provides to the Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie songs. And it works! The counterbalance the rest of the band provides makes this more palatable than his solo material (where he simply runs wild). The rest of the band would tell him to cut it out after this and release more conventional pop albums, but they’d never reach these heights again.
176 Big Star – No. 1 Record (1972)
This is one of those overrated critical darlings whose reputation precedes it. As much as I want to resist fellating this album the way so many critics do, I have to admit that this is a pretty near perfect collection of Power Pop songs, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that.
175 Heart – Dreamboat Annie (1976)
Heart has developed a reputation as a sort of female-fronted Zeppelin, and while that characterization isn’t entirely fair, what makes their early career is their Zeppelin-like ability to blend Hard Rock riffage with more contemplative acoustic material. By the time the ‘80s rolled around, commercial pressures forced them into a generic power ballad arena band, but at the beginning, they were able to craft thoughtful albums with a cohesive artistic vision.
174 Rush – Hemispheres (1978)
Most people would rate their next two albums as better than this, but for me, this is as good as Rush ever got. The title cut might be the last great sidelong suite, “Circumstances” is a solid Hard Rock cut, and the Harrison Bergeron-inspired “The Trees” doesn’t disappoint either. But the real standout here is “La Villa Strangiato”, which is the best instrumental of Rush’s career and is in the running for best Rock instrumental of all time. Rush would find a more distinctive voice in the ‘80s, but they never really topped this.
173 Bad Company – Bad Company (1974)
Bad Company’s reputation isn’t the best since they’re viewed as responsible for all the generic arena bands of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s like Journey, Foreigner, Loverboy, and, well, all the other Bad Company albums. But this is still a killer collection of songs that remains unparalleled in the genre, and that won’t change regardless of how much crap it inspired.
That's it for now. Let me know what you think!
As @rae alludes to below, the culture war implications of trans women in sports overshadow any actual concern for female athletes. The attitude of conservatives towards women's sports in my lifetime has been blase at best and condemnatory at worst. The most popular women's sport by far is tennis, but even there, a quick perusal of the world rankings reveals no household names. The biggest women's college event of the year is the NCAA tournament, and that isn't exactly a hot ticket. When Pitt basketball student tickets were hard to come by, the lottery system in place gave you credit for the number of women's games you went to just to boost attendance. The discussion about Title IX below had an air of incredulity about it, suggesting that if it were costing OCR this much to enforce equality among men's and women's sports, perhaps we were better off without it. I doubt many conservatives would care too much either way; they might not exactly rail against the idea of a school being forced to spend ungodly sums on unprofitable women's sports because they spend millions on the football team, but if the law changed tomorrow and colleges started shutting down women's teams or at least restricting them (playing locally as independents rather than flying them all across the ACC footprint or whatever) I imagine the arguments would mirror those they make when one someone suggests WNBA salaries should be on par with the men.
And then when a trans person goes from being ranked 400th nationally to 38th in a sport no one cares about regardless of what gender is playing it because they won some tournament that most people haven't heard of but is supposedly kind of prestigious, women's sports become a sacred thing that must be protected at all costs. I understood that there was real concern in the early days of the trans saga when advocates were arguing that personal identity trumps all and it raised the specter of failed male athletes ticking a box differently just to get a chance to compete, or for scholarship money, or whatever. But the relevant governing bodies imposed testosterone limits, and while we can argue that those limits are too high or too low, we can't argue that no man is meeting the most lenient ones without taking supplemental estrogen. The effects of taking supplemental estrogen are such that it's doubtful that any man would undergo this treatment just for a shot at playing organized sports in a discipline that offers no hope of making any money as a professional. Do they have a competitive advantage? Maybe, but I don't really care. The trans population is small enough that it's probably not a huge difference in the grand scheme of things, and you never hear about the trans athletes who don't win anything. One thing you never hear about is what the actual women athletes have to say about this. Governing bodies don't seem to be too concerned, and polls have repeatedly shown that the competitors aren't either. And if those most at stake don't care, then why should we? After all, when it comes to the priority of things, sports are pretty far down the list.
More options
Context Copy link