Yes, But Also

 

 

 

 Pieces like this one at Naked Capitalism bring out... conflicting isn't the word so let's say split feelings in me. The article is about how communication strategies for getting people vaccinated can backfire, basically for some segments of the population, more aggressive messaging can harden their reluctance to get the vaccine rather than ease it. What I'm split on is that yes, it is important to know how your messaging is effecting people, how it can be better, and to correct mistakes so you can achieve the goal. But on the other hand, I'm tired of pretending that if we tailor our messages in just the right way, then opposition to the vaccine will just melt away.

Obviously, the goal is get as many people vaccinated as we possibly can. So we need to make sure that the messaging is as effective as it can be. Whatever it takes to get people lining up for that jab, right? But at the same time, fuck these people. When we keep  almost weekly news stories about right wing personalities dying because they weren't vaccinated, I honestly struggle to see how it's very news worthy. "Man who refused to get treatment for highly infectious disease dies from that disease," isn't exactly a surprising turn of events. 

Then again, mocking these people's audience and dancing on their hosts grave isn't exactly the best way to make them believe you're on their side. Or that your primary concern is their continued well being. There's a long history of propaganda on the right that their political opponents see them as a mass of sub-human swine who, if they can't be corralled, are only fit for the slaughter. Which, yes, it doesn't help to reinforce this, but the idea that conservatives are under siege from the rest of society is the only story conservatism has about itself. If that hasn't changed over the course of centuries, I doubt a more even tone from newscasters on CNN will sway things very much.

Still, its wrong to treat people, especially ones you don't like, as a monolith. It's hard to convince someone you want them to take an opportunity to change when you're dancing on the grave of their loved one, telling the survivors that they deserved everything they because they believed people like Tucker Carlson. Shoving their family members death in their faces, if nothing else, is not a very good rhetorical strategy which, if your goal is to get as many people vaccinated as possible, you need to be careful about how you act because everything finds its way online these days. Someone is going to see you being a dick about their dead mom, so just keep that in mind.

However, it's bullshit that in this setup the "just get the vaccine already," crowd has to keep their emotions in check, or at least as neutral as possible, while the anti-vax crowd gets license to do whatever they want. On twitter the other day, I came across this screen shot of some one asking for legal advice and I think it's good for you to read it in full:

This woman lost her child because her boss not only refused to get vaccinated but refused to protect anyone from catching it once she knew she was diagnosed with COVID. When we talk about people getting mad at others for refusing to get the vaccine, this is what we're talking about. it's easy to frame this conversation in terms of elitist libs mocking homespun conservatives as ignorant hicks because that's a trope we use for everything, all the time. It makes the debate feel familiar, as just one more extension of a never ending culture war that consumes every aspect of our lives. Sure, there are elements of that trope, no doubt, but the prime driver of this rage is the bodies. The thousands of dead or infected who will possibly carry the effects of the disease for the rest of their lives. Why are those seeking to get people vaccinated told that they cannot react on their emotions, that they must keep them in check in order to extend every possible grace and fairness towards those who dismiss them at every turn?

There's also the the problem that vaccines are just the latest front of denial during the pandemic. At first, the disease didn't even exist. Then, it was just the flu. Then, it was nothing to worry about because it only had a 1% mortality rate. Now, it's that vaccines and vaccine mandates are fascist, authoritarian measures anathema to the very idea of American freedom. All these policy stances were ones that conservatives adopted and championed to protect their own political positions, no one on MSNBC or The New York Times made them say these things because they called them names.

The conservative fight against vaccines has nothing to do with science or freedom or anything else that comes out of their mouths. Their opposition comes from the fact that having to wear a mask or get a vaccine violates the one true principle of conservatism. If you're not familiar with it, the one principle of conservatism is that there must be an in group which the law protects but does not bind, along side out groups which the law binds but does not protect. Public health measures shatter this principle because they require conservatives to do things for people who are inherently (in their mind) inferior and imposes consequences for failing to do so. All the talking points, all the lies about the vaccine come from this central violation which means that no amount of messaging or coddling will change the conservative outlook completely.

Even so, it's important to still try. I have no sympathy for those who refuse to get the vaccine and die, but that doesn't mean I want them to. No one should have to experience begging for a vaccine (or really, their lives) before they get intubated a few days before they're dead. It's a pointless, horrific way to die, even if they brought it upon themselves, it still isn't anything to celebrate. Also, and a bit more cynically I will admit, the more people who go unvaccinated, the more it puts everyone at risk as more variants evolve to become vaccine resistant, spreading from those who got their shot and those who didn't with little distinction. Even if you can't empathize or sympathize, which to be clear, I have incredible difficultly with both, paying attention to how vaccine messaging is used is important even if the only compelling reason you can find is self-preservation.

Things I Wished I Loved: Killing Them Softly

I really wanted to like Andrew Dominik's 2012 film Killing Them Softly. The movie was the second collaboration between Dominik and Brad Pitt after the commercial flop of the criminally under seen The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford- I'm guessing the plan was that a punchier run time paired with a more manageable title would lead to a better box office return. The film is a tight 97 minutes but still manages to pack in the same thematic work of the stripping away the mythology to get to the ugly, mundane realities of a beloved American myth that Assassination was packed to the brim with. Everyone here is stellar, too. Pitt gives one of the best performances of his career with Richard Kind, James Gandolfini, Ray Liotta, Scott McNairy, and Ben Mendelsohn rounding out the cast. 

It's just such a shame that it all goes to waste. 

What kills this movie dead, what made it infuriating to watch in theaters and only gets worse on a rewatch, is the movie's insistence on putting the subtext through a bullhorn. 

The film takes place amidst the financial ruin and presidential election of 2008. Which, honestly, is perfect. The plot of the movie is centered around finding out who is responsible for disturbing the order of the world to set things right again so having the world collapse in the background provides some nice commentary about how performative and improvised these measures of control really are. There's also a nice corollary to the fundamental criminal nature of our financial system and how uncomfortably well it lines up with the kick up tributary system of La Cosa Nostra.

Instead of letting this marinate in the background, though, the movie brings its subtext to the forefront at every possible opportunity. The robbery of the gambling den that sets the plot off has C-SPAN on in the background, Hank Paulson's congressional testimony blares over a montage of two goons waiting to pick up a suspect, the camera lingers on a speech made by candidate Obama even after characters move out of frame, even the final climatic conversation is framed by Obama's victory speech. 

There's a fifteen minute period in the movie where none of this happens, where Dominik lets things lie and the story play out which makes the movie sores during this time. James Gandolfini has one the best scenes of his career wallowing in pathetic self pity, Pitt and McNairy trade one of the best subtly threatening conversations ever put to film and the assassinations that bring the whole sordid affair to a close are so expertly done that there's a thrill to how cold and professional they are. 

Even the movie's closing line, which should be an instant classic, feels more like the film berating you with its point instead of honing the theme to fine, sharp edge.

And yet. I find myself replaying "America isn't a country, it's just a business" and "I'm American. And in America you're on your own," over and over in my head these days. The social fabric of this country is so nonexistent that you can't even get people to wear a piece of cloth over their mouths in public because why should anyone be slightly inconvenienced for another person's benefit without getting something in return? Get a free vaccine? Nope. Texas and Florida are going so far as to ban local governments from instituting any anti-COVID measures because of "freedom" or whatever.

Hell, that isn't even the only thing that resonates in the movie. A huge thread of the movie is that the Mob, the most romanticized criminal organization, symbol of freedom from the drudgery of everyday life, has straitjacketed itself by adopting the structures and strictures of corporate America. For all the talk about self-determination, they're bound by the grind, trapped by the unrelenting need for money to fund our basic necessities. How free are then, if the only way they can live on our own is if they victimize someone else lest they get left out in the cold to hungry?

You have no idea how badly I want to say that Andrew Dominik made not only the best Western of the 21st century but also the best crime movie since Heat and that we should all be kicking ourselves for sleeping on them both. But then I just remember that slow zoom in on Obama as Gandolfini walks out of frame so the movie can grind itself to a halt for a few seconds so all the peasants understand what's happening and I just want to bang my head against the wall in frustration, baffled that a quiet masterpiece of a movie insists on tripping over itself on something so maddeningly trivial. 

If you're bored one night scrolling and these things don't bother you as much as they bother me, check it out. I may have a lot of problems with the movie but I at it'd be nice if people actually saw the damn thing.

Clay, Not Cornerstone

We have this idea that the law is inherent and immutable. It exists to protect us, to create order in what would otherwise be a chaotic, brutal world. But like every other aspect of society, the law is merely an invention, something we created along the way to make things run as we believed they should. As with any other invention, the law can be tinkered with, abused, or just outright ignored as needed. 

The Texas abortion law is one of a few recent examples of this practice. Under the law, all abortions are banned - including pregnancies that result from incest and rape - after six weeks. If any woman gets an abortion after that time, the law allows any U.S. citizen to sue not only the woman but the doctor who performed the abortion, anyone who gave her money to pay for it, anyone who gave her a ride, along with anyone else who could conceivably said to have "aided and abetted" in acquiring the abortion. Should the plaintiffs win their civil suit, the law requires judges to impose at least a $10,000 fine on the defendants, payable to the plaintiffs.

There are a litany of problems with this law. For one, abortion is a federally guaranteed constitutional right, up until the point of fetal viability. Banning abortions at 6 weeks on its own makes the Texas law inherently unconstitutional but, like I said, there are other problems, too. The whole point of the bounty system is for Texas to try to avoid an official state punishment against women who seek or get abortions. Its supposed to be an end run around the law, basically the official version of "You can't blame me for the things I let other people do." 

Obviously, I don't have the legal background to say definitively whether or not Texas declaring open season on women and their support networks while awarding bounties to pro-lifer vigilantes amounts to those vigilantes qualifying as state actors but, still. It's an incredibly obvious question to bring up, one which I expect will be argued at length as the challenges to the law make their way to the Supreme Court. 

The other, other problem the Texas law has is that it makes an absolute mockery of standing. In the legal world, standing is basically the concept that if you have suffered a specific harm, you have the right to sue to repair that harm in court. Larger point being, standing isn't exactly something you can just grant to people willy-nilly, there still has to be some form of active harm done to people bringing the lawsuit, especially when it comes to civil actions.

Part of why I think the bounty system won't survive contact (at least at first) with the court system is that there is no compelling argument in favor of it that doesn't involve the pursuit of state interests. What specific harm, for example, does anyone in Dallas suffer if a woman in El Paso gets an abortion? What possible injury could they cite as reason for the lawsuit? The state can claim this harm because it represents the whole of the community, so it can take action to protect what it sees as public interest. Except, Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey have slammed this door closed. These cases established and defined abortion as a constitutional right under the 14th amendment which limited the options states could use to directly crackdown on abortion. Even with a Supreme Court willing to indulge Texas' nonsense (we'll deal with this in a minute) required Texas had to invent this bounty scheme in the first place. But, like I said, standing isn't something you can conjure out of thin air, some part of it has to be conferred in order for it to work. 

Push against this feature of the law even just a little and it quickly falls apart. There is no basis for any random citizen to sue another for pursuing medical treatment they don't like. The only possible justification I can think of is that these suits are in the public interest but, again, private individuals don't have this because they cannot prove they've suffered a distinct or palpable injury which is a constitutional requirement for any lawsuit to work. These vigilante cases only legal authority then would have to come from the fact that these private individuals are acting as proxies for the state which, brings us right back to constitutional hard stop set up by Roe and Casey.

Whether any of this matters is an open question. With a 6-3 majority, the conservative wing can lose Roberts but still sit comfortably with a 5-4 ruling in favor of Texas. I've made a big deal about how flagrantly unconstitutional the Texas law is but, if the Supreme Court wants to, it can change the definition of "unconstitutional" whenever they want. Move to limit corporate spending in elections? Well, by our own doctrines, corporations are people, money is speech, therefore, campaign finance restrictions are unconstitutional. It's incredibly easy to alter the bedrock legal principles that our whole system is built on so, the next year will be somewhat nerve wracking as we wait to see whether or not women's bodily autonomy is something the Supreme Court is interested in protecting. 

Because for all the muddling the pro-life movement does, abortion is a bodily autonomy issue. Yes, a fetus is involved, but that does not make it the central issue. In order for the fetus to survive, it must use the the food, blood, and oxygen among many, many other things, of its mother. Here's the important thing- nothing and no one is allowed to use your body against your will. If you are in the hospital and another patient needs a blood transfusion to live, the hospital cannot take your blood because, bodily autonomy. Even when we die, our organs cannot be harvested to save others is we did not consent to do so when we were alive. It is a irony of their position that the so called pro-lifers dream world is one where a corpse has greater dignity and sanctity than a living woman.

There are no fundamental differences between a pregnancy or the above situations. The main objections against lumping all these things together usually bring out nonsensical arguments or religious ones about how, in the case of abortion, because sex was involved, that was the woman's choice so pregnancy is just her avoiding responsibility for her decisions. Which, honestly, your religious beliefs are your own but are ultimately irrelevant. If you believe that life begins at conception, that every fetus has a soul, and that every abortion is ending all the potential of a human life, fine, I'm not saying you can't believe that. What I am saying you can't do is turn around so that everyone has to live your creed, because that isn't caring or loving.

If your goal is to make sure every baby comes into the world with a family who loves and care about them, banning abortion won't do that. Because instead of love, this law uses the power of the state to make every woman afraid, afraid to go to their doctor, afraid to ask for help, afraid to do anything other than keep her head down and just try to figure it out however she can. This law is designed to cut pregnant women off from any and all decisions other than having their child and, much more insidious than that, place any one who helps them do anything else in legal peril. What love is to be found in fear, desperation, and isolation? 

This is why so much work is done by pro-life groups to make the whole abortion argument about the life of the fetus. Yes, it does function to muddle the discussion as a whole and wastes an inordinate amount of time not only trying to refute subjective moral and religious questions but also trying to move the argument to the actual issues abortion deals with. All that said, the rhetoric is primarily for their own internal consumption so they feel galvanized to pursue the goal. It also serves as a soothing mental balm as the contradictions of your stated goals about the sanctity of life being achieved by the reality of grinding an entire segment of the population under heel. Something has to square that circle, so in comes the pursuit of life itself above all else to trump the concerns of robbing women of their independence and dignity.

Another interesting aspect to notice here is that while Texas is flagrantly breaking the law, any prospective punishment is largely theoretical at this point. Which, again, shows that the law is largely a social construction that is unevenly applied. If you has an individual did something that so blatantly violated the constitutional rights, you'd be screwed. But a state does it? Not only do they get away with it, they get the chance to rewrite things so their illegality becomes the law itself.

One of the most common flexes of supposed first world countries like the United States is that we are a nation of laws. The idea is that we have risen above the barbarity of simply ruling by force of violence, that we have evolved into a system based on reasoned laws, applied equitably and dispassionately with only the occasional lapse brought about by individual bad actors. Except, laws are

tools. We wield them as we will to make the world a better place or to wrap people in chains. We use the law to put distance between us and the consequences of what we want. If something terrible is legal or the law does evil work we throw our hands up, say "what are you gonna do, it's the law," and move on. 

But the law, and its consequences, are only what we want them to be. It's never been anything more or anything less.

What Else Was Supposed To Happen?

Earlier this week, the Taliban retook Kabul, negating a near twenty-year occupation in a little over 90 days. Naturally, Biden is facing intense criticism over this as we haven't had an embarrassment like this since the Fall of Saigon in 1975. So amidst all this embarrassment and humiliation I ask just a simple question:

What else was supposed to happen?

If your answer is an orderly retreat then what you need for that is a continued U.S. troop presence working alongside Afghan forces putting up a coordinated defense against the Taliban offensive. At the time of our withdrawal, we had 2500 troops in country. That all the major cities surrendered almost immediately shows that the Taliban laid the groundwork to accept them. Also, if you want an orderly surrender from an advancing enemy, you have to work that out with them beforehand. Tell me, what do you think would go over better: what's happening now, or Biden submitting a formal U.S. surrender asking the Taliban for terms for it to withdraw in an orderly fashion.

 

"But we should get people who helped us out of the country," I hear people say as if the last year of the government leaving its own citizens out in the cold wasn't indicative of anything. If the government is willing to watch over 600,000 of its own people die without lifting a finger, it isn't going prioritize poor people on the other side of the world either. Never mind the fact that getting people out of Afghanistan brings up the other question of where are they going to go. Tucker Carlson is already pushing the propaganda that bringing Afghan refugees here is a existential threat to the United States, so. This country isn't exactly fond of refugees, especially ones we created.It makes us look  bad, which we hate more than anything else.

 

If your answer is that we should've stayed until the job was done, then show me one time in world history, let alone our own, where one country under military occupation developed the political and social structures to exist under its own self-determination. Japan, West Germany, and South Korea are the only examples that come to mind but even then they don't readout apply here. Japan and West Germany didn't have coordinated armed resistance movements led by their deposed governments for the entirety of our occupation. South Korea doesn't apply either since most of its progress came after they overthrew the military dictatorship we installed to rule over them. 

But let's say that the whole nation building thing is possible, what does that look like? Seriously, how do you know the job is finished? Leaving out the Taliban, the Afghan national government is riddled with hilarious levels of corruption, leaving it lethally incapable of providing public services to its population. So if the mission was to create a government in our own image, we succeeded.

Or, maybe "staying until the job is done" means we stay until the Taliban is militarily defeated. What makes that complicated is that Pakistan gives the Taliban money and a place of refuge. So even if they lose battles in Afghanistan, the Taliban has a safe haven to go and regroup to which is exactly what they've been doing since we abandoned the war when we invaded Iraq. What then, is the plan for Pakistan? Do we invade it, sanction them, what? Keep in mind that Pakistan is also (ostensibly) one of our allies so anything we do there comes at the cost of making any agreements between the Taliban and Pakistani government even stronger which is why no president has done anything about the situation. 

So what we have is an enemy we can't afford to defeat on one side and a puppet government that's as self-sufficient as a ventriloquist dummy on the other. There can't be any negotiation between the two because for negotiations to work, it has to happen between equal participants. The Afghan national government never brought anything to the table because any legitimacy it had came from our military. Why would the Taliban honor any agreement in this situation? Why would they allow an enemy to hold onto territory and power when they could just take everything once we walked out the door?

Leaving aside all these questions, how is any of this surprising when for the last ten years we've told ourselves we had to stay in Afghanistan is because if we left, the Taliban would take over the country in less than a month. This was the message from both the Obama and Trump administrations so why is everyone acting like this is the first time we're hearing how what happened could happen. We don't have to live up to the stereotype of the ignorant American loudmouth every single time. 

What's happening in Afghanistan is happening because there was never any plan for what we were gonna do once we got there. We knew we were going to blow people up but aside from that, there was never a grand strategy from the Bush (or Obama, or Trump) administration defining what the goal of the war was or what victory even looked like. We've spent the last twenty years doing the equivalent of spinning our wheels while we tried to figure out what it was all those people were dying for. 

It's important to understand this because it tells us that we lost Afghanistan decades ago. The Taliban taking control of the country was inevitable as far back as 2007-2008. Nothing we did changed this reality which is perhaps the hardest thing for us to come to grips with because it's an ingrained truth of culture that because we have the most expensive military in the world that means we have the best military in the world. But the only thing that money does is generate mountains of hardware doesn't need and can't use. So it's no surprise that the people putting this equipment to its most effective use are the Taliban fighters posing in American military gear to rub their victory in our faces. 

So what now? CNN is running articles about how Afghanistan is home to literal trillions of dollars worth of minerals to power new technologies. This isn't new information, of course, and one of the many frustrations of our occupation was our complete inability to effectively extract Afghanistan's natural resources that weren't poppy seeds for the global heroin trade. There are others who are worried  the fallout of our retreat will embolden China to invade Taiwan or Russia doing evil Russia things. There's a huge fear that the retreat is making us look weak on the world stage which is something we can't afford. 

Except we look weak because we are weak. But it's not the retreat that makes us that way. What makes us weak is our suicidal refusal to recognize let alone admit what our limits are. This causes us to engage in not one but two decades-long wars that left nothing but failure in their wake. It leaves us with a military whose main concern is being a public trough for defense companies to feed at than an organization concerned with national defense. 

We can't accept that the utter collapse of the Afghan government isn't so much a reflection of our complete failures, it has to be the Afghan people's fault for being so weak that they wouldn't defend themselves or their country. It's out of the question that all the time we spent there left the Afghan people with a government so actively hostile to its people that it wasn't a government anyone would risk dying for. We have to push the failure of Afghanistan as far away from us as possible because we refuse to process that we can fail so completely. The thing about that though, is that the world exists outside what we tell ourselves. And maybe, just once, it'd be good for us to recognize that the world where we do everything right and have the best intentions when we get it wrong isn't the world we actually live in.

It's About More Than Being Nice

 I realize that I have the tendency to get too worked up about things. I know it's not sensible for me to get mad at articles like these which compare the fall of the Roman Republic to the United States, especially when they're three years old. But the ideas presented here aren't limited to this article alone, so it's worth spending some time examining why they fall short and why we shouldn't be so eager to map the past completely unto our present, no matter how tempting it looks.

Part of why we should be careful about people telling us how well we mirror the past is that the story is never really about the past, it's always, with no exceptions, about the  problems of our present. So it is with this article from the Smithsonian, which tells us, in all its studied breathlessness, that what doomed the Roman Republic was the instability brought about from violent rhetoric and the disruption of political norms. The article quotes from historian Edward Watts then new book, who says that Rome teaches "its modern descendants the incredible dangers that come along with condoning political obstruction and courting political violence... Roman history could not more clearly show that, when citizens look away as their leaders engage in these corrosive behaviors, their republic is in mortal danger.” 

We'll come back to this idea of how the idea of a passive Roman citizenry is, but we need to sidetrack a little bit to call out the dangers of projecting our own image backward. The article quotes a 2005 book written by historian Cullen Murphy, who takes a more direct approach in comparing Rome and the United States. His argument is that Rome, after defeating Carthage in the Second Punic War, was in the same situation we found ourselves in after the end of World War II. Murphy says that we, like the Romans, found ourselves with "the world on our shoulders; and the implications of that responsibility have skewed things in every part of our society and economy, and put our old political (and other) structures under enormous strain." This wildly conflates the self-dealing fairy tales we've told ourselves in the post-war era with what the Romans got up to once they were the unrivaled power of their time. When Rome looked out at the world, they saw an opportunity for riches and wealth beyond anything they'd ever dreamed of, so they took it. 

It's hard to put into words the scale of plundering the Romans did, but suffice to say when they showed up to your neck of the woods, they were leaving with everything valuable they could find. Gold, silver, fancy furniture, and, most especially, people. The Romans saw the world as their spoils and wasted no time taking whatever they could from who ever they wanted.

What's worse is that the article engages in some of the sloppiest history work I've ever seen. The author, Jason Daley, calls out how Rome's hegemony led to social upheavals like the introduction of secret ballots - which Daley argues led to politicians developing political brands to appeal to the masses - and Rome's move away from civilian conscription armies loyal to Rome to semi-private ones who were dependent on their generals for their pay. These conditions, Daley says, led to a political situation where "whipping up the resentments of the lower classes and threatening political enemies with semi-private armies became the norm."

 Where the sloppy history work comes in is that Daley argues that these trends converged with the political career of Tiberius Gracchus in 134 B.C.The issue here is that the professionalization of Rome's armies, when the land owning requirement to be in the army was dropped, wouldn't happen until Gaius Marius became Counsel in 104 B.C., almost thirty years after Tiberius Gracchus died. Daley is right, sort of, that the flashpoint around Tiberius' actions as Tribune of the Plebs was the land reform bill, but Daley leaves out so much context that it's almost impossible to understand why it was such a big deal in the first place.

To start us off, we need a better understanding of how Roman society, specifically its armies, functioned. Rather than having a professional, standing army under the direct management of the state, the Roman army was drawn from levies of land owning citizens (they would also take conscripts from the other ethnic Italian communities, which Rome had, for the most part, already conquered). Each citizen would be responsible for providing their own weapons and armor, while the state would provide the food and other logistical support. Military service was required for Romans looking to get elected to the Senate or hold any sort of public office which, to the Romans, was incredibly important in their families prestige. This method of warfare worked really well when Rome fought traditional seasonal campaigns, but started to fall apart in the wake of the three Punic Wars.

The big reason why was there was no leave in the Roman army. Meaning, once you got called off to war, you stayed at war, no matter how long it took to finish. Men who left on campaign would leave their farms in the hands of their wives and children which works well enough if you're gone for a few months. But when these wars started lasting for years at a time, it wasn't uncommon for these farms to fall fallow, forcing the families to sell it off to other, richer families. Once all the wars were over, the soldiers who fought them came back to find their families destitute and homeless, their homes part of massive private estates called latifundium.

You may take this moment to ask yourself why couldn't these men couldn't just work their old land under its new owners and the answer to that is well, slaves. The rich who bought up all these failing farms staffed them with the slaves the soldiers brought back with them from their campaigns. So it's in this Rome, filled with conquering heroes with no roofs above their head, that Tiberius Gracchus introduces his land reform bill.

Officially known as the Lex Sempronia Agraria, Tiberius' land reform bill would parcel out land owned by the Roman state to the homeless and the poor so they could be self-sufficient. This bill sought to solve two problems, the first, obviously, was reducing the amount of homeless citizens. It's generally not a good idea to leave men who have spent years fighting for the state with nothing to do but get angry about all the things they no longer have because of the years they spent fighting. The second was that reducing the amount of land-owning citizens directly impacts Rome's ability to create an army. If the only eligible people to fight are landowners and you allow the amount of landowners to significantly decrease, then what you're doing is drastically reducing your martial capacity which, for a Republic suddenly needing to control exponentially more territory than it did before, is a recipe for disaster.

But the Senate did not like Tiberius' plan. Roman politics worked on elaborate client systems, run largely on personal reputations, family ties, and favors. If Tiberius' bill went through, he would have thousands of supporters dependent on his patronage who could be relied on to back his political agenda. Obviously, this could not be allowed. So the Senate did everything it could to stop him. Daley makes a big deal over Tiberius not asking for the Senate's permission to introduce his bill but the thing is, he didn't have to. As Tribune of the Plebs, he could introduce legislation in either the Senate or the Plebeian Assembly whenever he wanted to. It's true the Tribunes usually gave the Senate the heads up, but, given the open hostility to his bill in the Senate, Tiberius did the smart thing and just introduced it on his own terms.

Which brings us to the incident with Marcus Octavius. Octavius was the other Tribune of the Plebs, who the Senate paid to ensure that Tiberius' bill could not pass. So even though Tiberius had the votes, Octavius vetoed the bill. The most common story about what happened next is that Tiberius called for a vote to remove Octavius from office. When people voted to do so, he simply vetoed them as was is power as Tribune. When he wouldn't yield, Tiberius had Octavius physically removed from the Assembly, so the land reform bill could be introduced and passed 1without interference. Now, Tribune's in ancient Rome were sacrosanct, it was literally against the law to touch them. Tiberius went too far when he did this and his supporters got cold feet, so he resorted to basically shutting down the city by refusing to participate in any of his official duties until his bill was passed by the Assembly and the Senate.

Even then, this isn't what got him killed. When the Senate passed the bill, they gave the bare minimum of funds to the commission that was to split up the land so it couldn't function. What ended being the end of Tiberius was the death of King Attalus, ruler of the Greek kingdom of Pergamum. Attalus died without any heirs, so he left the entirety of his fortune, and the kingdom itself, to Rome. Seizing the opportunity to fund his commission, Tiberius claimed control of the money on the grounds that he was the representative of the people it was left to. Naturally, this pissed the Senate off something awful, since foreign affairs were exclusively their domain. In frustration, the Senate began spreading rumors around that Tiberius was out to make himself king. The tension around these rumors built to such a pitch that they are what ultimately led to Tiberius, along with 300 of his supporters,  getting beaten to death in public by his political opponents.

Yet, you would never know those were the stakes just by reading Daley's article. He sweeps every bit of this under the rug, reducing it to "Tiberius went outside political procedures, which is just the worst thing he could do, then some other stuff happened and then he died."

To top off this ridiculous argument, Daley returns again to Watts, who he quotes with the following: "People who are politically engaged are not killing each other and they’re not threatening to kill each other. When they disagree with each other they use political means that were created by the republic for dealing with political conflict." The absurdity of this statement is almost mind-boggling. To classify the Roman citizens who beat an elected official to death at the behest of the political institution in Rome as not politically engaged is the kind of tap dancing routine you don't see outside of Fred Astaire movies. The whole point of all this violence was, and would remain, so the Senate could protect its privilege and powers in the wake of ever increasing demands from the citizenry below that they, too, be included in the benefits of Rome's burgeoning empire.

Harsh language didn't kill the Roman Republic. If anything, the zero-sum nature of Roman politics mixed with powerful interests refusal to compromise on anything that would infringe on their position led to a situation where the only possible way to enforce anything was through violence. The breaking of political norms are superficial, polite things to be upset about but, in Rome and currently, they are merely symptoms of much greater, much more threatening fractures in the political system. If you want to avoid the really bad stuff, like the civil wars that would plague Rome for close to 50 years, you have to deal with the underlying power imbalances that drive political systems to become so irrevocably broken.

There's a reason Daley leaves out all this context. Without it, he can reshape the complicated political situation of the late Roman Republic, which then allows him to recast the political stakes into whatever he wants them to be. This ultimately allows him to focus on the most meaningless aspect of the end of the Roman republic, that people stopped caring about the rules. No where does he stop to consider that there are bigger problems in society than whether politicians play nice with each other. Flouting norms without consequence is important because it tells you that people believe they are no longer obligated to follow them. The thing is though, and I can't stress this enough, the reasons why people don't feel that obligation are more important than the rules themselves. Trying to game out whether Tiberius is more responsible than the Senate for fracturing political norms misses the point that both of them felt they had the power to do so. 

Like I said, I know I get too worked about things. Especially bad takes on history and what they tell us about the present. At the same time, how we view the past, and what went wrong in it, can't help but shape how we view what the problems of our world even are. If the best we can do is say that we should all be nice to each other and let everyone speak, we're doomed. If we can't learn enough about the past to question the important things in our society like who has power, what are they using it for, and how are they keeping it, then we'll just be stuck in these useless cycles until the world collapses around us while we're all standing around looking stupid with or mouths hanging open, wondering how any of this could have ever happened.

 

Saving Batman

Batman is one of the oldest, most popular superheroes we have. Eight different actors, either in live action or animated films, have portrayed him in theatrical releases over the last 32 years, along with a ridiculous amount of cartoons and video games during that same time period. Naturally, given all the exposure, the Caped Crusader has attracted a fair bit of controversy around him, even to the point where people question if he qualifies as a hero at all. So, along those lines, I want to go over how Batman came to his troubled reputation and how to fix it.

If we're talking about the problems with Batman, we have to talk about Frank Miller. A firebrand creator who cut his teeth with his original work Ronin and his run on Daredevil in the 80's, Miller, along with Alan Moore, brought new potential to comic book storytelling with his iconic work on the 1986 mini-series, The Dark Knight Returns. The comic is about an aged Bruce Wayne coming out of retirement to once again strike terror into the forever superstitious and cowardly criminal element of Gotham City. It's hard to understand now, but the impact of The Dark Knight Returns, and Moore's Watchman,  would change comics forever. They ushered in a whole new era of comic books built around bdarker characters, "mature" story lines, and an overall aesthetic of intimidating grimness that would dominate comics in the 90's before the industry nearly collapsed into bankruptcy.

For Batman specifically, Miller introduced a character more interested in exacting his vengeance over the criminal underworld, a man who would go to any lengths to be the terror of anyone who did harm to real citizens. It doesn't sound all that different on paper, but the way Miller portrays criminals as inhuman scum protected by weak-willed liberals who care more for the monsters than the victims they leave in their marauding wake casts Batman as the strongman who rejects the weakness of society in order to lay down the absolute brutality of law and order. There's a lot of fascist undertones in The Dark Knight Rises, undertones Miller makes explicit in his later Batman works, The Dark Knight Strikes Again, and All-Star Batman. The crown jewel of this trend, however, was Holy Terror. Originally pitched as a Batman series, the plot boils down to a murderous Batman knock-off slaughtering Saturday morning cartoon versions of Islamic terrorists. 

Even so, while Miller's work is influential, no one is more responsible for bringing "Batman is a fascist" to the mainstream than Christopher Nolan. In The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises especially, the Batman of Nolan's work is a rich dude using his vast resources to beat people to a pulp for justice instead of personal gain. 

In his mission to destroy the mob, Batman kidnaps Lau, a Chinese national, from his home in Hong Kong, then delivers Lau to the police for prosecution. To defeat the Joker, he hacks into every cell phone in Gotham City to pin down the Joker's location. 

Both of these would be highly recognizable in 2008 as the tactics of the War on Terror. Dragging the mob's account from Hong Kong back to the States is a pretty clear example of extraordinary rendition, while his hijacking of Gotham's cell network was a direct mirror of the NSA spying on all of our phone conversations and hacking into our emails. Lau's kidnapping is treated as the correct and necessary way to get around Lau's inconvenient legal rights, while the hacking is justified as a temporary, extraordinary measure to defeat an existential threat. The not so subtle implication being that as long as the threat exists well, civil rights are more like civil suggestions, really. 

For The Dark Knight Rises, Nolan's plot involves Bane instigating a barely disguised Occupy Wall Street movement in order to throw Gotham into chaos as cover for his terrorist takeover of the city. Again, with characteristic subtly, the implications of the story are that popular uprisings from the lower classes are inherently criminal because they invert the natural order and are instigated by hostile outside forces looking to destroy their enemy from within. There's also the Dent, which allowed the city to deny parole to any criminal deemed to have acted as part of a larger criminal enterprise. 

Both of these ideas, that mass uprising of the poor against the rich elite and that criminal elements deserve no rights or protections, are both elements of fascist thought which didn't go unnoticed at the time or since. 

What then could be done to make Batman a more palatable hero, one that can credibly be considered as someone committed to his mission to end crime in e saxvery aspect of his life?

Put simply, to be a hero, Bruce Wayne cannot be a billionaire. 

Now, Batman's wealth as always been a part of his character, which isn't all that unusual. The Scarlet Pimpernel and Zorro are both dashing, clever, super combatants at night who hide their prowess by pretending to be cowardly playboys by day. Given the longevity of the character, it's natural that writers would need to scale up Batman's wealth in order to keep him in the upper echelon of society. 

You could get away with making Bruce Wayne a billionaire back in the 80's and even well into the 90's because the idea of a multi-billionaire was so outrageous that it just blended into the fantasy of the world as a whole. Now that the real world is infested with billionaires however, the idea that Bruce Wayne can be a heroic figure with that level of obscene wealth is an illusion that can't be maintained. 

The problem comes down to the fact that being a billionaire is a crime. Not a crime in the mundane "what you're doing is against the law" definition, but in the broader "your existence depends on inflicting massive amounts of harm on as many people as possible," kind of way. 

Being a billionaire means you engage in wage theft, union busting, monopoly practices, stock manipulation, wage suppression, off shoring, and tax evasion, both of the straight up illegal variety as well its dressed up cousin tax avoidance, which is all the same tactics of tax evasion but legal because you bribed the government into rewriting the tax code to allow your shenanigans. Oh, right, you also need to inherit a fortune from your parents or borrow millions of dollars from them in start up cash.

Point is, billionaires are created not by their innovation, but by warping the political and economic systems of the world do that they reap every possible benefit while dumping as much of their losses on the public as possible. This parasitic social model leaves everyone not in the top 1% and above scrambling to maintain an increasingly expensive standard of living from an economy that doles out forever diminishing means to pay for it. 

Given all that, it is almost impossible to take Batman seriously as a hero in the pursuit of justice while he ignores all the systemic abuses that allows his wealth to exist in the first place. If he's a multi-millionaire, he still can afford to do a lot of what he does already, but it won't trigger the feelings of off-panel exploitation like his billions do. 

Another problem solved by knocking Bruce Wayne out of the billionaire's club is that it creates the space for him to be outgunned. The thing that makes a hero the most heroic is that they're at a disadvantage, they're always outnumbered, they're always up against stronger, better equipped enemies, or enemies who have the resources to buy protection from whatever government is around. When your main character is one of the richest men on the planet, these difficulties - and the tension they bring with them - aren't relevant anymore. So putting Batman in a position where he has to be a detective and figure out just how he's going to bring down the mob or corrupt business men he's after when he's completely outclassed is a good thing.

What's funny is that, when talking about overpowered superheros, the go to is always Superman. Sure, he's a flying brick, but underneath all that power is a kid from Kansas who just wants to do good in the world. He's powerful, yes, but in the mythic, modern day Heracles way. Batman, though, has power that translates too the world in very real, very material ways. We recognize his capabilities more viscerally because we live in the consequences of that power every single day.

 There are no analogs of the good billionaire in the real world. All of them thrive on the predatory practices that built their wealth and all of them actively fight to protect their position. 

If Batman stays a billionaire, he isn't a man on a doomed quest to save every child from the pain he experienced. There's a capital R Romantic element to that mission because it's about a men who is throwing everything he has against a world he ultimately cannot change. 

But, if he's a billionaire, he can. Bruce Wayne could spend years divesting his fortune to make Gotham into the kind of place that doesn't need Batman. Hell, he could buy whatever politician he wanted to change the tax codes so that they could properly assess and collect on the tax bill generated by his wealth so that the government would have the resources to build the social programs they need to eliminate crime. 

If Bruce Wayne is a billionaire, he actively decides not to do this. He chooses to maintain a social system that creates the poverty which gives birth to the crime levels he needs to justify his existence. This unspoken choice resonates through every action Batmam makes, turning him into the living embodiment of a system which beats people down into generations of the deprivation and desperation of poverty. 

It's fitting that this controversy surrounds a fictional character more than any real life figure. We have to relate to Batman directly without the interference of a captured media culture terrified of angering their billionaire owners. Because of that, because we can see the immense, world changing power that wealth creates but ultimately, is only used to further one man's personal quirks, it crystallizes for us one simple, elegant truth: A man can be a hero, or a billionaire, but he can never be both. 

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.