The Rules of the Game - Danse Macabre

A spooky interlude set to Camille Saint-Saëns's 1874 death-themed tone poem.  From Jean Renoir's 1939 classic, La règle du jeu.

Non-sequitur Bonus:  To evoke that after party feeling, you can't beat Confidence Man's 3 AM LA LA LA 

An Engagement with Reality

(Adapted from my side of a dialog with a Green of my acquaintance concerning the above video*)

A recent Minority Report segment touched on a few things I’ve been thinking about and that otherwise hit me as particularly salient re what voting does.  For instance, Sam Seder and I are 100% on the same page about why (given our ridiculously intentionally undemocratic political system) Democrats winning is always a better outcome than Republicans winning: because it relieves the otherwise relentless rightward pressure on the discourse. Bill Clinton didn’t suck only because he was a Democrat.  He sucked because he followed 12 years of Republicanism and preceded another 8 years of it.  (And that was all that was needed to get us in the fucking state we’re in.)  This fact as Sam laid out very well is ignored or misrepresented by Greens and other anti-Democrat voters on the left.  Democrat victories don’t absolve the left from activism but they make activism more liable to accomplish some of its goals.  It’s just a fact.

Beyond that, I thought Emma Vigeland was completely on point about what the task of voting is about.  To wit: “Engage with the fucking reality.”  I’ll be honest, that’s it in a nutshell.  One of two parties is going to win.  One is a major ass disappointment that is not what anyone wants.  The other is an evil anti-majority force that is exactly what the tiniest worst minority wants.  One is ineffectual and obtuse.  The other is laser focused on getting exactly what they want.  That is the choice.  That is the fucking reality we have to engage with.  You are free to vote Green to register your disapproval of the choices.  Either way, on January 20,  American foreign policy continues, but with one of the possible outcomes you didn’t have anything to do with, it continues with a misguided (corrupt even) idealism and ideology, and with the other it proceeds with a plan.  Notice I’m not saying this is good.  But one is better because it can be influenced; the other is hopeless. For those who are letting themselves off the hook for not voting for Kamala Harris because of Joe Biden's accomplice-role in Israel's genocide in Gaza, while I can't fault you for your instinct to punish,† as a way of explaining my own thinking on it, I would like to know how a vote for Jill Stein brings an end to Israel’s genocide if Trump wins. To Stein voting vote shamers of those voting for Kamala Harris, if you can’t answer that, then how will I ever be convinced not to care about the outcome of the election?  You may tell yourself that a vote for Stein is a vote against Genocide, but what good is a vote against genocide if you are convinced that you can't win regardless of the outcome?  Is it worth it if abortion rights are removed across the country, tax breaks for billionaires cut deeper into benefits for the rest of us, the Supreme Court becomes irreparably antagonistic to the non-millionaire majority for decades more to come?

Tell me this Green-voting lapsed Democrats: When you voted for Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry and Obama were you saying “go ahead, evil neoliberal sham democracy, here's my consent.”?   Were you ever in your life voting FOR the status quo, even when you vote-shamed me for voting for Nader in 2000?  I can tell you what I was thinking when I voted for Clinton—the first time it was “Die George Bush!!” I had registered as an independent by Clinton's second term because of my disillusionment with his first, but I still voted for his re-election as a way of saying “Fuck off Dole, you fuckin’ creep!”  True for Obama I, I was hopeful for change. (and eager to put a knife between John McCain’s ribs).   My point which is getting lost is, voting to me is not about consent.  It’s about engaging with the fucking reality that Democrats winning is better for the people than Republicans winning.  Always.   Sometimes just marginally, always never enough but it’s Always better.  I’ve never in my lifetime known a case when that wasn’t true.  Even in 2000, I voted for Nader but on election night when the outcome was in doubt and for the month after I rooted for Gore.  Because the reality was never going to be Nader brings down the duopoly.  I’m sure I thought I was sending a message to Democrats, but as Sam Seder often says, before the election the Greens are all about their votes sending a message to Democrats (never to Republicans for some weird reason), but when Democrats lose, no Green (least of all the Green candidate) says, “See?  We are why the Dems lost!  Blame us and learn our lesson!  This is the outcome we helped make happen!” Do you take credit for Trump’s victory in 2016?  (Because if you do, shame on you!)  Did Democrats learn a damn thing from the 2016 2% Green vote in Wisconsin?  No they did not veer left in 2020-- when Bernie Sanders won a few too many primaries in a row, they got their shit together and crammed the chronic pathologically unilateral bipartisan down our throats. But it was still better than the alternative. Again, voting is not about my feelings about democracy, it’s about the least harmful one winning.

You anti-Dem leftists who are still voting Green may think you're voting for democracy, but democracy is not on the ballot.  The truth is if you want to change electoral politics, the odds are pretty good you’re not going to be able to do it within electoral politics.  It’s not impossible but would require a groundswell – e.g., if Bernie Sanders had won the Democratic primary in 2016 or 2020 or Marianne Williamson had won in 2024.  The time for expressing yourself with your vote is the primary.  If you’re not “engaging with the fucking reality” on election day, it may feel good but you’re too late.

My bottom line on this is I don’t care necessarily how or whether people vote if they just keep it to themselves  (Personally, if you don’t want to engage with the reality, non-voting seems a bit purer of an expression to me). But if they are not advocating for the least harmful of the two possible outcomes, they better not be shaming those of us who are actually trying to actively mitigate the outcome.

A post-script about my 2000 Nader vote—I don’t know how I would have voted if I had lived in a swing state.  Probably for Gore, but not necessarily.  I was disgusted with the democratic party.  I honestly thought if Gore lost, so there.  I thought George W was a fuckup who would be a dopey one-term president.  I was obviously not looking at the big picture.  I was not looking at who would be in his cabinet and who he’d nominate to the Supreme Court.  I think we know what Emma Vigeland would say about that.

Truthfully, I don’t care who you vote for—it might be personally meaningful to you to vote Green, and that I think you’d agree is maybe a more immediate effect for you, maybe the sum total of what it does, a good in and of itself for you irrespective of what it means for anyone else, but it’s a different effect from what votes are traditionally supposed to do in an election.  That’s fine.  Here's a proposition, you don't have to apologize for your feel-good vote if  I don’t have to apologize for my nose-holding one.  

~~~~~

*The Green is the one who brought it up.  I was merely responding to his reaction to it.

† There is a precedent.  Anti-war voters punished Lyndon Johnson's Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1968 for Vietnam by withholding their votes for him-- and for their protest they got Nixon and Henry Kissinger and escalation instead.

The Mourning Cloak

The Wikipedia Entry for the mourning cloak butterfly (also known as the Camberwell Beauty, the White Petticoat and the Grand Surprise) reads in places like a David Lynch script.

• L. Hugh Newman likened the butterfly's pattern to a girl who, disliking having to be in mourning, defiantly let a few inches of a bright dress show below her mourning dress.
• The larvae and pupae ... respond to disturbances by twitching simultaneously.
• Newly hatched mourning cloak caterpillars can display selfish behavior, such as siblicide, by eating non-hatched eggs.
• Defense mechanisms include loud clicks when the mourning cloak flies away from a predator.
• Mourning cloaks also play dead by closing their wings tightly together and tucking their legs up against their body for protection and holding completely still.
• Mourning cloaks ... join together with other butterflies in a perch and fly menacingly towards their attackers—most often birds or other butterflies.

A widespread species, they tend to be seen in cooler more mountainous climes across Eurasia and North America, but they can be found as far south and outside their range as northern South America and Japan.  Newman, referenced above, observed that sightings of the butterfly in the UK were "concentrated around London, Hull and Harwich" all of which, being ports receiving regular shipments of timber from Scandinavia, led him to theorize that they had "hibernated in stacks of timber which was then shipped to England, and had not traveled naturally."  Newman "raised thousands for release at his 'farm' in Bexley, but none were seen the following spring. Specimens stored in his refrigerator for the winter, however, survived."

They are among the most long-lived species of butterfly.  Adults begin to emerge from their cocoons in late spring, upon which they aestivate -- the summer counterpart to hibernation-- remaining in a low energy and activity state known as torpor to weather the hottest months.  In fall, some migrate, but most remain in place.  Some pollinate, but most feed on tree sap and fallen fruit, or the "honeydew" exuded from aphids.  To weather the winter months, individuals will find a notch in a tree or rocky cliff face or nestle on the ground under bark.  Their ability to survive winter in adult form makes them among the first butterflies to appear in spring.  

Mating season begins in early April.  A non-dimorphous species, males compete for widely dispersed females over a broad range by displays of maleness characterized by domination of a desirable territory, a location "that females would want to visit," such as "sunny perches near ravines, wood margins, parks, gardens, lakes, ponds, around stream edges, or canyons in which males can perch and defend for multiple days." In this way, they attract females to themselves.  Females deposit eggs in 3 or more broods in colorful "ring clusters" on the twigs of plants, typically willows or poplars, likely to grow leaves in abundances that will nourish the hatchlings when they emerge as caterpillars. 

According to Wikipedia:

In several European countries with Germanic languages, other than Britain, the name for this butterfly literally translates to "mourning cloak", such as German "Trauermantel", Dutch "rouwmantel", Swedish "sorgmantel", Finnish "suruvaippa" and Norwegian "sørgekåpe". This suggests it is a name which came with Scandinavian or German rather than with British settlers, for whom this species would be considerably less familiar. Other common names include: Czech "Černopláštník" . "Babočka osiková". Polish "Rusałka żałobnik". Russian "Траурница" . Japanese "キベリタテハ" . Chinese "黄縁立羽". 

Having mated and laid eggs in spring and survived the year, the adults then die. 

Memoriana

Graphics above and below are from The Human Toll: Indirect Deaths from War in Gaza and the West Bank, October 7, 2023 Forward - Prepared by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins for the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, October 7, 2024

For many of us, something has changed in ourselves as a direct result of Israel's conduct of its ongoing "response" to Hamas's surprise breach of the Iron Dome October 7, 2023.  In the aftermath of the attack in which 1200 Israelis were killed and hundreds were taken hostage, as tens of thousands of civilian Palestinian bodies piled up within the open-air prison of Gaza throughout the month; as hospitals, schools, homes and apartment buildings crumbled under the force of 2000 lb bombs leaving 90% of Gazans unhoused within a span of weeks and the onslaught continued with unquestioning, ghoulishly apologetical American support and no end to the carnage in sight,  our world crumbled too.  

I remember back in October feeling very strongly that Israel had broken something it would come to wish it had not broken and that broken thing was the compact that we in the west have had (in so many unwritten words) to grant Israel the exceptional license to take reparations in perpetuity for Hitler's holocaust against Europe's Jews in whatever form it deemed necessary in how it conducted its affairs.  We agreed to grant Israel the right to arbitrate the equivalence of anti-zionism or opposition to Israel with anti-semitism.  We agreed to let Israel run roughshod over propriety and precision in how it characterized its enemies, in its right to perpetual victim status regardless of its culpability -- to grant its special pleading the power to erase its cruelty.  We agreed to look the other way as it constructed a separate and unequal life for the Palestinians it walled away, their access to food, water and supplies as tightly controlled as their freedom of movement within the homeland that Israel now occupied-- we agreed not to call it apartheid.  But it did not take the over 100,000 Gazans, the nearly 700 Palestinians in the West Bank and the growing number of killed civilians in Lebanon and Syria that Israel has slaughtered in the past 12 months , to say nothing of the hundreds of civilian Israelis similarly needlessly killed a year ago as mere collateral damage in their country's wars of choice to put the lie to the tales we let ourselves be told about Israeli virtue.  October voided that.  

As a result of Israel's self-exposure, I no longer believe that Israel's project would be rationalizable but for the unfortunate prevalence of odious conservative elements in its government, but rather that its birth out of European racism, anti-semitism and colonialism-- and especially in light of its conduct in the world to secure its dubious future ever since--should doom it.  The current ethno-state should be succeeded by a single state of egalitarian democratic rule for the current citizens of Israel who wish to remain and for the Palestinians that Israel has displaced.  I no longer accede to the proposition that the right of Israel to exist outweighs the rights of Israelis and Palestinians to co-exist in whatever peace they can forge together as equal citizens in that land, from the river to the sea.

Wicked Game

Thinking about it later, I wouldn't remember how I came to be here, emerging from a wood, suddenly surrounded by green, striding through shin-high grasses under a flaxen sky.  It had something to do with an urge for health-- a pursuit of clean air for my lungs and for the dark musty corners of a brain reluctantly coming to from hibernation after a persistent winter.  However it had come about, here among the insects springing and darting,  chirping and buzzing about me with blades of grass whipping my legs as I propelled myself forward across the meadow, it felt suddenly as though I had removed an iron shell from my back.  Where I had been weighted down somewhere back there behind me, on the other side of that forest, with the concerns of daily business, here I found myself unburdened, recreated.  

I paused midway across the clearing and surveyed the terrain before me. Which way to go?   The insect thrum was punctuated by the calls of crows to the right of me.  To the left was a sun just along a course of setting.  I proceeded north tentatively - the direction I was already heading - when I thought I caught glimpse of a flash of tawny red parting grass as it bounded away from me. I felt my heart skip a beat.  It stopped me where I was.   The creature seemed to stop as well.  Was it a fox?  Still preoccupied with my quandary about a direction, I looked away, but  something about the red-- I found myself looking back in spite of myself for another sip.  Failing to see it right away, I absently made another few steps in its direction and suddenly there it was again-- a vivid, earthy red peeking above the grass.  It bounded forward.  I stopped again to watch for a better look and again it stopped.  This was going nowhere.  I turned toward the northwest and took another step.  It seemed to alter its path in the same direction.  Before I was aware of it, I was changing my course to match its course, and heading again North, now finding myself in spite of myself in pursuit of it.  

I was on the other side of the meadow, tracking the shadows of forest again when I realized it. There was definitely something about the red-- I needed to verify what it was about the color that motivated me.   As I became conscious of it, I marveled at the growing certainty that something had taken possession of my will and that that something was the fact of the red of the fox.  I found myself trying to reconstruct the moment when it took hold of me.  I recalled the instant just moments before as I came midway across the meadow again in my mind-- the slice of time that the exquisite tawniness pierced the barriers of my perception and seeped into my brain, compelling me before I was conscious of what was happening.  But why recall when the fox was before me darting in and out of the dappled sunshine that pierced the canopy of forest and splashed the earth?  Where was that fox again?   A sudden bark told me.  I scanned the landscape before me trying to connect up once again with the possessor of that magnificent coat, but my search was in vain.  The only trace of the fox now was the skittering and scraping of its mane and the disturbance of ferns as it tunneled through the underbrush a score of yards in front of me.  It was like a hunger.  Or was it hunger?

As I came around a cluster of young fir, the unmistakable red of its coat bounded into view above the brush ahead of me.  Was it something bigger-- with the same red hair?  How could that be?  I struggled to understand what I'd seen when suddenly I came to a small clearing around a stump with a clean flat top.  Someone had hewn a tree in this wood.  Atop the stump were 3 brightly colored mushroom caps that looked freshly torn from their stems.  In my hunger they looked delicious.  I glanced ahead, and saw the undergrowth rustling where my quarry was advancing.  I picked up a cap, studied it briefly.  I took it to my mouth and gave it an exploratory tap with my tongue.  Perhaps I was paranoid-- I felt my head encircled by stars.  A barklike call brought me back to attention.  I quickly set the mushroom back from where I'd taken it and proceeded in pursuit of the red.  I picked up my pace, but the distance only seemed to grow between us.  And yet I got enough of a view now through the brush to see that somehow the red that I was pursuing was on a different form. Not the fox but on a very-fox like creature.  

Could it be?  It appeared to be running on two legs.  At times it seemed to stop and look at me as if to assure itself that I was still on the trail.  It waited for me to catch up just enough to gain some hope of closing the distance between us, and then turned and bounded away.  There came the bark again.  I was close enough to see for certain that my leader was no longer a fox, and not quite a human, but a kind of fox human.  With fox ears and what looked like a white tipped bush of a tail still trailing behind it. Still wearing a mane of luscious red. Was I the hunter or the prey?  I seemed incapable of surrendering to failure at the task of achieving an intimate encounter with the beast.  And just when my endurance seemed most eager to yield the chase altogether, there on the path lay a long flat object.  A ribbon.  I stooped to collect it and continued on my way, unable to tell by its condition how long it had been lying in the elements.  The question was soon answered by inference, as it now seemed that along the path every fifty yards or so were purposefully strewn an array of objects-- a dead sparrow, an handful of berries, a marbled stone, a hickory nut, a crudely fashioned nosegay of wildflowers, another collection of mushrooms.

These last and the berries, I again paused at, the hunger I had experienced having grown only more acute.  I consumed the berries.  The mushrooms tempted me; but again, I had only to dab my tongue on the cap of one to invoke the sensation of my head detached from my body and suspended amid the comets and satellites of space. I scanned the forest ahead of me for a sign of the creature. 

"Hey!" someone called.  It was a woman's voice.  There beyond the scrub that I was wading through, on the other side of a thicket, amid a stand of pine she stood,  a possessor of the same red hair that had set me on this detour from my solitary walk.  Was that a smile on her lips?  Was she speaking to me?  Before I could satisfy myself with an answer, she turned and ran, in the same prevailing direction that I had been going.  There was no sign of a fox, nor of a fox human, just the lovely figure of a woman, hair ablaze in the late afternoon sunlight, hurrying through the pine before me.  What was the harm in thinking it was me she had addressed with her "Hey!"

Before long I was in the same endless stand of pine, running after her on a carpet of needles.  The items I encountered on the path left were fewer and so far between and of such a random nature--  a large brass button, a scrap of colored paper, an apple--that I could not tell if I was imagining that they had been left there purposefully for me.  Still, the mere act of pausing to collect, study and ponder them slowed me down to such an extent-- and the descending twilight was a factor-- that my guide through this wood had reached a lead beyond my line of vision.  I could only hear the occasional commotion of her progress through the woods, punctuated every so often by bursts of sweet sounding laughter, and what could have been another "Hey!" or two seeming to let me know that I was going in the right direction.  By now my hunger had grown, as had my trepidation about the looming darkness.  Did I know where I was and how I would make my way back?  It seemed prudent to forge ahead in hopes that my red-haired companion would lead me to a settlement or a road by which I could find my bearings and make my way home.  The hunger was becoming unbearable.

I was no longer running, but walking as fast as my aching legs would carry me.  There she seemed to be yards ahead of me in the darkening wood.  At length, I heard what sounded like steps landing on wooden boards.  The rushing sound of water confirmed she had reached a footbridge.  I emerged from the wood to the edge of a much sparser clearing.  Across the bridge, she seemed to be waiting for me at the door of a well lit cottage.  How could this be in this forest that I thought I knew from years of childhood exploration and adult refuge?  I hurried to the bridge which spanned in an arch  over a splashing creek, and crossed it.  As I approached the house, I raised my arm in a wave.  She returned the gesture, turned away and entered the cottage, leaving open the door.  The closer I got, the stronger became the scent of something cooking.  A smell I'd never smelled before.  It was sweet, rich, earthy.  A nutty smell; almost a liqueur.  As I stepped up her front stoop, I saw her through the crack in the door, more lovely in this proximate approach than I had imagined as I made my way toward her in the diminishing sun of late afternoon.  I entered, removing my hat. I wanted to thank her for her hospitality, to ask her her name, to see if she could tell me where we were so that I could begin to plan my way back.  I opened my mouth to speak but before a word came out, she gestured at a pot steaming on the stove, the locus of those incredible smells.  She was so insistent and I was so famished that I knew I could not rest until I had tasted the contents of that aromatic pot. "Please" she said.  I nodded my thanks.  As I made my way to the stove, she turned and disappeared through a doorway and up a stairwell behind her.  Did she want me to follow her? It was clear the answer could wait.

A small bowl and a spoon lay on the counter next to the stove.  Into it I scooped ladles of a rich earth-colored mash of some kind.  A sweeter concoction I could not bring to mind.  I sat down with it at her table.  As I raised a spoonful of it to my mouth, I could sense that it had been cooling a while.  Inhaling the aroma, I took the sweet smelling paste into my mouth.  I savored it and swallowed, its substance blazing a path of delight from my tongue to my throat.  I eagerly took another mouthful.  As I did so, it suddenly seemed as though the world spun fast around me, sweeping me up into a bed of clouds and hastening me over acres of land and across miles and miles of sea to new shores on the other side of the world.  In its savoriness, I tasted the birth of civilizations.  Carts rolling, pulled by beasts of burden over mountain paths, their beds laden with the riches of the earth.  The sun, not just a star in the sky but a god, a provider.  The source and inspiration of every wondrous crop and the teller of tales of how to use them sacredly.  Letting the concoction wash over my tongue, I felt myself rising to the snow-capped peak of a mountaintop, set down at the foot of a path to the temple of the gods. Casting my eyes upward, I rose, ascended, ever higher to the gleaming auburn coat of She who walks in Light.

The next thing I was conscious of was myself lying leaned against an oak, under a canopy of stars on a moonless night, at the edge of a field I knew well was the very place where I first saw the red coat of the fox.  Amid the dewy grasses, I thought, How had I come to be here?  If I didn't die, I couldn't say whether I would be able to make my way home.  Unsure if I was breathing my last,  I distracted my mind from the pain that enrobed me by peering passively into the vast ocean of stars.  I contemplated the night and thought of her, wondering if somewhere out there amid the wisps of cloud had seeped the memories I sought in vain of how my time was spent with her.  Had I at last for even a moment been the possessor of that red?

Graphic Violence

Graphic from Many Gen Z Men Feel Left Behind. Some See Trump as an Answer, by Claire Caine Miller, NY Times, August 24, 2024.

Are Gen Z men pro Trump?  That seems to be the conclusion of a certain segment of media, perhaps exemplified, and amplified by the virality of the above graphic which appeared in the NY Times last month (and the accompanying article).  The discussions about the graphic that I've seen (e.g., a Breaking Points "debate" on the topic, to say nothing of various tweets (xeets?) about it) are eager to point out the tremendous distance between the purple dot on the left of the topmost line which represents the percentage gap between Gen Z women supporters of Kamala Harris and those of Donald Trump (i.e., Harris leads Trump among Gen Z women by 38%) and the green dot on the right-- namely the 13% lead according to the August NY Time Siena poll) that Trump has over Harris among Gen Z men.  In many of the discussions I've seen (including the NY Times articles on the topic), there does seem to be some elision of the fact that the poll is exclusively among voters in the 6 swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and that it took place after the Democratic National convention but before the widely watched debate between the candidates 2 weeks later. 

But before we get to the question at hand, can we talk about the graphic itself and the conclusions being drawn from it?  I will confess when I was originally confronted with the story I found myself too confused by the graphic to follow most of the conversations about it.  To my eyes, the most salient thing about it was not the rather typical extent to which the green dot floated to the right of the axis labeled "EVEN" for Gen Z men (about which the story screaming out to me is the exceptional rightness for Gen X-ers of both sexes aged 45 to 64), but rather the extraordinary extent to which which the purple Gen Z dot for women sits to the left.  Why then was the talk about Gen Z men?   Somehow, according to the prevailing narrative, the line represented a "Gender Gap", which according to the story was calculated as the sum of the 38% lead for Harris over Trump among Gen Z women and the 13% lead for Trump over Harris for Gen Z men or 51%.  But was this so meaningful as to warrant the discussion it got?  To me, it looked like nonsense.  We know that 38% more women support Harris than support Trump, but we don't know if Trump's support is the minimum of 0% or the maximum of 31% among Gen Z women that this number implies or somewhere in between.  Even if we knew the correct split between Trump and Harris among women, it would tell us nothing about where along the spectrum from the minimum split of 0% Harris-13% Trump to the maximum of  43%- 56% respectively that Gen Z Men's preferences fell.

The numbers appear to be related in the graphic, but that is strictly because in terms of their literal appearance they are connected by a solid line.  In fact, they have nothing to do with each other.  Does the calculation of the differences between them actually signify anything about a gender Gap? 

Fortunately we don't have to wonder.  The Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University has a helpful guide to what a Gender Gap actually is.  Contrary to the New York Times operative assumptions, it is not the magnitude of the difference between the preference of women for one candidate versus that of men for another.  Rather, it is the difference between men and women's preferences for the same leading (or winning) candidate in a race.  In that case, we do not have enough information from the graphic to determine the gap-- we would need to know who overall was leading in the poll, and then we would need to know the percentage of each gender supporting that candidate.   The difference between them is the Gender Gap.  This is simply not available from the data as presented in the NY Times Graphic.

The data that can be determined from the graphic according to the Rutgers Center are the Gen Z women's Vote (that 38% lead that Harris has over Trump for women) and the Gen Z men's Vote (the 13% lead that Trump has over Harris among that cohort according to the poll.).   Clearly it appears that Kamala Harris has an exceptionally strong lead among Gen Z women in the 6 swing states in which the poll was conducted.  It's less clear, given that the margin of error in these polls can be as high as 8%,  that Donald Trump has a lock on Gen Z men's votes.  

In fact, as John Sides notes at Good Authority, the conclusions reached at the NY Times based on its poll (and the Wall Street Journal as well as several other outlets eager to spin pleasing narratives) were contradicted by at least 2 other polls taken at the same time.  Both a YouGov.com and a Pew Research Center poll found that Gen Z men,  as much supporting data attests, actually lean toward Harris, with a much smaller gap between the genders than the NY Times Siena poll suggests.  Granted, these appear to be national polls and may not be indicative of the outcome we are in store for. But it is more in keeping with what we've learned about Gen Z in the past. I am skeptical of the enthusiasm that media outlets have about Gen Z men's susceptibility to conservative talking points.  I don't doubt a contingent of Gen Z cavemen lie in wait to succeed their neanderthal forebears on the culture war front.  I just have a bit more faith in the prevailing sense of the cohort. 

Appreciation Deficit Syndrome

It might surprise you to know (but shouldn't) that I don't have a YouTube channel.  So uninterested in having a channel am I that the only reason I know this is because it has thwarted me in the past when I have been most tempted to write a comment on a video.   My YouTube experience is that of an addict.  Most videos I quietly watch (frequently double speed if it's not music) and move on.  But every now and then, something moves or irritates or arouses me in a way that compels me to want to express myself, but merely attempting to like or dislike a comment on a video, let alone compose one, is something that requires a channel, which (for those of you not paying attention) I do not have.  As fiery as my passions can be, they have never been too fiery to perform the quid of creating a channel for the quo of commenting on or liking or hating a comment on a video.  But YouTube comments have a hold on the part of my soul that is YouTube addict.  In my daily YouTube excursions, I often find myself trying to get into the head of a person who having viewed the video I just watched is compelled to lift their fingers from their laps to record for the benefit of strangers for all time whatever flits through their brains.  I'm already ascribing more to the person than I could possibly know.  For all I know DaveinDubuque69 had been stewing about the video for a week before finally carving out the slice of time required to type: "I can't even." 

In defense of the proposition that the YouTube commentariat might not be collectively constructing the finest of human thought, has it escaped your attention that  there is a sameness to the preponderance of comments?  Given the predictability of so much of YouTube commentary, I've begun to suspect that it's a case of Pavlovian classical conditioning-- the stimulus is the moving image with sound, the response a limited number of stereotyped phrases:  "First." "Who's watching this in 2024?" "This is everything." "I am so here for this.". "Gentlemen of taste, we meet again." "Everything was so much better then."  I've noticed in the past year or two a couple of new categories.  The first seems to be provoked by vintage performance of female artists.  "Not a tattoo or a purple hair on her." And the ubiquitous "Underrated!"

For a while I've been logging every time I've come across "Underrated" by itself or in a phrase (usually "This is so underrated!" or "Criminally underrated!") in a YouTube comment.  In the past month I've seen the word used to describe the following (these are just the videos where I encountered the phrase spontaneously or where I remembered to check the comments):

Pixies' song Hey 

Pixie's song Here Comes your Man

Pixies Guitarist Joey Santiago ("must be the most underrated ever.")

Pixies Drummer Guitarist Bassist and Songwriters. (The comment got over 2000 likes and inspired the comment: "Most underrated comment") 

1959 sci-fi flick (and MST3K episode) Teenagers from Outer Space

The Netflix series Love and particularly Claudia O'Doherty (possibly true)

Gillian Jacobs

Bow Wow Wow (the song was Aphrodisiac)

Melissa Villaseñor on Stephen Colbert

New Mexico (the state)

We Both Reached for the Gun (from Chicago)

Maggie Gyllenhaal

Humphrey Bogart classics Petrified Forest, The Harder They Fall, The Caine Mutiny, The Desperate Hours, In.a Lonely Place

Swedish singer Robyn -- criminally 

Martin Short

Regina Spektor's I Cut Off My Hair 

"Listen do you smell something?" line from Ghostbusters

Goldfrapp 

Also observed in the course of gathering the above:

• Charlyne Yi's outfit for her impression of a turtle on Conan is "underappreciated". 
• Bad news for Jamie Farr: Teenagers think he is overrated.

"Underrated" is an outside-the-box adjective for something you like.  Taken at face value it's an objective datum about a thing-- an assertion that the ratings for it are low, which assumes that there are ratings about it, the amplitude of which can be evaluated.  Moreover, there is a judgment about the amplitude; to wit that it is excessively low.  Interestingly enough, there are indeed ratings that can be applied to YouTube videos.  Having watched a video, anyone (even those of us without channels) can take an extra step and register either a Like or a Dislike.  Could "underrated" refer to the ratio of Likes to Dislikes?  Maybe once, but Dislike counts are no longer public information on YouTube videos,  yet if anything the characterization of a video or its subject as underrated has mushroomed in recent years.  Could it sometimes refer to the ratio of likes to views-- an indication that the commenter considers, given the number of views, that not enough viewers have hit the Like button?   Perhaps, but in my unscientific evaluation of this possibility with the videos whose views and likes I noted above, there does not appear to be any great consistency-- the ratios range from 0.06% to 7.54%.   It also can't be a reliable datum because whereas individuals can rack up dozens of views, they are only allowed one like per video (per sock puppet account).  I certainly don't "Like" every video I come across that I "like".  Furthermore, plenty of enterprises exist out there that will sell content creators jacked up Like counts for a price. 

All of this is a bit beside the point if my suspicion about the popularity of "underrated" is correct, namely that it stands in as an objective sounding rationale for an imprimatur that the user is intending to confer upon a favorite video or its subject matter.  If the comment has any basis in numerical data, perhaps it's an assertion that a video does not have enough views-- single or repeat.  I can't help but feel that the word does a lot of work for the commenter-- elevating their own appreciation to a precious status in contrast to the expected derelict neglect of a work of art by the unwashed masses. *

There's an unintentional backhanded quality to the word, however.  Marina Diaminidis-- formerly of Marina and the Diamonds, lately of Marina-- was puzzled by how frequently "underrated" is used by her fans to describe her, saying "How big do you want me to be?

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* I suppose for the sake of thoroughness, I shouldn't rule out the possibility that the frequency with which I encounter the adjective "underrated" is a function of my taste for actually underrated things.