Fallout 4 is a Terrible Game

As I was walking this morning, I saw this Jeep with the Brotherhood of Steel logo on it. Since I will take any opportunity to think about the Fallout series, my mind started drifting over the game's when I landed on how terribly awkward the Brotherhood's introduction in Fallout 4 is.

It starts out well enough- you come across a small, besieged scouting party holed up in a police station in post-apocalyptic Cambridge outside Boston. You help them clear out the ghouls attacking them, then find out they're on a mission to recover some advanced technology they don't want falling into the wrong hands. It all goes well, you shoot your way out from an ambush by the big bads of the game and even get a cool energy gun as a reward. 

Then, just as everything is going so well, you get an offer to join the organization right then and there. 

The first time I played the game, this blew me away and practically killed all my hopes for it. Overly dramatic, no doubt, but it served as a harbinger, a sign of things to come that point to the fatal flaw at the core of Fallout 4. That is, Fallout 4 is an open-world RPG that doesn't want you to engage in its world. 

To catch everybody up, the premise of the game is that your character lived in the time before the nuclear war that annihilated the world. You actually start the game on the day all hell breaks loose, making it into a vault just minutes after the bombs start dropping before you're thrown into a cryogenic freezing chamber. Time passes, until you wake up to venture out into the wasteland to figure out why you've been awoken, who did it, and what's become of the world in the 200 years after the atomic war. 

Your very first mission involves you stumbling across a rag tag group of survivors, besieged by the ne'er-do-wells of the wasteland, who call themselves the Minutemen. You find out that they're the last survivors of a group dedicated to reestablishing a form of democratic society with all that entails in the Commonwealth wasteland. But they were betrayed and set upon by another mercenary group, who annihilated the rest of the Minutemen and let the survivors run into the wild to let the world finish the job. 

This wisp of a group is seeking one last place of refuge, somewhere they can make a home and rebuild. Since you're the main character, you lead them to the ruins of what was once the suburb you lived in with your family and it's here you get introduced to the settlement system. Or, as I like to call it, the mechanic that single handedly strangles the game in its crib. 

I have always, always hated the settlement system. At first, I thought it was because you are bulldozed into doing it- even if you don't want to, you have missions where the direct result is the creation of a settlement that you're now responsible for. Even if you neglect them, it's still an active decision that you have to maintain. The looting, inventory, and upgrading/customization options all either directly incentivize or require you to have at least one bare minimum settlement that can fulfill those functions. 

In a game that's ostensibly about you affecting the world through the choices you make, having a mechanic that requires you to shape the world in one specific way is actively antagonistic to that experience. And for the longest time, I was content to leave it at that. 

But then that little decal sticker led me to a breakthrough. That the system is actually worse than I thought. Because, the reason your induction into all the different factions have to be so divorced from the world the game presents is that the game never intends for you to fully experience the world it takes place in. 

Your settlements don't integrate with the communities in the world. Some individual farms and homesteads come under your protection if you pursue the Minutemen story, but once they do that, they just disappear into the background until they're an objective to protect in the mind-numbingly repetitive quest system. 

It'd be great if, after you've built up your settlement network, you had the opportunity to set up alliances or trade networks with the two main cities in the Boston wasteland. Hell, even if you just had the chance to use your settlements as supply boosts for the Minutemen, or workshops for the Brotherhood, or safe houses as part of the runaway slave network the Railroad runs, they'd be amazing. 

Instead, the settlements become more insular the more advanced they become. Eventually, you can build shops at them, meaning all your gear and loot selling needs will be contained to the settlements, so what's the point going anywhere else?

This leaves nothing for you to invest in the world the game creates or explore it for any other reason than to strip mine it for the raw materials you need to build and upgrade your settlements. 

Which is a goddamn shame when you get right down to it. Fenway Park has been turned into a community called Diamond City where people turned the baseball diamond into a thoroughfare which they built a community around. There's a seedy neighborhood of misfits, criminals, and the desperate called Good Neighbor that should be so much fun to delve into but you get like, three or four quests there. And then you're done forever with the place.

The core of the Fallout games is the wider world they exist in. There's a joy of discovery in wandering around the wasteland, tripping over whatever weird shit is waiting out there for you. And there's plenty here in the game that delivers on that front, too.

One of my absolute favorites, in this or any Fallout game that I've played, involves you creeping up on the Salem Witch Museum. When you get there, you find a few mauled bodies, one of which has recording on them. When you listen to it, you hear the small platoon talk amongst themselves when they hear something following them in the dark. When you go inside the basement door, working your way through the building, all is quiet except a very heavy thump from the floor above you. Then, when you finally get up to the second floor, the lights flicker over all the naked mannequins inside until you finally come face-to-face with the thing that slaughtered the mercenaries.

That, is a Deathclaw. An 8-foot-tall figure of death that's terrified Fallout players for years. And now you have to fight one in a dark, cramped, enclosed space with nowhere to run. It's a great moment, full of tension, atmosphere, with a terrifying and exhilarating climax.

But the game doesn't care. Which is what makes it so incredibly frustrating to play. Bethesda knows what draws people to the Fallout series, knows what makes the game interesting, but in the end decides not to focus on them at all. Instead, they shunt you off into a glorified inventory management mini-game and insist you enjoy it so you won't notice the lack of attention paid to literally every aspect of the world.

There are moments, scattered throughout the story, that almost, almost make the game worthwhile. The Railroad, with its mission to free the androids created solely to be slaves by the Institute is one of the coolest factions in the series. The moment you find out your son is actually in his sixties and is leading the Institute's efforts to swap out real people with identical android copies to extend their influence and destabilize the region, awesome. All your companions have the classic "burn outs need redemption" story lines- save two, who are excellent exceptions to this rule-that are a delight to play through (Kat, Piper, and Nick are my favorites). 

For all that, though, none of those threads are woven together to create a cohesive whole. None of them compound, enhance, or enrich the others. Nothing that happens in the world really matters because you aren't connected to it. Whatever end you choose, the sun comes up on a wasteland that barely even notices the next day and the day after that. And that feeling, that all you've done means nothing, just makes the whole experience feel like a crushing waste of time.

A Song of Ice and Fire Review

Over the summer, I decided that since Game of Thrones ended so abysmally, I decided to do the thing I told myself I wouldn't do the entire eight years the show ran- I would read George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. I'm glad I didn't choose to read it until now, because it's clear the themes of Martin's work flew over David Benioff and D.B. Weiss' head like an albatross over a ship at sea. My laziness saved me a great deal of frustration from a rather piss poor adaptation both in terms of comparing it to the source material and how well it told its own story.

Overall, the books are pretty good; the wandering close 3rd-person chapters- were each chapter is told in a different point of view- is a rather brilliant idea that, more than the events and scope of the story itself, make the books so grand and cosmic in scale. Martin's prose has a rather brisk pace to it allowing him to modulate the speed of the action on the page without losing any momentum. And Martin's remixing of historical events into a fantasy setting adds the layer of political authenticity and intrigue that people have been eating up in the series for over twenty years now.

As always, I've got issues, too. You can tell Martin really wanted to put the whole idea of the chosen child hero so common in fantasy through the ringer to show just how awful the idea really is. So we have the Stark children, ranging from three to fifteen, and Daenerys, who's thirteen when the series starts with her being sold to Khal Drogo. The problems here are twofold.

The first is that- especially with Sansa, Arya, and Dany- they live in a world where they are constantly held under the threat of rape or sexual exploitation from well, everyone. Sansa has the Hound, Ser Dontos, Tyrion, and of course Littlefinger all doing the Westersoi barely legal countdown, Arya spends all of Clash of Kings and Storm of Swords held captive by various soldiers and mercenaries who never fail to mention how she'd better behave or they'll violate her in a myriad set of ways, and then of course there's Dany who gets the wonderful experience of marital rape with Drogo and then works her way down to rampant sexual harassment from Jorah Mormont and Daario Naharis after Drogo bites it.

Compounding all this is that you can't follow through on the danger you're putting your protagonist in, lest you become that fantasy series distinguished by its non-zero occurrences of child rape. 

So what to do? 

With Dany, Martin decided that she should find a way to make Drogo see her as an equal. To do this, she introduces him to the cowgirl position, and by extension, consent. Martin tries really hard to justify this with the logic that since the Dothraki are nomadic horse worshipping people, they equate riding with dominance; so it totally makes sense that when Dany rides Drogo in front of the whole khalasar the only possible outcome is that they see her as an equal, too. It’s still an obvious attempt to post hoc justify all the abuse Dany suffered because she just needed to find a way to engage in the behaviour on her own terms. 

Martin lightly did this to Sansa, too. After her marriage to Tyrion and the Red Wedding, she has a mildly sexy dream of Tyrion and the Hound, but there’s no physical consummation either in the dream or real life. So at least Martin had the decency(?) not to fully commit to “it’s totally okay this is happening because they wanted it all along, just not the way they initially got it” twice. Dany, at least, got dragons to put her in a position of power that keeps her relatively ensconced from physical attempts. Sansa, meanwhile, gets jack shit. 

On top of living under the constant threat of the sadosexual impulses from burgeoning serial killer Joffery, Sansa then gets passed around to ostensible protectors who only further victimize her. The Hound saves Sansa from being raped by the mob during the riot in King’s Landing, then forces her to kiss and sing to him during the Battle of Blackwater Bay when he deserts. Tyrion shields her as best he can while he’s acting Hand, then when during their forced marriage he uses the fact that he wants to have sex with a 13-year-old to fuel his self-hatred because the only way any woman who’s not a whore will sleep with him is if he forces her to do so. Which, it's nice that Sansa’s potential assault is used to fuel man pain. It’s great, even. Then there’s Ser Dontos who, acting as a pawn of Littlefinger, helps frame Sansa for Joffery’s assassination then delivers her directly into Littlefinger’s pedo hands. 

Arya at least gets off easy by having anyone remotely close to her die or move on from her, driving her need to become a little miss murder machine to protect herself. 

But yeah, Martin creates this constant threat of bodily violation around the female characters, but can’t really follow through with much of any of it because of how pointlessly horrific it’d be, but he can’t have all that tension or danger go to waste so he has to redirect it to side characters who end up as gristle so Martin doesn’t subject his child heroes to wave after wave of nihilistic violence.

The second problem that comes out of this is that, in the end, Martin ends up having to rely heavily on the very trope he’s trying to deconstruct and examine. Jon Snow leads the defense of the Wall and becomes Lord Commander when he’s 16 because he’s just that well trained and competent from his whole undercover wilding adventure? Sure. Robb becomes king at 15 then goes on to run circles around commanders twice or three times his age? Why not? Bran becomes trainee to a shape-shifting, sorta time traveling omniscient psychic when he’s nine? Totally. 

By making his characters so young, Martin has no real choice but for the trope that child heroes go through extraordinary circumstances become exemplary individuals who naturally become more than their fellow men, thus are they able to fulfill their grand destinies. Basically, by trying so hard to throw cold water on that particular storytelling trope, Martin in the end has to rely on our acceptance of it to roll with the idea that the whole world will be saved by a handful of teenagers without blinking an eye.

The biggest loser of all this is though is Martin’s thematic statement of purpose. To borrow a phrase from Steven Attawell, Martin is a Romantic, not a nihilist, but it’d be hard to figure that out from Martin’s work at first glance. Since Martin creates a charnel house that consumes characters as they try, and fail, repeatedly, to save or otherwise improve the lives of people around them, you get the sense that all attempts to improve are bound to fail in the face of an uncaring, ruthless, world. It’s all very hopelessly pointless.

Except.

Except the point Martin wants to make in all this is that heroism and bravery aren’t found in the result, they’re found in the attempt. In sticking your neck out against hopeless odds, against a brutal, cruel world that relentlessly just doesn’t care. Because to Martin, the point is when it comes to living, we have a choice to be a reflection of the world around us, or to set ourselves apart, to rise above for no more reason than that it’s right. Most of the time, yes, it’ll end in failure. But sometimes, sometimes you take a leap of faith and kill an ice demon elf from the dawn of time.

All this could be avoided with reading comprehension beyond surface level events, but, still, when you stack failure upon failure upon failure on top of each other, it is your fault when people think that’s the point you’re shooting for and that whatever successes do come are fleeting accidents. 

What also bugs me is how Martin has given fodder for people to blame characters for things that aren’t their fault because he hamstrings their capabilities to preserve his plotting. 

The example that stands out through the series is Catelyn Stark. When her dying father keeps muttering the word “tansy” and apologizing but the boy was just too lowborn, that he would find her a better match, Catelyn puzzles out that tansy refers to tansy tea- a real life thing used to induce abortions- that the woman he’s apologizing to is her sister Lysa, but she stumbles a bit on who the lowborn noble could be.

Why this could only happen if Martin beat Catelyn mercilessly with the stupid stick is that by this point, Catelyn knows that Littlefinger has been going around for years telling literally everyone that he claimed both her and her sister Lysa's virginity when they were children. She also knows that Littlefinger lied to her about the origin of the dagger that someone used in the attempt to kill her son and, finally, that Littlefinger was an essential part in betraying Ned to getting his head chopped off. So, here she is, sitting as one of the few characters in the entire series who knows how Littlefinger is connected to every major event so far but… nope. She never puts it together because she can’t. Because Martin isn’t ready for that goose to be cooked yet so one of the smartest, savviest characters in the series just has a brain fart in the name of plotting.

The result of this is that Catelyn gets blamed for causing the Red Wedding, specifically through her release of Jaime Lannister. To be clear, this decision is a mistake, it causes a major breach in the Northern forces which leads to the Karstarks killing the remaining Lannister prisoners, which leads to Robb needing to kill the patriarch of the Karstark clan, which leads to the desertion of the Karstark army, which, is what helps create the circumstances for the Red Wedding to be as successful as it is. 

So, does all that make what happens Catelyn's fault, in whole or in part? No. What Martin is doing here is flexing his Greek tragedy muscles- Catelyn's mistake is borne out of her love for her children. She does everything she can to save everything that's important to her in the world, and all it does is bring her closer to losing everything she thinks she has left. It's heartbreaking, because for as much as she thinks she's responsible, there are hundreds of little things she can't control that brought about the destruction of everything she held dear.

That's the core of tragedy, that whatever actions that brought the character closer, it's nothing compared to the tides of fate that pull them in like an undertow to their deaths. But, instead of feeling that, Martin makes Catelyn act really stupid so instead of the Red Wedding feeling like an inevitable, inescapable act of fate, it just feels like she brought it down on herself by a moment of weakness acting like a typical, emotional woman. It's just a shame to see Martin's execution bungle his dramatic intent. 

In the end, I’m happy I read the series. I can see why it became such a phenomenon in the fantasy literary community and why it had such staying power when it got adapted. It's an epic, sweeping story that Martin, for the most part, pulls off. I'm glad that the series is one of the few things that live up to the hype. 

The Witcher Series Review

When Netflix announced it was adapting The Witcher into an original series, I was skeptical and apprehensive. When Henry Caville was cast in the lead role, that feeling intensified and intensified again when the trailers dropped. Having watched the series, I'm glad to say that all my fears were for naught in the end. 

As an adaptation, The Witcher sticks pretty closely to the stories it adapts from Andrezj Sapkowski's short story collections and translates them with more successes than misses, largely because showrunner Lauren Schmidt doesn't pull away from the fairy tale aspects and magic imbued into the stories to make them more serious for a general audience. That the series leans into the majesty as well as the darker twists keeps the series from miring in a navel gazing cynicism. 

On its own, the show is carried by solid performances from two of its three main leads, deftly executed action scenes, and plenty of witty dialogue that helps lighten the mood. Henry Caville does well conveying the simmering emotions under Geralt's monotone voice while Anya Chalotra captures the ambition, fury, and pride of Yennefer with each glance. The only lead who doesn't really carry their weight is Freya Allan's Ciri, but, that's more a writing problem than anything to do with her capabilities as a performer. 

Where the show gets in its own way is the decision to tell all three arcs at once. I can see why they'd want to- the stories they're drawing from are all mostly self-contained adventures with no direct impact on the larger plot except for people telling Geralt he really should take this whole destiny thing seriously. It's fun, engaging, and gives the characters depth but it doesn't provide a lot of momentum, plot wise. 

I see what they're trying to do, weaving multiple threads of rising action together to build a more sustained pace of excitement and cliff hangers that ties in to the Netflix's binging model of consumption. 

It's a fine plan, in theory, but fails in its execution because all three character arcs are fall into a valley of single-minded obsession almost immediately so instead of multiple threads rising and falling against each other, you have three flat lines with interruptions pretending to be complications. No obstacle is meaningful because none of them can have any impact until the finale allows it. 

Overall, The Witcher is a solid show with some of the funnest action scenes in fantasy, and where it's biggest flaw is mitigated by its short episode order so the frustration is over relatively quickly. 

Series grade: B

Blunderbots, Roll Out

On Thursday, Nancy Pelosi formally called for Articles of Impeachment against President Trump. This is based on the report issued by the House Intelligence Committee led by Adam Schiff which alleged after weeks of testimony, that Donald Trump attempted to use the power of his office to solicit Ukraine for assistance in his 2020 reelection campaign, which Trump confessed to on live TV months ago.

To be blunt, nothing's going to come of this. Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership in the House have bungled this from the very beginning, which isn't a surprise given that the leadership never wanted to impeach Trump in the first place.

We'll start with the bungling. One criticism that has been lobbed at the hearings from the very start is that they're boring as hell to watch. Obviously, there's a disingenuous aspect to this critique when it comes from people like Trump's son or on Fox News since they have a vested interest in making all of the President's abuses of power seem like nothing more than triggered liberals getting the vapors over the actions of a True American Hero. That being said, that there are those making the criticism with corrupt motives, doesn't mean there's no substance to the criticism at all.

The thing to realize about impeachment investigations is that the point isn't really to find out what's happened; by the time impeachment hearings start in the House, the broad strokes of the president's transgressions are already known and undeniable, the point of impeachment hearings is to generate and drive home the idea that the president is unfit for office and must be removed for his actions. Removing a duly elected sitting president is inherently a moment of high drama, if you want the effort to succeed, you have to lean into that, you have to give people a good show to keep their attention and passions high.

Instead of that, Schiff and the Intelligence Committee decided that the better approach was to let the hearings be a somber, stolid affair, where sensible, responsible government imposed itself over the chaos of the administration.

I can't emphasize enough how fatal of a mistake this is. In normal times, a government with unnecessary drama or grandstanding is fantastic. But if we're at the point where impeachment is not only possible but necessary, an ethos against making a fuss or causing a ruckus is going to get you absolutely nowhere.

This strategy makes even less sense when you consider the environment the inquiry would be taking place in. In the world of Fox News, the Republican base is going to be blasted literally every minute of every day that the proceedings are baseless, vindictive, or, hilariously, unconstitutional. Every thing that needs to be done to reinforce the idea that the Left is viciously attacking their dear president for no reason will be done, no matter how ridiculous.

Are they going to trout out an absolutely preposterous idea that impeachment hearings are a violation of the 6th amendments due process protections? Sure, why not. How about championing the conspiracy theory that it was really Ukraine who hacked the DNC server and interfered in the 2016 election? Fine, fuck it, whatever we need to do.

In this environment, the chances of swinging enough Republican voters- and, by extension, Republican Congressmen, is close to nil. So, instead of beating your head against the wall trying to achieve bipartisan support, you use that to make the noose tighter, to paint the picture that a failure to condemn Trump both in the House and the Senate isn't an act of exoneration, but complicity.

Now, I get the idea that calling something like impeachment hearings "boring" and expecting to be taken seriously is stupid, a sign of our hollowed out attention spans ruining our ethics of citizenship. What's at stake here are the foundational principles of our democracy, but we're too busy griping about not being entertained.

There seems to be this idea that there's a divide with politics on the one side, and principles like Duty, Honor, etc. etc. on the other. The politics side is seen as dirty, as the mire which we must overcome to reach the lofty principles of better, more refined civilizations. Thing is, if you want people to do those things, you gotta bring them there, you have to give them reasons, something to believe in, and to do that, it takes doing the dirty work of politics to convince people that there's something more to them, and the world they live in.

A few weeks of staid testimony followed by a day of constitutional law professors lecturing the public on the finer points of impeachment does not a compelling case make, so all this will just die on the vine in the face of a Senate with no incentive to side against Trump.

Which, isn't a surprise, since the Democrats came into this on their back foot.

It's been clear since the beginning of the year that Nancy Pelosi had no intention of doing any impeachment inquiries no matter what happened. Even when Robert Mueller handed Congress a report detailing ten times Trump used the power of his office to commit literal crimes, she passed. The only reason this is happening is that she was facing a revolt in the ranks because of her refusal to do literally anything to hold Trump to account. Which, just as a sidebar, think about that, faced with one of the most corrupt, unpopular presidents in the history of the country, supposedly master politician Nancy Pelosi was on the verge of losing the support of at least half her caucus. That's talent.

Anyway, they don't mean to fuck up, they just do. Democrats from Pelosi's generation operate under a philosophy of politics that shuns public passions as rule, so it makes sense that they'd fail so abysmally in marshaling them effectively. Deeper than that, though, is something else, I think, that impeachment is a fight Pelosi is afraid to lose but absolutely terrified of winning.

The losing part makes sense; Pelosi's power comes from her ability as fundraiser, securing money from people with more power than her by convincing them she'll be the best person to carry out their interests. She was in Congress for Clinton's impeachment, she saw the fallout of how that fight went both for the Republicans as a whole and for Newt Gingrich personally. She saw how Gingrich went from being one of the most influential and powerful men in politics to having to scrape by as a talking shill on Fox News, forever blacklisted from any strata of real power. I imagine Pelosi sees her nightmare version of that being a special guest on MSNBC, eternally trading quips with Joe Scarborough in the morning and tut-tutting Russia with Rachel Maddow for the evening crowd.

Still, even that pales next to the Boschian hellscape she would face if Trump was successfully impeached. Part of how the mainstream Democratic political strategy works is by reinforcing the idea that powerful political figures operate behind a protective veil of influence and power that can't be penetrated by regular ol' public pressure, it's just too hard. The idea is to make it feel like there's a barrier between those in power and the electorate that puts them there. This is done to make sure that any populist policies like Medicare for All or Debt Free college are both dead on arrival, and that Democrats have sufficient cover after killing them.

Most importantly, for this philosophy to work, no one must be held to account, for anything, ever. Think of literally everyone from the Bush administration who still appear on TV, work in the Trump administration, or do whatever the hell they want not living in prison where they belong. I mean, sure, you can lambaste Trump for giving John Bolton and Gina Haspel jobs, but he wasn't the one who let them walk away from their atrocities with no consequences.

That's why all the talk about holding Trump accountable, that no one is above the law blah blah blah falls so flat. The Democrats were happy to let Trump get away with literally everything he's done so far, including helping pass a $4 billion border security bill with no oversight after the concentration camp conditions the Border Patrol were holding asylum seekers in became common knowledge. People who behave or operate with the kind of incentives that Pelosi and her ilk operate cannot successfully hold Trump to account because, at heart, they don't really believe they should or are even capable of doing so.

It's honestly amazing that Trump has found himself in this position. He's a petty, real estate grifter operating as chief executive of a political system that almost explicitly encourages his kind of grift. Even with that handicap, he still manages to get himself in trouble by sheer repulsive force, backing a inept, submissive Congress into a shambolic display of what it should be doing as a co-equal branch of government.

If Trump fell, it'd prove that presidents are touchable, that with enough public pressure and action, they can fall just like anyone else. And what would happen then? Well, people might get the idea in their head that they can, and should, hold everyone to account, to make sure all those who put us in this position are banished for their failures.

For Pelosi and her ilk, that cannot, must not be allowed to happen. And for that, she will almost instinctively sell all of us out, even protect Trump as president, to keep whatever strands of power she can grasp.

In the end, this will go much the same way as Trump's bankruptcies- anyone who could bring him to heel will let him walk away clean as he passes  the ruin onto everybody else.

Brexit, Revisited

As I'm sure you've noticed, I'm fascinated by the politics of disaster. How governments and societies navigate their way through chaos and havoc has always been something I've been drawn to mainly because the primary strategy is to act like there is no disaster. Everything gets played off as business as usual which, of course, makes everything worse and any solution impossible. Over the last three years, the two primary examples of this dynamic have been the Trump administration and Brexit. The former I talk about all the time, so I think it's only fair I pivot to the latter.

I wrote a post about the referendum a few years ago, and, looking back on it, I'm still pretty happy with it. Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, said she wants to call another Scottish independence referendum by 2021; considering that a significant factor in the last referendum was the UK threatening Scottish admittance into the EU- a thing Scotland really wants to be a part of- isn't going to be at play anymore, I imagine the vote would be closer if not flipped if it happened again. Right now, the polls I could find on the issue usually fall between 49% opposed- 43% in favor with the rest undecided. It's a tight spread, one I can easily see being swayed by whatever shape Brexit takes over the next few years.

The other prediction I feel even more confident in though is that Northern Ireland will leave the UK and reunite with the rest of the island to make Ireland a whole republic. Because of how Theresa May pursued the Brexit project and the redlines that came with that position, I believe has only made Northern Ireland's exit an inevitability. 

 

To put this in context, May, as Prime Minister, set out to achieve what was called a "Hard Brexit" meaning that the UK would have no membership in the Single Market, or be in any way a part of any trade or customs agreement with the EU except those it negotiated after the UK left. This presents a problem because if the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland aren't covered by a shared set of laws any more, then there must be a border between them, which makes everyone really uneasy because any border with all the guard towers and military checkpoints that come with it will bring back the Troubles almost instantly.

So what to do? Well, the EU proposed, and the UK agreed to, a measure called the "backstop." Basically, it says that, barring any other options- which don't exist - when the UK leaves the EU, Northern Ireland will effectively stay inside the EU so it maintains all the same legal standards as the Republic, therefore eliminating the need for a physical border. The kicker of this arrangement, which May and the Democratic Unionist Party both complained about, is that instead of a physical border on the island, it creates an internal "sea border" between NI and the UK- meaning anything transported from NI would have to go through the full range of customs checks before it could be sold to the rest of the UK and vice versa.

How does this all tie together and make me think that the break up is inevitable? Because, at the end of the day, the consequence of Brexit for Northern Ireland is going to be one of two things- a return to sectarian partisan violence, or further integration with the Republic at the cost of isolation from the rest of the UK. If there's violence, all the old political questions of why do family's on the same island have to suffer border and military checks just to visit or do business with each other resurface in all the same ugly fashions. The other added wrinkle is that Northern Ireland voted overwhelmingly against Brexit and it's own domestic legislative body - Stormount - hasn't been in session for two years after the fallout of a corruption scandal involving the current head of the DUP, Arlene Foster. If violence does come, it will be because of policies pursued against the popular will, Catholic and Protestant alike, so I expect people to start asking rather pointed questions about why they should live in fear and die over a political project they didn't want to happen and was pursued with no regard to their rather delicate situation.

On the other hand, an internal sea border, by nature, would force greater cooperation between the Republic, Northern Ireland, and the EU, with the rest of the UK left out in the cold. This is why May, along with Foster, were so dead set against the idea of the backstop. It reinforces the idea that Northern Ireland has more in common, and more to gain, by being closely allied to Ireland proper while keeping the UK at arms length (Foster and the DUP as a whole have the added incentive of wanting to stay in the UK because that's the only way their regressive Protestant asses can stay in power.)

No matter how you look at it, whether it's a the problem is of returning violence or the wonky reality of trying to manage one country with two separate legal frameworks, the easiest, less convoluted answer to the Irish question is for Northern Ireland to just be Ireland. That reality is acting like a political singularity, pulling every discussion of the matter into its orbit until the crushing effect of its gravity brings the idea to fruition.

And while I believe that wholeheartedly, I don't want to put any kind of time table on when this will happen because of the major mistake I made in the first Brexit post I did. In that piece, I predicted that the EU would react with its general ruthlessness in enforcing its political agenda against what it saw as an existential threat. I was basing my analysis on the Greek debt debacle, where the EU Commission, European Central Bank, and International Monetary Fund- collectively known as The Troika- ground the newly elected Syriza party officials into dust over the issue of Greece's debt repayments. Syriza's (correct) position was that the Troika's terms of austerity were madness, that imposing such drastic cuts to public budgets would only make it more impossible for Greece to repay its loans which would drive them deeper into debt, which would only make the Troika demand deeper cuts for further assistance etc. etc. This argument fell on deaf ears and the Troika went about setting and forcing the Greek government to agree to absolutely punishing terms to the point where Greece still hasn't recovered from the 2008 crisis.

I expected the negotiations with the UK to go much the same way. In the early days after the referendum, Theresa May was making moves that pointed to UK's strategy being basically cherry picking EU membership benefits; full, unrestricted access to the single market, but without accepting any of the four freedoms central to that market. Obviously, this wasn't going to happen, and I foretold a brutal negotiation process where the EU laid out in excruciating detail that the extended grace which kept the UK sitting at the adults table of international affairs was now over, and would forcibly show it to its proper place where the other hanger on powers belonged.

This didn't happen. It didn't happen because the UK has, for three years now, acted like a senile, delusional old family member who's only around to rave about politics at Thanksgiving. It's almost impossible to lay out in full the sheer incompetence and bad faith the government has shown over the last three years. From triggering the Article 51 clause to leave the EU without any clear idea what it meant, to insisting, repeatedly, that the EU would grant it special exceptions to allow UK products and financial services when the EU negotiating team loudly, publicly, and insistently said that under no circumstances would that ever happen.

While she was Prime Minister, May would constantly go to summits in Brussels, seemingly come to an agreement with the EU team, then, when news broke in Britian about whatever the agreement was, would immediately backtrack and denounce the very same provisions she had spent the weekend negotiating. She would also try to make an end run around the European Commission by going directly to the different European heads of state to get support for her half baked initiatives even though the heads of state and the Commission told her every single time that such action wasn't appreciated and was completely unprofessional if not outright disrespectful.

Look, if a member of a foreign government names their cat "Brexit" because the constant indecision about wanting to go outside or stay reminds them of your government,  you've lost all credibility past, present, and future.

 

The only good moment Theresa May had came last November after negotiations closed and produced the withdrawal agreement. She said that the options before Britain were her deal, no deal, or no Brexit. It's literally the only moment of honest reflection in her entire tenure and it mattered not at all. 

Three votes were held to get Parliament's approval for the agreement and each time the measures went down in flames.

The final defeat prompted May to resign, which means the UK spent three of the six month extension the EU gave it on a meaningless election that changes absolutely nothing. Her replacement, Boris Johnson, is a buffoon who's spent his entire career honing that natural talent to become a living spectacle worthy of P.T. Barnum.

Recently, Johnson said that the backstop was dead, that he wouldn't honor it, and that he plans to go back and renegotiate not only that provision but the entire Withdrawal Agreement. That the EU has said, repeatedly (again), that renegotiating wasn't an option, that the Withdrawal Agreement is the only deal on the table and that the only reason the UK was granted an extension was so they could figure how to pass the Withdrawal Agreement is, of course, entirely ignored.

All this means that the UK is more likely than not to crash out of the EU without a deal of any kind which, is absolutely insane.

At their core, countries are legal entities with shit tons of people and land attached to them. Relationships between countries, by extension, are also just elaborate legal agreements. This is why Michael Barnier, the lead negotiator for the EU, set up that Brexit chart- it's basically a staircase of "If-Then" scenarios that break down "If these UK redlines, then this outcome." It's as close as a man can come to sketching out the terms of the deal in crayon so the UK could fully understand the consequences of their choices. Alas.

In effect, deal or no-deal, it doesn't really matter because Britain is screwed either way. One of the main rallying cries for this whole project was that it was an effort for the UK to take back its sovereignty from faceless EU bureaucrats. I'm curious about what they're getting though. Does forcing an ambassador to retire because he pointed out the obvious about the Trump administration or acting as proxy agents seizing Iranian ships off the coast of Spain sound like the actions of a sovereign nation, or do they sound like a client trying not to piss off its lone sugar daddy?

This dynamic is going to play out in social policy, too. When Trump did his state visit in May, he talked about the possibilities of the new trade deals that would come in the Brexit wake. In his usual "say the quiet parts out loud" way, Trump mentioned that one of the new avenues the US was excited for was opening up the NHS to US healthcare companies. Many a British politician - including Tories - lambasted the idea that the NHS would be auctioned off for profit to foreign companies.

That's all well and good, far as outrage goes, but when that request comes, what, exactly is the UK going to do to say no? If they leave with no deal, they'll need whatever deal they can get and it's not like Boris Johnson has shown any inclination to take an aggressive stance against Trump, or any U.S. administration's, demands. There's also the issue that the Tories can't protest too much about privatizing and crapifying the NHS since they've been doing that for years.

Then, you know, there's the EU. If the UK wants to do business with the EU, then they have  to sell products that conform to EU standards; standards the UK complained were too stringent and now will have no say in crafting or implementing. Because nothing says sovereignty than having to match your entire regulatory framework to a power that you didn't elect and can't influence in any way. (This dynamic is why the UK joined the EU in the first place.)

In the end, none of this really matters. The minute the referendum results came in, the UK set itself up for a path where the only possible outcome would be a UK diminished, humiliated, and dependent on the world powers that filled the vacuum left in the disintegration of the British empire. The only question was how.

You do have to wonder, now that they've got the "independence" they thought was so cravenly taken from them, are they happy?

Disposed to Suffer

Lately, I've been thinking about this Q&A at Zhul Library at NMSU I went to as part of my non-fiction class. The event was held during Sunshine Week- a week celebrating transparency and press freedoms- and featured three journalists and the spokesperson of the Border Patrol in this region. The spokesperson had a somewhat unenviable job of facing down a room of people in the wake of the stories that two children had died while in BP custody. Touchy subject, to be sure, which the agent attempted to get around by saying that Border Patrol is the immigration equivalent of beat cops- they're the ones on the metaphorical street, the actual detention of the migrants was handled by other parts of the federal immigration apparatus.

He did as well of a job as he could, but, throughout the initial discussion of the panel members, I kept getting a "I was just following orders" vibe from the intrepid PR stooge and wondered how quickly the Nazi comparison would come once the floor was opened to public questions. 

As it turned out, I didn't have to wait long. The first question from the public was whether the immigration policies the administration was pursuing was moral, and what, if any concerns the members of Border Patrol and ICE had in pursuing such policies. The spokesperson's answer amounted to saying that the thing he most liked about his job was that people were either following the law, or not. If they had proper immigration papers, he wouldn't arrest them; if they didn't he would. He then went on to say that the best part of his job was that, in effect, he didn’t have to think about any of these things, he just applied the law. The man who asked the question shot back with a comment about how that defense didn't work out very well at Nuremberg and the room was off to the races.

I've been wondering how our spokesmen feels now that 24 people have either died in ICE custody or shortly after being released from it. I wonder if he feels a little disheartened going to work now that the stories of how children and teenagers are stuffed into bedless rooms where the children are living in soiled clothes, with the teenagers in breast milk stained clothes because there's no one else around to feed the baby's. I wonder if he rolls his eyes a bit thinking about what he'll have to say when the government argues with a straight face that taking away soap, toothbrushes, and forcing children to sleep on concrete floors under bright lights satisfied the "safe and sanitary" obligation of the Flores agreement. I wonder if he's been thinking about what it means for him personally to go out into the world and defend intentional policies of cruelty that kill people who wanted nothing more than a chance for a better life.

Maybe I'm being too hard on our Pontius Pilate spokesperson. It's not like he's defending an organization whose current and former members- including his boss- are part of a Facebook group celebrating the deaths of those children or making threats to Congresswomen who criticize them; it's not like he's defending his fellow agents who made unofficial commemorative coins to mock the children they're keeping in camps. No, all he's saying is that he just represents the part of the system that feeds people into the meat grinder, but because he doesn't directly grind people into pulp, his hands are clean.

It's quite the abdication, but it's not like he's alone. In response to Trump's "Go back to your own countries" comment to four American citizens, Nancy Pelosi said well, this:

I reject @realDonaldTrump’s xenophobic comments meant to divide our nation. Rather than attack Members of Congress, he should work with us for humane immigration policy that reflects American values. Stop the raids - #FamiliesBelongTogether!

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) July 14, 2019

Somehow, I don't think asking the man who is purposefully creating a crisis that's killing people is interested in making that crisis more palatable to his victims. It's almost, as if, the cruelty is the point. 

 

But what strikes me the most about that tweet is the “he should work with us” line. To me, it speaks of an attitude that Trump isn’t going anywhere, that he’s going to be president for the foreseeable future and that, no matter what else she says, she doesn’t really see Trump as a fundamental threat to anything because she’s not going to do a damn thing to get rid of him. Instead, she wants to work with him, to mitigate his growing fascism and the official discrimination that’s pouring out of his administration every day.

Its cowardice masquerading as political savvy which she’ll get away with because, well, why wouldn’t she? It’s all she’s ever done, and she gets to be Speaker of the House, twice.

I took the title of this post from the Declaration of Independence, which says “mankind [is] more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Nothing more accurately describes this time and the reluctance to meaningfully confront Trump and what he represents beyond pithy clapping. Tucker Carlson is running segments that Ilhan Omar is representative of refugees who come to America because we accepted her, at great cost, only for her to become an ingrate spitting in America’s eye. Sure, language like that will spark a greater movement for ethnic cleansing and xenophobia but you can’t impeach Trump or explicitly call him a white nationalist because it’ll divide the country too much.

Even then, I feel like it goes so much deeper. When Bernie Sanders pitched his plan to forgive all student debt, the biggest push back came from people who repaid their loans who felt like the plan was an insult to them, that it made all the suffering they went through to pay their loans back meaningless. But, here’s the spoiler alert: if the only way you can make your suffering meaningful is to perpetuate it on someone else, it was always meaningless and unnecessary.

America is addicted to the philosophy that freedom is only as good as the suffering you endure to achieve it. No matter what it is, anything that would make life better is automatically rejected because it would make people indulgent or devalue their freedom. Universal Healthcare? No, it’s more important that people have the freedom to choose health insurance policies that will abandon them to die than for the government to ensure its people live. Welfare? That’s only for the lazy, dependent, unperson. Never expect to retire? That’s amazing, it’s the ultimate freedom to feel so insecure that you expect to be cast aside like trash the second you stop working.

This attitude paralyzes us, drowning us in misery for no reason other than the suffering is point. It’s the societal equivalent of those old self-flagellating priests looking to edify themselves before their god. This brutality does nothing but mutilate us into grotesque, pathetic, groveling creatures addicted to a ritual of pain because its absence has become so foreign, we’re afraid to live in a world without it.

The New York Times recently had a story talking about a woman who, through a bureaucratic quirk, wasn’t an American citizen anymore. She was born to two Americans in Canada, but because of the way ICE is acting these days, she couldn’t get the documents she needed to prove she was a citizen and spent a year in this legal limbo terrified of being deported as a result of her, on paper at least, non-citizen status. The kicker of it all was that she voted for Trump and plans to do so again.

Just think about that for a second.

This woman gets the barest hint of what it feels like to live in the existential terror that every immigrant, with papers or without, experiences in the age of Trump. She got just a small taste of what it feels like to know that the government could do whatever it wanted to her with no consequence and her response is to make sure that keeps happening. She said, “she continues to believe Mr. Trump will 'make America great again' and if that means thousands of people have to live their lives in fear or people are thrown into concentration camps, then so be it.

This is what I mean. Even with firsthand experience, this woman actively chooses to give power to the man whose policies caused her so much stress because hey, it has to be somebody right? Somebody has to suffer all those degradations, just as long as it’s not me.

That hypocrisy is what’s killing us, that no matter which direction you turn, the fundamental policy question isn’t how to improve society but “how can we impose the worst effects of the status quo on the people who matter the least to keep it all going?” The only possible result of all this is fascism, because if that is the central question of your society, that’s really the only ideology with a ready-made answer. If you don’t want to live in that, than you have to get used to changing the world in which you are accustomed which, honestly, shouldn’t be too hard because the world to which we are accustomed fucking sucks.

The End of Game of Thrones

I, like many people, did not like how Game of Thrones ended.  I really, really wanted it to finish on a good note, or at least have moments I could appreciate even if the whole didn't quite do what I was hoping for. But nope, all I've got now is the need to do an autopsy on a show that I liked, if never quite loved.

There will be many think pieces dissecting what happened in this season, but ultimately I believe it comes down to the fact that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss just didn't understand the work they were adapting. I've never read the books, but I think you can back up the idea that D&D don't understand the material just by looking at the show in isolation. Beginnings are important, and the first thing we see is meant to build the context of the world, and the threats facing it. So it's important to remember that our first experience in Game of Thrones is three rangers, members of the Night's Watch, finding a bunch of dead things in a quiet area of the woods before they're all brutally murdered by a White Walker. It's only after that that we get to see the Starks and Winterfell, and King Robert Baratheon with all the political intrigues and conspiracies and murder that will follow.

If the story was meant to be about those things, than that's where the story would've started. The entire reason that we get the White Walkers first though is so we remember that all this drama over who killed Jon Arryn, is Joffery the son of Robert, all of that is just flashy noise distracting us from the true enemy coming out of the dark with the dead coming with them. But it's clear that D&D believed that the real action of the series was found in the machinations of who sat on the Iron Throne rather than, you know, the war to save stave off the extinction of mankind. That's why in the final season the White Walkers are dealt with first, the apocalyptic threat they represent is only a speed bump to the more important question of who's going to rule Westeros afterwards.

This bending of the the conflict to the Iron Throne is why everything feels petty and unfulfilled. Jon's entire arc is about discovering that borders and kingdoms are arbitrary boundaries that lead to fragmented, incomplete responses to existential threats, all of which gets thrown out the window once the reveal of his parentage starts spreading. Bran gets hit with this too: he becomes the living memory of the world, able to see past present and future at will, which only matters because it will give him a unique perspective a king. It's like D&D looked at George R. R. Martin's work that the world was bigger than what ass parks itself in a fancy chair and said "Ah, no, it's not."

A large part of this is how D&D never really got a firm grip on consequences or ever bothered to treat character development as anything more than guidelines to be blown off whenever they needed rather than the underpinning of their entire show. Jamie is a good example of the latter- remember how he spent season 3 tied up, realizing how he's kind of a piece of shit, and how he had that moment where he opened up to Brienne about why he killed the Mad King to save literally millions of people? Remember how all of that made him seem like a conflicted anti-villain trying to find a legitimate way to live as honorably as he could? Remember how a season later Jaime rapes Cersei in front of their dead son and D&D saw no friction between his attitude to try and be better and that action? So it's not all that surprising that in the end they would chuck Jamie's development out a window so he could march his way to King's Landing and die with Cersei because... well, just because, that's why.

Which, speaking of her; Cersei's plot is the worst example of the show's habit of just forgetting that consequences are a thing. This is a woman who has no real claim to the throne, who only got it after assassinating every rival to her power by blowing them up in the Sept of Balor which caused her son to drop himself out a window so, yeah, she's got problems. This doesn't even begin to take into account how palpably hated she is for sleeping with her brother and all the naked contempt she has for the people she wants to rule over.  All these problems, compounded by Arya annihilating the Freys in the Riverlands, should have Cersei up against the wall, under siege in the Red Keep from enemy and ally alike even before Daenerys shows up because well, she murdered her way to the top and that tends not to go over very well when you're already hated and your machinations kill noble and civilian alike. Trying to survive making an enemy out of everyone should be an intense, high tension drama, but the show can't even bother to show her doing anything other than stand aloof getting drunk for two-and-a-half seasons.

This isn't just sloppy oversight but outright sabotage. Tryion and Varys, for example, know firsthand how much money the Iron Throne owes to the Iron Bank of Braavos which, in early seasons when they were still competent, would've been something they would have worked to apply as much leverage as possible. It's even more galling that this doesn't happen because it dovetails so nicely with Daenerys goal of winning Westeros without massacring everything in sight with the dragons, Dothraki, and Unsullied. Leveraging how unpopular Cersei is and how tenuous her hold on power is would be a pretty significant coup- get the Iron Bank to withdraw their money, and Cersei collapses under the weight her rule by paranoia has brought her.

It's thematically appropriate and fits with the goals the characters have in mind and how they would want to achieve them; Tyrion by using his knowledge of money and fiance and Varys could encourage a few riots here and there before making a pit stop in Braavos to talk to the Iron Bank. Instead, Tyrion becomes the dumbest person on the show and gets blindsided by every major event the plot takes and Varys just stands around waiting to get burned to death.

All that said, I don't think anyone got their character sacrificed more for plot reasons than Daenerys. What I always liked about Daenerys story was that she was a ruler who had at her disposal the equivalent of living nuclear weapons to use in her burning mission to reclaim her stolen destiny. There's a lot of temptation to just turn everything in your path to ashes because, why not? And while that temptation is certainly there for Dany throughout the series, she does seems to grow into someone who legitimately does want to make the world a better place, and who wants to rule by more than fire and blood alone.

Take this scene from season 6, for example. As terms for her support of Dany's war in Westeros, Yara asks for the independence of the Iron Islands, which Dany grants as long as the Ironborn quit their reaving and raping. It's a big moment, one that shows how Dany has learned from her time in Mereen that she can't take a no-holds-barred top down approach to ruling; if she wants to lead, she'll have to build coalitions of respect with those she seeks to rule instead of just demanding their blanket submission. Contrast that with the scene where she meets Jon for the first time- gone is the air of respect, instead, she's petty, demanding, and arrogant. Everything she should have carried over from her time with the Ironborn is just, gone, forgotten to set up the eventual turn where she burns King's Landing to the ground.

Which, yeah, Mad Queen Dany. The show really, really wants to retcon all of Dany's previous brutal actions as signs of foreshadowing that she totally had it in her to lay waste to innocent people and would do so given the right provocation. The death of Viserys, the killing of the warlocks in Qarth, the sack of Astapor, the crucifixion of the slave masters in Meereen, the burning of the Dothraki Khals, all these are shaded as the actions of a blood-thirsty tyrant who equates opposition to her as signs of inherent evil she needs to destroy. "All those people were against her and seen as evil, so that's how she sees everybody" the show tries to say, conveniently leaving out that literally every single example provided were people who explicitly wanted to enslave her to use for their own purposes, which are slightly different circumstances than being a surrendering civilian population which never acted against her.

The justifications for this aren't much better, either. In behind-the-scenes discussions and interviews laying out the reasoning for Dany's actions, D&D say that the setbacks she's faced in Westeros- the deaths of two dragons, Jorah, Missandei,  the loss of Dorne and the Reach, and the Ironborn as allies, the revelation of Jon's true parentage, have all accumulated and pushed her past her breaking point. To borrow some language from my creative writing workshops, "I don't buy it."

On paper, I can see it- Dany loses everything she loves and has spent years protecting, the appearance and rejection of a male relative that jeopardizes the destiny she's built so much of identity on, all of this builds into a pressure cooker of grief and paranoia that she finally breaks under right at the moment she's won every thing she's ever wanted. Again, in theory, not a bad idea, but the lynch pins of this are the sudden stupidity and incompetence of her closest advisers or not being able to see stationery ships while she's flying above them in clear skies. In other words, she's only backed into a corner because the plot demands her to be so, with all the contrived mechanics grinding the story into a twisted, incompetent version of itself.

It's a shame really, for the show to end on such an ignoble note. But it makes sense that it would given that the lesson D&D took from some the shows most iconic moments- Ned's execution, the Red Wedding- was that they were big, shocking moments of heavy, world altering spectacle. They thought that's all they had to deliver but missed that what made those moments work was the long, slow work of characters making choices- choices they thought they had to make, or didn't want to, or felt perfectly justified in making, that no matter what, all bound them, trapped them in an inevitable moment they couldn't see coming.

And maybe that’s the most powerful, underlying bond between this show and its audience. We too made the choice we believed was necessary, to continue on the same path when only doom was on the horizon in the hope that somehow, somewhere along that path there would a turn, a fork towards a better end that we just had to press forward to see; until, finally, we met our inevitable, miserable end that was waiting for us all along.