Monthly Archives: May 2016

05.13.16
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After ISIS Massacre of Real Madrid Fans, Muslim Lives (Briefly) Matter

 

ISIS kill 14 Real Madrid fans at supporters club

Horrible story, from Vice. 

According to AS, a Real Madrid fan club in Iraq was targeted by Islamic terrorists during a meeting, with 16 people being killed, and 20 more injured. The attack occurred in the town of Balad, about 75 miles north of Baghdad, where at least 93 people were killed in three car bombings yesterday. Gunmen wielding AK-47s entered the cafe where about 50 club members were meeting and began firing, leaving a grisly, blood-soaked scene.

The president of the group, Ziad Subhan, told AS that the Islamic terrorists “don’t like football, they think it’s anti-Muslim. They just carry out attacks like this. This is a terrible tragedy.”

That ISIS are the kind of guys who think everything that makes life even slightly worth living is anti-Muslim is as wretched as it is, at this point, axiomatic. It’s a blinkered and blood-soaked worldview that makes the simple act of watching soccer one of almost unimaginable bravery. It makes the world as parched as the land. But the story also has this.

Real Madrid is aware of the attack and released a statement expressing condolences for the victims and their families. The team will wear black armbands during tomorrow’s match against Deportivo.

Is this the first time that Muslim victims of ISIS have received international support and sympathy on the sporting level? The sympathy gap was made obvious to everyone after the back-to-back attacks on Beirut and Paris in November, which The Atlantic more accurately called “the empathy gap.” There is of course the idea that simply by being Muslims, they have brought it on themselves, and are victims, sure, but somehow also culpable. But more than that, a feeling that those lives are disposable. Partly because they are Muslim, but also because we assume that they are going to die, just from living over there. It’s an unspoken and unexamined feeling that they don’t feel pain, or that their losses aren’t as wrenching as ours. (TNC talked about this with the lives of black men in Between the World and Me).

So it is easy to be cynical and say “ok, so their lives matter only because of sports, right?” But if it is a shared love of sports that lets people recognize a shared humanity, then all the better for sports. Let’s just hope we remember this when people who aren’t cheering for a team are slaughtered.

05.13.16
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Political Quick Hits: Trump’s Butler, Facebook’s Journalism, and Mark J. Perrone on Paul Ryan

 

“I’ll remove my hand when Mr. Trump lets me!”

 

  1. I guarantee you right now there are people bemoaning the fact that Trump’s racist, unhinged sycophant of a butler is getting a call from the Secret Service for wishing President and Mrs. Obama to be hung for treason and saying he’d happily do it himself. Watch this turn into a rant about the 1st Amendment and Obama’s thuggish storm troopers, sent by (why not?) Eric Holder, who’s probably up to something nefarious, somewhere. The Secret Service, of course, has to do a perfunctory investigation of every threat to the President. That’s kind of their job, and it’ll probably entail a quick conversation wherein the establish that he’s simply a racist coward who spent an entire lifetime sucking up to other racist cowards, and move on. That won’t stop the complaining of course, but they have to do it. I’m sure at one point Leon Czolgosz was like “Oh, can’t a fellow even talk anymore? Don’t I have the right to express myself? When did this turn into Soviet Germany?” (Leon was pretty prescient).
  2. That said, I can’t imagine there will be too much wagon-circling around the Senecal (though “The Butler Said It” will be about 10,000 headlines). If you’re like me, you tread warily and reluctantly into comment sections on places like Newsmax or Breitbart or FOX. That, only more unhinged, are the sections of his Facebook page. When anyone says that the only racism is toward whites or that there isn’t something wild and loose and unchained in this country, point them to these. These are seriously unstable people, and they aren’t alone. For proof they aren’t, look at, say, the Republican Primary. (Warning: screenshot below from Mother Jones will probably make you sick and wail and gnash your teeth at the very thought that we live in the same country as people like this).
  3.                                    
  4. So yeah, it turns out that Facebook’s Newsfeed isn’t entirely algorithmic, and that human editors have some say. According to The Guardian, “Facebook relies heavily on just 10 news sources to determine whether a trending news story has editorial authority. “You should mark a topic as ‘National Story’ importance if it is among the 1-3 top stories of the day,” reads the trending review guidelines for the US. “We measure this by checking if it is leading at least 5 of the following 10 news websites: BBC News, CNN, Fox News, The Guardian, NBC News, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Yahoo News or Yahoo.” This of course has caused panic on the right, despite the presence of The Journal and Fox, because of reports that the editors would ignore stories from Breitbart or Newsmax. John Thune is screwing on his most handsomely concerned face to call for an investigation. Let’s ignore that Facebook is a private company. This is an important issue; millions get their news exclusively from Facebook, so what they decide is trending actually does matter. What Facebook does has an impact on our democracy. Which is why this is the best story ever about Facebook. I mean, come on: have you ever felt so positive about Facebook before? They actually use real news sources with fact-checkers and a sense of responsibility. Pushing stories from Newsmax, a place that Trump’s butler would think is “a little leftist”, would be wildly irresponsible. This is good citizenship by Facebook. This paints them in a much better light.  It’s not like you see Daily Kos or Shooting Irrelevance there either (although the latter would be fine). It’s a sign of modern conservativism that they see unholy bias in a publishing company not promoting the poorly-transcribed fever dreams from right-wing tidal swamps.
  5. A few days ago I ranted a bit about the Friends of the Parks in Chicago blocking the Lucas Museum, calling them “petty-tyrant pecksniffs”. However, and I’m honestly not quite sure how I missed this, I read that they are being represented in court by Thomas Geoghegan, a man whom I think is among the most honorable in the whole city, and who I admire greatly. This is a pickle, and it means that I failed as a blogger: reacting without doing enough research. I still think it is absurd, but I imagine the argument being that simply because a billionaire wants Rahm to jump doesn’t mean everyone has to say “how high”, which I respect, even if I think that ultimately the musuem is a GREAT idea. But Geoghegan vs. Rahm, man, it’s not even a question of which side you pick. Geoghegan vs. Father Pfleger? That’s much tighter. Their being on opposites sides of an issue is making my moral compass all loopy.
  6. Finally, Paul Ryan, and his vacant-eyed Hamlet vacillation on Donald Trump’s rough-palmed courtship.  I actually don’t envy Ryan his position at all, but he does deserve it. For an interpretation of the last few days, I’ll turn it over to friend of blog Mark J. Perrone, Private Eye. The title is “Thou Are Not False, But Thou Art Fickle”

 

“Maybe I won’t even go to the dance!”

 

Man, Paul Ryan is the Princess and the Fucking Pea.
 
I was watching MSNBC at the gym this morning, and his big “meeting” with Trump is today.  They’re covering it like these schmucks are dividing up postwar Europe. 
 
Reporter: “Trump arrived earlier to the building via car, a bold move.” 
 
Different Reporter: “We believe that Trump and Ryan are currently exchanging human words.” 
 
GOP Tool: “We think Paul Ryan will ultimately come to accept Trump as the nominee.  He just simply doesn’t know Trump, since his every utterance has only been covered ad nauseum for a year.”  
 
That Janesville Eddie Munster’s managed to turn this into Paul Ryan Mood Watch: “Oh Whatever Do I Feel?”  Paul Ryan 2020: LEADERSHIP!.

 

05.12.16
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One of those stories that makes me feel like Clint Eastwood in “Gran Torino”

Gran Torino Movie Review

Pictured: the author, if he were cool and tough. 

 

Times: 

When it comes to emojis, women can be brides or princesses, paint their fingernails, get a haircut and go dancing in a red dress. If those sound like roles determined by the patriarchy, well, it’s not a new complaint.

But it may be changing. Google wants to add 13 emojis to represent women, and their male counterparts, in professional roles.

“Isn’t it time that emoji also reflect the reality that women play a key role in every walk of life and in every profession?” said a proposal from a team of Google employees that was submitted to the Unicode Consortium, which serves as the midwife to new emojis.

The proposed emojis include women in business and health care roles, at factories and on farms, among other things.

This isn’t a leftist complaint about modern feminism. I think representations do matter, both for personal judgement and societal expectations. Symbols are often as powerful as actions, and changing underlying and even unspoken assumptions about gender roles is important. And it isn’t a complaint about emojis. Communication evolves, and pictograms aren’t exactly a new innovation. I think there can be a discussion about if they (and other text language) actually enhance or degrade communication, but that’s neither here nor there.

It just a reflection of me, and how the world has certainly passed me by. “Emojis? We’re talking about emojis? Of all the damn things…”  Honestly, I’m ok with it. Not because there is anything inherently wrong with the new- there isn’t- but deciding that you don’t have to be up on everything is really liberating. I don’t know if there is an emoji for semi-grouchy complacency, but if there is, that’s my face.

05.12.16
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“Until we find out what’s going on” Continues To Be Official Trump Policy

 

Pictured: John Kerry?

Remember when John Kerry was permanently labeled a “flip-flopper” thanks to a smart Bush team and an enabling press, who, with few exceptions, loved the label, adopted it, and breathlessly discussed it? It was fine to discuss his positions and character, of course, but any normal political act was instantly labeled another “flip-flop” by a press almost sexually enamored of a swaggering war President.

That’s normally how things work. Labels get stuck because the press is lazy and people easily accept quick caricatures in place of actual characterization. Bush was dumb (instead of arrogantly incurious), Gore was boring and a liar (instead of neither), McCain was grouchy (true!), Obama was aloof and arrogant (kind of true), etc. That’s the way it usually works.

That’s why one of the more genuinely frightening things about this election is that it has revealed, once and for all, the power of pure thuggishness in the face of any rationality. It’s why no labels have really stuck on Donald Trump. The rage he channels is enough to flatten the incredible contradictions, reversals, and sheer ignorance that underpins his campaign, like a boiling river leveling a hapless and god-beseeching floodplain town. His position on terrorism, or rather “terrorism”, makes this clear.

Continue reading →

05.10.16
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Identity Politics and The “Hunger for a Third Party”

 

Pictured: identity politics

 

The Atlantic has been writing a lot about whether their political coverage should include more about third parties, if that would be more fair and democratic. The initial reaction could be “of course not; that would be a waste of space. A 3rd-party has no chance.” The flip side is that of course they don’t have a chance, because no one writes about them. You can’t breathe without any oxygen.

Personally, I think The Atlantic, and other sources, should spend more time covering other political parties, but not because they have a chance. I think even with enough of a spotlight they wouldn’t be able to grow. Money and structure make it nearly impossible for our system to truly support a third party, and the latter reason isn’t necessarily negative. This is far from the first time in our history that people have looked to break up the duopoly, and even in times of turmoil- even when Whigs fall to the whayside- it coalesces again into two parties.

Still, though, there is the need to spend time focusing on what is happening on the outside, because it makes both parties more responsible (in theory, anyway) and allows for outsiders, like Bernie Sanders, to come in and shake things up. It might not matter electorally, but it matters in terms of policy, and it helps to showcase what people are thinking in this unruly nation.

Sometimes, that’s not very pretty.

Read more to find out what’s not very pretty! 

Continue reading →

05.09.16
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Chicago Gondolas; or, Sure: Why Not?

 

Pictured: Gondolas! Also Trump Tower. 

 

After the apocalypse of the last post, I’d still like to come out as being firmly in favor of the weird and kind of cool Chicago Gondola Plan. What I like is that it firmly reimagines Chicago as what it originally was: a river town, built from an impossible idea of dredging a narrow and shallow and sand-chocked river to ford a muddy expanse of swamp in order to make it, eventually, to the Mississippi. It was audacious and ridiculous and it worked. We’ve more or less forgotten that this was a river town, that it was built due to water, due to being at the perfect spot where the Great Lakes basin ends, and the continent shifts imperceptibly toward the Mississippi Basin. It’s that slight hinge, that tectonic blip, that has created the life of the city, and the destiny of million.

So focusing on the river, as the great people at Friends of the Chicago River* do, is an exciting development. And while I don’t quite see the connection between gondolas and Chicago, and while I don’t think they will be “iconic” in the way the Eiffel Tower is (despite the claims of the people proposing the plan), I think it is cool, and will bring even more people to the city.

 

Pictured: Gondolas! I think this can offer awesome views of the lakefront, the skyline, and the parks. 

 

What I especially like is that the plan is to go south along the river, to Chinatown and beyond. The area there has seen a bit of an uptick, as we move to clean the river and promote more tourism. Showing people that you can safely go sotuh of Madison is a good way to expand what Chicago tourism means. It won’t solve all the problems, but getting people to conceive of Chicago as more than Michigan Avenue and Wrigley Field is a great start.

(Also, while I love love love the idea of projecting opera on the back of the Civic so people can float up and watch it, I think they are overestimating the general appetite for opera.)

 

Pictured: perhaps an unrealistic expectation of public enthusiasm for opera. 

*Not to be confused with the ruinous petty-tyrant pecksniffs of the Friends of the Park, who blocked a museum to save parking lots. I’m so angry about this I can’t quite breathe.

 

05.09.16
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New York Times Chicago Survey: A Broken and Bitter, but Better City

 

At one point, people were leaving the Loop

 

On Friday, the New York Times published a survey showing Chicago to be a fiercely divided and unmoored city, unsure of itself and seemingly faltering toward some kind of calamity. It’s not hard to see why: unearthly violence has torn apart huge swaths of the city, while other areas go unharmed. Outlandish, Syrian-like police brutality, extrajudicial black sites,  and of course murder covered up at the highest levels all add up to simmering racial resentment.

In addition to this, basic institutions seem to be crumbling. The CPS has been battling much-loathed Mayor Rahm Emmanual, in what seems to be an actual liberal revolt against an entrenched system (Chicago has always been Democratic, but only the most blinkered partisans would ever say it has been an actual liberal city in any real sense). Governor Rauner is trying to starve out any union activism by destroying the schools. Hell, we can even look over at the chaos in Brazil and reflect that a large number of people thought that was a better place for the Olympics than Chicago. It’s not a great feeling.

So then why are things better? The shoots of hope come from the actual survey.

Read more on this mind-blowing bit of counter-intuition, especially if you are a hiring manager at Slate…

Continue reading →

05.06.16
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Super-Powerful Neutrinos Are Better Than Elections

 

You are: barely registering as existing

 

From Phil Plait, the best thing you’ll read today, about neutrinos traveling from a supernova 9.5 billion light years away, at nearly the speed of light, and hitting the earth with a force so great that if they hit you you’d feel it.

Think about that. Imagine the force to propel a subatomic powerful across essentially the entire history of the universe, from before the earth had even formed, before the storms that brought water, before the tectonic processes that still shape our world had started, through that time, as we slowly formed in this planetary heartbeat, and looked up to the sky, and wondered, and were fearful of its power, and developed tools that let us see it, and even more powerful tools that let us understand it: and these particles shot through uncaring, through distances that we literally can’t imagine, but can somehow record. Fast enough through unchecked infinity so that you’d feel it. You wouldn’t know what, it would probably barely be even the slightest register, but maybe you’d know. Maybe you’ve felt it before, and maybe it was the tiniest prick, and you shuddered. You wondered what it was, what mystery just gave you pause. Have we all felt them? Have we all been riddled with reminders of cosmic indifference?

And do they carry with them the unknowing loneliness of existence? Do they carry a hint of the emptiness? It’s not that you touched the void, after all: the void slammed into you, and passed through like like you were a ghost, the tiniest ephemera. Which, to space, (as Plait reminds us) you are.

Dark thoughts, but in the end, they don’t matter. After all, we’re here, for the shortest breath, and that’s pretty goddamn cool. We get to be here when people can not just learn about, but write sentences like this.

And that mind-stompingly distant galaxy produced a hail of subatomic particles that shot across the cosmos at just a hair under the speed of light, passing galaxies and clouds of dust and gas and heaven knows what else, only to be stopped by a single molecule of frozen water on a tiny blue-green planet, creating a flash of light so faint it took sophisticated technology and advanced science to see it at all.

Remember this next time someone says scientists are dupes or frauds or don’t know what they’re doing.

05.05.16
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Programming Note

Moving forward, I promise to spend less time on Trump, and more time on geopolitics, international relations, and, hopefully, literature and science and Great Lake diversions and cool stuff like that. Maybe more time spent making fun of Thomas Friedman, which is the lifeblood of any blogger. This blog wasn’t supposed to just be about the dirt of the campaign, but there’s something about the single-worst nomination in the history of this nation that’s just, well, gripping I guess, in the way that the mountain speeding toward the window of your cockpit has a certain fascination.