- 1-0! The Cubs aren’t the only first-place team in town!
- On more of an ontological level, nearly every season projection has had the Sox as a “possible surprise team”- that is, if things break right, they could be able to make the post-season. The questions that rise: is “consensus surprise pick” a logical impossibility? And is “possible surprise” so vague as to be entirely meaningless?
- On that, my prediction is that they’ll win somewhere between 78 and 130 games, depending on my mood and what is happening at any given moment. Adam Eaton gets hit by a pitch in the first? Big on-base team this year! Caught stealing two batters later? We’re not going to score any runs. The joy of baseball is that it is a long a long and languid season, punctuated by impossible excitement, and that the moment-to-moment doesn’t matter, but you can’t convince my imagination of that.
- The defense already seems markedly better. Yes, the smallest possible sample size, and yes, this is just the anecdotal eye test, but come on. It can’t be any worse than in 2015, unless a new punitive MLB rule forbids the outfield from wearing gloves.
- I have no idea yet if Brett Lawrie is a delightful goon or an obnoxious hypercaffeinated bro. Maybe both? It’s the Swisher Variance.
- Jimmy Rollins can still move, man. I hope that when I’m 37 I still have most of my speed. (Note: I am, and nope)
- Another nice thing about baseball is that you can flip and watch a bonkers awesome basketball ending and not miss much of your game. Unfortunately, because I was only watching intermittently, I didn’t realize I had the “UNC broadcast” and couldn’t figure out why they were only focusing on their crestfallenness. I was actually angry- are there not any Villanova fans, I complained bitterly to my wife- and conjuring up all sorts of nonsense bias scenarios. Along with speed, a sense of proportion and rationality is the first thing to go.
Superdelgates and “Stop Trump” Are Not Anti-Democratic
One of the great unresolved, and probably unresolvable, questions in American public life is what is meant by “elite”. To a large extent, this question is unanswerable by its definition: elites are always just the other, a useful tool, and thus inherently malleable, a shifter specter always in the shadows. It has been applied to the very wealthy, the political class, snooty college students, rampaging Harvard professors, union bosses, outspoken leaders of minority groups, and practically every other collection of people in America, no matter how insignificant, except for probably working-class whites, aka, “real Americans.”
A clear distillation of this was in the lead-up to the 1972 campaign. After the chaos and tumult of 1968, where Hubert Humphrey, who didn’t enter a single primary, was awarded the Democratic nomination, only to barely lose to Nixon, the party decided they had to reform. The McGovern Commission was tasked to overhaul the process, which shaped the primary system we know today. This was explicitly designed to cut the legs out from under party bosses like Richard Daley and labor leaders like George Meany, the quintessential politicians in the smokey room, deciding what was best for everyone.
On the surface, of course, this was right and good. The people should have more of a say, and not the jowly elites of a dying era. But to this, Daley and Meany could (and did) easily respond: what elections have you won? You radicals, you elite college students, have never won anything. We rose to power because we know how to win elections by giving people what they want and representing them. Being able to have ghost voters and ward heelers is all well and good, but unless you have a platform that makes people want to vote for you, you’re going to lose. They made the claim that they were the ones who represented the most people.
The disaster of 72, in which McGovern, one of the finest public servants America has ever produced, got trounced by the venal band of criminals in the Nixon administration, made the party reform the still-nascent primary system, by creating a system of superdelegates, whose votes were unbound by any piddling election, and who could more or less swing a nomination by themselves. It represents the return of the Establishment.
This system, and the primary idea in general, is coming to a head this year thanks to the insurgency of Bernie Sanders and the insurgent lunacy of Donald Trump. On the Democratic side, the idea of a lack of democracy in the system is exemplified by this Charles Blow column, in which he argues that the Democrats do not practice democracy, cleverly titling it “The (un)Democratic Party”, which is very, very clever.
He cites as his first example superdelegates, which he argues tilt the balance of an election by announcing in advance who the elites have chosen, and therefore giving momentum and media coverage to the establishment pick. This makes a certain amount of sense, of course. Bernie, it is assumed, can’t overtake Hillary because of superdelegate math, which means Hillary is already being treated as the nominee. But Blow also thinks that caucuses are undemocratic, because only those with enough time and passion can do them. The young radicals who support Bernie, for example, who are a contradictory elite.
There are two weird arguments here. The first is that being jazzed to votes makes you an elite, and is therefore somewhat sketchy. It’s the establishment argument used to undercut a genuine passion for Bernie. The second is that superdelegates are completely unresponsive to popular passions or electoral persuasion, a notion disproven in the last open primary on the Democratic side. Obama supporters were terrified that Clinton superdelegates would give her the nomination, but they switched over when it became clear that Obama was the choice of the majority of voters.
Because that’s the thing with superdelegates, or the Daley/Meany branch. They are very, very concerned with winning elections, which means putting their support behind the candidate they think gives them the best shot. Of course there is corruption and incest and greed in the selection, and they aren’t going to be right all of the time, either. But that’s part of having a party system. The party wants to pick a candidate it thinks can win, and the primary process is designed to give them an idea of how to do that. It isn’t designed to bind them to the passion of a minority. It makes it incumbent upon the lesser-known candidate prove they can appeal to the most people, which is what Obama did in 2008, and Howard Dean failed to do in 2004.
The Republican are figuring this out now. The “Stop Trump” movement is being assailed by people as anti-Republican as Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan as being the only thing worse than Trump getting the nomination. The anti-democratic measures being taken by party elites to change the rules so that they can possibly deny him the nomination are seen as a subversion of popular will, and to an extent, that is true. But to a greater extent, that is the absolute right of a political party.
Trump is winning some 30% of the GOP voters over, and is pretty much despised by everyone else in the country. He has almost zero chance at winning because he only appeals to a very small slice of the people. A party isn’t bound to a suicide pact because of a loud minority.
(Of course, that we got here is the fault of the GOP, which has no center and has destroyed itself, peddling insanity for decades. This is fine by me, but doesn’t change the central argument.)
I don’t think it is in the best interest of the GOP to Stop Trump. If they nominate, say, Paul Ryan, the party will tear itself to shreds even more than it has done. Trump and Cruz combined represent the majority of their voters, and there would be a revolt. Giving the nomination to Cruz would alienate the Trump people and they’d still lose huge, with a “true conservative”. Their best bet is to let Trump go down in flames, say that they were hijacked by a billionaire madman (without talking about why said madman appealed to their voters), do everything they can to obstruct Hillary, and try again in four years.
But that’s just the smart play here. If it wasn’t, they wouldn’t be bound to do it. We have a fairly-recent notion that the will of the people who vote in primaries is sacrosanct, and that to deny them their choice is elitist and antidemocratic. It isn’t. The candidates picked in the primary are chosen because they pass a test and prove they can appeal to people in Iowa and California and South Carolina. If a party legitimately doesn’t think that they can win a general election- that is to say, if they don’t think a majority of people want to vote for them- then it isn’t undemocratic to try to tilt the scales to someone who can win.
There are a million things wrong with our democracy, perhaps fatally wrong. A party using whatever method necessary to pick a candidate who can best represent their interest and win is not in the top 50%.
Homo Floresiensis: A Not-Incidental Follow-up
Sorry, our bad. Image from The Guardian.
In 2004, scientists announced a new relative in our fragile family tree, a (all together now) “hobbit-like creature” known as home floresiensis. It was a small little creature, and there was some evidence that it existed, in the Indonesian jungle, as recently as 12,000 years ago, which would put it not just on the earth the same time as homo sapiens, but in the same era as modern man, as we were beginning to puzzle out farming and society, and creating the modern world.
Indeed, it was even more exciting. There were legends in Flores, where the hobbit was found, of a forest creature, ebu gogu. It’s a small creature, sometimes translated roughly as “grandmother” (not literally) or “creature who eats anything”. Older legend had it out there in the jungle primeval, scampering around, always a fleeting glimpse in the mist. It was probably a monkey, or just made up, a tale sifting through the years, but you didn’t have to be a romantic to make the connection. To imagine that not very long ago, one of our distant relatives was still roaming the vast forests, and that our direct and wholly recognizable ancestors would see them. Would they make eye contact? Would there be a dim recognition, a spark of connection? Would there be fear? Would there be hatred? The thought was absurd, but it was tantalizing. There was poetry, and even hope. We could coexist, even as we became dominant.
That didn’t happen. More studies show that floresiensis was wiped out 50,000 years ago, most likely due to man encroaching on its territory. And not the man that was figuring out writing and could recognize a species that was so close to us, even if just in our imagination. It was our species at its most basic, a constant fight for survival and resources. The hobbit was just another competitive ape.
The new understanding of the dates make a lot more coherent sense in terms of the evidence of what we know about modern human dispersal,” says Matthew Tocheri, an author of the study from Lakehead University, Ontario. Over the past 100,000 years, extinction events followed modern humans wherever they went, he said. “It is not always the case the humans are the sole factor,” he added. “But they are often in the right place at the right time to at least be a part of the reason.”
This isn’t to blame our ancestors. That’s what you had to do. It’s just interesting that for millions of years there were many species of humans, intermingling and competing, but having a rough balance. We won, and the rest are all gone.
This is not an incidental follow-up to the global warming post.
Destruction of World Draws Some Headlines
(Potential barely-relevant music to accompany post*)
Yesterday, the news- including this blog– was more or less full of Donald Trump bloviating some nonsense about abortion, before claiming he was misquoted, and all right, everyone is very unfair to him. That’s cool. It’s an interesting thing to talk about, since he is a Presidential candidate. Also drawing some interest is that New York and London might be destroyed way sooner than anyone thought.
Trump on Abortion and Language: The Media Still Treats Him Like A Real Person
I mean, just look at this guy, will you? Image from MSNBC.
OK, so Donald Trump is going to be doing another townhall-style thing with Chris Matthews tonight, which means two things: 1) you are going to be hearing a lot about “my old boss Tip O’Neil (the over/under on mentions by Matthews is 987), and 2) you’re going to be hearing a lot of nonsense which is mistaken for “telling it like it is.” This isn’t deep prognostication; everything said during the show has already been dissected by the media. The real clambake is when Trump stumbled onto abortion, a topic about which he is as ignorant as anything else.
He basically managed to be both cruel and politically stupid, which are rarely the same thing for the GOP. On the one hand, he basically admitted that women would have to be punished if they sought an abortion when it was banned, which is correct, of course. That’s the hideously logical conclusion to making something illegal, although it’s something the GOP doesn’t like to admit. But more than that- and Charles Pierce thinks this is the big one– in doing so, he reminded us all that when you make safe abortions difficult or impossible to obtain, people will get unsafe ones.
Ostend: Roth, Zweig, and The End of Europe
When Belgium and the rest of the Low Countries fell to the Nazis at the outset of WWII, people around the world saw it in grainy newsreels, filtered impersonally through the impassive eye of a camera lens. As it trickled to us, through history, it got even more abstract, made distant and unreal by dint of black-and-white.
This wasn’t the case, of course, when Belgium was attacked by ISIS last week. We had instant updates, graphic color footage, and the tweets and personal videos recorded by thousands of smartphones. Those who weren’t there were safe and unharmed, of course, but didn’t have the comfort of distance.
Those attacks, and their personal immediacy in our lives, give a certain poignancy to Volker Weirdermann’s non-fiction novel (in the nice formulation of Independent reviewer Lucy Sholes) Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, And The Summer Before The Dark, translated excellently this year by Carol Brown Janeway. In it, a handful of great European writers, including two of the continent’s best, grapple with friendship, love, literature, alcohol, and the looming madness overtaking their homes, ready to burst forth everywhere, as they spend an uneasy summer in the once-idyllic beachfront town on the Belgian coast. Like with today’s social-media carried attacks, we see the end of one reality in an extreme closeup, with unflinching unease.
EgyptAir Hijacking and Our Weird Formulation on Terrorism
Pictured: Not a terrorist. Image from AFP-Getty via BBC
Thankfully, the EgyptAir hijacking turned out to just be a guy with a fake suicide vest who may or may not have been distraught about a woman. This was handled with what I can only believe to be typical Cypriot humor.
Earlier, Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades had responded to a reporter’s question about whether the hijacker was motivated by romance, by laughing and saying: “Always there is a woman involved.”
That aside, and the “troubling questions” about security we’re told the incident begs, there has been a strange formulation floating around all day. I first saw it in a Times “Morning Briefing”, but you’ve undoubtedly seen something similar. “A hijacker told the pilot he had explosives and threatened to detonate them, officials said, but he may have been motivated by personal factors, not terrorism.”
That’s an odd way to put it, and revealing. Yes, there were no political motivations, which of course means it isn’t terrorism. If he blew himself up, of course, it wouldn’t have mattered to anyone involved. Being killed is being killed. It’s the same kind of excuse we have in this country for being solemn for a few minutes after a mass shooting, telling each other that to talk about guns is to “politicize” it, and then going on our way- unless the shooter screams “Allah!” while pulling the trigger.
The San Bernardino shooters had no real connection to ISIS, no more than I do. They just were inspired by them, but there are a million factors that go into why someone decides to kill. They do it for any reasons, whether they are a recruit from Belgium or Adam Lanza or just someone who wants to pick a wolf costume and chooses ISIS, because it just happens to fit perfectly.
That’s why it is strange to say “motivated by personal factors”, and not terrorism. People join terrorist groups for personal factors, because they are angry or lost or feel small, and can be pushed over the edge from despair into inhuman violence by skilled recruiters and peer pressure. Some, yes, are just sociopaths or criminals, and a handful are true believers- but even among them, it is “personal factors”.
We treat terrorism as a free-floating evil, capitalizing the theological construct and applying it to humans, which weirdly robs people of their agency. We don’t see terrorism as an earthly phenomenon with earthly reasons, born from the same violent impluses that have led men to be wolf to men since they first realized that pain wasn’t something that was just felt- it could be inflicted.
Until we decide that we have to treat this as an actual human event, and not a mythological evil, there is no way to minimize its destructive power, or to lead people away. Saying “it’s not terrorism; it must just be a combination of sickness and desperation” is a perfect exercise in missing the point entiely.
Dear #neverhillary Bernie people…
Today, thanks to the timely death of Antonin Scalia, the most brazen assault on public sector unions of our time was killed. Friederichs vs. California Teachers Association couldn’t survive a 4-4 court, which means the lower court ruling was upheld. If Antonin Scalia was still around, it would have won 5-4, and the ability of unions to fund themselves would have been gutted. The public sector- the last great hope of the middle class, which is why it is under constant assault- would have collapsed into a race-to-the-bottom spiral.
This isn’t the last attempt at this. Public sector unions show that unions can still work, which is why they have to be destroyed. A conservative justice will tilt the balance again. It’s why the resistance to Merrick Garland has been so implacable. Conservatives are hoping that they can hold out til next year, when a GOP President will nominate a justice to finally kill off unions (among other things).
But please, remind me why there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Hillary and Ted Cruz or Donald Trump.
The Wisconsinization of Illinois
“Nice work, Walker!” Image from ChicagoNow
I’ve always loved Wisconsin. It’s fun to make fun of, but I have never once not had a great time in the state, whether camping up north or near Kettle Morain, hanging out by the lake in Milwaukee, relaxing in Door County with my lovely bride, reveling in the weirdness of Madison, or spending time at scenic Lake Ripley, my favorite spot, Wisconsin is always warm and hospitable. It’s got a great drinking culture, which doesn’t so much revolve around experimental cocktails as much as “the more the merrier”, and a great attitude toward eating. If there is one thing over which Scott Walker and I can bond, it’s ham, and the desire to eat more of it, at all hours. Ham for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You can’t go wrong.
But ham is probably the only area in which Walker and I would agree on anything (although we could both confirm that empirical reality that he won’t be President, though I imagine we have different feelings about that). One other thing to love about Wisconsin was its progressive tradition, which came about naturally, from workers and farmers, as a reaction to the power of capital and its corrupting nature. That’s also why the backlash in Wisconsin was always so fierce, whether that was the union hating Herb Kohler Sr or the drunken lout McCarthy. Now, that backlash has reached its apex, as Walker and his pet legislature have turned this great state into their personal Koch-funded experiment, destroying voting rights, the social safety net, corporate accountability, and the environment. In short, trying to wreck everything that is great about Wisconsin.
Former Trump Supporter Shocked That Trump is Trump
Shocked!
Stephanie Cegielski, former Communications Director of the Make America Great Again Super PAC, penned a missive in xoJane about why she can’t support Trump anymore. It basically boils down to no one thought Trump could win, and that he would be a great candidate to shake up the system. She was tired of the direction the country was taking, and thought this would be a great start.
The Trump camp would have been satisfied to see him polling at 12% and taking second place to a candidate who might hold 50%. His candidacy was a protest candidacy.
You’ll excuse me, but that’s nonsense. I’m sure there were some pros who thought that, but at no point did Donald Trump think he wasn’t going to win. There is a convenient narrative among former supporters that this was a lark, and that Trump is as surprised as anyone. He might not have thought it would be this easy, but Donald Trump doesn’t think he is going to lose. Even when he does- which is often- he immediately spins it in his head as a win of such towering genius that it’s like a billion times better than anyone has ever won.
Donald Trump was never a protest candidate, like Bernie Sanders was originally intended to be before his message found deep purchase. That wasn’t Trump. He assumed he would win. Cegielski’s other reasons for her initial support are equally unconvincing.
My support for Trump began probably like yours did. Similar to so many other Americans, I was tired of the rhetoric in Washington. Negativity and stubbornness were at an all-time high, and the presidential prospects didn’t look promising.
So, you don’t like negative people without a solution, and you stuck around past the rapist speech? This is nonsense. Trump was always a bitter, mean, vulgar, spiteful megalomaniac who never once expressed a positive thought that didn’t revolve around his own world-historic conquerings. Hell, half his introduction speech was spent talking about how much richer he was than Mitt Romney.
To say that Trump now is different than the Trump of June 2015, or that it wasn’t clear that he was always going to be this way, is self-serving in the extreme. It was always clear that he was an ignorant blowhard: he has been his entire life.
Cegielski’s note is to Trump supporters, so it has some value. It isn’t a mea culpa but a note of warning to them that their hero is a false one. But assuming that a woman (!) who has scorned Trump (!!) will be listened to shows that she has just as little awareness of what Trump is, and what is fueling him, as she did all those starry months ago, at the innocent beginning, when calling for a wall around Mexico was a springish lark. How could it have gotten so bad?
Shooting Irrelevance 