The Pigeon Hole of Optimization

Because I'm not playing DnD at the moment, I'm stuck doing the next best thing- going online to stalk forums so I can read other people talk about DnD.

Sometimes I worry about my fellow players. Optimization is so dominant in conversations about the various classes we have to choose from, which, to some degree, I get. Like anything, there's always going to be a debate about what the "best" classes or features in the game are. Every one has their favorites, but if there's going to be any kind of honest ranking there has to be some kind of objective metric to stack all these disparate options against each other.

 

To do this, we turn to good ol' fashioned maths. People will sit endlessly arguing about why the average damage rolls for one set of class options makes their preference better than someone else's and again, I get it. If you want to compare basketball players, you look at their numbers so, why wouldn't you do the same here? The point of getting your party together is to go around hitting monsters until they die, so it follows that whatever character options increase the amount of damage you do are superior. More damage, after all, means things die faster, meaning you have an easier time winning.

Now, before I get too far into this, I want to make it clear that I don't have anything against knowing any of these things. Taking a minute to get down into the raw numbers of what each class is capable of is a good way for a player to make an informed decision about what kind of character they want to create and what they want that character to do in their game. But if optimization becomes the only way you view the game, your perspective risks becoming overly narrowed. To highlight this, I want to talk about my favorite class, the monk. 

Go to any board on reddit, DnD Beyond, or anywhere that talks about DnD and the universal complaint you'll find about the monk is the classes d8 hit die. 

It's almost impossible to keep up with the other martial classes with their d10's (or d12), even if you have a decent constitution modifier of +3. The averages just aren't in your favor so, sooner rather later, if you're playing with another martial class, you're bound to feel some hit point envy as your game goes on. 

Every source points to this as a major drawback to the classes design (which we'll loop back to) but the binary focus of optimization leaves a lot to be desired even just on judging the attributes each class receives. 

Monks get a lot of defensive maneuvers to protect their somewhat paltry hp pool. Deflect missiles will protect you from pretty much any ranged weapon attack the moment you get it at 3rd level. The only times I took damage from ranged weapons was if I had already used my reaction to cancel out another attack. 

By 10th level, monks have Evasion, Stillness of Mind, and poison immunity. To put into prospective how effective these all are, let's pit the monk against some of the most popular enemies in the game: dragons. 

Of the five chromatic types, three breath weapons are matched against dexterity saving throws, which, because you have Evasion, if you make the saving throw you take... zero damage. Even if you fail, you still only take half damage. You don't even have to roll against the green dragons breath because you're immune to poison. So out of five of the most devastating monster attacks in the game, monks potentially suffer full damage from just one of them. 

Oh, and the terrifying presence all the dragons have? If you fail, use an action for Stillness of Mind to rid yourself of the terror, spend a ki point to go into Patient Defense, and you're all set to get back in fray on your next turn. 

Still, even with all those defenses, you're still vulnerable. Things could go wrong, you could roll poorly, and then, well, then you're in trouble. 

This isn't a design flaw. It's a choice meant to introduce risk because with risk comes choices and with choices come drama, aka the good stuff that makes the game enjoyable. 

As a monk, you can get pretty much anywhere on any battle map your DM draws up. If monks had a d10 hit die, players would take off at every opportunity, safe in the knowledge that even if things didn't go quite as they hoped, they had a bit of slack from an hp pool that can absorb one or two bad hits.

With a d8, though, players don't have this safety. Which is good; combat has to be dangerous to be effective. So while you can get up close and personal with your end-boss lich mage, should you is the question. In that split second decision lies danger and glory, it's impossible to have one without the other.

It's important to remember that Dungeons and Dragons is a narrative experience. For narrative to work, there has to be tension and combat isn't exempt from that. The three pillars of combat, exploration, and social interaction form the narrative triangle of the game. Combat, at heart, is just another way to express your character. In the case of the monk, the d8 is a limitation which forces players to make choices. And it's choices, not stats, not average damage per round, not any quantifiable metric, that defines characters. 

Combat isn't the only area to suffer from this mode of analysis. Another monk feature that gets universal dismissal is the one at 13th level, Tongue of the Sun and Moon. The feature grants monks the ability to understand, and be understood by, anything that speaks a language. It's a pretty cool feature, honestly, yet, as one breakdown of the class said, it's "of limited value for many monks given that charisma is the most common dump stat." 

This is why the idea of optimization is especially limited- it encourages players to see the "best" attribute in a situation as the only way to do something. Yes, charisma is the stat that gives characters their primary social skills. It does not, however, give you a good tool set for figuring out if the people on the other side of the conversation are being entirely truthful. For that, you need a good wisdom score to get a good bonus to your insight checks. And, wouldn't you know it, wisdom is the second most important stat for a monk to have. What a coincidence.

 

The lack of imagination around what this feature would allow players to do is somewhat worrying. To me, it reads as the designers knowing that monks don't usually invest in traditional social skills, so they gave them an ability that grants players an avenue to participate in social interactions in a way that was supported by the classes core stats. 

 

Beyond the mechanical level, the role playing opportunity of a character being able to speak every language because they have gained an understanding of the connection between all living things, of the oneness of all life, is incredible. Which is why it honestly baffles me that all the narrative and character possibilities get cast aside because it doesn't line up with one stat and optimization brain doesn't allow for any other creative possibilities.

At heart, what I see in optimization is the fear of failure dressed up as a design philosophy. Characters can only be highly specialized into doing what they're "supposed" to be good at, while anything their design may not automatically support is to be avoided at all costs. If you want to design a character who acts as the most efficient killing machine around, sure, I can see what the appeal is. But if you want a more well rounded character who incorporates their strengths and weaknesses into the narrative experience, this well runs dry incredibly quickly. 

 

Obviously, knowing the most effective uses of your characters abilities is important. Even so, the best way to use that information is knowing when you can use those abilities to be reckless, daring, maybe even a little stupid. Take a risk, be creative, be okay with failing, trust me. The worst that can happen is you have fun in a way you didn't think you could.

These Aren't the Droids You're Looking For

Over the last two weeks, controversies about cancel culture have spread across Facebook and Twitter like a brain rotting fungus infecting every edgelord or cranky uncle it came across. The latest hysterics came after the Dr. Seuss Foundation announced it was pulling six books from publication because of racist drawings and then again when news broke that a scene with Pepe le Pew was cut from the new Space Jam movie. 

There's a lot to unpack about why this is so ridiculous and why we're all the stupider for it, but, to clear things up, neither of these things are examples of anything getting cancelled. No one called for the Dr. Seuss books to get pulled from publication, it was something the company decided on their own because they don't want to be associated with images like these anymore.

It's important to note the real problem underlying the Dr. Seuss books isn't that the books were pulled, it's that they were pulled without a fight. 

Even if you take the view that the books were for purely economic reasons- i. e., they did it to protect the brand - what that says is that the Dr. Seuss Foundation looked at their products, looked at the potential damage the controversy could do to their non-racist books, and decided that their better option would be to just recall the titles with those drawings. Even in this telling, which is nothing more than a stripped down cost-benefit analysis, the reactions of Asian and Black communities were deemed important enough that the mere potential of the financial harm they could leverage was enough to change their practices. 

I'm not saying that's how it went down, just using it as an example that no matter how you look at this, this decision was made because the Foundation thought how their minority customers felt about their product, mattered. They thought it was important enough to do something about it without anyone pressuring them to do so. 

What all those headlines about political correctness gone too far are saying is that people who weren't important in the past, are important now. It's amazing how much this simple recognition bothers people, like they can't stand living in a world were other people are important, too. That's all any of this is, all any of it ever is, just blind anger over the fact that minorities get to have a say in the world they live in.

As for the Pepe le Pew thing, his scene got deleted when Space Jam changed directors. This is what's called making a movie. If this upsets you, I congratulate you on living a life with no actual problems. 

What annoys me most about all the outrage pieces over cancel culture is that they universally don't engage with why such a thing would exist in the first place. If they do, it's usually just complaining about how kids get so offended at everything these days. Which, yeah, if you look for people being stupidly upset over inoffensive things you're going to find them, obviously. Conveniently, the push to make this solely about overly sensitive millennials and Gen Z'ers let's people with actual power off the hook for making things this bad in the first place. 

Consider the world since the start of the millennium. We had Bush II lie his way into starting a war, operate a global torture regime, launch an illegal spying program, with no consequences. Then, the global economy burns to the ground in the fallout of fraudulent trading and business practices from literally the entire financial sector. Then, the same banks get caught actively laundering money for the Sinaloa drug cartel, rigging interest rates, and stealing money from their customers. No one went to jail or was even arrested for any of this, naturally. That's not to say we were limited to white collar villainy. For more blue collar scumbags, we have the cops who killed Eric Garner, Michael Brown or Tamir Rice - for just a small sampling - who all walked away clean after killing unarmed civilians. 

Then, Donald Trump happened. If there's any lesson from the Trump administration, is that people in power get away with whatever they want because other people in power choose not to stop them. Mitch McConnell could've pulled Trump's leash anytime he wanted by slowing down Trump's pet projects in the Senate until Trump behaved like a good little dog on camera, but that never happened. The Democrats could've decimated Trump's agenda by passing budgets that didn't allocate money for the wall, or the Space Force, or for any of the other ridiculous projects Trump undertook. But they didn't, because why would they? Sure, Trump himself is an asshole, but he's still President and this is still America. That Biden is continuing some of Trump's policies- like keeping the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem and supporting failed puppet Juan Guadio in Venezuela - show for the umpteenth time that Washington's problem with Trump was his personality, not his actions.

You can't expect people to look at the world, see all the open, unpunished corruption, and do nothing about it. Normal people can't arrest anyone, can't throw them out of office on a whim, but they can mobilize online to publicly shun or humiliate people off social networks. That's what cancel culture is, a response to offi cial failures to hold obvious criminals accountable so that someone, somehow suffers for the shitty things they've done. 

Naturally, there are pitfalls to this. Mass public outrage doesn't leave room for nuance or a sense of scale; for example, when Kathy Griffin posted that picture holding Trump's decapitated head, all that called for was a "wow, that's a bit over-the-top and desperate," not the massive dog piling she ended up buried under.  

It also acts as convenient cover for actual censorship, like when YouTube took down videos by independent news channel Staus Coup. The videos in question were coverage of the Capitol Riot, they weren't endorsing or advocating, just standard reporting. Corporations always move to co-opt the language of social movements to neuter their momentum, cancel culture gives them fertile ground to move against independent creators in the name of "protecting" the discourse from controversial elements. 

Critics of cancel culture are right that it's not good to rely solely on mobilizing mass movements of angry people against new outrages of the week. That what's happening isn't so much accountability as it is the public devouring of randomly selected individuals and doesn't address the systemic issues that allowed the harm in the first place. 

All of that is true, but to spend all the energy tsk tsking cancel culture as a sign of national decline seems more like a modern version of hating on hippies more than anything else. Cancel culture is the product of larger failures, not the cause of them. 

The easiest way to end cancel culture is to tear down the failed institutions that spawned it. Sure, there will always be people railing against something or other but if we can get the world to a place where assholes get punished for their asshole shit as an everyday thing, then at least we'll get to choose how much we want to stick around to listen. 

The Empty Promise of Bitcoin

News that Tesla bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin sent the virtual currency to an all-time high of $48,000 (it's since climbed to $52,000). This has sparked, again, discussion/enthusiasm about bitcoin's future as a viable currency or further widespread adoption. So this as good a time as any to point out that bitcoin will never be anything its faithful hope it will be. 

What is bitcoin

To understand why bitcoin will never work, we'll need to understand what it is. 

Bitcoin is a virtual cryptocurrency generated by its user base solving harder and harder cryptography equations. Its design and function was laid out in a 2008 white paper by someone calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto. 

The purpose of bitcoin was to create a currency that didn't have any state or central bank behind it. Only its users could create the currency and only they could ensure the coins validity. The idea behind this is to prevent the central authority from debasing the currency through inflation or issuing debt to print money. 

To protect against fraud, the system relies on something called a blockchain to record and verify payments. The blockchain is a public ledger filled with every transaction of every bitcoin, allowing its users to theoretically go back and track the entire history of the bitcoin they're being paid with. 

Because there's no central authority backing the validity of bitcoins, the users themselves have to perform these checks for each transaction. To do this, users are assigned a digital wallet they then create a password for. To buy something, the buyer submits a bitcoin- or whatever percentage of the coin they're using- from their wallet, then the coin is assigned a hash, which is like a digital signature. From there, another user, or network of users if they want to authenticate multiple transactions, verify the hash isn't being used for multiple purchases, does all the math, with the end result being the transaction is added to the blockchain, and life goes on. 

It's a ridiculously labor and energy intensive process, with Bitcoin mining using more electricity than Ireland.

Who Needs Trust?

If you wanted a simple reason why bitcoin is doomed to fail, it's that there's no trust in the system. 

The white paper closes celebrating that it laid out the best case for creating a currency that operates without trust. Bitcoin's barkers point to the blockchain as the ultimate solution to this problem- you don't need trust in a system of relentless verification. 

This sounds like a huge, game changing feature- except all it does is make everything more complicated for no benefit whatsoever. 

Imagine going to the grocery store and having to wait in line as the teller calls up every individual customer's bank to verify their account information, their available balance, only hanging up once they confirmed the transfer from your account to the store's was complete. 

Then imagine them doing this all over again once the next person in line stepped up. Then multiply this process for every single transaction at every store in every city of the country. Think about all the things you buy in a day and try, just try, to imagine all the time you'd lose if you not only had to go through this process every single time but also wait for everyone around you to go through it, too.

What people miss the most about money is that it is a social tool. The whole point of it is to facilitate moving resources from one place to another which, at some point, you're going to need trust to move the process along. 

You can see this process in the evolution of paper currencies. During the reign of Kublai Khan, the Yuan imperial government would send out papers marked with the amount of coins they owed to the merchants they bought supplies from. The promise was the merchants could come to the capitol and exchange the paper for coins whenever they wanted. Since trading the papers was as good as trading coin, eventually those pieces of paper became a form of currency in their own right. 

Something similar happened in Europe, too. Between the 14th and 18th centuries, these things called bills of exchange were used to facilitate trade among the different European countries. How they would work is a bank in Italy would issue a letter to one of their depositors so they could exchange it at another bank in Spain, where they could take the letter and exchange it for cash. 

Merchants could also use their bills as payment if they didn't have cash on hand. They would sign the document over, then the new owner could take it to the bank to get paid. Hell, people could even sell the bills themselves if they wanted to get some quick cash in their pockets.  

In London, banks would issue their own paper currencies to their depositors as a representation of the gold they had in their account. Eventually depositors asked for banknotes of smaller denominations so they could use for more everyday purchases. If anyone wanted coins instead of paper, all anyone had to do was just take the note to the bank who issued it and redeem it. And that was it- just trade a piece of paper for gold, no questions asked. 

The point is that for money to work, you need people to trust that what you're giving them is worth what you say it is. You need people to believe that when you hand them a piece of paper that says it is worth x amount of value, they can take that paper anywhere to trade on its stated value. 

Because bitcoin cuts out that trust, it's essentially crippled. It can't process payments at any rate that's sustainable- it can handle 3-4 transactions per second, compared to the 1,667 Visa manages- which leads to embarrassing situations like a cryptocurrency conference refusing to accept bitcoin payments because they take too long to process. 

Money is a vehicle for social cohesion and trust, bitcoin buries its users in isolation and suspicion. You can't have anything like FDIC insurance under bitcoin so if you lose the password to your wallet or someone steals your coins, you can't be reimbursed. Any coins that you got in recompense would have to come at the expense of someone else. Bitcoin at its peak is a zero-sum game, which, yeah, see how long that lasts. Or, see what happens when inevitable economic shock comes and whatever value people have is gone forever. 

Removing the social aspect of money from bitcoin's design has created a currency that demands total faith from its users but offers no protections to them when things go wrong. No matter the myriad other reasons, this choice will forever doom bitcoin from achieving anything its believers hope it will 

The Myriad Other Reasons

Bitcoin is hardcoded to have a limit of available coins. Once 21 million coins have been minted, the system stops producing them. There a few problems that arise from this, the biggest being that bitcoin is suicidally deflationary. 

Put simply, deflation happens when the value of your goods is higher than the value of your currency. So if you have $1 billion worth of goods to sell, but only $100 million in currency to buy those goods with, you've got deflation. The easiest way of solving this problem- just print more money- is unavailable because the currency is tied to a finite resource like gold. 

Since printing money isn't an option, the only thing to do is wait for prices to fall until they're in line with the available money supply. This process can take years as people have to absorb the losses they take while they're cutting prices and wages to match what people have in buying power. 

Why this is relevant to bitcoin is that it is nowhere near big enough to support a national, let alone global, economy. At $48,000, the total value of every possible bitcoin would come in at just over $900 billion dollars. That sounds impressive until you realize that the GDP- the measure of the goods and services produced in the economy- of the United States is $21 trillion. The crunch from the value of goods falling to match the value of bitcoin would trigger a depression so severe in length and scale the only viable way to end it would be to ditch the currency entirely, just like when countries abandoned the gold standard to escape the Great Depression.

The second, albeit not as catastrophic, problem is that one of the incentives for people to use so many resources to verify payments and add them to the blockchain is that they get a bitcoin as a reward. The groups who do this also charge transaction fees, but the coin is obviously the main draw here. 

As you can probably see, if no more coins are being minted, than the only incentive these groups will have to expend all those resources is more costly transaction fees. Plus, the more transactions lined up to get verified, the more difficult the equations get, which means more power, which makes it more expensive to solve, meaning for every single transaction you're not only using up bitcoins to pay for goods but also you're paying more and more for the time and energy needed just for the privilege of buying something. 

Aside from the electricity waste, there's literally nothing bitcoin does better than anything it intends to replace. Because your bitcoin wallet is tied directly to your I.P. address, cash is better for anonymous, untraceable payments which is why there's a concerted effort to reduce the amount of available cash going on right now. The efforts have failed miserably so far but the goal is clear: governments want the ability to track every purchase its citizens make and a blockchain is the perfect tool for that project. 

It barely even holds up an investment tool. Bitcoin's real value is the same as any other commodity: you get to exchange it for dollars. That's why it's not a big deal that some companies allow bitcoin payments, all they're doing is accepting to go through a longer, more complicated process to exchange your assets into real money. All the excitement around bitcoin is based on its dollar value. 

Sure it's on a bit of a tear now but we've been down this road before, too. The price will climb, media attention will draw new users excited to get in on the game but then the reality that you can't do much of anything with your new toy sets in and then the price can drop 20-30% in a single day. 

That's obviously not a very stable investment situation, which means more people cash out at a loss, the more the price drops because people lose confidence in bitcoin's value. Eventually, the price stabilizes again because the user base self-selects for true believers who keep insisting bitcoin is worth something which, slowly but surely, drives the price back up until the cycle repeats. 

Ironically, all these failures are why bitcoin won't be going anywhere any time soon. As an object of faith, the more bitcoin fails, the stronger people will cling to their belief. All bitcoin has is the faith of its users which means as long as they have that faith, this wannabe currency isn't going anywhere. 

Is There Any Way To Make It Work?

No. 

Bitcoin is explicitly designed to be harder to use the more people try to use it. The whole point of its payment system is that it grinds to a halt the moment transaction volume picks up. 

You can't change anything about bitcoin to make it more workable because bitcoin, at its core, is an ideological argument. Changing how bitcoin works means admitting the ideology that created it was wrong. Which no one will admit, because ideas aren't products, they don't get recalled if they're defective. 

Debt Is Not the Enemy

I cannot stand scare pieces about the national debt. Instead of educating people they largely seek to scare them with big numbers and piss poor economic analysis. They're ignorance and fear masquerading as responsible, somber thought which need to be dismissed at every opportunity. 

Now that we have a new president, there's been a rash of these pieces lately. Business Insider has one, so does Forbes. For an illustrative example, we'll focus on ProPublica's story about the national debt under the Trump administration. The gist of the article is that Trump insisted he would pay down all of the then $19 trillion debt over the course of eight years. Instead, he increased it by almost $7.8 trillion, which will squeeze our budget for years to come.

All that sounds terrible, right? The idea that we're almost $28 trillion in debt sounds catastrophic when $2,000 in unpaid medical bills could prevent you from getting a place to live or buying a car. But do me a favor, go read that article, come back, then tell me who, exactly, lent us all that money.

Having trouble? It isn't your fault. The article is deliberately vague about just who the United States owes such a massive debt to. Which is odd, considering the supposed point of the piece is to give people a clearer understanding of why the debt increase is a problem. The closest the article gets is mentioning that interest payments on our debt remain low because the Federal Reserve is purposefully keeping rates low. 

Why is that detail important, though? Does the Federal Reserve lend the government money? 

Well, no. 

What happens is the Treasury department issues Treasury bonds, which the Federal Reserve buys, depositing the money into the Treasury's account, and that's the birds and the bees of how money gets made. So what does that have to do with debt? Well, the Fed is part of the government but technically not. It's sort of its own independent thing that exists outside any of the three branches of government but operates with their authorization. 

All this adds up to the fact that when the Fed buys those Treasury bonds, it goes down as an asset on their balance sheet but as a debt on the Treasury's. One man's asset is another's obligation, and all that. The interest rate thing comes into play because the Fed sets the baseline interest rate that everyone uses for mortgages or whatever other loan you can think of. It also means they set the rates for government bonds and debt services, including the bonds they buy from the federal government.

Looping back around, this means all the concern about the debt is getting the vapors over how much money the government owes to itself. When you see that, it suddenly gets much harder to understand what the big fucking deal is. 

 

To be fair, the article is thorough in that it remembers to throw in a bunch of scary sounding statistics about the deficit, too. 

 

We're given all kinds of terrible sounding news about how Trump's tax cuts blew a hole in federal revenue which that our ability to pay back our ever increasing debt is hamstrung by the fact that 62% of our budget is tied to mandatory payments for programs like Medicare and Social Security.

 

This is as good a time as any to point out that federal deficits aren't a bad thing. We think of them as inherently terrible because we associate them with our own finances and figure that if we spend more than we earned for too long, eventually the creditors will descend like locusts to strip us of everything we have. 

 

Except, the government isn't a family. Or a business. Insisting that we perceive the government solely through those lenses is a failure of imagination which hobbles our ambitions.

So if the deficit isn't a signal that we're hemorrhaging money, what does it tell us? In short, the deficit is the amount of money the government leaves in the economy. For example, if the government spends $200 for a service, then taxes back $80, it's leaving $120 in the economy to circulate. It goes down as a shortfall on the government's budget, but that $120 is real money burning a hole in someone's pocket. If the government had a balanced budget any economic activity generated from government spending would be negated. Everything it spent would just be taxed right back, canceling everything out. A surplus is even worse because that means the government is extracting value from the economy rather than adding to it.

That's not to say that all deficit's are desirable. Tax cuts for the rich, for example, are bad not because they lower government revenue, but because it transfers more money to the already absurdly wealthy. By leaving literally billions of dollars in the savings and investment accounts of wealthy individuals and companies, the government is essentially leaving that money to rot. There's no way any one person or entity can use the ridiculous surpluses of cash they have on hand which makes that money effectively worthless because it's not circulating or doing anything except generating interest payments.

For deficits to be effective, they have to come through the government spending money on projects that increase employment or give money to people directly, or both. 

Governments are vehicles for wealth redistribution and deficits are one of the mechanisms it uses to accomplish that. It's good policy to pry that money out of the hands of the ultra rich because all they really do with it is tax avoidance and money laundering. 

 

Letting 90% of the wealth concentrate at the very top .01 percentile does more harm, fiscally, socially, and economically, than a deficit ever will, but you wouldn't really know that. Questioning the validity of private wealth is out of bounds here, a sign of moral and mental corruption if not outright failure. 

We all know something's wrong with this country. At this point, that's undeniable. Doing something about it means spending the money to change everything from the ground up and haul our backward asses into the 21st century. But if we do that, then the power dynamics of the country change, which means the rich and powerful aren't as rich or powerful as they could be. So we're stuck with these idiotic, incoherent pieces that do everything they can to convince you that government debt and deficits will bring about inescapable ruin. 

And yet, the sky never falls. We should take the lesson in that and maybe, just maybe, finally learn we don't have to be afraid all the time.

It's Lies and Liars

The desire to put Trump behind us as January 20th draws closer is approaching something tangible. Already there are multiple retrospectives about his presidency, the impact he had on America, questioning whether we can knit back together what he so clumsily sundered. 

To be honest, I'm not really interested in many of them. After five years, I don' trust anyone who still thinks that Trump is something that happened to America and isn't a representation of what America is.

Let's focus on what many called the most insidious aspect of Trump's presidency- his lies. Surely, there are presidents or people who could match his pace. It seemed like everyday Trump would overwhelm the news cycle with at least six impossible lies before breakfast then move on to entirely new, even contradictory lies in the afternoon. The media never got a handle on this, always seemingly caught flat-footed by the pace and flexibility of Trump's mendacity. They never quite caught on to the fact that Trump wasn't lying to advance anything grander beside making himself look good. Reporter's, pundits, every one kept waiting for the usual script of "Politician lies to support their agenda, gets caught, acts contrite, then moves on to new tactic to accomplish the same," to assert itself, never quite wising up to the fact that the more his lies were exposed, the greater the existential panic in Trump's mind grew, necessitating an even grander lie to square that dissonant circle.

Trump's biggest weakness is that he doesn't know how to play off a loss. He has to be the winner, has to be the best, in everything all the time, no matter what. That pathetic desperation is what did him in more than anything else right from the start. Instead of playing off the fact that his inauguration crowd was smaller than Obama's by saying that these were the true patriots, real Americans who fulfilled the promise of the founders, citizens who walked the narrow way of freedom, their smaller number a testament that they were swayed onto the easier, wider path of multiculturalism. Sure, fascist overtones are positively dripping from those sentiments, but that never stopped Trump before. Point is, he could've played up the near religious devotion into even higher pathological levels of worship past what they his supporters are already giving him and encased himself in near unassailable political positioning but, instead, chose to use an overhead shot of Obama's inauguration crowd that took five seconds of reverse image searching to confirm. Instead of spending his first week in office basking in the glow of his victory, he was embarrassing himself by pretending he didn't steal the accolades of the Black president who made him feel so inferior.

One of the biggest questions surrounding Trump's supporters is "How could they accept all the lies?" For one, they've been conditioned to by decades of Fox News and radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck who built their entire industry over lying to their audience. For another, everything else about their lives has been built on lies in some way, what makes the presidency so different?

Consider, Purdue Pharma actively paid doctors and generated studies to lie about the addiction risks of Oxycontin. The company even plead guilty in court to this in 2019. But it's going bankrupt, none of the executives are going to jail and the Sackler family already set up another pharmaceutical company to keep peddling their wonder drug. Meanwhile, all the addicts they created are now dying in record numbers shooting up heroin. 

You can do this all day, too. Exxon-Mobile knew that the fossil fuel industry was creating a climate crisis then spent decades setting up a network of think tanks and public intellectuals whose sole purpose was to lie about and obscure this fact. Goldman Sachs would bundle mortgages they knew would fail into complex derivative packages, lie about their worth to investors, then turn around and bet against those very same bundles, waiting to cash in on their inevitable failure. Let's not forget the efforts from the tobacco industry do deny their products link to cancer and emphysema, or the lead industry lying about the toxicity of their product. Oh, right, the Radium Girls- women who got cancer after being told to put their radium-infused paint in their mouths to "point" their brushes- also deserve a special mention.

And oh do things just go on. The officers who murdered Breonna Taylor lied about their evidence to obtain a search warrant, police lie so much on the stand in trial that defense attorney's invented the term testilying as shorthand, not to mention the staggering amount of overturned death penalty cases were police and prosecutors lied through their teeth about the defendant's guilt.The military lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident that escalated the Vietnam War, Nixon lied about sabotaging peace talks for the same war so he could become president, Regan lied about the Iran-Contra and the CIA's facilitating the crack epidemic. We lied about torturing people, WMD's, NSA surveillance, lead in water pipes, COINTELPRO, among so many others. 

Point is, we can't complain about Trump being a liar when our entire society is built around the manufacture and maintenance of lies.

Is it really surprising then, living a country where they're surrounded by lies on all sides, that Trump's faithful would throw themselves so fervently behind someone who lied about everything he spoke about? The only thing you could call out Trump for on his mendacious personality is how pathetic his lies are. But that he lies constantly, about everything, and kills people because of it? Nah man, that's American as baseball. 

"Can you believe that Trump is pardoning his cronies, his co-conspirators?!?!?!?" Yes, yes I can. If #MeToo, pedophile priests, or any of the rape scandals in the military have taught us anything, it's that powerful people stay that way because the connections and organizations they belong to actively cover up their crimes. Plus, this unprecedented abuse of power already happened when Elder Bush pardoned everyone involved in the Iran-Contra affair so they wouldn't turn states evidence against him and send him to prison. 

If truth is supposed to mean anything, then we have to tell the truth to ourselves about who we are. We need to admit that the conditions we find ourselves in now are the same that we've been in. The only difference is that the reality has become too intolerable for the lies to paper over anymore. Which, is good, it's the kick we needed to confront the lies that we've become too complacent with. But let's not kid ourselves into thinking that these are sudden developments that sprang out of extraordinary circumstances that just require us to right the ship and we'll be back on course. 

No. 

We are what we are because this is what we've chosen to become. We have to accept the responsibility of that. If we don't, we'll never come to terms with the fact that we allowed ourselves to get duped into believing that this brutal system was freedom. And if we never realize that if we have the power to accept it, then we won't see that we have the power to reject it, too.

Not All Things Are Tricks

M. Night Shyamalan is one of those film makers people love to ask "What the hell happened to you?" His breakout movies - The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs - cleaned up at the box office and were cultural events the same way Star Wars or Marvel movies are now. These days he's more punchline than anything else, a director who had one gimmick that increasingly sputtered out until his work crossed over into self-parody. You can find all manner of retrospectives of his work trying to autopsy his career and pin point the moment were things went bad. 

Interestingly, all these autopsies miss something. They all gloss over what turned out to be the canary in the coal mine, which, to be fair, I didn't even know existed until my girlfriend showed it to me. So, let's talk about The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan and how it spelled the doom of Night's career. 

The movie was a joint collaboration between Shyamalan and the Sci Fi network as a guerilla advertising campaign for Shyamalan's then upcoming release, The Village. It was played off as a behind the scenes documentary, but the entire thing was scripted, which generated some controversy at the time given the claims the film makes, but we'll get into that a little later. 

For now, I want to focus on what I think is the most unintentionally telling moments in the movie. In his first interview with the documentary crew, Shyamalan says that his goal is to make movies that connect in some unusual way; if they don't, then they're "just" a movie. The second comes when he's explaining his admiration for Alfred Hitchcock, specifically that he was a filmmaker who you could always see pulling the strings of his films stories. 

What these moments reveal is the pressure an artist places on themselves to live up to their own reputation. It may be hard to remember now, but the twists of Shyamalan's movies were talked about and dissected all the time. You couldn't talk about his films without talking about the secret, the inevitable reversal of what we thought we knew to be the story. People would look endlessly for clues or inconsistencies in his movies to see if the movie still held together once we all knew the "real" story it was telling. 

In that context, I can't fault Shyamalan for putting the twist at the center of his creative process. Everyone else was.

It's unfortunate how consumed Shyamalan became by the most inconsequential elements of his stories. It lead to situations so absurd, so nonsensical, that knowing them felt like a betrayal of the emotional investment people had leading up to the reveal. An article from the British Film Institute argued that Shyamalan's career tanked because his movies demand a childlike sense of wonder and attention in their quest to inspire deep contemplation in an era of cynicism and short attention spans. To that I would counter that when presented with things like the trees don't like us so they're making us kill ourselves or a group of people hate the modern world so much they decide to go LARPing in the woods, scorn is the only appropriate response. 

The real winner though is this documentary. It claims, with an honest-to-god straight face, that Shyamalan drowned in a lake near his childhood home. And died. For thirty-five minutes. Until he was resurrected by a spirit who gave him a preternatural ability to tell stories.

How anyone thought this was a good idea is beyond me. It's too outrageous to accept without question, there's no way the lie will survive even the slightest amount of examination, and there's no way people aren't going to feel betrayed and furious once the lie was exposed. Which is exactly what happened. 

Here again though, we see the pattern that emerged in Shyamalan's films- a baffling decision that couldn't survive any amount of scrutiny with no way to handle the fallout once it fell apart. 

The Village is a perfect example of this. Shyamalan really wants you to delve into the decision making of the town elders in creating the eponymous village. He wants you to feel the grief, the desperation that would allow them to agree to such a ridiculous idea. And, truth be told, there's a really good story in that. The problem comes with the fact that this little pocket of isolation can't exist without taking advantage of the world`it seeks to spurn. 

In order to keep prying eyes away from the town, the land it was built on was bought by one of the founding members and turned into a wildlife reserve. From there, the whole thing was declared a no-fly-zone so no one would accidentally buzz over their heads, ruining the deception. All those things can only happen because of laws and regulations that have come into existence over the last century or so. At the heart of this story is a tension that cannot be resolved. This community of grief-stricken, desperate people wants to live apart, isolated from the evils of the modern world but can only have the isolation they seek because of protections the modern world grants them. 

 

It's an unsustainable situation, waiting for the moment when their implicit relationship with the outside world is forced to be explicit by events they cannot control. Again, this is a fantastic premise with all the examination of guilt and grief that are central themes of Shyamalan's early work.

Except, none of that examination happens. The crime the elders sought to escape finds them when one of their children stabs another out of jealousy, their explicit reliance on the modern world comes out when they need medicine to save said stab victims' life.  

And then, everything works out. 

The medicine is retrieved without complication, the boy lives, and the perpetrator dies wearing one of the monster costumes which makes the lie all the more plausible. We're dropped into an untenable situation on the edge of disaster and leave it much the way we found it. 

How exhilarating.

To see how disappointing this storytelling is, let's work back to the Hitchcock quote from earlier. Yes, it's true that to say that Hitchcock was a filmmaker dedicated to pulling the strings on his stories and play his audience like puppets. But for what purpose? Take Vertigo, for example. We experience the movie squarely in James Stewart's character Scottie Ferguson's point of view. As a result, we are as disoriented as he is navigating the twists and turns as the story makes us question everything we know until it leads us to tragic conclusion. Where is the catharsis of mother son conversation from The Sixth Sense? Where is the quiet acknowledgment of the breakfast scene in Unbreakable? 

For Shyamalan's older works, the twist worked as the vehicle for the characters to find the courage to face a truth about themselves they could not accept, then move on. Both The Village and The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan rely on their twist to shock the audience into bewilderment that they live in a different world then they expected. Which, they already know. The whole point of a movie is to take people out of their normal existence; if all you give them is "You thought you were in this kind of story, but you're actually in a different one. Aren't you amazed? Aren't you astonished?" it should be no surprise that the response is "No."

Maybe I'm blowing this all out of proportion. Maybe I'm making too much out of a largely forgotten extended marketing gimmick. But if we've learned anything from a good twist it's that the thing that explains everything, that brings us into the full understanding of what's happened, is usually something tucked away in the corner, always a little blurry until we finally get a good, solid look at it.

The Things That Just Never End

The election has come and gone but because we can't ever do something and be done with it anymore, we're still hung up on its outcome. Rather than getting an idea of the landscape of the coming Biden presidency, we're stuck yet again on Trump being a toddler. 

Personally, I think there's reason to be worried but ultimately Trump will back down. To do the kind of thing he's looking to pull off he needs total control over people who have lots of guns and the political cover to use them when you've lost. You can see the personal moves at the Department of Defense as his attempt to solidify his hold over the military but having sycophants in leadership positions doesn't mean that the soldiers will follow orders. There's always going to be a contingent of soldiers who will happily go along with establishing a dictatorship, but whether there's enough to go along with Trump is something I'm rather doubtful of. 

Trump's political cover is also rapidly evaporating. It's one thing for Congressional Republicans to cast aspersions on the validity of our elections, that's just what they do, all the time. It's another thing entirely for them to put themselves in harms way for the sake of a man who clearly lost and will not pay the favor back in anyway. As far as thatgoes, Mitch McConnell did not get to where he is by sacrificing himself on the altars of lost causes. 

 

Even so, Trump is in the best possible position a losing president can be in. He's walking out of office with more votes than any Republican president has ever received, he took 93% of the party vote, and made gains with every minority group. In other words, Trump is in a position to retain near total control over the Republican party for years to come, if he bothered to realize it. But the man is so obsessively focused on his own ego that he can't see the forest for the trees. All he cares about is his image, the projection that he is a winner. He doesn't know how to translate or leverage influence into actual power, he just wants to look good on TV. Dude has the once-in-a-lifetime chance to have every future Republican candidate come crawling on their hands and knees for his favor but he's going to throw it all away because he won't be in the White House anymore. He's such a petty asshole he can't recognize the power that's right in front of him.

 

Per usual, Trump sucking all the oxygen out of the room distracts us from talking about some thing that's actually interesting. In this case, it's how, in a pandemic, depression levels of unemployment, and the most unpopular president in history, the Democrats came out of election night in a worse position than they started. 

Yes, winning the presidency is good, no argument there. But the focus on headline races obscures how hollow the victory really is. 

If every thing goes well, the Senate might be a 50-50 tie, but the party lost seats in the House and failed to take any state legislators. That last one is especially critical, arguably the most important elections on the ballot. The reason is that now that we've had a Census, it's time to redraw the district maps that make up the House of Representative and state legislature districts. So now we're in the position of having to fight uphill in gerrymandered districts to knock off well funded incumbents with a near nonexistent bench of exciting challengers.

This lack of a bench makes winning the presidency near useless. It doesn't matter if you're chief executive if you're effectively crippled in implementing your agenda. 

 

Naturally, there are questions over how Democrats could screw up such a layup of an election, again, and to the surprise of no one, they've decided that the party has just moved too far to the left. Which, honestly is too funny. Blaming Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and Defund the Police as the rocks which the blue wave broke against is classic liberal behavior, even though all were things that Biden and most House Democrats explicitly renounced. Still, the argument goes, the mere existence of these policy positions was enough to sink moderates prospects and that is why any further progressive agenda needs to be heavily reigned in.

What must never be questioned is the message that centrists candidates are running on. We must always assume that running candidates on oil and gas platforms with no investment in renewable energy during a rapidly worsening climate crisis has no downsides. We must also assume that backing police over social protests over their rampant abuses will also lead to nothing but good outcomes. It's good politics to tell your constituents that want you to make the world a better place that their desires are stupid and unachievable.

 

There should be alarm bells going off in Democratic circles right now. They barely scraped a win against the worst president we've ever had and lost ground in all the other areas of government that matter. They're very obviously running out of ideas and strategies to remain an effective political force who can enact policies at any level of government.

 

To close on a positive note, the one good thing to come out of the Biden candidacy is that it is impossible to form a cult of personality around him. The dude is charming enough, but there's a reason he's always been passed over in all his other presidential bids. Hell, even this time he couldn't even manage to get people behind him on his own; it was only when Obama and the rest of the Democratic political machine intervened to clear out all the other centrist candidates so they wouldn't split the vote for Biden. The absence of any popular movement around Biden means that his victory can't be chalked up to anything to do with the man himself.

 

Biden only has his presidency because voters organized themselves and busted their ass to churn out communities to the polls to line up behind his sorry ass. If popular movements can organize effectively enough to get a man nobody really likes elected, then we can do the same for things that are actually worth a shit. There's a reason politicians like Obama see the ideal body politic as one who shows up on election days but spends the rest of the time disconnected gossiping over brunch- things are so much easier when you don't have to deal with the rabble getting upset over their lot in life.

 

Keep getting in trouble, keep being a nuisance, keep making their lives hell. It's the only way any of us will get anything to help  us get by, let alone thrive.