Joe Biden Presses the Flesh

If you've been paying attention to the 2020 Democratic Presidential race at all so far, it can't have escaped your notice that something is not right with Joe Biden.  He was already bad but in the years since he has left the White House (going by history and not by Biden's delusional accounting) he has apparently declined from mere conventional terribleness to abject Hall of Horrors wretchedness as a candidate.  Already this season-- above and beyond betraying in his off-the-cuff remarks a loose idea of where he is at any given moment in the space-time continuum and a tenuous grasp on logic let alone the English language-- he has invited public reflection on his very troubling record with regard to race by reminiscing fondly about cooperating on legislation with segregationists (after opening his campaign with a message condemning Donald Trump's softness on racists); he's expressed a (no joke!) lack of empathy for millenials with regard to the way the outrageous cost of their educations have put them deeply and possibly permanently in debt at the start of their working lives; he has broken a pledge to take no money from fossil fuel executives at least twice; he has had to promise to "do better" in the area of unwelcome touching (while openly mocking the need to).  When his mouth opens you'd better believe his handlers tremble in fear of what could come out.  In this way he bears a strong resemblance to what he and a large contingent in the media presume will be his foe in the general election, and this could well be what inspires his backers most.

The loose cannon excitement of Donald Trump but filtered through the sensibility of an eager-to-compromise Centrist Neo-liberal democrat? How could he lose?  I'll tell you how: because if you like Donald Trump, the weak tea Democratic knockoff is not going to appeal to you in the least, and you can be sure the ones whose abstention from voting for centrist Hillary Clinton in 2016 enabled Trump's electoral victory will find better things to do on election day than vote for Joe Biden.

This invites the pondering of 2 mysteries.  First, given his propensity for extreme incoherence on every position of importance and the folksy logorrheic chaos that spews from his loose-dentured maw, why does he continue to remain at the top of the polls?  Even given the kid glove treatment that Biden, who is as solid a member of the establishment as there is, gets from the mainstream media, it would take pathological cluelessness to miss that the wires are coming loose.   My theory is that if Joe Biden is your candidate, you are not paying attention to the 2020 Democratic Presidential race.  The very act of preferring Joe Biden is an advertisement that you do not pay attention.   If you can't be moved from the hope that Biden must defeat Trump, taking the ostrich approach to how things are going with your candidate might be the only way for the hope to survive.  But will his supporters wake up in time to keep from making a monumental blunder come primary season?

Second, why is Trump's team apparently actively working on sabotaging Biden before the first primary vote has been cast?  You would be forgiven for thinking it's because they do not want Biden to be Trump's opponent.  But this makes no sense.  On the playing field in which Joe Biden and Donald Trump play, Trump is the hands down winner. Trump will chew Sloppy Joe up and spit him out within seconds of facing off against him in a debate.   The negative ads write themselves. Defending him against the attacks his behavior will invite will be a chore few will be eager to rise to. No, I don't think they want to prevent Biden from winning the nomination.  I think they are convinced Biden will be the nominee and, starting as they are from a very well deserved gigantic deficit in voter support themselves,  they aim to start chipping away now at the will to elect he who they assume, right or wrong, will be their opponent in the general election (provided their efforts aren't their own undoing).  In this fashion they expect to repeat the successful strategy that they employed and took advantage of against Hillary Clinton 4 years earlier.

It's not too late to thwart them from making 2020 a rerun of 2016, but it's going to call for the paying of attention beforehand.  As an appetizer, here, from Twitter, is a little slice of life on the Biden 30330 campaign trail that illustrates so much of why Joe Biden is so wrong for the job. 

🏭 @JoeBiden's climate plan doesn't call for a ban on fracking natural gas

🏭🏭 Andrew Goldman, who recently hosted a fundraiser for Biden, co-founded a natural gas company

🏭🏭🏭 Heather Zichal (Biden's climate adviser) has made a million dollars off of natural gas

🤔🤔🤔🤔 pic.twitter.com/dbDQZIuRC5

— Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@sunrisemvmt) September 23, 2019

Let's Make a Hash of It

Speaking of not knowing what one is talking about, a media blogger I occasionally read (and have been frequently infotained by for many years) was for an extended period a while back writing almost exclusively about how bad popular math and science books are … because he doesn’t understand them.  I was shocked one day to read in the comments of one of his diatribes on the quality of a particular biography of a 20th century mathematician that someone remembered that the blogger had had trouble with the Monty Hall problem years ago (2 administrations ago as it turns out).

For anyone who does not know, the Monty Hall Problem (named for the host of a wacky game show of my youth called Let's Make a Deal)  goes in a nutshell like this: You are a contestant on Let's Make a Deal.  Monty Hall shows you three doors on stage, behind two of which are goats-- but let's say piles of goat manure to remove an incentive for animal lovers-- and behind the other, in the original framing is a brand new car,  but to make it extra interesting, let's say $100,000,000.

You are instructed to select one of the doors.  Whatever is behind it is your prize. All things being equal, you have one chance in three of picking the door hiding the money.  At this point, one door is just as good as any so you pick one--let's say Door Number 1-- and announce your selection.  Instead of simply opening the door you picked, Monty opens one of the two remaining doors (let's say Door 3) to reveal a pile of goat manure.  He then offers (in a suspiciously assertive way as was his wont) to let you switch your pick from Door 1 to Door 2.  Should you switch?

Think about that for a moment.  Remember there's $100,000,000 at stake.  I'll wait. < Unloads dishwasher ... Paints house ... Reads Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century >

Ready?  The spoiler follows.  The blogger, in pretty typical fashion for initiates to the problem, insisted that on having your choices reduced to 2 by Monty Hall (i.e., from Doors 1, 2 and 3 to merely Doors 1 & 2), you actually now had a 50% chance of being right so you might as well resist the pressure and stay put with Door 1.  This is the choice that contestants on the actual game show made all the time.   As it turns out, and as Monty Hall well knew, it is not correct.  The rather surprising answer is that you should switch because 2 times out of 3, when you switch you get the money.  Our blogger, in light of the fact that the problem was being posed to him and the solution explained in the pages of the New York Times, not only strongly disagreed with the solution but confidently skewered the paper for spreading disinformation yet again.

What surprised me about the comment that I came across in the recent post was that on the day in question all those years ago, I actually helpfully emailed the blogger (very uncharacteristically on my part) to try to explain why switching when Monty Hall opens a door with a goat behind it paid off with a car 2/3 of the time.  The very next day, the blogger acknowledged (very uncharacteristically) that he’d received emails that suggested he might need to re-evaluate the situation, but he doubled down on his assessment based on the New York Times statement of the problem which he was originally critiquing.  (He was still wrong!)   I don't recall that it was ever mentioned again, and I thought I was the only person to remember the incident, but apparently there are traces of it still out there on the web—not just on the blogger's site.

My explanation went something like this.  Imagine instead of 3 doors, there are 4-- goat manure behind 3 of them and the fortune behind one.  In this case, you have a 1 in 4 chance of picking the right door the first time.   After hearing your choice, instead of one door, Monty reveals goat piles behind 2 of the remaining doors.   Now how confident are you in your first choice?  Do you still think your first choice jumped from 25% to 50% likely to be correct?

Not yet convinced?   Let's say there are 1000 doors.  999 of them have goat manure piled up behind them and 1 has $100,000,000 behind it.  You have 5 seconds to pick and nothing to lose so you pick door number 451.  Now Monty on hearing your selection, opens 998 of the remaining doors to reveal goat manure leaving only your choice and door number 778 closed.  There are once again only two choices left, but are you still confident that the original odds that door number 451 has the money behind it went from 0.1% to 50.0%?

The factor that your mind edits out with 3 doors is that Monty Hall knows where the money is.  His choice of door to reveal manure behind is never random.  He'll never randomly show you the money before offering to let you switch.  The reveal is done to fool you into thinking your odds of having chosen the right door on the first try have increased.  In truth they've never changed.  What changes is a stark reframing of the act of choosing on the second try.  By having manure revealed behind one of the 2 unchosen doors, your odds do not change, but your choice is simplified to Switch or Don't.   If you feel confident that your first choice was correct, stick with your first choice.  If you feel it's more likely that your first choice was incorrect, change your choice.  Staying with your first choice, you don't always lose, but by straightforward probability you do lose 2 out of 3 times whether Monty takes one of the doors out of play or not.  Switching to what Monty has conveniently made the only other option on your second chance, you win 2 out of 3 times-- twice as often as staying put.

What have we learned?  For one thing, we've learned that when Monty Hall gives you a chance to change doors, no matter how many doors you have to choose from and even no matter how many other doors hiding manure he reveals before asking for your decision, you're always at least somewhat better off switching.   Moreover, if I have done my job, I hope we've all learned and can take to heart that contrary to all other evidence day in and day out from time immemorial, on one day in 2006, the New York Times was actually correct about something.

Hot Topics

Satellite evidence confirming record number of fires in the Amazon rainforest, August 15-22, 2019.  (NASA Earth Observatory/Joshua Stevens)

I don't do well with live TV.   Awards shows, debates, breaking news, sporting events give me hives.  I have a hard enough time with live life.  Where is the escape in watching life unfold spontaneously on my television?  Naturally I had trepidations about CNN's 7-hour Climate Crisis Town Hall on Wednesday night with 10 2020 Democratic candidates.  But I wanted to see certain of the participants, and as it happened, 4 of the top names on my list appeared back-to-back at the time I tuned in.  I caught Joe Biden's turn part-way through. I was tuned in long enough to see him squirm to the point of popping a blood vessel in his eye when confronted by an audience question concerning his plan to attend a fundraiser the following night hosted by natural gas entrepreneur Andrew Goldman, in violation of Biden's pledge not to take  money from fossil fuel executives. Goldman, though not currently an executive in a strict pedantic sense, co-founded the natural gas company Western LNG (which stands for Liquefied Natural Gas) in Houston.  (Contrary to Biden's shocked response when confronted with the fact about his donor on Wednesday, and an indication that he would not attend if found to be true on his review, he attended the fundraiser with open palms on Thursday anyway).  Of all the candidates running, Joe Biden is perhaps the only one who could be pointed to whose entire political career has arguably been contributing to the problem of inaction-- sorry, bipartisan inaction-- on climate change.  Tenuous frontrunner Biden's lack of interest in the topic (manifested in his ill-prepared off-the-cuff manner of winging it in this nationally televised forum on the issue) is a major factor in why the DNC rejected a Climate Change themed debate of their own.  Based on his performance on Wednesday night, he doesn't seem especially eager to make amends.  (His lack of empathy for millenials apparently doesn't stop with their unique and worsening situation with college debt.)

I also saw Elizabeth Warren, who acquitted herself rather well I thought, appropriately skewering the greed of fossil fuel billionaires as behind our current predicament, before contradicting herself on the question of whether utilities should be public rather than private by suggesting capitalism that rescues us from the catastrophe capitalism created is to be encouraged.  (I'm not fully convinced.)   Her performance coming on the heels of Bernie Sanders's tour de force was strong enough that it made a couple of tough acts for small town Mayor Pete Buttigieg to follow.  Buttigieg's performance was leagues beyond the low bar set by Biden naturally, but his run-of-the-mill technocratic adroit-on-his-feet approach suffered by comparison to the bold mastery of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and was about where my attention started flagging.

Bernie Sanders who immediately followed Joe Biden provided a startlingly competent and refreshingly lucid counterpoint to the former Vice President's performance.  The questions were for the most part excellent and Sanders remained on point.  While it was encouraging to learn after the fact how many of the candidates rose to the occasion, of all the plans discussed, Bernie Sanders' is the most aggressive, the most far-reaching and the least compromising on the uncompromisable.

To be honest, in retrospect, there was that one moment from his segment that struck a bit of an odd chord with me, and I was not too surprised to discover by checking Google News on the CNN event on Thursday that it was the day-after talk of alt-right media.  The question was addressed to him by a teacher, the crawl informed us, Martha Readyoff:

I realize this is a poisonous topic for politicians, but it is crucial to face.  Empowering women and educating everyone on the need to curb population growth seems a reasonable campaign to enact. Would you be courageous enough to discuss this issue and make it a key feature of a plan to address climate catastrophe?

The answer I formulated in my head for Sen. Sanders as I watched mouth agape was something like this:

Well Martha the answer is no, and let me tell you why.  While I will always support a woman's right to choose and will do everything in my power to protect that right which has become precarious under the Trump administration due to its manipulations of the Supreme Court with the assistance of a Republican controlled Senate, I would not presume to encourage a woman to choose birth control for any reason.  A woman who chooses on her own to be childless in response to scientific predictions about the effects of climate change on future generations and perhaps in an effort to personally address issues of population expansion should have the right to whatever means make her choice possible.  But, no,  I do not believe government should be in the business of interceding in what should only be a matter between a woman and her physician.

The precedent for rejecting the premise of a question had already been set by his response to an Andrew Yang supporter seeking his opinion on exploring advances in nuclear power as an alternative energy resource.  To that question, Sanders expertly rejected the idea on the well established objections to the concomitant and as yet intractable problem of what to do with the millenially radioactive waste that is a proliferating by-product of the technology.  But to Readyoff's question concerning birth control, this is the answer that Bernie gave:

Well Martha the answer is yes, and the answer has everything to do with the fact that women in the United States of America, by the way, have a right to control their own bodies, and make reproductive decisions... The Mexico City agreement, which denies American aide to those organizations around the world that allow women to have abortions or even get involved in birth control to me is totally absurd. So I think, especially in poor countries around the world where women do not necessarily want to have large numbers of babies, and where they can have the opportunity through birth control to control the number of kids they have, is something I very, very strongly support.

I think the spirit of the answer I formed is in there, but I'm not sure that Sen. Sanders was tuned into the social engineering undertones of Readyoff's question that I picked up on (and could well have imagined) and their resonance with disturbing histories of eugenics.  If anything Sanders' tangent about the Mexico City agreement addressed the mirror image kind of social engineering policy that undermines a woman's right to choose-- if not within the US where it was at least until recently more fully protected, than outside the borders where we proffer aid.  I'll just say, Sanders answer surprised me nearly as much as Readyoff's question alarmed me.  But on sober reflection, I am less sure that the question was a trap to corner Sanders into publicly endorsing a draconian baby-culling social policy and more to see it in the light that no doubt Sanders did, as a somewhat fuzzy way to tie the very real threat to women's reproductive freedom posed by Trump, the Supreme Court influenced by his two picks thus far,  the Senate and an insidious Republican domination of State governments across the country to the issue, equally antithetical to the right, of climate change.  Nowhere does Sanders (contrary to what the shit storm of right wing media-slash-propaganda outlets simultaneously suggested) talk about government promotion of abortion-- his response as he states in the opening of it is-- as it should be-- all about the freedom of a woman to control her own reproductive destiny through whatever means of birth control are at her disposal.

Let me be perfectly clear:  I am opposed to sidetracking the government's response to climate change with formulating policy around the question of the ethics of procreation.  Population control could well be a path for individuals to consider, and seems to be a perfectly fine focus of a private sector non-profit.  It's not the place of government to do anything other than clear obstacles to the pursuit of birth control for those who see fit to practice it.  For my part- -and I'm not Bernie Sanders so I can be blunt-- this is probably not in my top 100 steps we could take to address the climate.  I do not think birth control should be a "key feature" of a government plan to address climate change. For one thing, it's too slow.   It's post hoc-- more a response and reaction to climate change and not necessarily a proactive step to mitigate it.*  I'm not convinced the invasiveness of the proposition of influencing individual women's choices to have children is warranted enough to require the involvement of the Federal government. While I'm more and more for social solutions to problems caused for the large part by unfettered havoc on the planet on the part of very powerful private interests, reproductive freedom is one area that I feel should remain forever free-- and procuring, protecting and preserving the freedom of it should be the extent of government's role in it.

~~~~~~~~~~
*Although fewer humans to engage in human caused global warming could not be a bad thing in the long run, given the concentration of blame for the climate crisis on less than 1% of humanity, the kind of humans being prevented is not irrelevant to its potential as an effective countermeasure.  In short, while I don't support government promotion of birth control as a solution in principle, forced castration of fossil fuel executives and their financial and legislative enablers (and for good measure their heirs) should not be off the table.

Snatch it back and hold it

By Mr Amos Wells Blakemore, Jr. late of Chicago, Illinois by way of West Memphis, Arkansas, and known better to the world as Junior Wells:

Rocky Horrors

Debra Messing is at it again.  She can't seem to let go of the notion that Susan Sarandon is responsible for Trump being in the White House.  What did Susan Sarandon do?  She inserted herself in earnest once again in the 2020 Democratic primary by publicly endorsing Bernie Sanders' candidacy.  After Sanders conceded the 2016 Democratic Primary to Hillary Clinton, Sarandon, who had already fallen out of love with Clinton in 2003 when the then New York Senator voted for the Iraq War,  publicly urged the disaffected to vote with their feet and abandon the ship of the Democratic party.  Her own vote was for Green candidate Jill Stein, but she intimated that even Trump would be a safer pick than Hillary Clinton.  Less fracking, she predicted; less war. 

Like Susan Sarandon, I was bitterly disappointed after the 2016 primaries.  It was hard not to crash after soaring on an unprecedented opportunity in my lifetime to dream with some realistic hope about an opportunity to vote for a Socialist in the General Election.  When Sanders conceded, I remained unenthused about his challenger, the nominee, and briefly, quietly contemplated abstaining from voting for president in November.  But on listening to the arguments of Stein, Sarandon and others and especially due to increased exposure to the cesspool of Trump, I was not convinced.

I have no regrets about voting for Hillary Clinton to avoid Trump in 2016, but neither do I harbor any special animus toward Susan Sarandon, at least, for voting her conscience.  Her supporters are right - Sarandon has many times over earned the respect of those on the left for putting her beliefs into action consistently for years.  I have never thought (for longer than an instant or two anyway) that Trump's election is owed to Sarandon's abstention from voting for his most serious opponent.  In the fight between Sarandon and Messing, my money is on the actual fighter.

Where I disagree with Sarandon's 2016 stance is not out of blame for Clinton's loss.  Rather it is with the notion that anyone with eyes open about Donald Trump before the general election can be excused for shirking in the effort against him.  Pissiness about Bernie Sanders' loss in the primaries is an especially feeble excuse considering Sanders' own commitment to Clinton's campaign following her nomination.  But by all indications at the time, Susan Sarandon's withholding of support for Clinton was due to a confidence in her impeccable moral purity that constrained her from participating in a Clinton victory, a purity that was no doubt persuasive and influential-- and certainly encouraging-- to some small percentage of similarly disgruntled Bernie supporters in swing states.  I've talked about my feelings about  the begrudgers, but I have to confess I reserve a special place in my personal conception of Hell for the saintly abstainers who actively sought to side with the Trump voters against Clinton in the wishful belief that Trump's blatant horribleness would "heighten the contradictions" inherent in the system and perhaps instantly foment revolution.  What made them so singularly special that they could be excused from the duty to vote responsibly, heedless of the Republican congress that Trump, if he won, would have at his disposal?  How bad does the greater evil have to be to vote for the lesser evil if Trump is not it?  How come they got to vote for the dreamy far out radical?  Why was it up to me to vote for the war-mongering fracking neoliberal in an effort to save our mutual society from the fake tanned, pussy grabbing, incurious, racist fascist bastard?

Is the effect you're getting the effect you want?  Was Susan Sarandon wanting to punish Hillary Clinton in 2016?  Was she hoping to signal a greater virtue in voting for Trump?  She is a dramatic actor.  I now suspect she was just being dramatic.   An interview with The Guardian in November 2017 if accurate and fair strongly suggests that far from being a super virtuous superwoman of the left whose vote for Jill Stein was too superior for its mighty purpose to be comprehensible to mere run-of-the-mill pants shitters who voted for Clinton to avoid Trump (I include myself), Susan Sarandon was a common naïf who assumed Clinton was going to win and was compelled to use her public platform to make clear that she wanted to claim no part in it.  In spite of her bluster about how Clinton was more likely to start a war and to pursue frantic fracking than Trump, in the Guardian intereview, she referenced the safety of her district for Clinton among the conditions that enabled her protest.  Explaining her stance in the general election, the article quotes her as saying, "Well, I knew that New York was going to go [for Hillary]. It was probably the easiest place to vote for Stein."  She has this to say about her widely cited argument in an interview with Chris Hayes on MSNBC in the runup to the election that Hillary Clinton was "more dangerous than Trump":

I don’t mind that quote ... I did think she was very, very dangerous. We would still be fracking, we would be at war [if she was president]. It wouldn’t be much smoother. Look what happened under Obama that we didn’t notice.

Acknowledgement that Clinton would be smoother (if not by much) than Trump doesn't sound like a pure belief in Clinton surpassing the danger of Trump.  The virtue is cast in doubt even more by the argument that Clinton was going to win anyway.

 In other words she spoke one thing publicly but justified her actions on a faulty foundation of the tragically mistaken belief about what the outcome of the election would be which in 2017 she apparently indicated regret in having wrong.  Could her story be unique?  The humanness of her mistake (if the impression left by the Guardian article is fair) gives me an odd kind of hope.  I don't doubt that there were some small number of Clinton abstainers who genuinely evaluated Clinton's capacity for malevolence as on a complete par with if not surpassing Trump's.  But Susan Sarandon, who is as virtuous as they come in leftist politics, appears with hindsight at least (which is 20/20 mind you) to not be among them. 

What about Debra Messing's intentions?  Does she want a mea culpa from Susan?  Does she want to lock Sarandon's support for whomever the Democrat is in 2020?  I suspect she's just being dramatic -- and hoping in the process to preemptively ridicule the wasting of votes on anything other than anti-Trump in 2020*.   But based on the frantic righteous (and absolutely correct) defense of Susan Sarandon that Messing's repeated attacks inspire, I'm not so sure she's helping her own cause.  Let's get the best candidate for 2020 now, and stock up on outrage until we need it. It's too late from a planetary perspective to quibble over purity displays in the general election.  It's too early politically to do anything but get the nomination right.
~~~~~~~~~~

* Would Debra Messing support the ticket in November even if the nominee were Bernie Sanders?  I'd really like to know.

Daddy-o

I generally have high standards in my choice of entertainment, but occasionally I get sucked into certain unpardonable indulgences.  One in particular is a very popular streaming show of a sci-fi nature* with no particular redeeming value-- not even a personal one I could point to, like, "It's so bad it's good" ... or "It fills some cultural void in me" ... or "I like it".  This show is actually not good at all and it's not even not good in an interesting way.  It's not a show I would necessarily want to participate in discussions about.  With one exception.  One of the main characters on the show is a singularly average looking small town police chief.  He's paunchy, balding and middle aged.  He's got a mustache-- not a stylish job, just hair on the lip.  He also has, not a beard, but several days of beard growth.  He's got a big fat head that his Smokey-the-bear police hat is too small for.  I. Hate. Him.  The average looks are not the problem-- the non-Hollywood casting is one of the few things I admire about the show.  What gets me is the flavorlessness of the role in combination with the cockiness of the performance.  There's a swirl of picky little things I contend with every time the character shows up:   His touch with comedy is not light.  There's not a tremendous amount of intelligence shining from within.  He's not merely crabby, he oozes entitlement to be crabby.  While he's called upon to mete out justice without a lot of formality, Dirty Harry style, he's not particularly deft with the tough guy act. Most galling of all, for some reason this guy with the sex appeal of a turnip is called upon to parade his half-naked dad-bod around in one context or another every other show it seems.  I haven't taken the trouble of remembering the character's name but in my mind it's Dad (even though I couldn't tell you whether the character actually has children.  It's not the children that makes him Dad.  It's the mustache.).

On principle, I don't fast forward through shows I'm watching-- not even the not particularly good ones.  It's a solidarity move.  It doesn't seem fair to people who actually watch the shows. But the antipathy I feel for this character has tempted me to make an exception in his case.  On the other hand, I have to admit to a certain fascination about how this vacuum of charisma continues to be a center of the show.  It's like a kind-of-near train wreck that didn't-actually-happen.  I can't take my eyes away from it even though there's not really anything I could point to to look at.

My daughter, who does not watch the show, tells me that she hears that this character has a fan base among her cohort, the millenials.  What could they possibly see in him, I wonder.  She tells me it's exactly what I hate: that he's just a big dumb Dad.  They like him because he's a Dad??!  Ugh!  I suppose it should have been obvious to me since there is literally nothing else going on with this guy.

What is it with young people and their capacity to be entertained by Dad figures?  Someone my daughters' age enthusiastically recommended I watch a Bert Kreischer comedy special.   I'm going to give them one more chance at a recommendation to redeem themself.  I've also learned from my daughter about a popular video "dating game" released not too long ago in which the object is for the protagonist, a new-Dad-in-town, to choose a "date" from among a selection of other Dads in the neighborhood.  What!?  You're kidding me.  Is it a horror game?  No!  Is it political education disguised as discomfiting social satire?  No!  You mean, it's just supposed to be fun?  Yes. And young people actually buy and play this game?!  Yes, they do.  I'm not at all worried about this up and coming generation, until I hear about shit like this.

Always on the cutting edge of music I noticed in my YouTube recommendations not long ago new videos from Soccer Mommy and Hockey Dad.  Something is really terribly wrong when college students are naming their bands after their parents.†  This indicates to me a failure of parenting.

We're supposed to be progressing, but instead we're indulging in stale, dad-aged obsessions like racism and misogyny again.

Kids!  Dad is not cute!  Dad is not cool!  Dad is Donald Trump.  Jordan Peterson will not save you.  Joe Biden will not save you.§  You're not supposed to like Dads, you're supposed to resent them.    You're supposed to rebel against them.  They are the enemy!  They are old, they are overweight (and if they’re not overweight, they’re vain), they are angry, they have terrible taste in music.  They watch Fox News.  They criticize you for no reason.  They laugh at cruelty. They have stopped learning.  They don't understand you!  What's more, they made this world that you're inheriting.  They could have done something about global warming but they only made it worse.  They could have made this a safer, fairer world but instead they acquiesced to the most evil systems of politics and economics in the world and a devotion to or at least an okayness with a bullshit concept called the free market.  And now we're enslaved to it. You want to fix it and they're telling you what they always say about anything that could make your life better: We can't afford that!   This is a lie.  It's just a reflex with them.  They don't know what they're talking about, but they do know that you can't have what you want.  They have ruined your future.  And they did it accidentally on purpose because it was more fun for them, it was easier for them, and they could get away with it because nobody could tell them what to do.  They are selfish. They are uninformed and proud of it. They are complacent and they have taught you to be complacent too.

So drop the obsession with the old man, kids!   When it's time for Fathers' Day, just remember this:  Every day is Fathers' Day...

~~~~~~~~~~~~
* It's the one where all the originally pre-teen characters still wear rugby shirts and beanies and socks with shorts even though the actors portraying them are by now beyond puberty.

† It really pains me to report that Soccer Mommy is actually pretty good.  I refuse to listen to Hockey Dad.

§ Bernie Sanders will save you.

Pwease no steppy!

When we see the scurvy, morally decrepit Reprobate-in-Chief literally hugging the American flag for the cameras like the perverted weirdo that he is and spouting inane platitudes about the US of A it's not difficult to understand what Samuel Johnson meant when he called patriotism "the last refuge of a scoundrel."  But is that all that patriotism is?  In the relative halcyon days of the early 1960's when life was somewhat sweet; when our commonality was celebrated and we were engaged actively (if not always unanimously) in the broadening of it to include Americans of all types, backgrounds and walks of life; and when the memory of our collective successful struggle to defeat Hitler and fascism in World War II-- the last defensible international endeavor undertaken by our military-- was still rather fresh in our minds, it was assumed that Patriotism was a virtue shared by (or available to) all Americans.  I confess, when I see Trump mugging like a dope, the impulse to want to slap the flag out of his filthy mouth is probably as close to that classical ideal of patriotism as I ever get.  But I was witness to the absconding of the concept of Patriotism by the jingoistic scoundrels of the right when Presidents Johnson and Nixon's escalation of the dubiously conducted Vietnam war turned popular opinion against it, and it became difficult to see it as anything other than a veil behind which the worst impulses, deprivations and policy impositions of the ruling class were routinely masked.  They must have thought we were idiots.  Given their successes and the way they translate to our tribulations, they may have been right.

Still it is not correct to say that "the last refuge of a scoundrel" is all that patriotism is.  When you see it manifested in spontaneous expressions of gratitude for the service of those suddenly revealed to have served in the military, or in the ubiquitous square flag decals and slogans that have become de rigueur decorations of the back of dump trucks and semis, or in the flag pins that had better adorn the lapels of our elected representatives, it's clearly also a kind of obsessive compulsive disorder, a manic escalation of the competition to display one's unbridled devotion to the country-- even though no one asked or particularly cares unless reminded to, and certainly not to an extent that merits the shameless exhibitionism.  The gratitude is backhanded-- it's really an assertion of ownership.  In the service of their overseas adventures, in response to the emergencies that arise from their clumsy lack of neighborliness in the world, you give your life and limbs.  As thanks to you for your willingness to proxy in person for their aggressions, they wear a pin.

Ostensibly, patriotism according to Merriam-Webster is "love for or devotion to one's country."  Given the arbitrariness of the circumstances of one's country and the many ways it could have gone differently, I can see how the patriotic impulse could be considered nothing more than an adaptive behavioral tic to the situation you find yourself in, but a virtue?  This is one of those things that survival sense dictates we should probably not probe too deeply (because challenges to it engender such inchoate and hot emotions in those who think with their fists), but it withers under any kind of honest rational scrutiny.   It's telling that the usage samples in the Webster definition reveal nothing but pathology about the meaning of the word:

Although poles apart ideologically, they are both unashamed of their patriotism.
— Christopher Hemphill

 You may not agree with him politically, but no one can question his patriotism.

They supported the war with a fierce patriotism.

As Voltaire noted, "It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind."  Patriotism, being based on the accident of one's birth, or at best fanaticism about one's chosen home, is the sort of thing that is both indefensible and something to be used usually in its least defined and most undefended state as an instrument to cast aspersion on the integrity of one's adversaries.  While it shares this feature with much of religion, at least religion is codified to an extent that it can be argued with.  Still my lack of religion and basic disdain for patriotism if disclosed publicly would disqualify me from public office and from the trust and basic respect of a good majority of the country.  If you wanted to impugn my character on the basis of my lack of patriotism, you could absolutely do it; I'd only be consoled that at least the feeling is mutual.

I'll grant that my experience of patriotism as on balance a pathology causes me to disfavor it, but is there anything to redeem the concept for me?  Am I the pathological one for having such animosity to it?    No one defends the patriotism of citizens of other countries; likewise it is only American patriotism that I as an American am qualified to consider.  It seems to have been a useful quality for the American revolutionaries who sought to divorce the territory from Great Britain, since it seized them with an image of something worth defending.  I'd be loath to argue that the enlightenment ideals of the original patriots were not something to be patriotic about and it would have done them no good to dwell on how far their own behavior and lifestyles deviated from it.  That our nation would then go on and wield patriotism as an excuse to persist in enslaving humans to perform our labor for free and to engage in genocide against the original inhabitants of the continent as we expanded our borders exemplifies the type of mischief that it can accomplish.

The problem with Patriotism is that it's usually either isolationism, nationalism, imperialism or war-mongering pretending to be a virtue.  The masquerade becomes a reflex.  The mindless devotion becomes the point, and through the lens of Patriotism, those who point out the widening gap between the ideal of America and the reality can appear as opponents rather than champions of an America worthy of devotion.  I've been encouraged by a proliferation of the champions recently, maybe best exemplified by the freshman class of Congress, but I'm not ready to let go of the sense that their challenge to the status quo could be met as usual by the masterfully practiced enemies of progress at any turn.

The idiosyncrasy of one nation's patriotism over another's raises an obvious point.  The US did not always exist and there is no reason to think it will exist in perpetuity.  Perhaps a revolution may some day come out of the observation that the dysfunction of a place is directly proportional to its size.  Perhaps the world will for instance one day reject the tyranny of beholdenness to a few primarily unjustly advantaged super-powers and the elites that prop them up, favoring instead a return to an organization along the line of mutually cooperative and peaceable micro-states,  the concept of empire having been relegated to the dustbin of history.  In this case, the memory of patriotism toward the former empire will be exposed as vanity.  Why wait?  Be skeptical now.

The logical endpoint of organization of the world into micro-states  (Burj Al Babas, Turkey)