Top TV of 2022

Ahh yes here's the thing where I talk about what I watched on TV this year.  After COVID-related production delays gave last year the thinnest list of quality TV since I started doing this exercise, the medium roared back with the best year of TV since 2015 or so.  I legitimately wrestled between seven different shows for the top spot, and the eventual champion feels like a winner whose success won't soon be recreated.  In sum, a few all-timers finished off their runs, a bunch of new shows popped up to take their place, and the usual slate of miniseries were as strong as ever.  Hooray for you and me, the ever-blessed viewers.

As I decided a few years back, I'm no longer doing a top 25 and am only ranking the best of the best.  So apologies to Ramy, What We Do in the Shadows, White Lotus, Severance, The Old Man, Slow Horses, and a bunch of other perfectly good shows that fell just shy of my semi-arbitrary demarcation of greatness.

#13 - Only Murders in the Building (Hulu)

While not as tight or effective as it's initial season, Only Murders' sophomore campaign was nonetheless a success.  This is partly because it's fundamentally a hangout show, and it was still very good at being just that.  But even more crucial is that its light satirical touch lends itself to an honest self-awareness of the limitations of trying to string along its peculiar concept for multiple seasons.  This ongoing meta-commentary helped it to avoid the most predictable pitfalls, and led to a juicy cliff-hanger that was equal parts fun and necessary for the show's continuation.

#12 - The Rehearsal (HBO)

#11 - The Righteous Gemstones (HBO)

Putting these together because they share the same strengths and weaknesses.  On one hand, every little detail is perfect, from the lightly-repressed beefcake Jesus troupe in Gemstones to the placement of literally every morsel of Nathan Fielder's bizarre simulacra.  On the other hand, do all these pieces add up to anything larger?  For Gemstones the answer is "occasionally": The confluence of storylines pays off in the mid-season episode "As to How They Might Destroy Him" far more meaningfully than the muddled conclusion of the Zion's Landing arc.  For The Rehearsal it's necessarily a bit more of a mystery.  Part of this is because the basis of the show is what appears to be Fielder's earnest confusion over what it means to be human.  But it's also that, despite the artifice, the show is literally engaging with real life.  The text of the show even spells this out: Nathan uses the entirety of his HBO budget to impose his will and account for everything, but it still spills over into the real connection with one of the child actors detailed in the finale.  The end result is that Fielder is perhaps even more confused about life, which perhaps is the point?  What I can say is that these shows practically force you to engage with them at a deeper level than you might expect and that alone is commendable.

#10 - We Own This City (HBO)

If nothing else, the opening seconds of David Simon's latest miniseries demonstrates that he knows what the viewer came here for: Jon Bernthal's ludicrously good (?) Dundalk accent.  And sure, there's a lot else Simon doesn't know, but he'll always know how to build his specific storytelling construct for maximal affect.  Hence the inclusion on this list of this tale of real-life police corruption/belligerence and the structures that enable it.  This evident contradiction between Simon's intention and his output has grown to the point where I'd like to wipe his brain and force him to watch the entirety of his oeuvre, just to see if a naïve David Simon comes to a different conclusion about what is to be done (it would at least give us a salient data point for or against "death of the author," semi-literally).  I tend to hope that such an exercise would help him to see the light—like his other works, We Own This City doesn't explain the ultimate "why" but ironically it does explain the "why" of why the actually existing David Simon doesn't quite get it.  From the lack of insight into what drives the nameless horde of protestors to the room full of self-interested decision makers that inherently prevent progress, a deep appraisal of the show will get the honest viewer most of the way there.  Or you could just take the word of Simon's own character, the reform-minded DOJ attorney who concludes her futile efforts with the following thought:

“Look around. Look at it. We’ve built this machine where half the damn country, the part with money and power, chew up the other half that didn’t have anything to begin with. Watch it work. This is what we want. Then the Freddy Grays, the Eric Garners, the Michael Browns, are what we get. Every page of whatever court order we write, it won’t fix it.”

#9 - The Bear (FX on Hulu)

Whiplash but funnier and more explicitly about trauma, for better or worse.  And there's some cool needle drops, including the penultimate episode which consists mostly of "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" playing in the background of utter chaos, as it should.  It's one of the most Chicago-y things on TV since...the last series Jeremy Allen White starred in.  And there was even a mini-discourse about a white t-shirt.  Pretty good.

#8 - Barry (HBO)

Three seasons in, the thematic heft of Barry remains pretty light.  Can a person who does bad things be good?  What does true redemption mean?  Can you make honest art in Hollywood?  These dilemmas have been wrestled with elsewhere, both more adroitly and more thoroughly.*  To which I say to myself: Who cares?  Bill Hader and friends are having a lot of fun making something equal parts sleek and unique.  Sometimes a show is just really good TV and that's enough.

*ie. Whether Barry is "redeemable" says less about him or his situation or even redemption in general than it does about our society's fundamental lack of honesty about the subject, and the show doesn't appear to be interested in exploring that last part at all.

#7 - Andor (Disney+)

Where Barry succeeds almost entirely because of its flashiest parts, Andor makes its mark with nearly unparalleled economy in storytelling.  Sure, the series' singular thematic focus on the building of revolutionary consciousness is cool, but it's also fairly rote in the moment (while still being fun to think about afterwards).  But I don't care about that because a) like I said, it's incredibly cool to have something this explicit in its aims, and b) the story is crafted in such a precise and unsparing manner that I would still love it even if it were about nothing.

#6 - Reservation Dogs (FX on Hulu)

Still one of the biggest delights on television.  No other show manages to balance irony and earnest sentimentality as believably as this one.  The central conflict of the second season necessitated divergent storylines, which would send many a lesser show into a spiral of diminishing returns.  But as I remarked last year this show thrives on its Leftovers-type structure of semi-isolated storytelling, so the (temporary) fracturing of the titular friend group actually served to benefit the series as a whole.

#5 - Pachinko (Apple TV+)

Pachinko made easy work out of adapting what I am told is a hard-to-adapt book.  In the process, it manages a near-perfect demonstration of how to tell a story across multiple timelines, ranging from occupied Korea to pre-Lost Decade Japan.  The interplay of the different time periods highlights the parallels between inter-generational struggles without giving any of them the short shrift.  And all of this is tied together through food, which grounds the show in a way few others manage.  Finally, having a perfect theme song will always bump a show up a spot or two.

#4 - My Brilliant Friend: Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (HBO)

If I'm being picky, the third season of My Brilliant Friend suffered ever so slightly because of the necessities of its narrative.  Lenu and Lila's lives have diverged to the point where they are rarely together, and thus their peculiar dynamic that drives the show is mostly limited to timely phone calls and awkward dinner parties.  But even if they're not physically present in each other's lives, it's made repeatedly clear that the specter of The Other still drives their every thought and action.  In a way, this is actually more interesting, if not always quite as tangible.  Regardless, the show's meticulous power of observation channeled through Lenu's (mostly) reliable narration is enrapturing no matter what story is being told.

#3 - Better Call Saul (AMC)

There's a million things to say about Better Call Saul, all positive, but what really sticks with me is its unparalleled competence.  Possibly no other series could [mild spoiler] wrap up the stories of two of its most famous characters with four episodes to go and send us to black-and-white Nebraska for a conclusion that spends a lot of time at the mall.  And have it be thrilling!  The reason this works is our faith that the Gould/Gilligan brain trust will make it worth our while, which has been earned by more than a decade of patient and meticulous depiction of people's inner lives and thoughts and the logical actions that result.  Not only does this approach lend itself to a more honest and organic brand of storytelling, but it also comes with a built-in advantage: You'll always get to watch exceptional characters do exceptionally competent things...at least until the corrosive nature of those things brings about their downfall.  Terrific series which I will miss.

#2 - The Dropout (Hulu)

I didn't really think the creator of New Girl would be up for tackling the story of everyone's favorite criminal Elizabeth Holmes.  I was very, very wrong.  The weird tonal mish-mash of quirky earnestness and slacker apathy bordering on nihilism was always the sticking point in what was an otherwise enjoyable sitcom.  But here that approach is perfect because that's exactly what the story of Elizabeth Holmes is!  What makes the show equal parts thrilling and sobering is that very specific energy of trying hard without having anything of substance to offer, which is the very lifeforce of Holmes, the miniseries itself, and even modern capitalism as a whole.  This ethos of sorts even spills over into the ending, which I was prepared to hate.  But rather than forcing an overwrought reckoning or a "moral of the story," The Dropout just ends with a hysterical Amanda Seyfried screaming at nothing in particular.  Feels about right.  

#1 - Atlanta (FX)

I loved the previous seasons of Atlanta, but the final two seasons that aired this year cemented it as something else entirely.  Donald Glover and friends take the promise of the half-comedy, half-drama, half-serialized, half-naked commentary, half-horror, half-transcendent format we first saw in Louie and injects it with an honesty and clarity that Louis CK could never muster, for all the obvious reasons.  The result is self-assured in a way that nothing else ever has been or possibly ever will be.  Great shows have great stories that lead to perfect moments of resonance.  This show created wholly unique spaces that subverted expectations constantly, in every direction, thus rendering the need for "moments" or perhaps even "resonance" irrelevant.  In this way we are all Earn, staring at that picture at the end of season three, aware of the richness of meaning in every thing, every dream, every moment, but doomed by our fundamental nature to never quite grasp it.  Probably the apotheosis of modern TV or maybe just TV period.

College Football Playoff Predictor - After October

October has come and gone.  Here are your Playoff odds going into the stretch run:

Not much to say, really.  If it wasn't for Tennessee this would be incredibly boring.  Clemson is well ahead of Michigan largely because they don't have to play Ohio State.  Alabama remains in good shape because of their superior SOS, while Oregon has the best chance of the Pac-12 challengers largely for the same reason (Georgia in non-con and playing UCLA and Utah cross-division will do that for you).

Likewise, the conference odds don't have a lot of surprises for us at this point, unless Troy being in command of a bad division does something for you.

The Week 10 preview is as you might expect.  The game of the year, a couple of other important battles, and then Michigan and Ohio State going on the road to face some overmatched conference opponents.  I honestly really like a slate like this because it allows you to focus on a few games and really get into them.  Enjoy.

Public Citizens: I Don't Like This Guy So Everything Is His Fault

Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism - Paul Sabin (link)

Public Citizens accomplishes two things.  The first is ostensibly the book's explicit purpose—that is, judging Ralph Nader's* political project as more or less a failure through the lens of a worldview based on the self-evident goodness of existing liberal governance.  I will expand on this in great detail later.  

*I'm aware Nader was not the only person in the consumer advocacy movement, but the narrative of the book focuses on him, so I will also use Nader as a short-hand for the movement in this post

But first let's talk about the second, far more useful accomplishment.  By painting a detailed picture of Nader's advocacy and the political climate in which it took place, Sabin has (likely unwittingly) laid the groundwork for a meaningful and robust critique of Nader from an anti-capitalist perspective.  This evidence points to two specific axes along which Nader's work was doomed either to inadequacy or outright failure.

The first of Nader's fundamental problems is ironically the same issue I have with the author (more on that later): an underlying bias towards fundamental liberal/capitalist assumptions about the limits of political imagination.  My personal judgment is that reformist attitudes such as Nader's are not inherently doomed to irrelevance, but having the misfortune to attempt this specific project during a period of rapid alignment of capital (the dreaded "neoliberal turn") certainly muted his accomplishments.  Regardless, his disavowal of socialism/communism probably boxed him in to an overwhelming degree.  The book describes his attitude towards extant socialist political economies as cold at best, and paints his perceptions of the USSR as being overwhelmed with bureaucracy and not as subject to "insecurity" as was needed for his reformist goals.  A grant proposal he wrote in 1968 to "propose a fundamental change to the American political and economic model" is probably the most concise demonstration of his ethos in this regard.  He identifies the problem with American society as one of domination by "countervailing powers, with three major forces—big government, big labor, and big industry—each pursuing its own interest and balancing off the interests of others."  This suggests perhaps a vague spark of anti-capitalism, but if that ever did exist in Nader it's snuffed out by his proposed solution to this problem, namely "the ad hoc force of the public or the citizen-consumer."  By using the term "citizen-consumer," he's defining the people he's advocating for explicitly using the terms of the "major forces" that contribute to their ongoing oppression.

The second problem from an anti-capitalist perspective was that Nader was entirely too enmeshed within existing structures of capital.  His movement was one of "professional citizens [that] necessarily attracted individualistic middle-class and educated followers."  Sabin quotes the Environmental Defense Fund's co-founder as explicitly saying "we operate entirely within the sociological structure."  The book goes into great detail about how the Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corporations were major backers of the consumer advocacy movement.  Not only did this arrangement limit Nader's organizations from being overly political; it also served to de-radicalize and control young idealists: "Rebellious law students, who initially aspired to an egalitarian organizational structure with no single chief executive, quickly found themselves working under a former assistant US attorney with an inaugural board that included prominent New York lawyers and civic leaders."  As one of the founders is quoted in reflection, "we opted to work within the system of political economy that we found and we neglected to seek transformation of the system itself."

All this said, it's hard to fault Nader too much, as was able to use the tools at his disposal to accomplish a great deal.  And as I've studied the seventies more and more, I've come to see capital's entrenchment during the period as largely inevitable, given what came before.  As such, Nader's direct responsibility for helping to establish regulatory bodies and standards that persist to this day (albeit in some disrepair) is commendable.  The book itself does not deny these accomplishments, which leads to an unresolved tension within its narrative. How can one frame Nader's efforts as an "attack on big government" when those very efforts were aimed at reforming the government largely by using its existing processes and institutions?  Sabin never identifies this contradiction in his narrative, and as a result his argument falls flat.

There's a few different angles to this disconnect.  The most obvious one is that Sabin's narrative often provides direct support for Nader's claims that various structures of liberal governance were fundamentally corrupt or incompetent.  Sabin concludes his section on unions by blaming Nader's rhetoric for their decline: "The critique of labor organizations [...] drove a wedge between unions and liberals [...] that would help undermine unions in the years ahead."  This comes less than two pages after an anecdote about a Nader-backed reform candidate being murdered, along with his wife and child, by henchmen of the entrenched union president he was challenging.  Later, Sabin details how Nader and his allies took Edmund Muskie (among others) to task for their perceived weakness in standing up to the forces of industry.  Sabin categorizes such political pressure as "an ambivalent relationship with the Democratic Party" while simultaneously admitting that the strategy worked, resulting in the passage of legislation that was "tougher than it otherwise might have been."  The book never really tries to resolve this tension, largely ignoring the validity of Nader's claims and rarely providing any alternatives to Nader's approach, which he seems to find distasteful.

Sabin also appears to draw a number of connections that aren't supported by his evidence.  He credits Nader's reforms with "creating a politics that was less transactional and more ideological," but provides no direct evidence for such a claim.  He claims that Nader's success "created more arenas for conflict—the courts, Congress, regulatory settings, and the media" while ignoring that those are inherently political arenas explicitly designed to manage conflict.  He categorizes progressive opposition to Carter as a "lack of unity" and as "caring more about political purity than...the liberal political coalition" while ignoring the larger context of Carter's (and thus the party's) rightward lurch.  He blames Nader for airline deregulation while a) providing minimal evidence for the claim (he sources like 10 books for that paragraph and I couldn't find independent confirmation, so take it with a grain of salt that Nader even supported it), and b) minimizing the roles of those in power (and not really mentioning who influenced them, by the way) that actually passed the bill.  He makes a half-hearted attempt to a connect Reagan's anti-government rhetoric to Nader's critique of government, but a) it's not very convincing, and b) only serves the purpose of casting Nader with a thin haze of suspicion.  Sabin spends several pages describing Bill Clinton's weird Reaganism-lite politics, but it's never clear how this is supposed to stem from the consumer advocacy movement other than an overlap in word choice.  And as you might have guessed, he saves his weirdest analysis for the 2000 election:

"Nader expressed politically damaging vitriol for Gore and the Democrats by equating them with Republicans.  'Our two parties are basically one corporate party wearing two heads and different makeup.' [...] Nader threatened to dampen voter enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate[...]and to tip the balance in one of the swing states."

Both here and elsewhere, Sabin provides zero concrete evidence for the "politically damaging" claim, makes zero effort to engage with the actual substance/truth of Nader's argument, and fails to mention Bush v Gore even once.  What's more is that, for all his liberal assumptions elsewhere in the text, he seems to miss a key one here—namely, that in a liberal democracy the point of the vote is to cede absolute power to the people, if only for one fleeting moment.  The people who voted for Nader owed Al Gore precisely nothing; not their enthusiasm and not their vote.  And in as much as Nader represented the concerns of his constituents, neither did he.  Sabin's prose is dispassionate enough that I can't say for sure that this book is entirely motivated by a grudge against Nader, but there is absolutely a preponderance of effort to that effect.

What further reinforces my reading of this book as some sort of weird Freudian retribution scheme is how Sabin betrays his own lack of imagination around the capabilities of government just like he depicts Nader as doing.  He speaks of "Nader's inability to come to terms with the compromises inherent in running the executive branch."  He says "the public interest critique of government held those in power up against a model of what they might be, rather than what the push and pull of political compromise and struggle allowed."  He credits Carter with "a pragmatic approach to governing that might integrate these conflicting truths (of the value of government vs its limitations)."  Finally, he seems to sum up his ethos best in the closing paragraph (emphasis mine):

"By primarily playing the role of uncompromising outside critic, the public interest movement neglected to build support for government in a way that could facilitate policy-making in a politically divided nation or that could support internal reforms that might improve government operations.  Americans continue to struggle to craft an approach to governance that acknowledges, and strives to balance, the inherent limitations of government, markets, and citizen action."

I very much understand the immediate, practical limitations to what can be done under our current regime.  I know that Medicare For All will not be passed tomorrow, no matter how many people want it to.  But that's not the scope of the political project described in this book, and the author is being dishonest in treating it as such.  For whatever faults Nader's project may have had, it was a dedicated attempt to ameliorate legitimate problems through relatively moderate, structural means over a long period of time.  If you are really advocating for the continued existence of a system of government that has an "inherent limitation" against achieving modest reforms such as these, then what do you really support?  Why does it seem that these "limitations" Sabin invokes line up almost perfectly with the type of government he seems to desire?  Sabin never addresses let alone conceives of these questions, so I will leave it to the reader to ponder them further.   

In the end, you have a liberal author enamored with the New Deal order writing a diatribe of sorts against a liberal activist who worked towards something slightly different.  That the author fails to grasp any larger truths (ie. how the collapse of the Bretton Woods system likely made any sort of continued New Deal formulation inherently untenable) ironically mirrors how Nader may have underestimated the efficacy of his approach in the wake of the neoliberal turn.  In this way, Nader's actions and Sabin's narrative represent two different sets of liberal ideals that have both wielded meaningful political power in the recent past.  And yet, here we are.

College Football Playoff Predictor - After September

 Doing monthly updates on this because I am lazy.

Part of the reason for the monthly updates is that the clear top three teams we started the season with have a) all looked the part, remaining roughly a touchdown clear of the field on a neutral field and b) passed all of their tests thus far.  But as promised there's been a fair amount of movement beneath that, with Oklahoma and A&M disappointing, NC State holding serve, and USC and Minnesota (?) surging.  Perfectly cromulent September all things considered.

Conference odds reflect two paradigms.  For the Group of Five there is effective anarchy.  Cincinnati appears to be the class of the American again, but other than that the only thing I can promise at this point is chaos.  Get ready for an unranked 11-2 team to make the Cotton Bowl.

For the Power Five, things look a bit more normal with chaos lurking just beneath the surface.  Kansas State is 28% to make the Big 12 title game.  Washington is at 37% for the Pac 12.  And no team is more likely to make the Big Ten title game than Minnesota.  Everything still could get weird-ish...stay tuned.

 

Suspicion of Others is Bad Part 3 of ???

As the proxy war between Russia and NATO rages on, the phenomenon of reflexive left-bashing (which I commented on previously) has continued as well.  This post from a couple of weeks ago is as illuminating of an example of this as I could ask for, so let's blog about it.  While I won't go through every point, I did want to touch on a couple of specifically rage-inducing mistakes the author makes.

First is this list of supposed "lies and idiocies":

"I think it’s worth recalling all the lies and idiocies that have been repeated since the start of the conflict: First, we were told war was impossible, it was a figment of the Western imagination; then we were told war was inevitable, because it was provoked by the West; we were told that they intended to trick Putin into a destructive quagmire; then we were told this was part of Putin’s grand master plan to defy the West and create a new world order; then, that Russia’s total victory was assured in a matter of hours, then days, then weeks, and that news of Ukrainian success was all propaganda; then, that Russia’s serious reversals were actually pre-planned and a new offensive would eventually overwhelm Ukrainian defenses. This moving, parrying, retreating discourse seems to follow or anticipate the retreats of the Russian army itself, trying to dig in to new positions, only to have shift again."

I'm not going to claim all of these assertions are true, as it's clear in hindsight that some of them are wrong.  That said, it's important to note that a) I'm not aware of a specific person/group that has held all of these positions (the author makes no effort to elucidate this either), and b) lumping all of these statements together helps to hide the fact that some of these things are undeniably true.  What this rhetoric accomplishes then is to establish a respectable narrative of the war from a liberal perspective that treats any deviation, legitimate or not, as immediately worthy of suspicion.

"But how about the people who buy it, repeat it, and create their own variations on its themes? What could possibly account for all these contradictory and absurd positions, which have been uttered at different times by the same people? All these sentiments are all the product of a single proposition: the Western democracies are always wrong, both morally and practically. When the West struggles and fails, it’s because of its decadence and senility, a sign of its imminent collapse, when it prevails, it’s because of its dastardly wiles and the limitlessness of its ill-gotten resources. Russia’s appeal in the West, which crosses the traditional boundaries of right and left, is irresistible for those who believe the worst crime imaginable is Western hypocrisy. Since this hypocrisy is the only unforgivable sin, Russia’s crude and cynical exercise of power, it’s barely plausible justifications for its actions, its overt gangsterism at home and abroad, is seen as a virtue."

The author makes two key mistakes in this passage.  One is that his argument essentially equates critiques of US power as being exclusively attribution error, which forecloses the possibility of very real structural critiques.  Two, it ignores the reality and the omnipresence of actually existing US hegemony.  Even if we grant that the US is not the primary instigator of this conflict (which is not a given), it is clear from their lack of diplomacy and their surplus of arms shipments that they are using their position of power to support and perhaps even encourage the continuation of this conflict.  And if one is a subject to this hegemonic power, I would argue that it is actually a moral imperative to speak against it.  More to the point, as much as the term "leftist" signifies anything specific, it signifies anti-capitalism.  The US is undeniably head of the global empire of capital, and as such, should be the primary adversarial state apparatus of anyone who claims allegiance to the left.

"This leads to mind-bogglingly absurd positions: self-avowed Marxist-Leninists cheering on Lenin’s great enemy, Russian chauvinism, self-declared defenders of European Civilization and “traditionalist” Christians rooting for the destruction of the cradle of Slavic Christianity at the hands of who at other times they would deride as Chechen bashi-bazouks. In the coming months and years, we will likely see the one turn into the other: Red becoming Browns, Browns turning Red, Christian becoming atheists, atheists becoming Christian, “new systems” declaring the essential compatibility of Orthodoxy and communism, of international socialism and national chauvinism, politics shrugged off and then adopted as any other affectation, like health fads or sudden tastes for the exotic Orient, but having the added benefit of granting the appearance of serious conviction and purpose. Here we get an insight into the unifying principle of all these supposedly disparate tendencies: a type of base, moronic cynicism. More than anything else, it is this moronic cynicism that takes itself to be devilish cleverness that is the governing ideology of the Russian state and society, and it attracts all its global admirers."

Unlike other paragraphs, there isn't necessarily anything here that is factually untrue.  The problem instead is more one of degree.  Ganz does not name anyone specific, but the only knowledge I have of "self-avowed Marxist-Leninists" matching this description are sex pests and literal cryptofascists.  Not only do I question if these people I assume he has in mind are "leftist" to any meaningful degree, but it's not clear that there are all that many of these people or that they hold any significant purchase in any larger left-oriented power structures (which barley exist in the first place).  By building what is effectively a straw-man argument against an unnamed, unrepresentative other, and then claiming this will lead to the dreaded "red-brown alliance," he is implicitly smearing anyone who might advance anything approximating this vague position as a potential fascist collaborator.  To this, I will again ask the questions: What does this suspicion of others accomplish?  Who does this serve?  Does it actually help the people of Ukraine?  Or does it help further entrench the premises that will lead to their continued immiseration?

Suspicion of Others is Bad Part 2 of ???

 A few months ago I wrote this post about suspicion.  The central thesis was this point from earlier:

"Many Americans hold essentially Manichean views of the world, but those views are mostly a direct consequence of our hegemony and our political system.  Our two party system leads to a red team/blue team mentality where people who identify with one team view anyone who doesn't adhere to all perceived tenets of that team with suspicion.  Similarly, people who view American hegemony to be "good" tend to be suspicious of those who voice concerns to the contrary (and vice versa)."

Since then I have seen this sort of thing transpire time and time again.  But today I saw an example so clear and so illustrative of this disconnect that I had to document it.  It started with this post from Edward Snowden about Biden's recent speech, the gist of which is contained in its introduction:

"“What’s happening in our country,” the President said, “is not normal.”

Is he wrong to think that? The question the speech intended to raise—the one lost in the unintentionally villainous pageantry—is whether and how we are to continue as a democracy and a nation of laws. For all the Twitter arguments over Biden’s propositions, there has been little consideration of his premises.

Democracy and the rule of law have been so frequently invoked as a part of the American political brand that we simply take it for granted that we enjoy both.

Are we right to think that?"

I think his argument that follows is largely true, if a little narrow in scope.  Yes, the CIA and other covert organizations are fundamentally un-democratic, but that's just one part of our wretched nation and not necessarily the one I would focus my argument on.  Regardless, I think his instinct to question Biden's premises in this manner is spot-on.

Not everyone agreed, of course.  One such dissenter was moderately good pundit/writer Ryan Cooper:

Cooper's characterization of Snowden's argument in the second tweet is perhaps the most clear example I've seen of someone who thinks America is "good" completely mischaracterizing the argument of someone who doesn't.  Snowden explicitly doesn't engage with Biden's argument but rather his premises.  Equating that with saying "Biden's wrong" misses the point entirely.  It's entirely possible (or even probable) that Snowden actually prefers Biden to Trump, but that preference is not cogent to the specific argument he's making, so he rightfully doesn't include it.  

What's more is that Snowden is in exile specifically because he exposed our government's crimes, and yet people use this extremely understandable reason for his opposition to our government to cast further suspicion on him:

What we end up with here is a demonstration of how the two axes of my thesis on suspicion often become entangled.  Someone opposed to the currently existing American state is also unlikely to be a blue team/red team partisan, and thus someone who is such a partisan may conflate an argument for the former position with a sort of softly peddled argument for the opponent.  Or more likely, they may view any argument that doesn't center their partisan views as being implicitly for their partisan opponents.  I think this is wrong obviously, but it's also just such a small way of seeing and interacting with the world.  Don't we want something better than this?  If so, isn't it our minimum obligation to avoid an appeal to suspicion when we see something we don't immediately agree with?

College Football Playoff Predictor - Year 8

With news that a 12-team playoff could happen as soon as 2024, this exercise is nearing its completion.  But until that time we beat on, spreadsheets against the current, borne ceaselessly into debugging my R code.  Here are the playoff odds that were calculated before the action of Week 0 and last two nights that I was too lazy to post until now:

A couple brief remarks:

1. Yep, the same teams dominate the top that always do.  A clear top three that are seven points clear of the field in the computers and a post-hype Clemson that could be dreadfully competent make up the top four.  While this certainly could indicate a very boring playoff race, the top ten games of the year (in terms of playoff odds at stake) show that each of these teams faces at least some resistance from their moderately strong schedules.  And do recall that two of last year's playoff participants were outside the top 20 in initial playoff odds.  So chaos, as muted as its been over the last eight years, is still possible.

2. That said, I would tend to take the under on Clemson's number above, which means that the fourth playoff spot may be more up for grabs than you might think.  And there are enough interesting squads in the space below the top four to suggest that something approaching "fun" could happen with the race in November.  This might not quite equate to "chaos," but it does suggest that something more compelling than you might expect could come to pass.

3. The alternate view one could take based on these initial playoff odds is to simply ignore the playoff and enjoy the broader scope of what college football has to offer.  Go see your local D-III team.  Pick a week to watch the Mountain West and CUSA action on CBS Sports Network for an entire Saturday.  Follow Oregon State around like they're the Grateful Dead.  Sure, I'm going to watch every stupid Alabama team until my eyes bleed but that doesn't mean you have to.  Allow these words to liberate you from your burden.

4. And if nothing else, it's an NC State hype year.  We only get one of these every five years or so.  Cherish it.

What is to Be Done

 From this morning after the Dobbs decision was handed down:

On way to the court pic.twitter.com/XrE9ExAzhm

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) June 24, 2022

Humanity faces numerous existential crises at the moment.  Climate change is the overarching issue, but others like nuclear war, growing risk of pandemics, and general political instability all overlap with each other and threaten us all the same.  The common link between all of these is that we absolutely can not come close to mitigating (let alone solving) any of these problems under capitalism.  All these dilemmas require an international movement of solidarity to properly address them, which the political economy of capitalism is diametrically opposed to.

The Dobbs decision, along with all the other dogshit rulings this week, are all crises in and of themselves.  The inability to obtain a legal abortion, or boycott an apartheid state, or rely on a public education will all cause direct, material harm to millions.  Viewed through the existential scope of the previous paragraph these decisions serve a larger, even more nefarious purpose of making any sort of movement towards solidarity more and more impossible.  A person jailed for an unjust law, a woman injured or dead from an unsafe abortion, a Palestinian driven off their land—the clear second-order effect of these rulings is that people victimized by the law will not have the liberty nor the means to help in the fight to build a new future.

If nothing else please let this be the moment that cements your commitment to prison abolition. They are going to incarcerate people for miscarriages. They are going to incarcerate mothers and aunts and big sisters for helping teenage relatives abort.

— Charlotte Shane (@CharoShane) June 24, 2022

The means with which capital will enforce these rulings is clear.  They will use their soldiers (cops, ICE, border patrol) and their materiel (weapons, prisons, surveillance) to punish people to suit their ends.  Which means the immediate goal of anyone looking for a livable future is clear: The marginalization, defeat, and dismantling of these systems of oppression once and for all.  If you need a hit of optimism right now, I will add that I tend to think that if we can achieve this first step towards liberation, then the second step (abolition of capitalism) will be relatively easy.

Which makes the "how" part of this the million-dollar question.  I don't know what the ultimate answer is but I know what it's not.  This struggle requires a mass movement, which is anathema to both our bourgeois democratic institutions as well as our legacy institutions.  The organization that will overcome this is either in its infancy or has yet to be started.  Let's build it together.

"For many in the United States, it is easier to believe that Cuba is lying about their democratic achievements than to come to terms with the fact that our own government is choosing to deny us those same rights"https://t.co/mH8jhgozN0

— JR Giha (@jotaRgiha) June 20, 2022

Combat Purity

This is a good article.  I recommend reading it in its entirety and then coming back here.  I would quibble with a point or two, but I generally agree whole-heartedly with the analysis and prescription contained within.  The gist of it below is very good and echoes a lot of what I write on here:

"In America, by contrast, the dominant common sense is essentially anti-solidaristic: It is the notion that one must look out for himself, for his own; and that others — especially alien or unfamiliar Others — are a natural threat to one’s individual achievement. These are the ideas that feel instinctively true to many Americans, that feel realistic and sensible. And thus, “wokeness,” as I have idiosyncratically defined it, is hostile to the basic logic of leftist organizing. Solidarity requires an invitation, a warm and friendly offer to collude in a risky proposition. It doesn’t work as a sanctimonious entreaty to identify with an existing set of self-evident values. As leftists, we must make this offer — of interdependence in exchange for shared liberation — again and again, in different places, to different people, in different ways and hope that it begins to make sense. That’s the whole game. Won’t you join me?"

While I and many others liked the article, not everyone did.  In fact a lot of people hated it!  With much vigor!  Which is funny given both a) the purposefully apologetic tone of the article and b) the very concept of solidarity it argues for.  This would not be notable except for the specific counter-argument proffered by most of the critics.  Here is an incomplete sampling of these critiques for those of you that aren't constantly guzzling them in on Twitter like I am:

The throughline I get from these (and other) reactions is best summarized as this: The critique of "wokeness" in the article entertains and/or sounds vaguely like right-wing critiques of the same thing, so the critique itself must be reactionary.  I think this is silly.  I will expand on this assertion below, but it's important to note that the author anticipates this reaction and addresses it in the article:

"And so, the loudest critics of “wokeness” are usually either (a) reactionaries who would despise left-wing values regardless of the idiom in which we expressed them or (b) liberals who have made such a fetish of electoral margins and campaign messaging that they don’t recognize as legitimate those forms of political activity which are not reducible — or in every instance conducive — to the goal of Democratic electoral gains. Those of us who believe in a more egalitarian racial and economic order (and who doubt the Democratic Party is the only or best vehicle for achieving it) have no particular reason to trust either of these factions. Their critiques of our political strategies are impossible to disentangle from the incompatibility of our political visions.

That all being said, I want to suggest that the critique of “wokeness” may point to a real problem for socialists, feminists, and other radicals, one obscured by our disdain for its messengers and their motivations. This real problem is obscured because it overlaps, at times, with our opponents’ tendentious complaints. So we dismiss it."

This is good analysis, but I would like to take it a step further.  Our political opponents, wrong as they may be, are still people who live in the same reality as we do.  And even though our increasingly atomized world explicitly encourages arcane views of said reality, it has yet to completely divorce the observed from the real.  As such, people with a warped sense of what our society will is or should be still interact with it and experience it in a manner that is at least somewhat concordant with how us on the left do.  Accordingly, our political opponents will still be able to observe and identify the same fundamental problems with society, even if their subsequent expression of these problems may be warped to an almost unrecognizable degree.

What this understanding of the world means for this particular debate is that even the most hideous and revanchist stopped clock is occasionally going to report the correct time.  Your average right-winger is still going to personally experience the deleterious effects of capitalism even if they've been trained to cast the blame on the day's chosen outgroup.  As such, this means that pretty much any meaningful critique of capitalism/society/etc is going to at some point echo something a non-leftist says, almost as though the Rand Corporation is sponsoring a thousand monkeys with typewriters not to eventually replace Shakespeare but instead shitposters.

What this means is that any pursuit of performing ideological purity (which I ascribe to the commenters above) such that you never so much as even broach the cant of your political opponents is inherently futile.  This does not mean you shouldn't try to avoid language/arguments that have been effectively captured by the right (for example, saying the more incisive "corporate media" instead of "mainstream media"), but it does mean you shouldn't be scared of invoking a right-wing demon by simply using the wrong words.  As long as you are clear in your logic and firm in your moral commitments, you will be fine.  And at the very least, you won't have to walk on pins and needles just to advocate for a better world.

How to Think about YIMBYs (and Everything?)

As I've been progressing through my reading list, I have often reflected on what I read through the lens of a piece that was fairly formative to me, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading."  The whole thing is great, but I keep coming back to the rhetorical question posed at the beginning:

"Sometime back in the middle of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, I was picking the brains of a friend of mine, the activist scholar Cindy Patton, about the probable natural history of HIV. This was at a time when speculation was ubiquitous about whether the virus had been deliberately engineered or spread, whether HIV represented a plot or experiment by the U.S. military that had gotten out of control, or perhaps that was behaving exactly as it was meant to. After hearing a lot from her about the geography and economics of the global traffic in blood products, I finally, with some eagerness, asked Patton what she thought of these sinister rumors about the virus's origin. "Any of the early steps in its spread could have been either accidental or deliberate," she said. "But I just have trouble getting interested in that. I mean, even suppose we were sure of every element of a conspiracy: that the lives of Africans and African Americans are worthless in the eyes of the United States; that gay men and drug users are held cheap where they aren't actively hated; that the military deliberately researches ways to kill noncombatants whom it sees as enemies; that people in power look calmly on the likelihood of catastrophic environmental and population changes. Supposing we were ever so sure of all those things — what would we know then that we don't already know?""

Sedgwick goes on to pose the question of "what does knowledge do" and then expands on this at length to contrast between the "hermeneutics of suspicion" and the alternative suggested in the chapter's title.  I've made clear that, in general, suspicion of others is bad, so Sedgwick's conclusions are right up my alley.  Yet the hypothetical above still sits with me on a slightly separate plane of thought.  Both a purposeful government plot or a catastrophic public health failure will induce the same suffering and material depravation on those affected.  But when it comes to fighting back, knowing who to fight back against and how absolutely depends on finding the root causes.  An apathetic force can (perhaps) be swayed and/or reformed; an actively malign force needs to be defeated.

As a lot of what I read concerns the machinations of capital and its lackeys like the CIA, this sort of dichotomy comes up all the time.  People who do the bidding of capital range from committed monsters like Allen Dulles and George H.W. Bush to cheerleaders who may not ultimately be aware of what they're cheerleading (see all of the reputable names that received CIA money in the name of "promoting democracy").  Furthermore, because this dominant ideology filters down into the general populace, there are going to be plenty of well-meaning people that then parrot talking points that ultimately support the status quo.  And so even though it very much matters whether or not someone is a CIA asset or on the payroll a lobbying group or whatever, from a purely rhetorical standpoint, that knowledge does not do anything.  The lowliest person arguing for capitalism is as wrong to do so as the most mendacious CEO.

Enter the dreaded YIMBYs.  With respect to housing policy YIMBYs are, generally speaking, people who support new housing development as the primary means of addressing the housing crisis.  To be clear, building new housing is indeed good.  But, the problem with the mainstream YIMBY position is that in reality, it leads to supporting private developers who almost exclusively build luxury units which are often immediately captured as stores of value by capital, which in turn dilutes the potential of increased supply to reduce rents elsewhere.  If this dry description doesn't do it for you, imagine the "drill, baby, drill" Republicans from yesteryear, except for building apartments.  Yep, it's that dumb.

I was on vacation this week, so I did not become aware of the latest dust-up involving YIMBYs and the left until I saw this tweet.  It should go without saying that poor people moving to a place is not gentrification, but that's besides the larger point.  Which is: Boy, this guy is a real shit-stirrer!

The people he's dunking on, both here and in the original tweet, are pushing back rightfully on the logical outcomes of YIMBY policies that I mentioned earlier.  Instead of further defending his own positions, he is treating everyone else with suspicion, suggesting that either a) people on the left don't actually want to build more housing?, or b) someone who owns a home can't be anti-capitalist?  It's almost enough to make me doubt his own commitment to the fundamental problems his politics are ostensibly meant to address.

But before I get too suspicious of others, I think this sort of conflict is a perfect place to apply the paranoid/reparative dynamic.  I prima facie doubt this guy is materially tied to the interested of developers/capital, and furthermore, I have no specific reason to believe he is.  But still, this is the exact sort of thing someone beholden to such parties would do.  And if your argument fundamentally supports the interests of capital, why shouldn't we engage with it as such?  At the same time, the reparative instinct should return us to the initial thought—this is just some guy, wrongheaded and combative as he may be, and we should try to build something positive out of this conflict.

Ultimately, I'm not sure how to perfectly square these two ways of viewing the phenomenon.  There is work left for me to do on that front!  But I do think that the rhetorical question at the beginning does provide a good way for us to avoid kneejerk suspicion in a case like this.  He's quacking like a duck, but he's probably not a duck, but 80+ years of American ideology has maybe made us all ducks in some way?  Maybe those of us who know of our government's misdeeds develop an instinct of suspicion that isn't necessarily wrong, but may not always be useful?  Maybe we know we weren't always this knowledgeable and there but for the grace of God, we could be this guy?  Whatever the answer is, I promise to write part two of this post when I find it.

What is Manufacturing Consent Anyway?

I got ratio'd in the mentions of the DSA International Committee for defending them, which is a good indication of the lightning rod/whipping boy they've become for the war-hungry liberals who are basically ready to nuke Russia.  It would be otherwise unremarkable to mention this much less make a post about it but for the specific, recurrent counter-argument I received.

First, for some context, the original series of posts:

This all feels like bog-standard anti-imperialist rhetoric, but of course a lot of people have been conditioned to be vehemently opposed to that.  One guy replied with a screenshot of a Bloomberg poll, so I replied back:

As you can tell, a lot of people did not like this!  A common response was to basically reiterate the headline to me, claiming that you can't possibly oppose the "will of the people."  Of course this is silly: A lot of bad things are also very popular, but that doesn't mean I should like or support them.  But the other repeated reply I got was much more pernicious: 

In short, the common argument is that no consent is being manufactured here, and that the sudden groundswell of support for NATO expansion is wholly organic.  This stance shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what "manufactured consent" is at best, and is wildly disingenuous at worst.  I will address the best case scenario.

The first counterargument to this is contained in some of the responses themselves.  A few people noted that Finnish support for NATO membership was well underwater until very recently.  Here's some data to that effect from the same polling outfit:

What's notable here is that Russia also invaded Ukraine in 2014 (and had invaded Georgia before that, and was a general menace to its neighbors, etc etc).  And yet, support was roughly a third of what it is now, and subsequently went down even as Russia continued to occupy parts of the country.  I won't claim to understand the inner workings of Finnish media, so I don't know precisely how or why this swift turnaround came about.  But I'm going to guess it's something similar to what happened here in America (a place that was also lukewarm towards opposing Russia in 2014), where a media apparatus increasingly prone to exaggerating claims of Russian influence on our decrepit political processes subsequently took a very bad and devastating war and turned it into The Worst Thing To Ever Happen.  Building a narrative out of a selective version of the truth to drive people to support a specific course of action is literally what manufacturing consent is, and it appears to be the most likely explanation of why this time is different, both here and in Scandinavia.

This leads directly into the second counterargument.  Many of the responses assumed (or appeared to assume) that my use of the term manufacturing consent meant that I think corporate media is being wholly deceitful and/or fabricating the events surrounding the war.  While this does happen, the concept is much better understood as a filter on the truth rather than a factory of outright lies.  Yes, you should be skeptical of opinion polling, but I think the main proposition presented by the Bloomberg article (Finnish citizens now want to join NATO) is likely true.  What "manufacturing consent" is in this scenario is not the results of the poll itself, but the process that led to that poll.  And a near-perfect microcosm of this process is Bloomberg's inclination to report on the high levels of support for joining NATO while ignoring the dissent that the DSA highlighted.  Which in turn leads to braying hordes on the internet who've never stepped foot in Finland claiming to profess the definitive and sacrosanct "will of the people."

To conclude, understanding how this works is important, but it's all sort of besides the larger point.  Finnish opinions are not my primary concern here — after all, the instigating post in question is me, an American, defending an organization with America in its name against the cause of an American proxy war with Russia, which is currently devastating the people of Ukraine.  Regardless of what popular opinion says, I will always think that war is bad and should be avoided at all costs.  The process of manufacturing consent is a small part of this, but it helps explain how these wars earn widespread popular support when they very evidently serve no one other than imperialist leaders and weapons manufacturers.  If you ever find yourself on the same side of an argument as those ghouls, you might want to take a second to reflect what you're really consenting to and why.

Some Films Are Pretty Good

I don't know if this is a larger pattern or random chance, but I've seen a lot of bad movie criticism lately.  Most of these are too frivolous or silly to merit a response, but I finally found one that broke me:

Some brief thoughts:

1. I tend to find myself somewhere in the middle of the didactic/aesthetic dichotomy of art.  The fundamental purpose of art is to communicate truth as one sees it in a nature that more direct methods cannot achieve.  Rank didacticism is pretty obviously incongruent with that vision.  At the same time, cowardly or ignorant art that doesn't at least occasionally put its cards on the table betrays the very idea of truth itself.  In short, I just want a well-told story that conveys a richness and a consideration that doesn't waste the attentive viewer's time.

Judging by the above, I am guessing the OP falls more towards the didactic side of this spectrum.  Which is fine, whatever, people can engage with moving pictures in a different way than I do.  But the specific problem here is that the OP appears to be applying a didactic lens to an incredibly aesthetic film.  This fundamental mismatch of object and subject doesn't just lead to an incorrect take; Rather, the contradiction rooted in her own misunderstanding is instead externalized, and is thus resolved by casting suspicion on Anderson (which, I should note, is directly refuted by his previous work).  Once again, desiring art that explicitly conforms to your morals isn't wrong per se, but expecting or even needing art to do so will only lead to trouble.

2. Critical fallacies of this flavor are commonly summarized as "depiction does not equal endorsement."  Getting in the mind of an "evil" character or showing something bad happening does not mean the director/actor/writer thinks said character or event is cool and good (not that it even necessarily matters).  The OP specifically mentions prison and class struggle, and yes, the film does depict both of these things.  But just because the specific characters of the film navigate the specific events of the film in the way they do does not mean that the film itself is explicitly or even implicitly advocating for carceralism/fascism/etc.  This doesn't mean that those aspects of the film shouldn't be interrogated—they absolutely should be!  But a meaningful critique requires much more than the paucity of thought and the appeal to suspicion on display here.

3. One of the most cited observations of the late Mark Fisher is his idea that the didactic nature of certain works of art "performs our anti-capitalism for us."  He specifically cites the second half of Wall-E, and how it's easy for viewers to sneer at how the material excess afforded to the ship's passengers blinded them to reality.  The OP's analysis is literally the contrapositive of this; Performing one's own anti-capitalism by severely misreading a piece of art.  And as we all remember from math class (?) the contrapositive is as equally valid as the original statement, which means I have proven her wrong with math.  Never say your undergraduate degree doesn't matter.

4. I am not overly familiar with the OP, but I do recall listening to her on a podcast episode.  Her area of expertise (feminist critique of the modern concept of family) is compelling and worthwhile, but it's also unquestionably provocative.  Such an area of advocacy requires her to challenge a dominant structure in our society; one that many people identify with on a personal level.  In effect, she has to be explicitly contrarian to advance such a position.  To be clear, contrarianism is service of a specific moral goal is fine and good.  But when that contrarianism escapes its useful context, as it appears to have done here, it can lead to wrong and/or unnecessarily vitriolic rhetoric.  This may then cause others to question whether your seemingly purposeful contrarianism was offered in good faith, potentially undermining the whole basis of your work.  I'm not less likely to believe in the deleterious effects of the patriarchy as the result of her bad takes; my moral commitments are much, much stronger than that.  But I am less likely to listen to her specific advocacy.

5. As is my tendency when encountering "divisive" art, I thought The French Dispatch was pretty good.

Suspicion of Others is Bad Part 1 of ???

In my "manifesto post" I started a couple years back, I keep a running list of insights that feel to be a) somewhat unique and b) somewhat valuable.  One insight that feels relevant to the ongoing Russia/Ukraine/NATO conflict is this:

"Many Americans hold essentially Manichean views of the world, but those views are mostly a direct consequence of our hegemony and our political system.  Our two party system leads to a red team/blue team mentality where people who identify with one team view anyone who doesn't adhere to all perceived tenets of that team with suspicion.  Similarly, people who view American hegemony to be "good" tend to be suspicious of those who voice concerns to the contrary (and vice versa)."

Both of these Manichean tendencies have become more explicit as the United States' informal alliance with Ukraine has turned the conflict into a proxy battle between competing world powers.  The most common demonstration of such a worldview has been to label folks on the left as "tankies" or "traitors" for making relatively milquetoast statements that echo consensus opinion from not that long ago.  But this line of attack is mostly just reflective of the knee-jerk anti-leftism that's been bashed into American's skulls for decades, so I don't think it's worth mentioning beyond this acknowledgment.

What is worth mentioning are the ways people justify this knee-jerk anti-leftism to themselves and to others.  This sort of rhetoric and logic is much more insidious than simple name-calling, and has effectively become the prevailing ideology that assists capital in marginalizing the socialist/communist/collectivist impulses that arise naturally from the deleterious effects of capitalism.  I'm not going to try to write something comprehensive about this because I value my time (ha ha), but I did want to remark on one series of tweets as I find it particularly illustrative of the larger phenomenon.

The original tweet in question is the one below (in case you're not aware, Chapo Trap House is a leftist podcast and the QT is a tweet from one of the hosts): 

First off, "contrarian-fascist" isn't a thing, so this person is effectively just saying "fascist" in his 2019 post.  This means that his argument is that a single post expressing distaste with blind worship of a politician is effectively "fascism."  Aside from the patent absurdity of calling someone "fascist" for a tweet, this completely misunderstands what fascism is.  Fascism relies on dutiful adherence to authority, which the post he cites is in direct opposition to.  Because of this fundamental incongruity this is a perfect demonstration of the second type of suspicion I mention above.  It's also a textbook example of horseshoe theory, in which various liberals, centrists, and even leftists smear others as secret right-wingers based on some superficial perception.  Of course, this is bullshit and it's important to understand this and fight back against this internalized delusion. 

The replies feature a variety of flavors of this pathology.  This one builds its own horseshoe theory on shared resentment of liberals.  The superficiality of the argument belies the posters' apparent incuriosity.  Leftists can't possible have a more considered position on this matter, it has to be this simple rubric I have in my mind! 

There's also this slightly more advanced strain of the same theory, in which it's assumed that leftists can't possibly believe the things they profess, and are only drawn to simple aesthetics:

Finally, there's an attempt to do a material analysis of the situation, which is at least a little more honest than the rest of this.  The problem is...how does this make any sense?  The money in question is not for posts but for the deeper discussions on the matter hand.  That's what a podcast is after all!  Are Chapo patrons paying Matt Christman for his posts?  I am certainly not as the website is free.

Moments like this are revealing.  A subset of the population that likely considers themselves anti-war (and perhaps even anti-imperialist) will often revert to this fundamental suspicion of others when faced with arguments that stem from well-considered positions on those very same anti-war and anti-imperialist sentiments.  In doing so, they effectively do imperialists' work for them, seemingly unconsciously foreclosing the possibility of a future free from imperialist aggression.  If you're on the left it's important to fight back against this.  And if you find yourself fighting with the left it's important to ask yourself whose interests your suspicion of others truly serves.

ADDENDUM: A fun thing to do when someone subtweets "the left" about not showing proper condemnation of Russia is to ask for examples because you will almost never actually receive any such examples.

Slate Pitch: Sinophobia

You may have heard there is an Olympics happening.  Amidst the biennial discussion of athletic splendor, wasted tax dollars, and corruption, there's an additional thread to this year's narrative: These Olympics are taking place in Beijing, the capital city of the nation whose socioeconomic success most threatens America's status as the global hegemon.  This has led to very dumb commentary in all the places you would expect to find very dumb commentary.  But rather than using my time to discuss all that nonsense, I want to focus on one sometimes decent (?) publication who has apparently spent their entire ad budget on promoted Facebook posts.  That's right, we're talking about Slate dot com.

Based on the headline above you might not be surprised to learn that Slate has a bit of a reputation for unapologetic contrarianism and provocation.  While there definitely is some of that going on here, the majority of the problems with Slate's Olympics coverage are relatively mundane and subtle.  But this is actually more damning than their normal levels of cringeness, as these arguments and the underlying assumptions that support them appear to reflect some combination of willful ignorance and unquestioning fealty to American foreign policy interests.

The first article in their story stream is a good warm-up.  It starts with an odd discussion of China's COVID measures.  It's too sloppily written to infer the author's precise intent, but it reads like the New York Times' repeated criticisms of those policies which also tend to ignore the benefits of those policies (namely that almost no one in China has died of COVID).  It then refers to China as an "increasingly brazen authoritarian state" without a) any immediate justification or b) any sense of awareness of our countries' own authoritarian practices.  It mentions the artificial snow without any reference to similar conditions at the last two winter Olympics.  Finally, after a little more COVID-trolling and several non-specific references to "human rights," the author cites their specific grievance with China:

"The government’s repressive moves are well-documented. There are the harsh crackdowns on dissent in Hong Kong, and of course the detention of nearly 2 million Uyghurs and other Muslims in a northwestern region of China. The U.S. State Department determined last year that China’s actions amounted to genocide and that its government had been committing crimes against humanity since 2017."

I'll talk more to the specifics of this later, but it's important to note that the author stakes the entirety of this claim on the word of the U.S. State Department, who I would not treat as credulously as they do.

The next article makes an attempt to introduce perspective to the proceedings, detailing the varying level of atrocities associated with every recent Olympics.  But it wheels out many of the same arguments to stoke fears of China.  The only justification it can give for accusations of genocide is that it's "pretty well acknowledged" to be happening.  The country is taking "iron-fist, authoritarian" measures to achieve the sinister ends of...protecting its citizenry from COVID.  The games themselves are "an authoritarian flex, a chance to show the world just how efficient and organized an Olympics can be when you can literally just tell everybody what to do and they have to listen to you."  As opposed to America (or anywhere), where labor is never coerced out of anyone.  The author even dips his toes into the lab leak conspiracy, which is the most obviously false red-baiting theory of them all.  It also mentions the Peng Shuai incident, which....well OK that one is undeniably bad, being extremely weird at best and a shameless cover-up of a crime at worst.  You got me there, Slate.

Next up is this article about the Uyghur torch-bearer, the spectacle of which is compared to the hypothetical of Germany choosing "a Dachau prisoner to light the cauldron at the 1936 Berlin Olympics."  Ignoring the grossness of invoking the Holocaust for a dumb analogy, the Nazis explicitly did not do that because they hated the Jewish people and wanted to eradicate their entire race.  We also should remember that the actual opening ceremonies in Atlanta were capped off by Muhammad Ali, a man literally imprisoned by our government for refusing to participate in the Vietnam War.

Now for the article from the screenshot above.  It's clear the author is doing a bit of schtick here, which...whatever.  But regardless, this passage is both wildly patronizing and suggestive of some malign influence for which he cites no evidence:

"Her age also raises questions about the extent to which this decision was hers alone. We don’t know what sort of advice she got, what sort of pressure she was under, and whether this was actually someone else’s choice that she went along with and now can’t take back."

The author also compares China to the U.S. which he says "has its problems, sure, but is still an actual democracy.''  To which I would say, are you sure?  But the worst part of the article combines these two impulses to disastrous effect:

"After having competed for the United States during the 2018–19 World Cup season, Gu announced that she would henceforth be representing China. “The opportunity to help inspire millions of young people where my mom was born, during the 2022 Beijing Olympic Winter Games is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help to promote the sport I love,” she wrote on Instagram. “Through skiing, I hope to unite people, promote common understanding, create communication, and forge friendships between nations.”

That’s nice! Who doesn’t love communication, friendship, and common understanding? Chinese President Xi Jinping, for one. Since well before 2019, China’s leader has presided over a massive surveillance state and has subjected the Uyghurs in Xinjiang to what the United States and other international observers have deemed a genocide."

Here let me re-write that last part.  Let me know what you think:

"That’s nice! Who doesn’t love communication, friendship, and common understanding? American president Joe Biden, for one. Since 2021, America’s leader has presided over a massive surveillance state and has subjected the Palestinians in Israel to what Amnesty International and other international observers have deemed apartheid."

The last article I'll remark on is unironically the best one of the bunch.  I am biased because I listen to the author's podcast, but I think it's pretty clearly that this piece has a balanced perspective appropriate for the subject matter at hand.  But still, he couldn't resist including this very dumb line:

"The next few Olympic sites are in democratic countries that are not currently committing genocide (France, Italy, the United States)"

I already remarked on the foolishness of calling ours a "democratic" country, but I wouldn't really tut-tut about "not currently committing genocide" when we did genocide indigenous people (both here and abroad), we're currently doing something genocide-adjacent at our southern border, and we've let more than a million citizens die of a largely preventable disease.

After reading through all these articles, it's clear that Slate's case against China rests on the mantle of "human rights violations."  And the main violation being cited on that front is the genocide of Uyghurs in Xinjiang as reported by the State Department, New York Times, and others.  To be clear, I don't think Slate has a central directive from on high to push this specific angle; rather, I think it's mostly a reflection of the prevailing sentiment in America.  In this light, it's important to hold the media accountable for being unwitting accomplices to American threat inflation.  So then if you as an American have gone along with that fundamental suspicion of China, you should ask yourself one question:  How do you *know* there is an ongoing genocide?

To be extremely clear, I do not know what precisely is happening in Xinjiang, so I'm not going to be offering a specific "correction" to the official narrative.  And to be even more clear, I think it's extremely unlikely that what the Chinese government is doing in Xinjiang is writ large good.  At best it is a justifiable modernization project being executed without the requisite amount of care for or input from its subjects.  But because our government claims to definitively know that China is up to something very bad, I think it is incumbent on us as citizens to ask questions of an institution that's lied to us in similar fashion before.  And when you start to ask those questions, you might find that some of the more extreme claims of the US government will begin to unravel.  What's more is that a lot of the evidence being used by the accusers has been provided by a single person with a clear agenda.  And aside from the obvious geopolitical effects, such posturing leads to smears of "genocide denial" for those that question the narrative, and racial strife for those not even directly involved.

The ultimate point of all this is not to bash Slate, cheerlead for the CCP, or downplay crimes against humanity.  Rather, we should all strongly consider why American institutions are pushing this specific narrative and what side effects such rhetoric has on, among others, Asian-Americans.  It's been nearly a year since the advent of the "Stop Asian Hate" slogan.  A specific thing we can do to materially stop this hatred is to be highly critical of these pervasive assumptions that implicitly ask us to do the opposite.