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: "This is everything." 

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?" "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 thoroughness's sake, 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. 

Cry If I Want To

Although I hated Kamala’s speech at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, I still hold out faint hope that it’s a strategy to get her elected, which I still support as the best of the 2 possible outcomes.  I hold out hope that freed of Biden and in office (thanks to the support of those she was wooing via her speech along with the shit eaters and nose holders) she will be freer to be non-Bidenish. Nevertheless, I went from being a hopeful supporter before the convention to a bit of a shit eater thanks to the DNC.  So you might ask, what is my resistance to the Green Party?  Third party voters do not even expect their candidates to win.  Talk about a low bar.  In other words, we are all rolling over, all of us who still participate in electoral politics when you’d think given the level of misery there might be some concerted or even chaotic move to take it back. As an example of possibility in the UK there is talk of replacing the House of Lords with a People's House of randomly selected citizens a la sortition. 

But back to American reality in late summer 2024, I’m not saying the Green Party is actually worse than either of the parties of the duopoly, just that it objectively does not have power. I think the Green party is for leftists who truly do not think it matters who is in power in this system, whereas leftists who vote for Dems truly think it matters who is in power.  It’s a fucked up system that needs to go because on balance it causes harm.  In my opinion it’s because the people in power cause harm and that’s why I’m more concerned with who those people are.  (And who are these people who are so hell-bent on maintaining a broken status quo at all costs in spite of popular and electoral desire?)

I remember in April 2020 in particular I was thinking that if the left could get its shit together and come together into a rival electoral force it would be a good thing.  I think in retrospect that would have been the time.  If it worked, Joe Biden would probably have lost to Donald Trump probably because of the 3rd party, but the 2024 primary would not have been a sham and might have actually been interesting.

But in practice, I can’t get past thinking a left unified into a new contentious third party means Republicans win every election going forward.  It feels like it would consist of existing 3rd party (legacy duopoly castoffs) plus new duopoly castoffs mostly from the dem party meaning from smallest to largest there would be this left 3rd party with barely 20% of voters, Demoncraps with about 32% and GOP with less than 48%.  I.e., diminished Dems, the same GOP, meaning GOP lock in every election, in spite of the majority of voters being to the left of the spectrum.

I really wish the left would commandeer the Dem party (and/or the GOP)   Overwhelm it with killer ideas and power and vitality.  Take AIPAC money and burn it.  Alienate the crypto-nazis and paleos and neo-libs and cons and attract the rabble rousers.  Seems less pie in the sky.  So the 20% moves into the 32% party, alienates 15% or so existing dem voters but attracts another 20-25% from among the non-voters and keeps Dems who will vote for Blue no matter who who will find a way to live with replacing the Senate with a Citizens Chamber selected by lot, executing a plan to accelerate EV infrastructure, enacting single payer healthcare, etc. if it means Blue on the electoral map.

Some might object, "They won't let the left near the reins of power."  But if we commandeer the party, they becomes us, right?  When I read the Best and the Brightest last year I was struck by how similar to third way democrats the Kennedy wing of the dem party was, but for 30 years prior it was Keynesian.  Eisenhower is the GOP analog for the Rooseveltian Era that Clinton was for Reaganite GOP in the neo-lib Era.  I mean, parties can change their focus.  They can be commandeered.

As Kamala Harris' acceptance speech demonstrated, it’s still Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer’s (and their donors’) party.  It’s Biden and Obama and the Clinton’s party.  But they are old and dying and the world that brought them to power is dying too.  (It’s a zombie apparently but it is flailing to maintain hegemony.  Hence all that talk of NATO and Hamas and Immigration and play by the rules economics)  That’s my punchy uneducated feeling.  My theory is a commandeered Dem party moves to the left.  I think Dem victories are good for the left.  It’s Dem losses that move Dem’s to the right.

This I know-- punishing the Dem party for Joe Biden's egregiously senile support of Israel's genocide by voting for the Green Party is about as likely to move the needle on the issue as writing in Norman Finkelstein.  If it makes you feel good, who am I to interfere?  But if you want your vote to contribute to an end to Israel's atrocity, you might not be thinking it through if you expend your vote on the Green Party.  If Kamala Harris loses because of it, it's worse than futile.  It's self-defeating.  In the meantime, Kamala Harris is not Joe Biden, but until she wins, she is working for him so don't expect her to repudiate his anachronistic support of Israel before she sees him retreating in the rear view mirror.

In a way thinking about sortition is what clarified this for me.  Electoral politics are a sham.  They are not fixable.  They are designed to keep the elite the elite.  But the evil genius of those that electoral politics serve is that they implicate those that they allow to vote in their own exploitation by forcing them to chose the marginally lesser of evils (evils being self-selected careerists from our elite institutions) to govern themselves.  The governing will always be within the bounds of what the elite deems acceptable.  It’s only become more obvious since the end of history, the age of forever wars,  the financial meltdown, big tech and pandemics  as Congress, the judiciary and the executive behave however they please in spite of clear indications that what they please does not please the electorate.  (Hence arms and military funding being sent to Israel in spite of their making possible the Gazan genocide, hence no single payer healthcare, hence no free education or debt forgiveness, hence the budget for social spending being strapped because it’s dependent on the strapped class and not at all on the owner class, etc.).  In other words, electoral politics is what it is.  We have to make the best of it until we can get rid of it.  To my mind, more parties is not making the best of it because only 1 of 2 parties will win. 

The ultimate goal is sortition.  That’s what we really need to work on.  But in the meantime, we’ll each have different ideas about how best to live with this rigged system because whatever we do will never be enough to get us what we want.  If like me you think not all outcomes are equal under this extremely bad system you try to shoot for the best or least bad outcome.

American democracy is uniquely undemocratic.  A paragon of undemocraticity. (?)  In a parliamentary or representative democracy in which the government’s makeup is determined by the makeup of the vote, it’s at least possible to form coalitions.  In the duopoly that’s impossible (except within one or the other of the two parties).  It’s designed to be us versus them.  Everything else is noise.  The best we can get to an idea of a fix for it is rank choice voting in which you can still be implicated in how things are run if your formerly unspoken second choice gets the majority on a second round.  Your second choice won!  And it’s your fault for confessing it was your second choice! But as we don’t have rank choice voting we are especially at the mercy of the two parties.  They don’t have to pander to the fringe if they don’t want to.  GOP is unusual because its politics are so fringe it has to collect the odious fragments to win so it has a higher pandering quotient and more cohesion and solidarity.  Very fuckin weird system.  It’s unusually bad and undemocratic.  The nerve of saying it’s the best democracy in the world as Kamala Harris said in her speech. We have to stop pretending this is actually democracy.  It can’t be when winner (the plurality yet) takes all and losers get nothing.