Catching Up

Good lord it has been a month.  As usual, we've managed to cram what would normally be an entire year's worth of drama into a few weeks so let's get to it.

We'll start off by looking at the excerpts from Bob Woodward's new book, which the Washington Post and others reported on from an advance copy.  Overall, it doesn't reveal anything new, per se, it just gives us more specifics on what a complete shit show this administration is.  From calling Jeff Sessions retarded, to wanting to assassinate Bashar al- Assad, to just forgetting to pull out of a trade deal with South Korea because Gary Cohn just took the order off Trump's desk before he could sign it, the book is apparently filled to the brim with stories of a beleaguered staff doing whatever they can to hold off the worst impulses of the most unqualified president in history.  None of this should be shocking, since the only thing Trump has ever proven competent at is keeping his cadre of bootlicking supporters to overlook his constant, repeated failures.  Everyone who spoke out against his candidacy said that this is what his presidency would be and now the book is just confirming our ability to point out the obvious.

The most damaging anecdote for me is the one that pertains to Trump's former attorney John Dowd.  In a mock-Mueller interview, Trump collapsed and went on a 30-minute rant that kicked off with "This is a goddamned hoax!"  Dowd, seemingly finally realizing just how terrible his client was, told Trump not to testify because it was that "or an orange jump suit."  Amazingly, after he had a complete meltdown in a practice session, Trump still thought that he'd be a "real good witness."  Dowd also said Mueller couldn't interview Trump because our allies would say "I told you he was an idiot. I told you he was a goddamn dumbbell. What are we dealing with this idiot for?”  Two things: 1. It's bold of Dowd to assume they weren't - or aren't - already doing that and 2. How bad do you have to be when you're own lawyer is basically begging the man investigating your client not to interview him because it'd make us an international disgrace?  

If that wasn't bad enough for Trump, The New York Times publish an anonymous op-ed from someone claiming to be an administration official telling the world all about how the Cabinet members are all quietly working to sabotage Trump's worst impulses.  Before anyone gets into the mindset of believing the op-ed writer's justifications that they're doing this because they feel they have a higher duty to the country than just the president, I'm gonna stop you right there because that rationale is, in a word, horseshit.  I think the anonymous author and his cohorts honestly believe that what they're doing is for the good of the country, but that to me reads more as a surface level explanation that serves a deeper, more cynical end.  Because here's the thing, if you're actively sabotaging the president you work for, than you obviously believe that that president is unfit to hold the office.  As it happens, the Constitution provides a way for the Cabinet to remove a president who is mentally unfit or otherwise incapable of performing the duties of the office and that is the 25th amendment.  The relevant section in this case is Section 4 which reads, in full:

"Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office."

In plain English, the VP and a majority of the of the Cabinet officers tells Congress that the president can't preform his duties, Trump, in this case, sends a letter saying "Nuh-uh", to which VP et al. send another letter saying "Double Nuh-uh" and then Congress votes on it to decide either way.  Think of it as a presidential vote of no confidence.  Anyway, the author name checks the amendment as something his fellows discussed but ultimately decided against because they "didn't want to cause a constitutional crisis" so they decided on a game of low-key sabotage instead because hey, it's Trump, he's too stupid to notice.

So why do I think all this self-congratulations isn't as sincere as the writer would have us believe?  In short, it's because all these people want to work again.  Every once in a while, Politico or someone else will run a story about how all the Trump staffers who work in the administration can't get a job or a date because everyone's disgusted by them.  What's more, the author, and by extension, his colleagues, are all die-hard Republican partisans.  The author laments at one point about how the press is ignoring the actual "accomplishments" of the administration like "effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more."  For context, one of those proposed effective deregulations is from the EPA concerning power plant emissions.  It's an Obama-era rule (of course) that the EPA estimates prevented up to 11,000 deaths a year, so that's nice.  Let's also not forget about how the FCC repealed net neutrality which lead us to the wonderful situation of Verizon throttling firefighters phones and trying to bilk them for a higher data plan while they fighting the (current) largest wildfire in California history.  The tax cuts are nothing more than the outright transfer of wealth to the super rich, so uh, score one for the oligarchy, I guess?

Point is, these people don't have any actual problem with what Trump is doing, they just have a problem with him, specifically.  They see the writing on the wall, they've undoubtedly read all those same articles detailing how their former compatriots association with Trump has poisoned every aspect of their lives, they've got front-row seats to see Trump's reactions to Cohen's guilty plea, Manafort's conviction, and how his financial adviser was given immunity by the Mueller investigation.  They definitely saw that leaked GOP spreadsheet that lists every investigation the Democrats could potentially launch into the Trump White House if they retake the House in the midterms.  So yeah, the walls must feel a little closer than they used to be, so before the tide really starts turning, all these people who will probably need jobs sooner rather than later want to give themselves some cover.

Which brings us back to this op-ed.  For all its claims about higher duty and what they feel they owe to the American public etc. etc. this op-ed is more of a signal to the monied and professional political world that when they get ex-Trump staffers looking for work, those people will be able to say "Did you read that Times op-ed? I was one of the people it was talking about."  It's a way for the rats to set up some cover when they start fleeing the sinking ship or if Trump starts mass firing people they can point to the op-ed as the reason why; that they were tragically found out and now can't protect America from the degradation's of the Trump presidency any longer.

For all the talk about wanting to protect America and it's constitutional republic from the whims of an anti-democratic president, the author and his cohorts are doing nothing more than the literal bare minimum to stop him and explicitly say they refuse to use the constitutional methods provided to them to remove Trump from office.  So instead of doing the brave, principled thing, these people are going the underhanded and unaccountable route while they wait for other people to solve a problem they're too cowardly to directly confront.  I'm sure that there won't be any negative consequences now that the famously paranoid, conspiratorial, and retaliatory president they've insisted on leaving in power knows that he has people working against him in his administration.  That should work out great.

Then, we had a story also in the Times concerning Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and his alleged efforts to secretly record his conversations with Trump to gain material for possible 25th amendment proceedings.  The timing of the story was pretty suspicious to me since it was concurrent with the first rumblings of the sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, but also because of all the other legal developments I mentioned earlier.  A story like this serves a perfect pretext to fire Rosenstein and, by extension, Mueller in a last-ditch effort to end the investigation that is clearly closing in around Trump and his family.

On the other hand, it's also hard to believe that the story was planted by people working on Trump's behalf as anonymous sources who could corroborate the tip to the Times reporters when they came calling.  For one thing, this requires more sophisticated media relations than Trump or anyone in his administration has ever proven capable of.  It also shows a remarkable amount of planning and strategy that he's never once demonstrated in any aspect of his life, ever.  I imagine if Trump did plant this story he'd have done so by calling up the Times himself pretending to be somebody else saying that this Rosenstein fella tried to spy on the great, fantastic really, President Donald Trump.

Since the Times doesn't mention a detail like that, I'm resigned to taking the story at face value.  Which, is really embarrassing for Rosenstein, because the story the Times tells is of a man who is hopelessly out of his depth.  He seems legitimately blindsided by the fact that Trump used his memo criticizing James Comey's handling of the Hillary Clinton investigation as the basis (however short-lived) for Trump's firing of Comey.  I honestly can't think of what other the purpose Rosenstein thought the memo had other than providing a pretext to fire Comey and derail the Russia investigation, but, he apparently had one in mind.

From there it presents a man who spirals out of panic, proposing to wear a wire himself in his meetings with the President or by getting the men Trump was interviewing to replace Comey to wear one instead.  No one in the administration appears to have gone along with this plan because it's an obviously a bonkers and haphazard one, and things seemed to just fade away into the background until now.  Rosenstein still has a job, although for how long seems to be an open question and one that likely won't be answered until the Kavanaugh confirmation is done.

Which brings us to the latest open sore the Trump administration has inflicted on us.  I'll make this clear up front, Brett Kavanaugh has no business being a Supreme Court Judge.  His entire judicial career has been one where he was groomed to move up through the judicial ranks so he could rewrite the law to fit right wing partisan goals.  That's it.  The law is irrelevant beyond providing a pretext for Kavanaugh to reshape it to make this country a better place for the already rich and powerful while they crush everyone else under heel.  If you're wondering why he immediately started raving about how these allegations where the by-product of an extensive outside money campaign undertaken by people looking to revenge the Clintons well, it's because that's exactly the kind of thing he's been involved in from the very start.

So, what to make of the assault accusations against him?  Personally, I believe them for a couple reasons.  First is the well documented fact that false rape accusations are incredibly rare and, more importantly, all Kavanaugh has to defend himself is his word and his word is, objectively, shit.  Common Dreams has a good breakdown of all the things Kavanaugh has lied about over the years, but I just want to go over some highlights.  In 2002, Kavanaugh received documents stolen from Democrats on the Senate Judicial Committee that outlined lines of questioning the members planned to use in upcoming confirmation hearings at the time.  Kavanaugh said he never received or saw the  documents in a 2004 hearing regarding the issue and in 2006 when at his confirmation hearing to the appellate courts but proof that he received the documents came out earlier this month, so whoops.  Another incident involved Kavanaugh saying he had no knowledge of the Bush administrations wiretapping program except again an email turned up where he was asking John Yoo about that very subject.  Lastly, Kavanaugh denies ever taking a position on whether or not presidents could ever be prosecuted for crimes or not which would be true except for all the times he did just that.

In short, on the one hand we have a man who's spent at least the last fourteen years lying to members of Congress under oath about issues that could complicate his career path and on the other we have three women with no equivalent evidence for dishonesty.  That's not really a toss up in the credibility game.  That hasn't stopped people from trying, though, and since the efforts have largely been focused around Dr. Christine Ford, that's what we'll work with too.  The main talking point around Ford's accusation is that it can't be true because she waited so long to report it, that if she had really been assaulted she would've reported it at the time but since she didn't, her claims is obviously dubious.  What I love about this line of defense is that ignores all the death threats, the public accusations of being called a liar, having your entire life put under a microscope, plus just the general humiliation and trauma that comes with having your assault become common knowledge to millions of strangers all over the country.  But sure, the only reason she could have for not coming forward publicly is just because it never happened.

The other usual "reasonable" point people wanting to cast doubt on Ford's claim is that she's coming forward just now.  What drives me nuts about this is that line of reasoning is that it acts like there's no larger context the accusation is happening in.  Kavanaugh is being considered for a seat on the Supreme Court which sets him up as one of the most powerful people in the country.  It also makes him virtually untouchable, in the entire history of the United States, only one Justice has ever been impeached.  So you're telling me if the man who tried to rape you was about to become one of the most powerful and unassailable men in the country, you'd keep quiet about it?  You wouldn't feel compelled to share that information, to give a fuller scope of the person who's going to shape the country with every decision he makes for decades on end?  Under that context, is it really so surprising that Ford and the others would come out with their allegations when there's still a slim chance those accusations will actually matter?

Not surprisingly, the accusations haven't made any dent in Republican will to see Kavanaugh confirmed.  The week-long investigation the FBI is going to launch will likely be inconclusive, so people like Jeff Flake and red-state Democrats like Joe Manchin can have something to point to as cover when they vote to confirm Kavanaugh to the bench.  If nothing else, the last week has given people a real time example of what rape culture looks like and how it functions.  You see, a key aspect of rape culture is scrutinizing the victims actions while dismissing or excusing the perpetrator's.  From Tucker Carlson asking whether Ford failed in her obligation to tell the world that Kavanaugh was a rapist to the evolving defense of Kavanaugh's behavior going from "he didn't do it, he may have did it but it's outside the statute of limitations, okay he did do it but who hasn't violently held down a woman and tried to fuck her?" you can see a dedicated effort to make the conversation about how since Ford and the other accusers didn't behave like "real" victims, than they obviously can't be.  Any attempt to bring the conversation back to Kavanaugh's actions- the actual relevant topic here- is met with the kind of dismissal this woman provides such a great example of.  There's also Lindsey Graham lamenting that these accusations will ruin Kavanaugh's life if they prevent him from being confirmed which, yeah, speaks for itself.

I've seen some things about how the confirmation hearings will have negative effects for the Republicans going forward because women will take note of Dr. Ford's treatment etc. etc.  I highly doubt that anyone is losing sleep over that possibility.  Republican presidential candidates have won the white women vote in every election since at least 2004, which is unlikely to change anytime soon.  The most likely groups of women to look in disgust at the Kavanaugh hearings are women of color, but since they don't vote for Republicans  anyway in very great numbers and they're part of groups that state Republican parties actively disenfranchise through laws and gerrymandering efforts likely to survive legal challenges with Kavanaugh and Gorsuch as sitting members on the bench so this is really a situation where Republicans don't lose anything at all.

What I think is the most revealing aspect of this whole drama though is that it was never supposed to happen at all.  Dianne Feinstein received Ford's letter in July and then did nothing with it.  She refused to tell the other Democrats on the committee of the letters existence until news stories about its existence were printed earlier this month.  The reason Feinstein gave is that she thought the Democrats would have better chance attacking Kavanaugh on legal ground instead of personal controversies.  Sounds reasonable, but doubtful when you take into consideration that she also ignored a lawyer representing people who would testify about Kavanaugh's conduct as a judge over his career.  This makes me think that the plan was to let the nomination go through relatively uncontested to protect red state Democrats like Joe Manchin (WV), Heidi Heitkamp (N. D), and Claire McCaskill (Mo.) while letting other members like Kamala Harris and Cory Booker have flashy but ultimately irrelevant moments for them to stump on in the primaries next year.

A big part of why I believe this is because at the end of August right before the Kavanaugh hearings started, Chuck Schumer struck a deal with Mitch McConnell to fast track the confirmation of 15 Trump appointees in exchange for a paltry number of Obama holdovers explicitly so those same Senators mentioned above could have better reelection chances in the upcoming midterms.  The timing of that deal combined with the fact that Feinstein sat on the assault allegations and other damning material on Kavanaugh draw a clear picture to me that Democrats were pulling their usual game of playing for penny-ante political gains in the face of Republican power moves.  It's amazing to me in this day and age that the Democratic leadership is willing to trade away lifetime appointments for people who will actively work to undermine any sense of equality the law has provided in the last 50 years for the chance to stay in the Senate for another six years.  Honestly, on policy, they aren't as bad as Republicans, but is it really worth the trade-off of them being politically useless?  (Oh, right, Tom Perez said the DNC would still campaign and protect Senators who vote yes on Kavanaugh.  Because fuck your base and their principles, right?)

In milestone news, this month also marked the 10th anniversary of the Bear Sterns failing and the financial crisis that failing triggered.  The main things I want to reinforce about this is that the response to the crisis and its aftermath is, in my opinion, the biggest failure of Obama's presidency.  The crisis was the result of years of Wall Street's fraudulent activity via their sub-prime loans.  TO recap, the sub-prime loans where loans banks and other mortgage firms like Country Wide made to pretty anyone with a pulse, often falsifying the loan recipients personal information to make it look better on paper.  They then bundled these things together and sold them off to pensions, retirement funds, hedge funds, whoever they could find, so that when the loans started going bad and failed, their customers would eat the loss instead of themselves.  This went round and round until the music stopped, the banks couldn't unload the loans fast enough, then credit everywhere froze at which point things went haywire and governments got involved and you know the rest.  Point is, the crash wasn't the result of things just going badly, it came about after systemic economic frauds couldn't find any more suckers to feed of off.

As I've said many a time before, the Obama's response to the blatant criminal activity was to let the entire industry off scot-free and let them walk off into the sunset, intact, with no repercussions whatsoever.  His stimulus plan was also a weak half-measure that only promised that whatever recovery we had would be slow, stagnant, and wouldn't actually allow people to recoup what they lost in the first place.  Which, if you haven't noticed, is the economy we have now.  This stagnation, with its pitiful to non-existent wage growth, to seeing the people who wrecked the world get richer than they were before made people desperate for a candidate who was unconventional, who would buck the system, who didn't seem to play the standard Washington game.

Obama will usually defend his performance by saying that politics is an air carrier that can only change course in subtle, discreet ways, and can't make any radical changes in direction too quickly.  Which, in normal times, is true.  However when the world is burning down around you people will often give you leeway to radically change the game.  In fact, that's what people were hoping Obama would do.  Instead, he passed on the opportunity, following his near dogmatic belief in reasonableness no matter the circumstance.  Say what you will about Obama has a person, but as a president his failure/refusal to take bold action when it was needed the most hamstrung us into the conditions that would make Donald Trump.  That failure should hang around his legacy like a millstone, but it probably never will.

For news on the American Reich front, we found out this month that the Trump administration moved $10 million from FEMA and $260 million in cancer and HIV/AIDS research among other programs over to ICE to help cover the costs of the detaining the nearly 13,000 children still in federal custody.  The other fun part is that the administration also proposed changing the licencing of detention facilities from the states to the Department of Homeland Security.  The reason for this is so the administration can avoid a legal settlement that only allows them to detain children for 20 days and they can proceed to hold them indefinitely like they do to their parents.  Like I said before, this is barbaric cruelty as policy, nothing more.  There's no ethical or moral defense for a system that intentionally causes mental and emotional trauma for the children or where the agents responsible for their care starve, beat, and rape them.  The rule change, like all federal rules changes, is subject to a 60-day open comment period and is also open to legal challenges.  The comments don't have any kind of binding power, and a legal challenge is somewhat doomed by the fact that it will end up in front of a stacked 5-4 court who will in all likelihood rubber stamp whatever flimsy national security reasoning the administration uses to justify the policy change. 

Moving on to good news/bad news, the Trump administration admitted climate change exists. In a July report from the National Highway Safety Administration, the agency says that they believe there will be a 7 degree Fahrenheit increase in global temperatures by 2100.  Bad news comes in when the same agency says we should do nothing to stop this.  To put things in context, the last time global temperatures increased by that amount it resulted in something known as the Permian-Triassic extinction event a.k.a. The Great Dying a.k.a the worst mass extinction in Earth's history.  The Trump's administration's argument is that the rise in temperatures is so catastrophic that any measures to prevent it- in this case maintaining higher fuel standards- are essentially pointless so we shouldn't do them at all.

This is, in blunt terms, suicidal policy.  During the Permian-Triassic, temperatures rose 10 degrees Fahrenheit, so for the Trump administration to just wave off a temperature increase that puts us in the range of the largest extinction event in our planet's history is just, well, I don't have really have another word except suicidal and I already used it.  But think about it, within the span of one average human lifetime, the climate of the Earth could change to the point where it becomes too hot for us to survive and then we'll all be gone.  And this administration's response to that is "Eh, who gives a fuck anyway?"

There's something in physics called the Fermi Paradox which, in a nutshell, is trying to figure out in a universe as old as ours, with billions upon billions of stars and planets, where is everybody?  Why haven't we run into any alien civilizations or, at least, the ruins of alien civilizations?  It's a fascinating thing to think about with tons of hypothetical answers.  One of my favorites is something called the Great Filter which posits that something in the development of life-whether it be abiogenesis, sexual reproduction, or ecological destruction- prevents intelligent life from developing to a point where it becomes capable of interstellar or intergalactic travel.  Since we haven't encountered any other civilizations, that means there hasn't been one to survive the filter.  The more I look at ours and see a dedicated effort to write off the extinction of our species to save car makers the hassle of making cars with lower emissions, the more that hypothesis seems credible and the less I think it will be any great tragedy if/when we do check ourselves out of existence.

To end on a good note, here's a video of Trump making himself the literal laughing stock of the entire world.  Enjoy.

True or False, Are Always Revealing

Every now and then, when the stars align, the internet gives us the chance to gain some actual insight amidst all the cacophony we subject ourselves to.  Over the last week-and-a-half, there've been three articles published that give us a rather unguarded look into the current conservative mindset, so it's worth taking a look into them.

The first is an article from the Tucker Carlson owned Daily Caller, where one its editors, Virginia Kruta, went to Missouri rally for gubernatorial candidate Cori Bush with special guest star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  By now, you may have the seen Kruta's hilarious money quote where she says,

"But then Ocasio-Cortez spoke, followed by Bush, and I saw something truly terrifying. I saw just how easy it would be, were I less involved and less certain of our nation’s founding and its history, to fall for the populist lines they were shouting from that stage.
I saw how easy it would be, as a parent, to accept the idea that my children deserve healthcare and education.
I saw how easy it would be, as someone who has struggled to make ends meet, to accept the idea that a “living wage” was a human right.
Above all, I saw how easy it would be to accept the notion that it was the government’s job to make sure that those things were provided."

We'll get to the full unpacking of this in a second, but I think it's also important to note how Kruta closes the piece: "I left the rally with a photo — in part to remind myself of that time I crashed a rally headlined by a socialist, but also in part to remind myself that there, but for the grace of God, go I."  Kruta's been the butt of many a joke over her gut reaction to hearing that the government could indeed see to it that she could live a life free of the suffering caused by not being paid enough for her work so she wouldn't struggle to pay her bills, or that she would have to stress out over whether she'll go bankrupt if she has a medical emergency, or if her children want to go on to higher education they wouldn't have to take on a crippling amount of debt to do so is sheer abject terror, but, while she deserves all of that, it's important to note why she feels that way.

See, the amount of of suffering people experience in today's economy isn't an accident, it's the whole point of it.  If a student comes out of college with an advanced degree but mountains of debt that means they can't leverage their education to get better pay because they need whatever they can get to start paying back those loans.  The threat of medical bankruptcy is used as a way to keep workers stuck at whatever job they have because if they leave that job, they lose their insurance.  The whole point is to create a meager existence that keeps people obedient and cowed out of fear of losing what little they have if they stand up for themselves.

So why do people who are products of that system want to keep it going?  Why wouldn't they want to change things for the better?  Because in this style of system, the brutality of it is legitimized when one generation passes the suffering they went through down to the next.  This is sold as a way to reclaim a sense of  agency- they survived this world and became tougher for it so they now get to pass it on to their children and their children after them.   If younger people seek to end or change they system that causes all that suffering, then its treated like older generations- like Kruta's - are being cheated because if it's proven that all that suffering is entirely meaningless and unnecessary then, well, maybe all those times she sacrificed or went without so she could scrape by one week to the next, were unnecessary and meaningless as well.

In this system, suffering is the point.  The whole point of that "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" nonsense is that you know you've "made it" when you stop being the recipient of beatings and degradation and start administering those things to other people.  If, all of sudden, people have the means to live without the indignity of working full-time living paycheck-to-paycheck or the stress of staying at a shitty job because they'll lose their benefits or they'll get the same shit pay everywhere else, then all of a sudden people like Kruta and her ideological brethren lose a lot of their power.  They don't know what to do in the face of someone legitimately offering a better way forward, all they have is that fear and a feeling of "Thank god I don't believe people should live with dignity like those whackos."  It does really go to show that they don't think that a fair days work should come with a fair days pay, or whatever other platitude about the value of hard work that drizzles out their mouth is true, at the end of the day, they just want to make sure as many people as possible are absolutely miserable so they can condescend to them when they dare think they deserve better.

Next up is this hilariously incompetent polemic against single-payer from The Hill.  Written by Dr. Deane Waldman from a Texas think-tank, Waldman's piece is a greatest hits of anti-single-payer arguments conservatives have trotted out for years now.  Classics like "it costs too much!" make their early and obligatory appearance: "Most people thought the cost of Obamacare, $1.34 trillion, was excessive, but that’s peanuts compared to the $18 trillion price tag for Bernie Sanders’ — and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s — Medicare-for-All."  True, recent analysis has put the price tag of Bernie's plan at $32 trillion over ten years.  Considering that we spend about $3.2 trillion right now on healthcare, keeping our current level of spending with even more coverage is actually a pretty successful plan.  If we keep the law as is, then by 2026 we'll be spending $5.7 trillion a year so... tell me again how single-payer is too expensive?

Next up, Waldman trots out the oldie-but-goodie "people die waiting for care" scare chord,

"There is death-by-queueing in single payer systems, where sick persons die from treatable conditions because they could not get care in time and succumb “waiting in line” for care. You don’t even have to go outside the U.S. to see these avoidable deaths. In our own single payer or Medicare-for-All system, the VA, “307,000 veterans may have died waiting for medical care.”

Yes, it is an unfortunate reality that, especially in recent years, more people are dying because the NHS cannot handle the sheer amount of people they need to treat. Likewise with the VA, that 307k number was the cumulative total of veterans who died while they were waiting for their applications to be processed.  That number came from a 2015 report detailing problems with the VA's patient intake process and some of the deaths go as far back as 1988.  Obviously this presents a lot of problems for how VA documented and kept track of the veterans seeking to get care which do need to be solved, but just dropping the number without any context over how many years it took to reach it is misleading to say the least.  That Waldman also tries to make the problem of patients dying because they can't get access to care an exclusively single-payer problem by omitting the 50,000 people who die a year here because they don't have insurance is a signal that he's not using these numbers in good faith.  Lastly, a significant reason why the NHS and VA have these problems keeping pace with their patients needs is that they have been subject to massive budget cuts and under-funding for years on end.  Apparently when you don't give doctors or hospitals the resources they need to keep track of or properly care for their patients, those patients end up dying.  Odd, that.

But we haven't gotten to the best part of Waldman's little screed.  Here's Waldman's utopia healthcare scenario:

"In 2017, the U.S. spent $3.4 trillion on healthcare for 323 million Americans, or $10,526 for every man, woman and child. Imagine if every family of four put $42,105 in an HSA every year! and simply shopped for and paid for their health care. No government stealing our money to pay its bureaucracy. No insurance company delaying or denying care. Just the old but right doctor-patient relationship with no one and nothing in between.

The answer isn’t Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s rebranded socialism. The answer is for us to turn away from government dependence and rely on ourselves."

This is fantasy.  It'd be like if Waldman said that if men wanted to save money on their colonoscopy's, they should look into alien abduction because they don't bill for their time.  Even if we indulged the absurd notion that the average family of four just has $40k laying around doing absolutely nothing, let's see how far that actually gets people.  The average stay in a hospital here runs people $5,220.  So, if you stay in a hospital for eight of the 365 days out of the year, hope you don't need any other care.  Keep in mind, that's just the cost for laying in bed.  You want even more bundles of joy for your family?  Be prepared to pay $10 grand if you go the natural route or $16k if you need a C-Section.  Need a heart bypass?  Kiss $28,000 of those savings goodbye.

Reading this idiocy, I was reminded of this article by The American Conservative from last year which said that within five years conservatives will either directly offer or quietly assent to a universal healthcare policy.  The reason, they said, was because it was the only way to effectively cover everyone at the lowest possible price.  Which, yes, that's true as any Google search comparing our healthcare costs with the rest of the world will tell you.  As far as they where concerned, "[t]he objections to socialized healthcare crumble upon impact with the reality."  Which, again, is 100% true.  My objection to this article is that it assumes that the conservative movement as a whole actually gives a shit about reality or is capable of recognizing it.  Because right here, in the face of ever-growing popularity for Medicare-For-All single-payer system, we have a man contorting himself to put forward a solution which depends on not only turning away from government health programs but the entire concept of insurance itself.  He's committed to something so abjectly ridiculous because that is what he is paid to do so.  Waldman, and all the other hacks along with him, will only double-down on their farcical positions opposing single-payer healthcare the more popular and inevitable it  becomes, expecting them to examine their beliefs and adjust them in response to evidence is a fools errand.

Which brings me to the last article I wanted to talk about, because when it comes to ignoring reality in all its forms, no one has anything on religious fundamentalists.  This story from the Washington Post covers one evangelical congregation in Alabama and how they handle the supposed moral crisis that would come from being a Christian and a Trump supporter.  Their pastor, a guy named Clay Crum, is even doing a sermon series on the Ten Commandments and just got to the one about adultery.  I guess there's supposed to be some sort of tension in whether or not Crum will say something in his sermon condemning Trump as an adulterer, but if you're able to remember a year back when the good Christian white folk of Alabama did their damnedest to elect a child rapist, it won't come as a surprise when Crum says nothing or how easily the congregation is able to wave away something as petty as philandary.

The article does try really, really hard to act like there is a serious conundrum that Christians are trying to solve, which, I guess they get points for trying?  The Post sets things up like this:

"In poll after poll, they have said that Trump has kept his promises to appoint conservative Supreme Court justices, fight for religious liberty, adopt pro-life policies and deliver on other issues that are high priorities for them.

At the same time, many have acknowledged the awkwardness of being both self-proclaimed followers of Jesus and the No. 1 champions of a president whose character has been defined not just by alleged infidelity but accusations of sexual harassment, advancing conspiracy theories popular with white supremacists, using language that swaths of Americans find racist, routinely spreading falsehoods and an array of casual cruelties and immoderate behaviors that amount to a roll call of the seven deadly sins."

All I can really say here is that "awkward" is one hell of a word choice here.  Maybe if we have a sit down with Sheilia Butler, a member of Crum's church, we can better understand this issue, (apologies for the wall of text)

"we’re moving toward the annihilation of Christians...

“Obama was acting at the behest of the Islamic nation,” she began one afternoon when she was getting her nails done with her friend Linda. She was referring to allegations that President Barack Obama is a Muslim, not a Christian — allegations that are false. “He carried a Koran and it was not for literary purposes. If you look at it, the number of Christians is decreasing, the number of Muslims has grown. We allowed them to come in."

 She continues:

Linda nodded. It wasn’t just Muslims that posed a threat, she said, but all kinds of immigrants coming into the country.
“Unpapered people,” Sheila said, adding that she had seen them in the county emergency room and they got treated before her. “And then the Americans are not served.”
Love thy neighbor, she said, meant “love thy American neighbor.”
Welcome the stranger, she said, meant the “legal immigrant stranger.”
“The Bible says, ‘If you do this to the least of these, you do it to me,’ ” Sheila said, quoting Jesus. “But the least of these are Americans, not the ones crossing the border.”
            To her, this was a moral threat far greater than any character flaw Trump might have, as was what she called “the racial divide,” which she believed was getting worse. The evidence was all the black people protesting about the police, and all the talk about the legacy of slavery, which Sheila never believed was as bad as people said it was. “Slaves were valued,” she said. “They got housing. They got fed. They got medical care.”
“I think they are promoting violence,” Sheila said, thinking about the 800 weathered, steel monoliths hanging from a roof to evoke the lynchings, one for each American county where the violence was carried out, including Crenshaw County, where a man named Jesse Thornton was lynched in 1940 in downtown Luverne.
“How do you think a young black man would feel looking at that?” Linda asked. “Wouldn’t you feel a sickness in your stomach?”
“I think it would only make you have more violent feelings — feelings of revenge,” said Sheila.
It reminded her of a time when she was a girl in Montgomery, when the now-famous civil rights march from Selma was heading to town and her parents, fearing violence, had sent her to the country to stay with relatives.
“It’s almost like we’re going to live that Rosa Parks time again,” she said, referring to the civil rights activist. “It was just a scary time, having lived through it.”
She thought an all-out race war was now in the realm of possibility."

So let's just do a quick run down, shall we?  Here we have conspiracies popular with white supremacists (the idea that Obama was a Muslim), language that swaths of America would find racist/spreading falsehoods (the slavery wasn't that bad trope, citing the time of  Montgomery Bus Protests as a bad thing), and casual cruelty (the complete dismissal of even the idea that she should show compassion to immigrants).  Huh, it's almost as if she supports Trump because she's exactly like him.  Weird.

What makes this unintentionally hilarious is that the congregation is under the umbrella of the Southern Baptists, whose leadership is a little sensitive to the faith's staunch support of Trump since they have a history of- as the article so euphemistically puts it- "whiffing" on major social issues of the time.  During the Civil Rights era, for example,  the Southern Baptists either supported or said nothing against segregation, so when it comes to supporting a man who's putting people in concentration camps, you could see how they might be aware of history repeating itself.  Not that they're going to so anything, mind you, but they're aware this time that supporting Trump makes them look bad, which I guess counts as growth, if you want to really abuse the term.

What really gets me about all this though is how just painfully obtuse all of these people are.  They honestly believe that because they live in a world where black men get to be president, gays can get married, and they're called out for being the hypocritical pieces of shit that they are, that all of that somehow makes them oppressed.  Crum says of the election that "[i]t encouraged them that we do still have some political power in this country," which, my only response to this is: Are you fucking kidding me? Conservative Christians have been the bedrock and sole dictator of Republican's social policy for almost forty years.  You can't be a Republican politician at any level without mentioning how much you love Jesus, every presidential candidate has to make the obligatory promise to nominate judges who will strike down Roe vs Wade; these people have one of the two major political parties in this country by the balls and they still think they're disenfranchised? Honestly, what world are these people living in? (That's not a hard one- they live in the world where Muslims are coming to kill them in the night by sneaking in with Mexicans while simultaneously stirring up black unrest to keep the police busy and since Democrats took all their guns away, they'll be helpless to defend themselves in the religious war waging all around us)

What's ironic about all of this is that Crum left the church for a time when he realized how morally bankrupt it was.  As he put it,

"He saw the pastor of his childhood church stealing money, and as he got older, he saw deacons having affairs, Christians behaving in hateful ways and finally he came to see it all as a big sham.

“I thought it was very hypocritical,” he said. “That they pretend. That it’s all a show.”

Unfortunately, Crum is now just another cast member.  He's taken to wearing this lapel pin of tiny baby feet with the tagline that the pin is the size of a fetus' feet at ten weeks. It's all part of his (and the churches) commitment to being Pro-Life.  But that's just as hypocritical, pretend, and performative as everything else that lead Crum to leave the church in the first place.  It's easy to care about a fetus- it's not a real person yet so it hasn't had a chance to do anything disagreeable like being black and angry, or being born on the wrong side of a border, or gay, or pro-gun control, or for whatever other reason these people come up with to say that they don't have to follow through on their god's commandment to love their enemy as they love themselves.  That hypocrisy isn't unique to this one congregation- it's the cornerstone of the Pro-Life movement, after all- but it serves one of my larger points that you can't expect people to turn away from Trump when he gives them everything they want.

Christianity for these people ultimately isn't a philosophy for them to live their own lives by or seek comfort in during troubled times; at the end of the day, their faith is a weapon to bludgeon everyone else into submission.  It's why they don't mind that Trump denigrates every other aspect of society while telling them that they're the rightful heirs of America, it's why they don't care when he throws non-white people into cages or tears children from their parents arms.  This is the world they want to live in, where they're told over and over again how special they are and all the threats to their power-real or imagined- are mercilessly crushed by the state.  All Trump has done is remove the illusion that they were ever anything else.  I can understand why they would want to perpetuate that illusion, but we're not under any obligation to go along with it.

And Now You Know

It's been a running thing between my brother and I for the last two years that, whenever Trump does something, to say "If you ever wondered how the Nazi's sold their ideas, well, now you know." From his wholesale demonization of an entire minority group from literally day one of his campaign, to his talk about how the press is the enemy of the people, to his promising to use official state power to go after the supposed enemies of "righteous" white conservatives, all of it has followed a very predictable pattern. He jumped the gun a little on concentration camps, but we all make mistakes when we're eager to get things done. Right now, we're in the period were the Administration is actively trying to expel immigrants from as many aspects of public life as they can- like purging the military of immigrant service members or having ICE find whatever pretext it can to strip naturalized citizens of their green cards so they can then be deported to countries they haven't lived in for decades.

For anyone still asking, "How could this happen here?" well, hate to break it to you, but the lines dividing America from the Reich were always much thinner than we've been lead to believe. For one thing, the U.S. was a direct model that the Reich copied on their way to gassing millions of people. The Jim Crow segregation laws were what the Nazi's used as a baseline for the Nuremberg Laws stripping Jews of their property, businesses, homes, establishing curfews and the ghettos they were then forcibly moved into. The eugenics movement that started in America provided the language of what a "pure" society looked like once it had been purged of all undesirables. And Goebbels learned most of the propaganda techniques he would use from American advertising. Considering how fervently America clung (then and now) to the idea that the only "real" citizens are the white ones, it's not too surprising that the Nazi's would find a lot to appreciate in a culture like that.

We've kept other aspects of fascism alive and well in our culture, too. The unquestioning, compulsory patriotism and fetishistic worship our military are both easily exploitable for anyone with Fuhrer ambitions. After all, how weird would it really be to for kids to say a pledge of allegiance to the flag and a picture of the Beloved Leader every morning? How strange is really to "force" public displays of national pride and servitude when the National Anthem plays before literally every single sporting event, and at almost every public gathering in general? Add to that the Republican party has spent the last 50 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act slowly but surely turning itself into a haven of white nationalism with its own media ecosystem that actively gaslights its consumers into believing that the "Mainstream Media" is merely a front for leftists to undermine their culture by letting the blacks, women, Mexicans, gays, and the (((globalists))) but they were safe now, safe to hear how the Feminazis, and the PC Police where all working to implement the gay agenda of a Islamic Communist New World Order. All in all, we were a country that kept itself primed to accept a fascist paradigm, all we needed was the right circumstances.

And then the 2008 crash happened. The pillaging of the middle class to feed the rich that started under Reagan and refined under the Clintons finally came due as all the credit funding the gambling racket that had become the housing market collapsed under its own weight. Suddenly there were millions of people jobless, homeless, and coming to the quick realization that the government would only give them half-hearted and poorly executed mortgage relief plans while it was busy dumping trillions into rescuing the banks that broke the world in the first place. With the economy so terrible for so long, I figured it was only a question of "When" Republicans would cough up something like Trump, not "If."

So, while America becoming the fascist hell-hole it secretly wanted to be is depressing but not all that surprising to me, what I underestimated was how strong the "civility" response would be. I mean, I've read the Letter from a Birmingham Jail a lot, had shaken my head at the false empathy King lays out when he talks about the White Moderate and how their council to the Civil Rights movement was to suffer their indignities until they, the White Moderates, deemed the appropriate time, place, and methods for black people to be treated as actual people. It made sense on an intellectual level that society would be made up of people who were complacent with the way the world was set up and didn't want to rock the boat because, hey, they got the perks of being automatically higher in social hierarchies and if they had to actually earn that spot, they might not be able to. Even then, seeing these people up close and personal is a hell of thing to behold.

What makes them so dangerous is that these are the people that autocratic and repressive systems depend on the most to sustain themselves, but they get to pass themselves off, both in their minds eye and to the public at large, as the voices of reason, people who are just trying to find a way for all the disparate pieces of society to come together and comprise on their differences. This is fine when you're trying to figure out what movie to go see or what kind of food you want for dinner, but when you have a group on one side saying, "we think immigrants are an infection that needs to be eradicated to keep our country pure" and the other is saying "This is literally how shipping people to gas chambers starts," it's somewhat... lacking.

Their plays at compassion are nothing more than cowardice, no exceptions. If you think that a woman who speaks for the administration who is taking people's children away by saying they're just going to give the child a bath, or that their children will be in a camp nearby where they'll be able to visit, then whisk those children away never to return- again, exactly the same thing the Nazi's did- if you honestly believe that the woman who defends and justifies the administration that does this suffers the same indignity because a restaurant wouldn't serve her, then your moral compass is downright pathetic. The separation  policy- and the straight indefinite detention plan that replaced it- are  monstrous things that makes anyone who supports them, carries them out, or defends them monstrous in turn if they weren't already. Hemming and hawing your way out of condemning those actions and those who champion them isn't a mark of highly developed sense of empathy, it's just complicity.

Part of this stems from how we're taught about the evils of the past, or, more specifically, the kind of people who perpetrate them. We’re taught that the Nazi’s or the racists in power during the Civil Rights Era were always cut from obviously evil cloth who used their power to stomp down all who would oppose them until finally, heroic virtue had its rightful triumph. The image of screaming crowds surrounding black children while they walk into school or the cheering crowds at Hitler’s speeches have all been used to make us think that the only people who openly support these things are the virulent, frothing hordes that we can then safely Other.

What gets left out is all the seemingly perfectly polite people who treated the denigration or extermination of entire sections of society as natural as the sunrise. They are otherwise perfectly sociable, naturally bigoted without any of the obvious stink that comes with say, marching around with tiki torches chanting “Jews will not replace us.” Again, these are the people oppressive regimes live and die by because, when push comes to shove, they’ll be the ones fighting to block any measure of progress or reform by tut-tutting protests as being too disruptive and how they’d be much more effective if people conducted their marches in such a way that they’d be easily ignored. Deep down, these people understand they benefit greatly from “the way things are” and that if they change, they run the risk of losing those benefits which they'd rather not do, thank you.

The other part of this comes from the White Moderates friends, the ones who go to the same clubs and dinner parties but who feel a stronger urge that Something Should Be Done when they watch the news. These are usually the people bemoaning the lack of civility because they don’t like seeing their social circle lumped in with the open bigotry of people in Make America Great Again hats. These are the people who have “Injustice anywhere is a threat to Justice, everywhere” on at least one placard in their home or office and always told themselves that, if they ever lived through a time of moral crisis, they would no doubt be on the side of justice and freedom etc. etc. Now that they find themselves in the that position, they’ve found out that calling out the villainous Other means calling out their mimosa brunch clubs, suddenly standing up for the equality of all mankind against bigotry gets slightly awkward or, horror of horrors, possibly even rude.

So instead of living through that dreadful reality, they start chanting out America is and always has been a land of great compromise; we should all learn to see things from each other’s point of view to find the hallowed middle ground. They keep pushing this idea so that they never have to confront how they’re much more comfortable defending the despotic people than they ever wanted to believe. They think there’s some way to go back to the time where the subtle bigotries and quiet authoritarianism of their social circles could be easily ignored.

Except that’s not going to happen. ICE has already separated an American family by “accident” in their rush to be the new Gestapo, and the time will come where that isn’t a mistake anymore. Don’t brush off the idea that it would never happen because it already has. We’ve already been the land where one ethnic group monolithically ruled over everyone else through direct or state sanctioned violence and executions. Returning us to a time where the state would actively punish or suppress anyone who threatened the white hegemony was the explicit platform of candidate Trump which he’s spent the last year-and-a-half carrying that promise through. You can’t shut the door on that now that the people who wanted to live in that world again know it’s perfectly acceptable to demand it loudly and publicly with the hope that they’ll back off once they rediscover their alleged decency.

Yes, I know the policy was shut down by the courts, as was part of Trump's new plan to hold families together indefinitely. but these will be talked about as obstacles to be overcome by finding judges and Congressmen who will alter the laws so that they can punish these criminals as they deserve. When that moment comes, it'll come to cheers, it'll be made into a galvanizing force for the Republican base, which they will respond to. There isn't going to be a moment where they go "Wait, are we the baddies?" Anyone still riding the Trump train is in it for the long haul, wherever it takes them.

I’m sure someone somewhere will say that I should still give all these people the benefit of the doubt, but, what doubts am I or anyone supposed to have this point? Trump has been doing all his Trump things for three years; everyone by now has had a chance to figure out where they stand. If literal concentration camps aren’t enough of a warning bell that maybe we’re headed in a bad direction and that we shouldn’t be willing to extend so many good graces to the people who support that, I don’t know what will be. There aren't any complicated reasons or motives left for us to discover, there's just the question of what are we going to do.

My bet is that we'll try to sweep all this under the rug of hyper-partisan polarization so we can pretend there's nothing to worry about, or anything to do, because it's just the usual Democrats and Republicans, always calling each other names. We'll retreat into complaining about how the internet has made everyone so much more disconnected, more willing to be mean to one another rather than connect to find a compromise like we did in mythic days of yore. And then, when someone worse than Trump gets the nomination and possibly the presidency, we'll start to wonder all over again how our strategy of doing absolutely nothing to fix our problems could have gone so wrong.

Fallout: New Vegas

Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas is my favorite game of all time. After playing through it a few times I think the reason I love it so much is that has a pretty sophisticated philosophical underpinning and some pretty neat historical parallels for a post-apocalyptic revenge game.

The plot revolves around you, the nameless Courier, hunting down the man who shot you in the head and stole the platinum chip you were hired to deliver. As you make your way through a post-apocalyptic Mojave desert, you find out what the chip does and how it fits into the machinations of the three main factions fighting for control of the Hoover Dam, and consequently, the Mojave desert as a whole: Caesar's Legion, the New California Republic, and the enigmatic ruler of New Vegas, Mr. House.

What really draws me to this game is just how deep the game draws from Roman history and its various political eras. The most obvious is Caesar's Legion, who use football gear and red shirts to do the best they can to mimic the Legionnaire image of yore. They're led by a man named Edward Sallow who calls himself Caesar and who claims to have structured the marauding army and its principles after the ancient Republic/Empire after he found a history book detailing the accomplishments of the society. The only problem is that the Legion resembles exactly none of the aspects of the Rome it claims to.

See, the Legion isn't really a state, or a government. They have no civil or legislative power structure to speak of, their hierarchy is strictly military. Why this clashes is that even in the death throes of the Roman republic, a.k.a when real-life Caesar was in his prime, the whole point of getting to the top of the Roman power structure was to be Consul, or, the chief executive of the state. Commanding your own legions was prestigious, no doubt, but command over a military unit was still just the means to the commanding the civil state. 

There's also the issue of how the Legion treats the people they conquered. The republic, and even the Empire for most of its run, sought to incorporate and integrate the people they conquered into the Roman system. They took a massive amount of slaves (the only legacy the Legion faithfully continues), but for anyone left behind the deal usually was they could keep their own customs and traditions as long as they didn't interfere with or cause any trouble for their new overlords. 

The Legion, by contrast, annihilates the culture and tradition of every tribe they conquer. Any tribe "incorporated" into the Legion is purged of its adult fighting men, the women are forced into sex slavery while the children are put into chattel service or brainwashed into becoming new Legionnaires.

At its heart, the old Roman system that the New Vegas Caesar claims to be so inspired by is a system designed to direct every aspect of society towards optimizing itself to function under a civil, republican state. The Roman Republic is specifically designed to push ambitious Romans into serving the wider goals of the state with an extreme deference to tradition through complex networks of patronage while the Cursus Honorum provided a clear, if cut throat, proscribed path to climb the civic ladder into greater positions of of power. The Legion being a strictly military operation with no civil state to speak of with a general acting as a permanent dictator sort of makes them antithetical to the legacy they claim to carry on.  But, it does line them up pretty well with a later imperial dynasty, the Severans.

The Severan dynasty was started by a man named Septimius Severus. Proclaimed Emperor by his legions after the death of Commodus in 193, Severus fully established himself as Emperor in 197 after, for Rome, a light period of civil warring. The man Sallow has the strongest analogue to though is Septimius' son, Caracalla.  

Caracalla, born Lucuis Septimius Bassianus, was Severus' eldest son, and when his father died control of the empire was split between Caracalla and his younger brother, Geta. Septimius' parting advice to his sons was "be harmonious, enrich the army, scorn all other men." Given that Septimius died in February of 211 with Geta following him in December of that year, you can see which parts of that motto Caracalla was more interested in following. To be fair, the parts of his father's creed Caracalla was committed to he carried out in spectacular fashion, killing up to 20,000 people who had supported his brother after Caracalla assassinated him, he let his soldiers plunder and murder the city of Alexandria to their hearts content after the city staged a play mocking Caracalla's story that he killed Geta in self-defense. Caracalla spent most of his short reign campaigning against barbarian tribes in Germany and gave the army such a significant raise he debased the currency with the all the money he was creating to pay them.

Sallow, likewise, pays no heed to anyone or anything that isn't directly related to his army, and is constantly keeping them on the move conquering and plundering so they don't get antsy and revolt against him. And since Sallow wants to bring as much of the world as he can under the yoke of his slaving and raping army, I think it's fair to say that he can also inherit Edward Gibbon's characterization of Caracalla as the common enemy of mankind on top of everything else.

Ironically enough, if you want to see a truer representation of the Roman Republic, you just need to look over to the Legion's archenemy, the New California Republic. The NCR is actually a better analogue to Rome in pretty much every way; it started out as a small, independent city-state that grew, through military prowess and diplomacy, to become the dominant power of its state. It is also endlessly expansionist as the late Republic became, and unlike the Legion, works to fully incorporate the territories it conquers into its wider political system. (Before I go further, it should be noted that the creators of the games based the NCR on the early version of America in the games.  Since the U.S. follows a similar pattern to the republic as well, the transfer isn't much of a fuss.)

But the NCR is very much the end stage Roman Republic, so while they have a very high value on political enfranchisement and democracy, the actual voting process is driven and manipulated by small, powerful interests groups, most noticeably the brahmin (basically cattle) ranchers, and the various trade companies looking to establish monopolies on trading routes new and old. While the NCR does for the most part let their new territories do as they did before, most of those territories are acquired by force because they have something the NCR finds desirable or they are simply "along the way" to a goal of the NCR, like control of the Hoover Dam or New Vegas. There's also the problem that their expansion is drawing in abundant resources that filter primarily to the elite factions I mentioned earlier, making the system more reliant on the spoils of conquest to function and funneling the wealth and power from said conquests into narrower segments of society.

This, in a greatly overstuffed nutshell, is exactly what happened to the Roman Republic after it started its era of major expansion after they defeated Carthage in the Second Punic War. As they were able to bring more and more of the Mediterranean world under their control, they brought in raw materials (gold, silver, timber, and slaves) and all the material wealth of the people they conquered back to Rome.  The problem was that since only men of Senatorial (already the richest men in the country, by default) could command legions, all that wealth went straight into the very top of the Roman world.

Since Rome didn't have a professional army at this time, all their soldiers were citizen farmers (you had to own land to be eligible to serve), but since the campaigns were lasting for years at a time, these soldiers farms went fallow while they were off fighting Rome's "enemies." Their families, in order to not starve, would often be forced to sell their land to richer Senatorial citizens, who then incorporated those farms into ever increasing estates. When all the wars were over and the soldiers came home, they found they had no home to return to, and instead of being able to work what used to be their farms under the auspice of the new landlord, they found their land being worked by the hordes of slaves the brought back from the places they conquered.

Naturally, this created something of a problem among the Roman citizenry. Tiberius Gracchus and then his younger brother Gaius would be the first to try to reform the Roman system and try to make sure the spoils of Rome's wars trickled down to the people who fought them, but they were both murdered on behalf of the Senate, and the question of who should have what and how much power in Rome would eventually lead to more people like the Gracchi's coming to power who were also murdered by the Senate, to civil wars, to finally a point where Octavian could kill the last vestiges of the Republic dead and start the Empire we all know and love.

The NCR stands right on the precipice of that whole, sad story. The expansion has made them more reliant on the success of the military to maintain the government's legitimacy, they need the resources that would come from controlling Hoover Dam and the money generated from New Vegas to recoup the expenses of winning the war, and since they are becoming more militaristic, the focus of governmental power shifts away from the amorphous blob of the legislature to the more dynamic, singular personalities of the executive. If the NCR wins, they'll have no other rival to focus on, and all their political and military machinations, like Rome's, will turn inward, until there's so much chaos that the people will be happy to forget their republican roots just to have one, singular personality in charge of everything if for no other reason than that one person will be able to restore some semblance of order to their lives.

Which brings us to Mr. Robert House, billionaire, ruler of New Vegas, and robot-builder extraordinaire. House is actually one of the characters I'm most impressed by in the game since it would've been easy to make him the obviously evil overlord looking to crush everyone under his heel for his own gain. House survived the nuclear apocalypse that made the Fallout world into what it is and has spent the 250 years or so since the bombs fell trying to reestablish his Vegas as the Old World getaway it once was. He is unabashedly in favor of autocracy, doesn't think of anyone outside of how he can use them to advance his own agenda, and casually disposes of anyone who becomes a hindrance or useless to him. Instead, he's an interesting exploration of a Benevolent Despot and, in our Roman analogues, fits best with Octavian and a lesser known emperor named Diocletian. Octavian, of course, was the first proper emperor of the newly established Roman Empire.

Just a side note here, I'm not using the name Augustus as is convention because I think it's important to remember that while Octavian took on a seemingly more noble and softer approach to his rule than his wild and ambitious younger days which saw him killing off literally every enemy he could think of in the proscriptions or his sacrilegious break in to the vaults of the Temple of Vesta to read Marc Antony's will so he could expose Antony's even bigger crime of disinheriting his Roman children for the ones he had with Cleopatra. The softer, subtler, more mature strategy Octavian used in his later years is based off the same ruthless philosophy he used from the very beginning; adopting the name Augustus was very much a strategy to make people forget the bloodletting of his youth, that he had left all that thinking behind, but it's important to understanding the man himself and his place in Roman history to take whatever steps are necessary to not let that strategy work. Hence, Octavian.

Anyway, Octavian learned from his adoptive father Julius Caesar that going around openly acting like a king while your enemies are very much alive and well is a good way to get yourself murdered and not much else. So, to solve that problem, he made the previously mentioned to-do list of everyone he wanted dead, and then went about acting like the Republic was thriving and he was in no way, at all, a king or an emperor.

After Octavian beat Antony in the last civil war of the Republic, Octavian went about propping up the old Republican order in public as much as he possibly could. He had the Senate "award" him powers and privileges that by sheer coincidence made him the head of the army, the civil government, and the religious order. This wasn't so hard to do, since most of the people on Octavian's old kill list were prominent Senators, so all the ones still breathing were doing so because they either didn't possess the capability to pose a threat to Octavian's power or were very dedicated to appeasing him. The second prong of Octavian's strategy was still holding Consular elections and elections all down the line to maintain the illusion of the old Republic; he portrayed himself as nothing more than just the first citizen among equals, or Princep. It was a beautifully orchestrated and executed lie; plus the Romans loved him for ending the constant civil wars and bloodshed that came with them. As a result, all the honors that placed every aspect of Roman life under his direct control where seen not as a tyrannical seizure of power but rather as rewards justly and honorably earned by Rome's most prestigious citizen.
 

 Where Octavian sought to hide his autocracy, Diocletian openly celebrated it so he could use that power to completely remake the Roman world. Diocletian coming to power ended what is now known as the Crisis of the Third Century, a period of fifty years where, after the end of the Severan dynasty, Rome was plagued by famines, invasions, and even split up into three separate entities at one point. Diocletian came to power in 284 A.D. and went about crushing every problem the Empire faced at the time. He beat back the various Germanic tribes attacking the Empire from across the Rhine and Danube, he defeated Sassinad Persia to the East them negotiated a peace treaty with them, he established what became known as the Tetrarchy, where he and co-Emperor Maximian, along with two junior emperors, split the Empire into four areas each was responsible for. He changed the borders of the Empire's various districts and how the army was garrisoned in them so they could better respond to threats (this also made them smaller so no ambitious general could have enough military power to proclaim themselves emperor, which happened a lot in the 3rd century). Put simply, Diocletian is the number one reason the Empire survived long enough to collapse a hundred years later.

Like I said earlier, House is a mix-and-match of the two emperors, and takes what I think are the best aspects of each. From Diocletian he takes the sheer will and capability of taking a shattered and broken patch of the world and rebuilding it brick-by-brick into something vibrant again while his ruthless pursuit of his goal using all avenues available is pure Octavian. 

House's main goal requires that the world be functional enough that the people in it have enough the income to make New Vegas rich and have enough protected infrastructure to get them there safely to deposit said income. It makes no sense to him to wage a war against the people who he wants as customers, so he entices them instead, with all the glamour and allure that Vegas can provide.  But he is adamant that Vegas is his, and anyone wanting to business with it or in it is going to do so on his non-negotiable terms. In his ending, he uses his robot army to kick the NCR out of New Vegas and its surrounding areas. Well, the military branch of the NCR, anyway, the civilian population is welcome if not encouraged to make their way to New Vegas whenever they see fit. House also does away with the two main flaws of his inspirations; he doesn't have any desire to enact any morality laws like Octavian did and he pointedly refuses the divine aspects of power that Diocletian brought into the Imperial fold with its accompanying religious persecutions.

Underpinning all the historical notes is the theme that mindlessly clinging to old ideas will doom us to the ennui and destruction their adherents want to save themselves from. In the DLC Dead Money, the phrase "Let Go, and Begin Again" is hammered home at every possible moment just in case you don't pick up on the fact that it's the theme of the entire game.

Seriously, if you want to find the best solution to almost every single moral conundrum in the game, figuring out to best apply the phrase "Let Go, and Begin Again" is gonna be the way to go.  The game is rife with examples of how when people don't do this it ruins every aspect of their lives and the people around them. We've already gone over how the Legion using the edifice of Rome but without any of Rome's actual governing philosophy makes them less an agent of governance and more a force of tyrannical brutality. But the poster child for obstinate, damn-the-consequences adherence goes to the Brotherhood of Steel.

For non-players, the Brotherhood is a paramilitary organization that follows a rigid Codex whose primary purpose is hunting down and collecting technology - specifically weapons technology - so that people in the wider world can't use it. They do this because they believe that the unfettered pursuit and use of technology is directly responsible for the destruction of the Old World and humanity can't be trusted with that level of technology ever again. Like pretty much every faction in Fallout, they have a point, but pursue it too far. By the time of New Vegas, the organization is going through a rough time. They're quarantined in an underground bunker that only a select few can leave. The actual strength of the chapter is dwindling; they lost most of their forces in a disastrous pre-game battle under their old leader and they don't have enough people left to replenish their numbers. This is somewhat complicated by the fact that the Codex also forbids them from admitting people into the organization who weren't already born into it.

One of your companions, Veronica, is a member of the Brotherhood and her personal quest is about you trying to convince the new Elder that they need to modify how they do things or else their entire way of life will literally die out. In the end, the Elder recognizes the necessity of adapting how they do things and the ultimate futility of strict adherence to the Codex, but he refuses. The only outcomes for Veronica is to willfully go into exile or stay and suffer in silence as everything she holds dear suffers a long, slow, pointless death.

This theme of being stuck in limbo between difficult choices isn't unique to Veronica. Almost every quest of the sentient members who can tag along for your journey through the wasteland involve putting something from their past behind them and moving on with their life. Whether it's helping Boone overcome the guilt from a lifetime of killing in the NCR, including having to kill his wife to save her from a fate of sexual slavery in the Legion or helping Cass wreck bloody vengeance on the people who destroyed her family's caravan business, to convincing Raul that it's still worth it to fight for things in the world even, especially, when you've lost something precious before, or getting Arcade to finally come to terms with his father's legacy in the Enclave by helping him put together his father's old team and realize that he can exist on his own terms.

The game does give you the chance to use the past as inspiration, as well. One of the factions you come into contact with is a tribe called the Great Khans, a Mongol-inspired outlaw tribe that's existed from the very first Fallout game. They're currently courted by the Legion to attack the NCR in the upcoming rematch for control of Hoover Dam. You can break the alliance by convincing the leader that the Legion won't treat them as equals if they win but will make them all chattel slaves instead. But even with that, it's still not enough. Papa Khan needs something, a path for his people to follow to stave off extinction. And you can give it to them, by finding a book detailing the history of the Mongols, which inspires the Khans to head to Wyoming and create a pretty respectable empire of their own by incorporating the forgotten social sciences back into their society.

While this theme is a through line in the vanilla game, the DLC's go out of their way to make it as explicit as possible. In Honest Hearts, you meet Joshua Graham, a former general in the Legion who was banished and burned alive after he failed to win the first battle of the Hoover Dam. Graham is a brutal and terrifying warrior, and again, to get the best ending available, you have to convince him to let go of all the anger that fuels his violence so he can have a sense of inner peace and tranquility to finally put his blood-lust and shame behind him. In Dead Money, you have to convince your three heist companions to put aside their own vendettas or literally all of you are going to die.  There's even a chance of you dying a humiliating death locked in a vault if you don't resist the temptation of greed that's driven everybody to the casino in the first place. Old World Blues has you convince a conclave of mad scientists to stop using their passion for Science! as an excuse to cut things up and put them back together for no reason and instead use their discoveries to positively shape the future of mankind.

But it's the last DLC, Lonesome Road, where the game uses this theme to best effect. In this DLC, you are drawn to a place called the Divide by another Courier named Ulysses (as in the general, not the Greek hero). As the story goes on, you find out that Ulysses used to be a member of the Legion as well, his role as a courier was a cover for him to be an advance scout and a spy. You also learn that his breaking point came when he helped a tribe called the White Legs wipe out the settlement of New Canaan, a refuge of Mormons who had rebuilt their culture after the bombs fell. The guilt he faces over wiping out a culture that survived for so long and against so much breaks something inside Ulysses, who, to put it lightly, is obsessed with symbols and their meanings

If you pick up all the audio diaries he left behind in the Divide, you can talk him down from his plan to use nuclear warheads to wipe out the NCR and the Legion simultaneously. Why I think this DLC uses the theme of letting go of the past so well is that Ulysses wraps himself up in the ideologies and symbols of worlds and places that are dead and gone and the conclusion he draws from this is that since symbols and the people who give them meaning all inevitably die, well, then it doesn't really matter if that end comes sooner rather than later. But by collecting his history and using it to tell him that he can and has grown out and adapted the beliefs he has out a variety of symbols and experiences. And by doing so, you get him to realize that while ideologies don't always survive intact, they don't really need to, they can be molded into something new and used in more ways than anybody knew they could be.

And that, at its core, is the point of the game. It's actually what makes it an optimistic game. The past shapes us and we're never really done with it, but we aren't beholden to it. We can move on, we can choose to be something other than what our pasts have made us into. It's painful and always more work than we thought, but it can be done. More importantly though, if you do everything right in the game, you can heal pretty much every wound you come across and make the world a better place than you found it.

Which, think about that.

The game is saying that no matter how broken, how terrible the world is, if you do the work, you can still fix yourself and the people around you. But you have to do the work to make that happen. You'll have to give up a lot, and do a lot of things for a lot of people that you will probably hate doing, but, in the end, it can still fix the world for the better.

Which, all in all, is a pretty comforting thought, right now.


Notes:

If you want to dive into the history of Rome a bit more, my suggestions are read The Storm Before the Storm by Mike Duncan, Rubicon and Dynasty by Tom Holland, and check out Duncan's History of Rome podcast and Dan Carlin's Death Throes of the Republic.

On Jordan Peterson

I've never been impressed by Jordan Peterson. When he first started making the rounds on the internet a few years ago, I just figured him as just the latest in the large and never ending category of public thinkers who make their money by telling shiftless white dudes that the world really does belong to them by right and that women and minorities are stealing it from them. It's a nice and well worn path to success, and now that he's at the point where more people actually know of him, I just wanted to go over some of the things from his profile in The New York Times that highlight for me just how empty a vessel Petersen's intellect really is.

The thing that can't be stressed enough about Peterson's ethos is that is embarrassingly lazy. For example, a foundational principle of Peterson's philosophy is that women are an inherently chaotic force that, unless properly contained and directed, are a threat to functioning society. As evidence for why we should just accept this, Peterson says this:

"You know you can say, ‘Well isn’t it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine’ — well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn’t matter because that is how it’s represented. It’s been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can’t change it. It’s not possible. This is underneath everything. If you change those basic categories, people wouldn’t be human anymore. They’d be something else.
They’d be transhuman or something. We wouldn’t be able to talk to these new creatures.”

Never mind cultures that didn't portray women as chaotic forces of evil, but just examine the reasoning on display. Here is a supposed public intellectual saying that we cannot critically examine why cultures throughout time and all over the planet have done everything they can to keep women out of power and realms of influence even and especially when they proved more competent than their male competitors (Hatshepsut being a prime example). We're supposed to just automatically accept these portrayals as unvarnished truth that we as a modern society are ashamed to admit because of political correctness.

Also keep in mind that Peterson is a psychologist whose entire job is to dig into where people's preconceived mental notions and behaviors come from and why we continue them. Apparently, investigating the motives behind thousands of years of concentrated effort to denigrate and subjugate half of the population is not only a waste of time but also a fundamental threat to what makes us human.

This is just stupid. It's nothing more than Peterson refusing to question his own assumptions and trying to pass it off as ancient wisdom that's keeping us from spiraling off into some kind of Philip K. Dick dystopia. I guess we should all be grateful that he's doing such important work.

The next thing I want to delve into is why Peterson's entire message of self-reliance and self-determination is hypocritical bullshit. Here's his response:

"He was angry at God because women were rejecting him,” Mr. Peterson says of the Toronto killer. “The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”

Mr. Peterson does not pause when he says this. Enforced monogamy is, to him, simply a rational solution. Otherwise women will only go for the most high-status men, he explains, and that couldn’t make either gender happy in the end."

He goes on to say:

"But aside from interventions that would redistribute sex, Mr. Peterson is staunchly against what he calls “equality of outcomes,” or efforts to equalize society. He usually calls them pathological or evil.

He agrees that this is inconsistent. But preventing hordes of single men from violence, he believes, is necessary for the stability of society. Enforced monogamy helps neutralize that."

Peterson would write on his own blog that when he's talking about the enforced monogamy he's talking about isn't some police state where the government forcibly pairs women with incels, he just means enforced monogamy in the cultural and societal sense where women are just expected to marry and have sex with men so they don't get angry at the world and start killing people.

Again, this is complete and utter nonsense.  Peterson, like so many libertarians before him, wants to set up some kind of demarcation between culture and government where cultural norms just enforce themselves. This is a smoke screen that stupid people mistake for substance.  

 

Back in the good old days of socially enforced monogamy, you know what kept women from owning property, having control of their inheritances, and working jobs where they could build significant independent income? Laws. Cultural norms have been, and always will be, enforced by the state- pretending that setting up a culture that mandates women grow up to become wives won't come with complementing government action to ensure that's the path they take is either ignorance, obfuscation, or some mix of the two. With Peterson, it's hard to tell the bullshit he's merely selling from the bullshit he earnestly believes.

But let's look at another portion of the interview, where Peterson is talking to a fan and brings up The Feminine Mystique

"I read Betty Friedan’s book because I was very curious about it, and it’s so whiny, it’s just enough to drive a modern person mad to listen to these suburban housewives from the late ’50s ensconced in their comfortable secure lives complaining about the fact that they’re bored because they don’t have enough opportunity. It’s like, Jesus get a hobby."

Let's break down a couple of things here.  Remember, Peterson's whole message revolves around the fact that the world is going the way it's going because men are being robbed of their ability to successfully determine what their own lives are going to be, that society is deeming them useless, dooming them to lives of ennui and dissatisfaction. And yet, when reading a book by a woman who describes exactly this same phenomenon, he doesn't understand why they're so upset. He genuinely doesn't seem to understand why women stuck in lives they have no control over would be so dissatisfied living them simply because they have material comfort.

On top of all that, remember that Peterson's solution to violent men is to remake society we live in so women have less independent opportunity so there are more of them to be sexually available for the "lesser" men who can't compete with the opportunities women create for themselves and leave those men in the lurch. In Peterson's world, women are simply the means for men to lead more fulfilling lives and all the self-reliance, deterministic messages that spew out of his mouth just don't apply to them.

Lastly, I want to dive in to why Peterson has earned a reputation for being the Deepak Chopra to budding fascists. At one point in the interview, Peterson says this

"The left, he believes, refuses to admit that men might be in charge because they are better at it. “The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence."

So, here's the rub in all this. For Peterson, white privilege doesn't exist, which creates a bit of a problem since in virtually every aspect of society, from income to wealth to job opportunities to even prison sentences, being white and male gives a person perks that can't be accounted for by education, ability, or really any other factor. This presents a problem because you can't ignore the preferential treatment given to white men because 1. It robs white men of their supposed victim-hood that Peterson is capitalizing off of (basically, you can't be robbed of your privileges by feminists if those privileges don't exist) and 2. If he acknowledges that race and gender confer undeserved advantages to his audience, well, there goes his audience. So what's a hack to do? Well, obviously, he squares this circle by saying that those privileges were earned by men being just that competent.

How this ties into fascism is that the base of all fascistic thought is that current hierarchies and the societies that built them are the natural and superior ways of being, that all of those who are at the top are there because of merit, and anyone clamoring to rise above their station is a threat to the system and must be subjugated or destroyed. 

When Peterson talks in those vague generalities about how we need to make culture more Christian because Christianity has been around for so long and is the "root" of Western civilization, about how men are at the top of societies hierarchies because they're just simply the best people to be in charge of things, he's very careful to not say that other religions or women are inherently inferior. That's the the thing that separates him from more explicit fascists like Milo Yiannopoulus or Richard Spencer, which isn't an accident. I'm sure Peterson can see how Milo went from being a media darling to hawking supplements on InfoWars or how Spencer went from a hotshit college provocateur to begging for money to fund the lawsuits against him after the Charlestown rally last August.

By avoiding the explicit condemnations of inferiority that other alt-right thinkers engage in, Peterson gets to keep his hands clean, so to speak, with the veneer of respectability and all the money that comes with it. If members of his audience drift towards more explicit speakers advocating the superiority of white men who call for more extreme suppression of women, minorities, and Jews, Peterson can throw his hands up and say "Not my fault. I never said anything like that." 

 

And sure, he may be technically right, but Peterson is the well-dressed, well-spoken doorman for a whole slew of vile, reactionary politics that are growing in popular and political power across the world right now.  And we shouldn't let his suits or manicured speech patterns get in the way of us recognizing that and calling him out as such.