Ugh

We officially crossed 100,000 covid19 deaths. At least that's shut up all the dumbassess who kept saying "The flu kills 60,000 a year, gawd. We don't shut the country down for that!!!!!!!!"

The only thing that remains to be seen is how deep our official levels of asshole will go. Multiple states are changing their unemployment systems to if your job is open but you refuse to go back because of fear of infection it counts as a voluntary quit. Which means those people would be ineligible for unemployment.

In Texas, the Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that a lack of immunity to covid19 was not a valid reason to request an absentee ballot. They delivered this decision after hearing the case remotely so not to risk potential infection from covid19. This will be one of many such cases in the months to come with potentially similar outcomes in red states. As Trump said, if you allow mail-in voting, you'll never get Republicans elected again. 

Usually, flagrantly saying the quiet part out loud like this will bite you in the ass but, given that election rules are the purview of the states, it is unlikely to lead to a negative outcome. There's enough political cover for Chief Justice Roberts to say that since Trump is merely expressing a political opinion and has no capacity to create discriminatory rules, there's no infringement on the people's right to vote. 

Since Roberts has the daylight, he'll take it- but he'll probably assign Kavanaugh or Gorsuch to write the opinion, if it comes to that. He may cast the deciding vote, but Roberts won't want to get his hands dirty to validate the reasoning. 

Which brings me back to a horse I feel compelled to keep beating until election day. Biden is in a deep hole against Trump. Yes, I know he's up in the polls. So what? Polls are a measure of who the general public prefers as a person. What they don't measure is how effectively campaigns deliver their message to mobilize its supporters to donate, phone bank, canvas, etc. etc. that makes up the actual work that gets people elected. Being liked more than Trump isn't a game changing asset- you could put up a rotting corpse in a head-to-head against Trump and odds are the corpse comes out on top. 

It seems the cornerstone of Biden's campaign is that he isn't as bad as Trump, which is the exact same mistake the Clinton campaign made in 2016. So far, Biden has told people that if they believe Tara Reade's accusations they shouldn't vote for him, that any black people who hesitate to support him aren't really black, and has failed to gain any traction among Bernie's supporters.  

If you tell people not to vote for you because of a moral quandary surrounding you, you're giving people license to won away from supporting you. They may not denounce you, exactly, but their silence will be noticeable. Also, if you tell black people that their concerns over your long history of cementing institutional racism that you aren't really apologizing for is making them hesitate is actually all their fault not yours, that won't end well. Also also, the idea of a white dude getting to dictate black people's level of blackness because they won't let the harm he's done to their community go is bound to be a winning issue. 

Lastly, if you want Bernie supporter's you have to adopt his policies. They won't come along without a convincing commitment to their policy goals which Biden can't deliver, sooooo yeah, there's a good chance a large portion of voters under 45 for show up, which obviously doesn't bode well. 

All of these are factors are looming over the Biden campaign but don't appear dangerous because there's no pressure yet. But once the summer is over and Trump and Biden start going at it, all these weaknesses will manifest and drag Biden into a statistical tie if he's lucky until November. Since the best idea the Biden camp can come up with to get younger voters on their side is glorified online hangouts, I'm not optimistic they'll get a handle on things. 

What should be especially concerning is that Biden doesn't have any avenue to shore up his weaknesses. Usually, candidates use their VP picks to cover any holes in their appeal. This is actually why Obama picked Biden as his VP; Biden was a sign to the conservative wing of the party that all the hope and change talk wouldn't go too far or change too much. 

But who could do that for Biden? His biggest weaknesses are from the left-wing of the party and left-leaning independents but he can't exactly placate them given that the entire philosophy of his campaign is a rejection of everything those voters believe in. Even if he picked Elizabeth Warren, she's so thoroughly trashed her reputation that she's nothing but a liability at this point. Sanders is obviously a no-go because the establishment figures who fought so hard to deny Sanders the nomination won't abide him being a heartbeat away from the presidency.

So who does that leave? The only people Biden can pick are other centrists which only compounds the problems with his campaign. Anybody who could plug the holes in Biden's campaign would end up being more dynamic, influential, and personable than the man himself so, that's also a limiting factor. 

Funnily enough, the literal week long affair of Amy Klobuchar highlights the problem Biden faces. Just on its face, who cares about Amy Klobuchar? Who among you even bothered to learn how to pronounce her name or remembered it after she flamed out in the primaries? The only reasons she was a serious contender were-in order- she's a woman (which Biden promised as his VP), she's a centrist who appeals to the same people as Biden so there's no threat of her taking her ball and going home if Biden doesn't agree to policy demands. 

Even if things went well, at best she adds nothing to his campaign so there's no real point to her being there in the first place. But things did not go well because a Minnesota policeman named Derek Chauvin murdered Gregory Floyd. Chauvin has killed people on the job before, you see, and the prosecutor who declined to bring charges against him and dozens of other cops was none other than our dear friend Amy Klobuchar.

This ultimately is the greatest weakness Biden and his ilk face. They spent their entire careers chasing the reputation of being respectable, of not being soft-hearted liberals out to save pathetic losers from a world they were too weak to survive in on their own. They did this by creating policies like the Crime Bill or the Welfare Reform which caused an insane amount of suffering in minority and poor communities on purpose. They saw that the true test of being a respectable, serious politician was the willingness to fuck over black people so they grabbed that ball and ran with it. 

So while centrist Democrats rail against Trump's bigotry, the uncomfortable truth Biden et al. are desperately trying to avoid is that Trump is merely escalating the policies and attitudes Biden staked his entire career on.

Even so, the most annoying thing about pointing out all these flaws is inevitably the argument becomes "He can't be worse than Trump." Which, I know. Pretty much everyone who doesn't like Joe Biden knows that Trump is worse. However, Trump being Trump doesn't erase the consequences of Biden's career or the philosophy that drives him to this day. 

Brow beating people into voting for Biden with no guarantee that he'll be different is effectively telling those people that their suffering doesn't matter, that asking for protections and guarantees that the harm won't be perpetuated is selfish. 

What you're telling these people is that you don't care.  

You're telling them that the life and death struggle against Trump is an abstract one about democracy, the soul of the republic, the Constitution, or the Supreme Court. Blood is too messy in such pristine, rarefied air, so it gets left out. Sure 100,000 and counting are dead, yes what happened to Gregory Floyd was tragic, but let's not be untowardly angry about the whole thing. Won't someone consider the property damage?

There's no point in saying this election is the biggest fight for the country's soul if you're going to get squeamish. If you think people stealing shit out of a Target is morally comparable to a cop murdering someone in broad daylight on fucking camera, shut up. If protesters breaking the windows of a precinct is worse then the cops firing rubber bullets and tear gas into the peaceful protests which started the riots, give up. 

If things like Minnesota bother you, if they make you uneasy, then please be courteous and come to terms with your defeat, now. You don't have the guts to fight for the world you want in the way it needs to be fought for, so it'll never come to pass. If you don't like the protests because they make you uncomfortable in the same way Trump makes you uncomfortable, then you can't distinguish against the legitimate anger of the oppressed and the whims of a dictator. You want the fight of the century but you want it done politely, comfortably, where no one steps out of line.

You're right about one thing, though. We're about to have one of the most defining elections in recent times. It's going to be a brutal, nasty fight. And because of you we're walking into it timid, crippled, and afraid. I hope you're happy. 

Avatar: The Last Airbender Season 2

A few years ago, I did a fun little piece on the first season of Avatar: The Last Airbender. I planned on following it up with write-ups for the other two seasons but I got distracted and never got back to it. But now that the show has returned to the interwebs, now's as good a time as any to rectify my mistake. 

To summarize my first piece, the first season is good but suffers from an overall lack of tension. Zuko is too sympathetic, Zhao is more antagonistic to Zuko than the main cast, which makes for with good episodic tension but leaves something lacking when it comes to the bigger picture. 

Season two changes this immediately. With the introduction of Zuko's younger sister Azula, the threat level in this show skyrockets. She's everything you want in this show- she's dynamic, powerful, manipulative, and just barely holding back a psychotic break. In her introductory episode, she nearly captures Zuko and Iroh just by playing on Zuko's insecurities. She puts everyone on their back heels by attacking them from every possible angle. Whenever she loses, it's just barely, so it's no surprise that, come the end of the season, she wins everything, conquering the Earth Kingdom via a coup and nearly killing Aang with a well-timed lightning strike. 

The other thing that really pushes this season to another level is the introduction of earth bending. We saw a bit of it in season 1, but we get so much more of it here and adds a much more visceral quality to the fight choreography. There's just something about two people pummeling each other with the ground they're standing on that makes the fights feel so much more dangerous and exhilarating. 

What I also appreciate is how the show explores the political aspects of the 100-year war. The Gaang spends the first half of the season making its way to Ba Sing Se, the last major Earth Kingdom stronghold and home of the Earth King. Their plan is to see the Earth King, tell him about an upcoming eclipse which will disable all firebending, which is the perfect time to launch an invasion of the Fire Nation to end the war. 

Except, once they get to the city, they're cut off from seeing the king and everyone they talk to seems to have no idea that there's a war going on outside the city walls. 

This state of affairs is brought about by the Dai Li, the secret police of Ba Sing Se who work to keep order by gaslighting the city into ignoring the war altogether and actively keep its existence from the king so he doesn't do anything stupid. 

Funnily enough, there is a legit point behind them behaving this way. Cities under siege tend to fall because they crack from the inside. When resources spread too thin it gets fantastically hard to hold everyone together and soldier on through food, medicine, and water shortages. Even cities as self-sufficient as Ba Sing Se have a psychological limit that a century of war would erode. Eventually, the walls protecting you from the threat outside morph into the walls of your coffin. 

So it makes a certain kind of sense that the Dai Li would value order above all else. In a city where the poor are literally walled off from the rich and powerful, any breakdown in order would lead to massive riots and fires which would be a nightmare to deal with. And it would be increasingly harder to prevent such a thing when to have the Fire Nation slowly but surely raiding, burning, and conquering its way all over the continent until Ba Sing Se is the only place left to go. In that scenario, its only a matter of when the city breaks, not if. 

Of course, pretending that the war doesn't exist at all to the point were the pressure keeps on mounting because nothing's being done to relieve it is stupid and bound to fail as well, so remember kids, you can only propaganda your problems away for so long before they come bursting through your door. 

Personally, I think this is the strongest of the original Avatar's three seasons. Part of what made the show so fantastic was that it isn't three separate seasons as much as one story broken into three distinct acts. In the second act, you raise the stakes, complicate the established arcs, and bring the heroes down to their lowest point. This season does all of these with aplomb, making for some of the funnest, most exciting, and heartfelt moments you'll find in any media. 

This season is the show firing on all cylinders without an ounce of fat on it. It doesn't have to do any off the narrative set-ups that slow down the first and third seasons to varying degrees and can get along with the business of telling its story. It leaves the heroes in such a desperate place that it makes their victory feel all the more powerful when it finally comes. It makes that inevitable victory feel earned because, even though you know it's coming, you have reason to doubt. 

More than anything, it leaves you in a position where you have to keep watching to find out all it works out in the end. Which is what we'll get into when we look at how the ending of the series kinda spoils all the good work spent getting there. 

The Curse of The Dark Knight

I love The Dark Knight. From the moment the first trailer dropped with Heath Ledger's Joker laugh echoing over the outline of the bat symbol, I couldn't wait for the summer to come and see it on opening day. Which, I did. Then I saw it three more times in theaters over the next four days. 

One thing that always bugged me though, was the handling of Harvey Dent. For the longest time, I thought it was the result of movie reaching for too much, being too ambitious for its own good. 

Now though, I realize that the problem wasn't Nolan's ambition but his rejection of mythic storytelling. 

One of the key selling points of Nolan's Batman was its commitment to realism; that is, providing plausible explanations for how some one like Batman could exist. That didn't stop from the movie from stretching things out for a more heightened reality but it did so in the way that was acceptable for action movies.

This move away from the more comicy aspects of the form didn't hurt the main story so much since it replaced those with the genre conventions of cops and robbers movies to great effect. But that only covers the conflict between the Joker and Batman- the genre conventions leave Harvey out in the cold which Nolan and screenwriter Drew Goddard didn't quite know how to reconcile. 

So why would Harvey throw such a wrench in a grounded, realistic narrative? Well, it's because Harvey is drawn from a more theatrical, operatic tradition that isn't meant to be cut down to a more naturalistic setting. 

Dent is made up like a modern Greek tragic hero; he's an exceptional figure who's prowess and competence has led him to the zenith of his world. But, because of an inescapable flaw, his world will come crashing down until it inverts around him- everything that created his success will be what traps him in his misery. 

What makes Dent such a pitiable figure is that he is trapped in his dichotomy- he is forever completely good on the one side and an utter sadist on the other. His sides have no way of communicating or reconciling, he is nothing more than two absolutes forever warring for dominance. The trait he's meant to warn us about is thinking that there are only the guilty and the innocent, the good and the evil, with nothing in between, so that we learn to navigate the gray in the world or drown.

To pull this off, you have to lean into the more mythic elements of the comic form and be willing to go for those more operatic notes even it does risk making things feel a bit silly. 

But, Nolan doesn't do this until it's too late. 

When Dent makes his transition to Two-Face, he becomes a one-dimensional villain obsessed with vengeance the we've seen a million times before. The movie reduces him to a coin flip gimmick that it removes all meaning from. The point of the coin flip is that, because he is nothing but absolutes, he can't make a nuanced decision. He doesn't know how to handle ambiguity or decide which extreme he needs to engage with. 

So he flips the coin, letting fate decide for him. Flipping the coin is a surrender, the final pathetic act of a man who's will has been completely crushed inside of him. In the movie, it's just the vehicle for the whims of your everyday murderer. 

This refusal to engage in the more mythic aspects of Two-Face's character is part of why the ending doesn't land the way Nolan wanted it to. The end of The Dark Knight hinges on the audience accepting that the legend of Harvey Dent is so important that if it's compromised by the revelation of his actions, then the entire project of reform dies with him. So the idea that if you push Dent's crimes onto Batman, then the people of Gotham believe they can solve their problems within the law and don't need someone like Batman to do that work for them. 

The whole speech of "the hero we deserve, but don't need right now," is about how there are larger stories people need to believe about the world they live in. It's a very mythic approach to the characters and the world they live in. It's also the very thing Nolan has been doing his level best to make sure his audience ignores. The tonal whiplash that comes from this shift is why so many people left the theater thinking "The fuck was that ending on about?"

It's a shame, really. The success of The Dark Knight convinced the industry that for comic book movies- and fantasy action movies in general- to be successful they had to match Nolan's hyper realistic style, so they removed all traces of the any mythical origin. Do you remember the Russell Crow Robin Hood? Or that Hercules movie The Rock did? Probably not. Because, shock of all shocks, if you divorce characters from the things that make them interesting and compelling, they turn out boring more often then not. 

Thankfully, this trend is starting to buckle. The Guardians of the Galaxy series and especially the success of Into the Spiderverse has shown that studios can make money by leaning in to the more fantastical and sillier elements that comics have to offer. 

There's a reason comic books haven't died out, even though they have come very close over the decades. So, maybe, just maybe, there's something about these characters and how their stories are told that keeps audiences engaged and coming back for more decade after decade. And, I don't know, maybe there's something to learn from that. 

A Little Panic Never Hurt Anyone

One of the things that's been driving me insane over the last two weeks or so is the blase attitude liberal political analysts are treating the current pandemic situation. This piece in USA Today is emblematic of the trend where people are pointing to Trump's growing panic over his falling poll numbers against Joe Biden, which is fueling the desire to reopen the country to put a halt to the economic disaster before November rolls around. What drives me crazy about these takes is the unspoken assumption that things will be normal enough come November for the elections to happen like normal. This idea isn't quite as dangerous as Trump's reopen at all costs, but it is in the same ballpark.

It's insane to me that there are still people thinking that the time for our lives going back to the way they used to be is just around the corner. I know I talked about this in my last piece but it bears hammering in- unless we exponentially increase our testing capacity, none of us are going anywhere anytime soon. Every expert who looks at our situation says we need to run 500,000 tests a day at least to track the transmission of the virus and safely reopen society. That estimate of what we need runs up to 5 million a day which sounds all but impossible when you consider we've only managed to do around 6.5 million tests in the last three months.

Even if we do manage to get the bare minimum of 500k tests a day, we'd be still be months behind in our testing capacity that we'd only just start to get the general outline of what our infection rate is. The idea that our testing capabilities will be up to snuff to guarantee public safety in the middle of what will probably be our second wave in the fall is, respectfully, dubious at best. When you factor in that there were 52 cases tied to the Democratic primary in Wisconsin after they were held with in-person voting, I imagine it's going to be a pretty hard sell to convince millions of people to go stand in line for hours on end all over the country.

This is a massive problem because Biden's only hope to win is high voter turnout. Almost every piece I've seen discussing the election goes out of its way to mention Biden's lead in the polls and treat that as a slam-dunk guarantee for a win in November. Sure, Biden has a five-point lead on Trump right now, which seems impressive except Hillary had a ten-point lead on Trump at this time in the 2016 election. If the candidate you're running now has half the lead after three-and-a-half years of horrific incompetence that's on full display in the middle of a pandemic, you shouldn't be celebrating.

What's more, you should consider that this is about has good as it gets for Biden. Sooner rather than later, he's going to have to start appearing on the national stage to make the case for his presidency. He won't have the safety net of his wife to speak for him, and the questions around the Tara Reade allegations will only intensify as time goes on. It's going to be a brutal onslaught after the summer, one that Biden is blatantly incapable of handling. Of Biden's supporters, only 28% say they're very enthusiastic about his campaign which, in the context of our times seems like a trivial thing to focus on but, it's really, really not.

Think of it this way- assume there's no backup election process set up by November, meaning everyone has to go out to fewer polling places and risk exposing themselves to infection. Biden is starting out four points behind Hillary's "very enthusiastic" numbers in September 2016, and that number is only going to drop the more pathetic performances Biden delivers as the campaign intensifies. If fewer and fewer people are fired up for Biden's presidency, then the fewer people are around passionate enough to convince people to brave election day.

If things keep going the way they're going, election day will revolve around one question: which candidate do you believe in to risk the lives of everyone you love by going out to vote for? We know for certain that Trump's voters will follow him to their graves, do you know any Biden supporters who will do the same?

All these factors should have Congressional Democrats scrambling like their lives depend on it to set up vote-by-mail systems across the country and get it done now. Trump has made his opposition to this well known, but you could get around this by making it look like states that support him get more aid to vote in person or whatever to make it "fair" in his eyes. They should've started this three months ago, to be honest, but the second best time would be right now. The House however, isn't scheduled to come back until next week; and since there aren't enough tests in DC to cover the members of the Senate, there's no way the House will be fully covered so who knows how long they'll be in session before they have to break when someone catches the virus.

Remote sessions and voting would be the logical solution to all these problems, but again, nothing's been done to set up such a thing up. Yes, it'd be a huge logistical hassle, but, I don't know, maybe it's worth the effort to set that up so the country isn't left to the whims of a toddler to manage the pandemic response?

At the end of the day, I'm stupefied that there are still people who honest to god in their heart of hearts believe that Trump is a problem that will, eventually, solve itself. No one does anything to stop him, no one sets up any strategy to win, they just sit back and wait for Trump to lose. This delusion means our nominal opposition party is sleep walking us into four more fucking years with this asshole.

So yeah, maybe these are things we should be worried about, and I don't know, start making sure don't happen?