The Problem With ‘Hey Guys’

“Okay, guys,” a female coworker of mine recently began, as she addressed me and a female colleague. Then she stopped herself, said she was making an effort to use more gender-neutral language, and carried on talking.

It was a small self-correction, and a glimpse at the conflicted feelings stirred up by one of the most common greetings in the English language. Guys is an easygoing way to address a group of people, but to many, it’s a symbol of exclusion—a word with an originally male meaning that is frequently used to refer to people who don’t consider themselves "guys."

My coworker is one of many who have started editing themselves in response to this exclusion. In the course of reporting this story, I heard from teachers who wanted a better way to get students’ attention, an ice-cream scooper who wanted a better way to greet customers, and a debate coach who specifically encourages his students to use y’all. These are representatives of a broad coalition of people who have contemplated, and often gone through with, excising guys from their vocabularies.

There are, of course, plenty of people—including many women—who have no problem being addressed as “guys,” think the word has evolved to be entirely gender-neutral, and don't see a reason to change their usage. But others aren’t so sure. “I think there's a really serious and welcome reconception of gender lines and relationships between sex and gender going on,” says John McWhorter, who teaches linguistics at Columbia University and has written several books about language. He says “something has crested in particular over about the past 10 years”—something that has people examining their everyday communications.

In my reporting I heard from several people who said that the word is particularly troubling for trans and gender-nonconforming people. “As a transgender woman, I consciously began trying to stop using guys some years ago,” says Brad Ward, a college counselor at a high school in Atherton, California. She added, “When I’m included with a group that is called guys, there’s some pain, since it takes me back to my male days in a way that I’d rather not go.”

I also heard that guys could grate on women working at male-heavy companies. In tech in particular, some told me they saw the word as yet another symptom of a female-minimizing industry. “There are a lot of guys in tech and ‘guys’ is used all the time in my work and social environments by both men and women, but since it doesn't resonate with me anymore, I do feel like I'm not part of the group,” says Amy Chong, a 29-year-old user-experience researcher in San Francisco.

In some workplaces, people have used technology to gently push back against the gender-neutral guys so that they themselves don’t have to speak up. A group of government employees wrote a custom response for the messaging app Slack that would have a bot ask questions like “Did you mean friends?” or “Did you mean you all?” whenever a user wrote “Hey guys”; a Spotify employee embraced the idea, and the professional network Ladies Get Paid has a similar feature in its Slack group of some 30,000 members.

As these examples indicate, there’s additional scrutiny these days on communications that happen within or emanate from organizations. This is likely why, after I put out calls for opinions on guys, I heard from many people who worked in education or customer-facing jobs. I heard from one teacher who switched to using folks after thinking about the inclusive-learning environment he’d like to create, and another who opted for peeps or scholars. Similarly, an employee at an outdoor-goods store told me that her company’s human-resources department had encouraged the use of more-inclusive terms when addressing customers. “Folks and y’all were determined to be more acceptably neutral and you guys was asked to be toned down,” she said.

Many people are trying to phase guys out of their vocabulary in social settings as well as at work. Coby Joseph, a 26-year-old urban planner currently living in the San Francisco Bay Area, told me that he no longer uses the term after considering “how much of our language centers men”; he found guys “lazy and inconsiderate” and stopped using it four or five years ago, except in cases when he’s communicating with people whom he knows identify as male.

This crowd of guys-objectors is not alone historically. People have been resisting the term for decades, and perhaps the most passionate opponent of the word is Sherryl Kleinman, a former professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In a 2002 essay in the journal Qualitative Sociology, she wrote about the problem with male-default terms such as “chairman,” “congressman,” and “mankind.” Kleinman saw them together as “another indicator—and, more importantly, a reinforcer—of a system in which ‘man’ in the abstract and men in the flesh are privileged over women.”

She reserved a special disapproval for “you guys,” which she considered the “most insidious” of these phrases, and with the help of former students made a small card that anyone could print out and, for instance, leave behind at a restaurant to communicate their dislike of the term to a waiter who had used it. “When you’re talking to a group of customers, gender doesn’t really matter, so why not replace ‘you guys’ with ‘you all,’ ‘folks,’ or ‘y’all,” it reads in part.

by Joe Pinsker, The Atlantic | Read more:

Image: DI Studio/Shutterstock/The Atlantic

Much Ado About Nothing

Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson confirm high-stakes, winner-takes-all match

The story broke—if you want to use that word—late last week: Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson are negotiating to play a $10 million “winner-take-all” match. The reason “winner-take-all,” is in quotation marks is because you can be sure that, if the deal comes off, both players will make money. The prize money might be winner-take-all but there will be plenty of money for both players in appearance fees and, perhaps, a percentage of the TV rights and the corporate money that would be on the table.

Here’s another thing: It’s meaningless, unless you think that exhibition golf is something to pant over the way one online golf writer did when he wrote this past weekend: “This will be the golf event of the year.”

No, the golf event of the year will be the Ryder Cup. Right behind will be the four majors. Then the PGA Tour playoffs and all the real events on tour where there’s actually something at stake.

That doesn’t mean the event won’t get a high TV rating—it will because sports fans love big names and because there is still a fascination with everything Woods does among most of the golf media and many golf fans.

There’s nothing wrong with exhibition golf—it’s been part of the landscape forever. Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf—especially the old version with Jimmy Demaret and Gene Sarazen doing the announcing—was, in fact, wonderful. The old CBS Golf Classic, when the late, great Frank Chirkinian came up with the idea to mic the players, was a lot of fun to watch during the winter when there was snow on the ground outside.

Even the Skins Game was worthwhile at the beginning because of the big names who came to play. When it died though, it did so for one major reason: People realized there was really nothing at stake; corporate America was paying the players. It wasn’t as if the other players were taking out their wallets to pay Fred Couples off on the 18th green.

There were also the Woods prime-time exhibitions played against guys like David Duval and Sergio Garcia when he was TIGER WOODS. Those mercifully ended after a couple of years.

Woods and Mickelson have both said they want to play for an amount that makes the other one “uncomfortable.” How is it uncomfortable if you aren’t playing for YOUR OWN MONEY? Remember Lee Trevino’s line about pressure? He always said real pressure was having to make a putt for $1,000 when you had about $10 in your wallet. That’s pressure.

If Woods and Mickelson each put up $5 million—even though that amount wouldn’t come close to breaking either one—there would be some real pressure. But they’re not going to do that and both will get paid to show up.

So where’s the pressure? (...)

Woods’ return this year has been a mixed blessing for golf. His presence has certainly spiked ratings, especially in those events where he’s contended on the weekends. But it has also meant that a lot of very good stories—like the two guys who have won majors this year—have been largely overlooked.

The irony in this is that if Woods and Mickelson had ever had a REAL rivalry, an exhibition like this wouldn’t be looked at as that big a deal.

The fact is, Woods—who is five-and-a-half years younger than Mickelson—had already won eight of his 14 majors by the time Mickelson won his first of five. The two never really battled down the stretch man-a-mano at a major. There was never a Nicklaus-Palmer playoff like at Oakmont in 1962 or Nicklaus-Trevino at Merion in 1971 or the three classic Watson-Nicklaus duels (Masters ’77; Open Championship ’77; U.S. Open ’82).

The rivalry was more about their differing personalities and about the very real fact that they didn’t like one another. Now, they’re buddies. Or, at the very least, two businessmen who get along well enough to know a gold mine when they see it.

by John Feinstein, Golf Digest | Read more:
Image: Sam Greenwood/Getty Images

[ed. See also: $10m Tiger Woods v Phil Mickelson showdown would be in poor taste.]

What I Miss: A List

by Liana Finck, Catapult | Read more:

Image: Liana Finck
[ed. See also: The Moment Your Life Crashes and Burns: On Divorce, Injury, and Questions Without Answers.]

Brett Amory, Waiting 222, 2014
via:

Hume the Humane

Socrates died by drinking hemlock, condemned to death by the people of Athens. Albert Camus met his end in a car that wrapped itself around a tree at high speed. Nietzsche collapsed into insanity after weeping over a beaten horse. Posterity loves a tragic end, which is one reason why the cult of David Hume, arguably the greatest philosopher the West has ever produced, never took off.

While Hume was lying aged 65 on his deathbed at the end of a happy, successful and (for the times) long life, he told his doctor: ‘I am dying as fast as my enemies, if I have any, could wish, and as easily and cheerfully as my best friends could desire.’ Three days before he died, on 25 August 1776, probably of abdominal cancer, his doctor could still report that he was ‘quite free from anxiety, impatience, or low spirits, and passes his time very well with the assistance of amusing books’.

When the end came, Dr Black reported that Hume ‘continued to the last perfectly sensible, and free from much pain or feelings of distress. He never dropped the smallest expression of impatience; but when he had occasion to speak to the people about him, always did it with affection and tenderness … He died in such a happy composure of mind, that nothing could exceed it.’

In his own lifetime Hume’s reputation was mainly as a historian. His career as a philosopher started rather inauspiciously. His first precocious attempt at setting out his comprehensive new system of philosophy, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), published when he was 26, ‘fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots’, as he later recalled, with self-deprecating exaggeration.

Over time, however, his standing has grown to the highest level. A few years ago, thousands of academic philosophers were asked which non-living philosopher they most identified with. Hume came a clear first, ahead of Aristotle, Kant and Wittgenstein. Scientists, who often have little time for philosophy, often make an exception for Hume. Even the biologist Lewis Wolpert, who says philosophers are ‘very clever but have nothing useful to say whatsoever’ makes an exception for Hume, admitting that at one stage he ‘fell in love’ with him.

Yet the great Scot remains something of a philosopher’s philosopher. There have been no successful popular books on him, as there have been for the likes of Montaigne, Nietzsche, Socrates, Wittgenstein and the Stoics. Their quotes, not his, adorn mugs and tea towels, their faces gaze down from posters. Hume hasn’t ‘crossed over’ from academic preeminence to public acclaim.

The reasons why this is so are precisely the reasons why it ought not to be. Hume’s strengths as a person and a thinker mean that he does not have the kind of ‘brand’ that sells intellectuals. In short, he is not a tragic, romantic figure; his ideas do not distil into an easy-to-summarise ‘philosophy of life’; and his distaste for fanaticism of any kind made him too sensible and moderate to inspire zealotry in his admirers.

Hume had at least two opportunities to become a tragic hero and avoid the cheerful end he eventually met. When he was 19, he succumbed to what was known as ‘the disease of the learned’, a melancholy that we would today call depression. However, after around nine months, he realised that this was not the inevitable fate of the wise but the result of devoting too much time to his studies. Hume realised that to remain in good health and spirits, it was necessary not only to study, but to exercise and to seek the company of friends. As soon as he started to do this he regained his cheer and kept it pretty much for the rest of his life.

This taught him an important lesson about the nature of the good life. As he later wrote in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748): ‘The mind requires some relaxation, and cannot always support its bent to care and industry.’ Philosophy matters, but it is not all that matters, and although it is a good thing, one can have too much of it. ‘Abstruse thought and profound researches I prohibit,’ says Hume, ‘and will severely punish, by the pensive melancholy which they introduce, by the endless uncertainty in which they involve you.’ The life ‘most suitable to the human race’ is a ‘mixed kind’ in which play, pleasure and diversion matter as well as what are thought of as the ‘higher’ pursuits. ‘Be a philosopher,’ advised Hume, ‘but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.’

In 1770, Hume was also presented with an opportunity for martyrdom, in somewhat bathetic circumstances. The Nor’ Loch in Edinburgh, where Princes Street Gardens now stands, was being drained as part of the expansion of the city. Walking across it one day, Hume fell into the bog that still remained. He cried for help but unfortunately for him, the women who heard him recognised him as ‘the great infidel’ and were not inclined to save him. Hume reasonably pointed out that all Christians should help anyone irrespective of their beliefs, but their understanding of the parable of the Good Samaritan was not as up to scratch as his and they refused to save him unless he became a Christian there and then, reciting the Lord’s Prayer and the creed.

A Socrates would perhaps have refused and died in the name of truth. Hume, however, was not going to allow the stupidity of others to cut his own life short, so he did what any sensible person should do: he went along with their request without any intention of keeping his promise.

In this he was following the example of the only other philosopher to rival Hume for all-time greatness: Aristotle. Here is another thinker whose stock among cognoscenti couldn’t be higher, but who has failed to capture the public’s imagination (although Edith Hall’s recent book Aristotle’s Way (2018) is trying to change that). Not coincidentally, I think, Aristotle also refused to play the martyr. Like Socrates, he was condemned to death for impiety. Also like Socrates, he had the opportunity to flee the city to safety. Unlike Socrates, that is exactly what he did. So while everyone knows how Socrates died, few know that Aristotle, like Hume, died in his 60s, probably also of stomach cancer.

It is somewhat perverse that the attractiveness of a philosophy seems to be directly correlated with how miserable its author’s life was. However, that is not the only reason why there are few self-ascribed Humeans outside academe. Hume’s philosophy does not add up to an easily digestible system, a set of rules for living. Indeed, Hume is best known for three negative theses.

by Julian Baggini, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Petra Eriksson at Handsome Frank
[ed. See also (recommended): Defining Philosophy.]

The Millennial Socialists Are Coming

In May, three young progressive women running for the state Legislature in Pennsylvania, each endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, won decisive primary victories over men heavily favored by the political establishment. Two of the women, Summer Lee, 30, and Sara Innamorato, 32, ousted incumbents, the distant cousins Dom Costa and Paul Costa, members of an iconic Pennsylvania political family.

Elizabeth Fiedler, 37, announced her run three months after giving birth to her second child, and she had a nursery in her Philadelphia campaign office so other parents could drop off their kids before canvassing shifts. Talking to voters, she spoke of depending on Medicaid and CHIP for her kids’ health insurance, and of the anxiety she felt during two weeks when their insurance lapsed.

Lee was open about the more than $200,000 in student loans that have weighed on her since graduating from law school, which gave her a visceral sense, she told me, of the “need for free, quality education for everybody.” (An African-American woman running in a largely white district, she ended up with 68 percent of the vote.) Innamorato spoke about how her father’s opioid addiction had pushed her and her mother from the middle class. “I’ve lived the struggles of my district,” she told me.

Their races were part of a grass-roots civic renewal that is happening across this country, something that is, for me, the sole source of optimism in this very dark time. Marinating in the news in New York City, I’m often sick with despair. An authoritarian president of dubious legitimacy and depraved character is poised to remake America for generations with a second Supreme Court pick. The federal government is a festival of kleptocratic impunity. Kids the same age as my own are ripped from their migrant parents.

But all over the nation, people, particularly women, are working with near supernatural energy to rebuild democracy from the ground up, finding ways to exercise political power however they can. For the middle-aged suburbanites who are the backbone of the anti-Trump resistance, that often means shoring up the Democratic Party. For younger people who see Donald Trump’s election as the apotheosis of a rotten political and economic system, it often means trying to remake that party as a vehicle for democratic socialism. (...)

On Twitter, Trump has fantasized about a red wave that will sweep even more Republicans into power in November and reinforce his rule. But the real red wave may be democratic socialism’s growing political influence, especially among young people. “She really showed that you can run on these issues and win,” Maria Svart, national director of the Democratic Socialists of America, said about Ocasio-Cortez’s platform, which includes Medicare for All, abolishing the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and a federal jobs guarantee.

The D.S.A., to which Ocasio-Cortez belongs, is the largest socialist organization in America. Its growth has exploded since the 2016 election — when, of course, avowed democratic socialist Bernie Sanders ran in the Democratic primary — from 7,000 members to more than 37,000. It’s an activist group rather than a political party, working with Democrats in the electoral realm while also agitating against injustice from the outside.

Many of the D.S.A.’s goals, reflected in Ocasio-Cortez’s platform, are indistinguishable from those of progressive democrats. But if the D.S.A. is happy to work alongside liberals, its members are generally serious about the “socialist” part of democratic socialist. Its constitution envisions “a humane social order based on popular control of resources and production, economic planning, equitable distribution, feminism, racial equality and non-oppressive relationships.”

Talk of popular control of the means of production is anathema to many older Democrats, even very liberal ones. It plays a lot better with the young; one recent survey shows that 61 percent of Democrats between 18 and 34 view socialism positively. The combination of the Great Recession, the rising cost of education, the unreliability of health insurance and the growing precariousness of the workplace has left young people with gnawing material insecurity. They have no memory of the widespread failure of Communism, but the failures of capitalism are all around them. (...)

Indeed, while there’s a lot of talk about an ideological civil war among Democrats, on the ground, boundaries seem more fluid. In Pennsylvania recently, I met with moderate suburban resistance activists who’d volunteered for Innamorato, thrilled to support a young woman who could help revitalize the Democratic Party.

Barry Rush is a 63-year-old retiree who used to vote for both Democrats and Republicans, but who, horrified by Trump, now devotes himself full time to a liberal group called Progress PA. His main concern is electing Democrats — “I’m gonna pull the Smurf lever till this gets fixed,” he says of voting blue — and he knows that the Democratic Party needs young people. He was heartened by all the millennials at Innamorato’s victory celebration: “There were 500 kids there!” he said. It gave him hope for his grandkids.

The young members of the D.S.A., meanwhile, are hopeful because their analysis helps them make sense of the Trump catastrophe. They often seem less panicked about what is happening in America right now than liberals are, because they believe they know why our society is coming undone, and how it can be rebuilt.

“The Trump disaster is that everyone feels threatened individually, and feels like they have to fight Trump and fight this administration,” Arielle Cohen, the Pittsburgh D.S.A.’s 29-year-old co-chair, told me as I sat with her and two other chapter leaders in a small coffee shop in the city’s East End. “And socialists are saying, this has actually been going on for a long time. It’s not just Trump. It’s not just who’s in office.”

There is a strange sort of comfort in this perspective; the socialists see themselves as building the world they want to live in decades in the future rather than just scrambling to avert catastrophe in the present.

by Michelle Goldberg, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Seth Wenig/Associated Press

[ed. I wonder how many people who profess to be against socialism actually understand the differences between it and communism (or capitalism for that matter). See here and here and here. It's the natural yin to neoliberalism's yang.]

Contemplating Woman Machine by Server Demirtaş
via:

Iggy Pop and Anthony Bourdain
via:
[ed. Bonus:]

How to Completely Delete Facebook From Your Life

[ed. It ain't easy.]

Buh-bye, Facebook. It's been real.

So you've had it with endless scrolling through the News Feed, notifications that wake you up in the middle of the night, memories that remind you how little your life has changed over the years, and groups that are just too big and you don't even know why you joined in the first place.

In short, you want to delete Facebook from your life.

It's a big decision, and it can be pretty scary, but we assure you: It can be done.

Before you start, though, think long and hard on whether you want to delete or merely deactivate your Facebook account.

Deactivating Facebook is fairly easy and painless. If you do it, your Timeline and other info will disappear from Facebook — but only until you reactivate your account. Yes, this means all your data will remain stored somewhere on Facebook's servers.

Deleting Facebook means you can never access your account again or retrieve any of your content or data. That means you need to take additional steps to remove traces of your Facebook data (as well as preserve it for yourself) before you delete your account.

To deactivate your account, follow these steps:

1. Click on the down arrow in the upper right corner of Facebook and click on Settings
2. Click on General
3. Click on Manage Account
4. Click on Deactivate your account
5. Enter your Facebook password and confirm deactivation

Yup, it's that easy. You're now gone from Facebook, but as we said, it's just a temporary measure that doesn't really delete your data on the service. You've just deactivated your Facebook account. To permanently erase yourself from Facebook, you'll need to delete your account altogether.

But, before you do that, it's prudent to take a few additional steps.

You may be done with Facebook, but you probably want to keep the data you've amassed on the service. Think about it: Posts, photos, videos, messages, likes, list of friends — it's all potentially valuable, and it really doesn't hurt to preserve it. To back up your data, do the following:

1. Open Facebook settings
2. Click on Your Facebook Information
3. Click on Download Your Information

Here, you'll be able to choose the date range, what types of data you'd like to backup, and media quality. Our advice: Just keep it all, and leave the media quality on high.

You can also choose between a HTML format, which will make the file easier to view, and JSON format, which will make it easier to import the data into another service (yes, it's quite possible that there will be another popular social network after Facebook one day). Now, click on "Create File," and store the resulting file safely.

This may sound a little paranoid, but getting rid of any trace of your existence on Facebook is harder than you think and requires more steps than just hitting that delete button. So before you do so, we suggest you do the following three steps, and an optional fourth step:

1. Remove associations between third party apps and Facebook
2. Turn off Facebook platform
3. Check how much of your data is held by third party apps
4. Clear your Facebook history

Parts 1) and 2) are easy, and consist of the following:

1. Go to Settings
2. Click Apps and Websites,
3. Check all apps and then clicking "Remove."

To turn of Facebook's platform, do this:

1. Go to Settings
2. Click on "Edit" under "Apps, Websites and Games"
3. Click on "Turn Off."

Important: Facebook might be the only way you can log in into some third-party apps (such as Tinder) and websites. Make sure you check those services and switch to a different type of login (email and password, for example) before you cut all ties to Facebook.

Check how much of your data is held by third-party apps

Now comes the tough part.

by Stan Schroeder, Mashable | Read more:
Images: Stan Schroeder and Bob Al-Greene
[ed. I can see real value in some kind of app that would do all this for you. Probably be sued out of business in a micro-second.]

The Mozart of Fly Casting

As the competitors in the 2016 Flycasting World Championships arrived at their hotel in Nelijarve, Estonia, some noticed a 12-year-old girl jumping on the hotel’s trampoline.

The girl, Maxine McCormick of San Francisco, was not a tourist. She was their competition.

Maxine was competing in four events in the biennial championships of this niche sport, in which the world’s best handlers of flies and rods test their skills in a series of accuracy and distance competitions. Maxine, instead of tinkering with her equipment ahead of the competition or fretting over the wind, spent most of her time on the trampoline, jumping or lying down and reading on it. Once, she fell asleep.

Then she trounced every other woman in the competition’s most popular event, trout accuracy, in which competitors cast into a series of rings. Her score was also higher than those of all the men except one: her coach, Chris Korich. She placed third in the salmon distance event, using back muscles honed by hours of tree climbing to propel her line 127 feet.

“She’s the most efficient fly caster on the planet,” said Korich, who has been coaching Maxine since 2013. “I don’t know anyone in history that can claim to be better.”

In the five years since Maxine began fly casting — which she describes as “fly fishing without the fish” — she has become the sport’s youngest champion. And this weekend, at 14, she defended her accuracy title at the world championships in England with a score of 52 in the women’s division — 21 points clear of the second-place finisher. She also won the salmon distance category.

“I never knew I would become this good at anything,” Maxine said in a recent interview.

Anita Strand, the nine-time world champion caster from Norway who took silver in the 2016 accuracy event, recalled watching in awe as Maxine pivoted between two existences — world champion fly caster and child.

Now, she is no longer the tiny girl on the trampoline. She’s a teenager, taller and stronger, favoring fashionable clothing instead of the utilitarian outfits of most of her competitors. At practice, she’s focused and quiet, and when she starts casting, her dark eyes narrow to a frown as she attacks her target.

Maxine’s speedy journey to casting supremacy began when her father, Glenn McCormick, took her to the Golden Gate Angling & Casting Club in San Francisco in 2013. Like most people who come to the club’s pools, he simply wanted to become a better fisherman.

He didn’t know about the sport of casting, which began in the United States 150 years ago and flourished during the first half of the 20th century, when casting competitions took place at Madison Square Garden. The sport has faded into obscurity, but there is still a robust community of local clubs around the country, as well as national and international tournaments sanctioned by various governing bodies.

It’s a tiny sport, but the clubs offer people a chance to improve the distance and accuracy of their cast, which leads to more productive fishing. About 75 people compete in the yearly national tournaments, and there are about 150 elite competitive casters throughout the United States.

Maxine’s gift quickly became apparent. In the same way that tennis prodigies are somehow able to get extra spin and power on the ball from their first days on a court, Maxine could make the fly come off the tip of her rod with a zip and efficiency that young casters rarely have, her father said.

She also had access to local clubs that counted world champions as members, including Korich, an 11-time world champion. Temperate weather also helped, allowing year-round practice. By the time Maxine was 10 she was regularly outscoring all the women at national tournaments.

Equipment could be an issue. Waders didn’t fit. Korich had to sand down her rods to fit her strength levels. Korich, 59, who has two daughters of his own, balanced his instruction with frequent breaks for playing in nearby creeks, and often found himself standing under a tree, praying that Maxine wouldn’t fall out of it.

He also let her come up with names for the fundamentals she was learning. The wrist muscles she needed to activate while casting became her “magic rainbow bands,” in honor of her hobby of making rubber band bracelets. While practicing her back cast, a move that requires a thrusting backward motion, she imagined poking a giant in the eye with her rod. To remind herself to keep her movements close to her body to conserve energy, she pictured herself in a giant egg she didn’t want to crack. Korich has even learned how to use Snapchat to communicate with her.

With Maxine dominating the juniors, Korich told her she should focus on beating the sport’s Michael Jordan — Steve Rajeff, 61, considered the best fly caster of all time. Maxine agreed.

by Shelby Pope, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Joshua Lott

Why Can’t We Just Play Ball?

As long as I can remember, I’ve been a sports fan. As long as I can remember, I’ve been interested in the military. Until recently, I experienced those as two separate and distinct worlds. While I was in the military -- I served for 20 years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force -- I did, of course, play sports. As a young lieutenant, I was in a racquetball tournament at my base in Colorado. At Squadron Officer School in Alabama, I took part in volleyball and flickerball (a bizarre Air Force sport). At the Air Force Academy, I was on a softball team and when we finally won a game, all of us signed the ball. I also enjoyed being in a military bowling league. I even had my own ball with my name engraved on it.

Don’t misunderstand me. I was never particularly skilled at any sport, but I did thoroughly enjoy playing partly because it was such a welcome break from work -- a reprieve from wearing a uniform, saluting, following orders, and all the rest. Sports were sports. Military service was military service. And never the twain shall meet.

Since 9/11, however, sports and the military have become increasingly fused in this country. Professional athletes now consider it perfectly natural to don uniforms that feature camouflage patterns. (They do this, teams say, as a form of “military appreciation.”) Indeed, for only $39.99 you, too, can buy your own Major League Baseball-sanctioned camo cap at MLB’s official site. And then, of course, you can use that cap in any stadium to shade your eyes as you watch flyovers, parades, reunions of service members returning from our country’s war zones and their families, and a multitude of other increasingly militarized ceremonies that celebrate both veterans and troops in uniform at sports stadiums across what, in the post-9/11 years, has come to be known as “the homeland.”

These days, you can hardly miss moments when, for instance, playing fields are covered with gigantic American flags, often unfurled and held either by scores of military personnel or civilian defense contractors. Such ceremonies are invariably touted as natural expressions of patriotism, part of a continual public expression of gratitude for America’s “warfighters” and “heroes.” These are, in other words, uncontroversial displays of pride, even though a study ordered by Republican Senators John McCain and Jeff Flake revealed that the U.S. taxpayer, via the Pentagon, has regularly forked over tens of millions of dollars ($53 million between 2012 and 2015 alone) to corporate-owned teams to put on just such displays.

Paid patriotism should, of course, be an oxymoron. These days, however, it’s anything but and even when the American taxpayer isn’t covering displays like these, the melding of sports and the military should be seen as inappropriate, if not insidious. And I say that as both a lover of sports and a veteran.

I Went to a Military Parade and a Tennis Match Broke Out

Maybe you’ve heard the joke: I went to the fights and a hockey game broke out. It was meant to poke fun at the fisticuffs in National Hockey League games, though these days there are fewer of them than in the “glory days” of the 1970s. An updated version would, however, fit today’s increasingly militarized sports events to a T: I went to a military parade and a baseball (football, hockey) game broke out.

Nowadays, it seems as if professional sports simply couldn’t occur without some notice of and celebration of the U.S. military, each game being transformed in some way into yet another Memorial Day or Veterans Day lite.

Consider the pro-military hype that surrounded this year’s Major League Baseball All-Star Game. Not so very long ago, when I watched such games I would be transported to my childhood and my fantasies of becoming the next Nolan Ryan or Carl Yastrzemski.

When I watched this year’s version of the game, however, I didn’t relive my youth; I relived my military career. As a start, the previous night featured a televised home-run derby. Before it even began, about 50 airmen paraded out in camouflage uniforms, setting the stage for everything that would follow. (As they weren’t on duty, I couldn’t help wondering why they found it appropriate to don such outfits.) Part of T-Mobile's "HatsOff4Heroes” campaign, this mini-parade was justified in the name of raising money to support veterans, but T-Mobile could have simply given the money to charity without any of the militarized hoopla that this involved.

Highlighting the other pre-game ceremonies the next night was a celebration of Medal of Honor recipients. I have deep respect for such heroes, but what were they doing on a baseball diamond? The ceremony would have been appropriate on, say, Veterans Day in November.

Those same pre-game festivities included a militaristic montage narrated by Bradley Cooper (star of "American Sniper"), featuring war scenes and war monuments while highlighting the popular catchphrase "freedom isn't free." Martial music accompanied the montage along with a bevy of flag-waving images. It felt like watching a twisted version of the film Field of Dreams reshot so that soldiers, not baseball players, emerged early on from those rows of Iowa corn stalks and stepped onto the playing field.

What followed was a "surprise" reunion of an airman, Staff Sergeant Cole Condiff, and his wife and family. Such staged reunions have become a regular aspect of major sporting events -- consider this “heart-melting” example from a Milwaukee Brewers game -- and are obviously meant to tug at the heartstrings. They are, as retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich wrote at TomDispatch back in 2011, propagandistic versions of "cheap grace."

In addition, Budweiser used this year’s game to promote "freedom" beer, again to raise money for veterans and, of course, to burnish its own rep. (Last year, the company was hyping "America" beer.)

And the All-Star game is hardly alone in its militarized celebrations and hoopla. Take the 2017 U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York City, which I happened to watch. With John McEnroe in retirement, tennis is, generally speaking, a quieter sport. Yet before the men’s final, a Marine Corps color guard joined a contingent of West Point cadets in a ceremony to remember the victims of 9/11. Naturally, a by-now-obligatory oversized American flag set the scene -- here’s a comparable ceremony from 2016 -- capped by a performance of “God Bless America” and a loud flyover by four combat jets. Admittedly, it was a dramatic way to begin anything, but why exactly an international tennis match that happened to feature finalists from Spain and South Africa?

Blending Sports With the Military Weakens Democracy

I’m hardly the first to warn about the dangers of mixing sports with the military, especially in corporate-controlled blenders. Early in 2003, prior to the kick off for the Iraq War (sports metaphor intended), the writer Norman Mailer issued this warning:

“The dire prospect that opens, therefore, is that America is going to become a mega-banana republic where the army will have more and more importance in Americans' lives... [D]emocracy is the special condition -- a condition we will be called upon to defend in the coming years. That will be enormously difficult because the combination of the corporation, the military, and the complete investiture of the flag with mass spectator sports has set up a pre-fascistic atmosphere in America already.”

More than 14 years later, that combination -- corporations, the military, and mass spectator sports, all wrapped in a gigantic version of the stars and stripes -- has increasingly come to define what it means to be an American. Now that the country also has its own self-styled strongman president, enabled by a spineless Congress and an increasingly reactionary judiciary, Mailer’s mention of a “pre-fascistic atmosphere” seems prescient.

What started as a post-9/11 drive to get an American public to “thank” the troops endlessly for their service in distant conflicts -- stifling criticism of those wars by linking it to ingratitude -- has morphed into a new form of national reverence. And much credit goes to professional sports for that transformation. In conjunction with the military and marketed by corporations, they have reshaped the very practice of patriotism in America.

Today, thanks in part to taxpayer funding, Americans regularly salute grossly oversized flags, celebrate or otherwise “appreciate” the troops (without making the slightest meaningful sacrifice themselves), and applaud the corporate sponsors that pull it all together (and profit from it). Meanwhile, taking a stand (or a knee), being an agent of dissent, protesting against injustice, is increasingly seen as the very definition of what it means to be unpatriotic. Indeed, players with the guts to protest American life as it is are regularly castigated as SOBs by our sports- and military-loving president.

Professional sports owners certainly know that this militarized brand of patriotism sells, while the version embodied in the kinds of controversial stances taken by athletes like former National Football League quarterback Colin Kaepernick (cashiered by his own league) angers and alienates many fans, ultimately threatening profits.

Meanwhile, the military’s bottom line is recruiting new bodies for that all-volunteer force while keeping those taxpayer dollars flowing into the Pentagon at increasingly staggering levels. For corporations, you won’t be surprised to learn, it's all about profits and reputation.

In the end, it comes down to one thing: who controls the national narrative.

Think about it. A set of corporate-military partnerships or, if you prefer, some version of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s old military-industrial complex has enlisted sports to make militarism look good and normal and even cool. In other words, sports teams now have a powerful set of incentives to appear patriotic, which increasingly means slavishly pro-military. It’s getting hard to remember that this country ever had a citizen-soldier tradition as well as sports teams whose athletes actually went almost en masse to serve in war. Consider it paradoxical that militarism is today becoming as American as baseball and apple pie, even as, like so many other citizens, today’s athletes vote with their feet to stay out of the military. (The NFL’s Pat Tillman was a noble post-9/11 exception.) Indeed, the widespread (if shallow) support of the military by so many athletes may, in some cases, be driven by a kind of guilt.

“Collusion” is a key word in this Trumpian moment. Even though Robert Mueller isn’t investigating them, corporate-owned sports teams are now actively colluding with the military to redefine patriotism in ways that work to their mutual advantage. They are complicit in taking a select, jingoistic form of patriotism and weaponizing it to suppress dissent, including against the military-industrial complex and America’s never-ending wars.

Driven by corporate agendas and featuring exaggerated military displays, mass-spectator sports are helping to shape what Americans perceive and believe. In stadiums across the nation, on screens held in our hands or dominating our living rooms, we witness fine young men and women in uniform unfurling massive flags on football fields and baseball diamonds, even on tennis courts, as combat jets scream overhead. What we don’t see -- what is largely kept from us -- are the murderous costs of empire: the dead and maimed soldiers, the innocents slaughtered by those same combat jets.

The images we do absorb and the narrative we’re encouraged to embrace, immersed as we are in an endless round of militarized sporting events, support the idea that massive “national security” investments (to the tune of roughly a trillion dollars annually) are good and right and patriotic. Questioning the same -- indeed, questioning authority in any form -- is, of course, bad and wrong and unpatriotic.

For all the appreciation of the military at sporting events, here’s what you’re not supposed to appreciate: why we’re in our forever wars; the extent to which they've been mismanaged for the last 17 years; how much people, especially in distant lands, have suffered thanks to them; and who’s really profiting from them.

by William J. Astore, TomDispatch | Read more:
Image: via

Kate Wadsworth
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Ana Mercedes Hoyos, Bananas Still Life, N/D

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Xue Liang, Little bird on a rock in a bamboo grove N/D
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When You’re Hot, You’re Hot

Career Successes Come in Clusters

In 1905, Albert Einstein was on a roll. Between March and June of that year—which scientists refer to as his annus mirabilis, or “miracle year”—the legendary physicist finished three different papers that would radically change how we think about space and time, and pave the way for quantum physics.

“And that’s not even getting into the summer,” marvels Dashun Wang, an associate professor of management and organizations at Kellogg.

To Wang, Einstein’s big year posed a puzzle. In a previous study looking at the careers of more than 10,000 scientists, Wang had found that the timing of a researcher’s most influential paper was completely random—it was equally likely to come at any given year in their career, be it the beginning, middle, or end. But the concept of a “miracle year” seemed to challenge that conclusion.

“What are the odds, if everything is random?” Wang wondered.

In a new paper, Wang investigates whether “hot-streak” periods like Einstein’s are more than just a lucky coincidence—in science, and in other fields as well. He teamed up with visiting student Lu Liu and Kellogg post-doctoral student Yang Wang, as well as Chaoming Song of the University of Miami, Roberta Sinatra of Central European University, and Lee Giles of Pennsylvania State University.

Looking at the career histories of thousands of scientists, artists, and film directors, the team found evidence that hot streaks are both real and ubiquitous, with virtually everyone experiencing one at some point in their career. While the timing of an individual’s greatest successes is indeed random, their top hits are highly likely to appear in close proximity.

And while more research is needed to determine what causes these bursts of genius, Wang says that the findings shed important new light on the patterns underlying success in all fields, and could be used to improve decisions about tenure, promotions, and hiring.

“If we know where your best work is, then we know very well where your second-best work is, and your third,” he says, “because they’re just around the corner.”

Pinpointing Hot Streaks

Wang nicknamed his earlier paper on the timing of scientific successes “the hope project.” By demonstrating that a scientist’s most-cited paper was equally likely to appear in any given year, his findings refuted the conventional wisdom that researchers in their 50s or 60s were past their prime. The only reason that early-career hits were more common, explains Wang, is because younger scientists tend to be more prolific. “So if you keep producing, maybe your biggest work is yet to come,” he says—hence, plenty of hope.

But what happens after that big hit? Wang could imagine two very different scenarios.

If the timing of every paper a scientist wrote was truly random, then “regression towards the mean” should set in—meaning their next paper was more likely to be average than spectacular.

On the other hand, there were logical reasons to think that one strong paper might beget another. “If I produced a good work, I feel like I learned the trick,” says Wang. “Now I feel like I’m equipped to do another work that’s just as good or even better.”

Working with Liu, a PhD student at Kellogg, Wang began to design an experiment. The idea: “Let’s not just focus on the biggest hit, but let’s also look at the second-biggest hit, and the third-biggest hit,” he explains. Their goal was to determine whether there was some kind of statistically meaningful pattern in the timing of one’s greatest achievements.

Using Google Scholar and Web of Science, Wang and Liu obtained data on research papers published by more than 20,000 scientists, which included the number of citations each paper received in its first ten years.

Then they decided to expand the analysis beyond academia. “We realized, ‘Gee, if this happens, it might be in all different kinds of careers,’” Wang says.

That idea was inspired by Alejandro González Iñárritu, the director of Birdman and The Revenant, explains Wang. “He won two Oscars back-to-back for best director. And that’s where I realized, this is not just scientists. This story’s much much bigger.”

So they collected data on the careers of artists and firm directors. To gauge success, they obtained the auction prices of artworks produced by 3,480 painters, sculptors, and other artists. And they combed film database IMDb for the career histories of 6,233 directors, using the IMDb ratings to approximate the success.

by Jake J. Smith, KellogInsight | Read more:

Image: Michael Meier

It’s So Freaking Hot. Now What?

cwick (Chadwick Matlin, features editor): 🎵 Summertime, and the livin’ is really freaking hot. People are jumping into the sea in Greece to avoid wildfires. The temps are higher than they’ve ever been in Japan. California is dealing with the biggest wildfires it’s ever seen. The heat even has Andean flamingos laying eggs for the first time in 15 years.

The consequences of climate change are growing more undeniable than ever. Which leads me to wonder: What now?

Christie and Maggie, thanks for joining the Slack chat to answer that totally simple question.

christie (Christie Aschwanden, lead science writer): “simple” question 😂

cwick: Editors pride themselves on asking giant questions and demanding simplified answers.

maggiekb (Maggie Koerth-Baker, senior science writer): Glad to be here, Chrad.

Chad

cwick: Off to a great start, Meggie.

maggiekb: I pride myself on my typing skills.

cwick: I want us to try tackling the question in a few different ways:

1. By talking about the politics of climate change, of course. 
2. By discussing whether the dire reality of climate change means that scientists’ roles in public discourse ought to change going forward. 
3. And by answering the question of what comes next: Are all these ecological changes the new normal or just a waypoint on an even more dangerous trajectory? 

christie: This is a lot to chew on. I didn’t realize we were going to be here all day!

cwick: So let’s start with politics — much was made that President Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord. But is there any line to draw between the hot summer we’re having and Trump’s decision?

christie: Well, there’s a line to draw, but it’s not between this hot summer and Trump’s decision. The heat of this summer was set with the emissions we’d already spewed into the atmosphere.

The goal of the Paris climate agreement was to keep the overall average temperature of the planet from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius, and some estimates suggest that we’ve already put out enough greenhouse gases to exceed 1.5 degrees. To keep our emissions within the 2-degree “carbon budget” will require countries to leave 80 percent of coal, 50 percent of gas and 33 percent of oil untouched until at least 2050.

maggiekb: There’s a gap between immediate news and climate consequences. Arguably, one of the big problems with the politics of climate change is that the results and the risks play out on different time scales than the politics.

cwick: Maggie, I think that’s a sharp insight about why political action has been so hard to come by on climate change. (Corporate interests have also played a role, of course.) What’s a politician to do about that dynamic?

maggiekb: Oh, corporate interests have DEFINITELY played a role. But what I think is particularly interesting is how they played a role. One of the things I’ve written about in regard to the Paris agreement is that, 30 or 35 years ago, it probably would have been a bipartisan, no-debate sort of thing. Starting around 1990, environmental legislation became WAY more divisive.

christie: And I would argue that one reason that happened is there were real efforts underway to do something about it, the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, for instance. But then the corporate interests swooped in…

maggiekb: What made the corporate interests successful is that they were able to convince enough conservatives that climate science was a backdoor to oppressive, statist, globalist government.

cwick: Was it just conservatives? Obviously they’ve been more vocal about climate denialism, but Democrats are just as susceptible to corporate influence.

maggiekb: My point here isn’t that conservatives are bad, bad, bad. My point is that we keep having these debates about climate science … while ignoring that what the debate is actually about is political philosophy.

christie: What happened was that climate change became an identity issue. As Dan Kahan at Yale has documented, “What people ‘believe’ about global warming doesn’t reflect what they know; it expresses who they are.”

maggiekb: You can’t show people enough charts to make them believe climate change is a real threat if they feel like accepting what they see in the charts is going to hurt them and their family. And I think that’s the fundamental political problem here. What the corporations did right (for their purposes, not for the planet) is to turn the science (that you can’t argue about) into a proxy for political philosophy (which you can).

christie: And they used the “sound science” strategy to enlist science to muddle the debate. Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway document this in their book, “Merchants of Doubt.”

maggiekb: And so scientists and politicians who care about climate change spend all their effort now trying to explain uncertainty spreads and the greenhouse effect when the conversation that we actually should be having is, “OK, how can we tackle this problem in a way that is philosophically acceptable to the most people?”

cwick: So given all that, what are climate-minded voters in the U.S. to do right now? Should they be focusing on state-level legislation instead of federal?

christie: Chad, a bunch of governors have banded together to take action. What’s happening now is a bottom-up kind of approach that’s happening on local and state levels. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee told Yale Environment 360, “We heard the president wanted to run up the white flag of surrender. We wanted to send a strong message to the world: We’re not going to surrender.” (...)

Also, when a city or state adopts climate-friendly technology and regulations, that can have a ripple effect. For instance, California’s market is big, so when it makes stricter rules for fuel efficiency, manufacturers are nudged into producing the necessary products to meet them.

When a city looks to improve energy efficiency in its buildings, it creates a market for those products too.

christie: Everyone has to pitch in, so it’s not at all insignificant that cities are doing that.

Also, when a city or state adopts climate-friendly technology and regulations, that can have a ripple effect. For instance, California’s market is big, so when it makes stricter rules for fuel efficiency, manufacturers are nudged into producing the necessary products to meet them.

When a city looks to improve energy efficiency in its buildings, it creates a market for those products too.

maggiekb: That reminds me of this article, which shows how the growing size of American homes (and the growing number of electrical appliances in them) all but canceled out gains in home energy efficiency.

christie: Oh, yes, the beer fridge problem! You get a new, energy-efficient fridge and then keep the old one in the garage. Or, what happened to me was that I got a very fuel-efficient car, and I felt less guilty driving so I did more of it.

by Chadwick Matlin, Christie Aschwanden, Maggie Koerth-Baker |  FiveThirtyEight |  Read more:

Image: Paul Zinken/Getty
[ed. This seems to be an important point: how substative issues of fact become matters of political philosophy (and how much corporations, lobbyists, media, the religious industrial  complex, etc. exploit that dynamic. See also: U.S. Catholics 'sickened' by sex abuse report, stand by their faith.]

Hail to the Chief

Soon, according to a June report in The Washington Post, the moment of truth will arrive. Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating the president, his administration, and his campaign, will deliver his verdict on whether Donald Trump obstructed justice.

On the larger and more complicated question of his campaign’s possible collusion with Russia, Mueller may take longer to issue a second report. But it is widely expected in Washington—which has been wrong about such matters before—that a first report, on obstruction, will drop before Labor Day. Assuming it happens, it will follow shortly after Mueller’s July 13 indictment of twelve Russian military intelligence officers. Those indictments have to do with the larger collusion story, and they suggest that more indictments might well be on the way. Even as Trump gave Putin the benefit of the doubt in Helsinki, a Russian woman, Maria Butina, was charged with trying to illegally influence the 2016 election.

It seems inconceivable that Mueller will absolve the president in that first report. Trump has obstructed justice right in front of our noses, and more than once, either because he doesn’t know what obstruction of justice is or because he knows and doesn’t care. The most notable instance was his interview with Lester Holt of NBC in May 2017, right after he fired FBI Director James Comey. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had prepared a letter laying out the president’s reasons for the dismissal. The reasons included, rather laughably, the charge that Comey was unfair to Hillary Clinton in his handling of the probe of her State Department e-mails. Holt asked Trump about the reasons stated in the letter, and eventually Trump acknowledged that they hadn’t a thing to do with it:

I was going to fire Comey knowing there was no good time to do it. And in fact when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.

That is obviously Trump saying, as directly as Trump can say anything, that he fired Comey because of the FBI’s investigation into his campaign’s possible Russia ties. But it’s hardly the only example we know of. Two months before that, in March 2017, he’d berated Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a meeting about Sessions’s earlier decision to recuse himself from the Russia probe and urged him to reverse course. He also made requests to both Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats and National Security Agency director Michael Rogers to issue statements proclaiming that there was no collusion (both refused). There is more along these lines. Arguably every single tweet the president writes about the investigation, attacking Mueller’s “13 Angry Democrats” and denouncing it as an invariably upper-cased Witch Hunt, is an attempt to obstruct justice; if you don’t think so, get yourself placed under federal investigation and try mimicking Trump’s Twitter habits and see what happens to you.

All of this doesn’t begin to detail what Mueller and his team have learned from interviews about what took place in private. It’s a reasonable bet, then, that Mueller will find that Trump and others around him—former press aide Hope Hicks, possibly his son Donald Jr., maybe Jared Kushner, other campaign associates and hangers-on—have lied or tried to quash or in some way compromise the investigation.

If that happens, what comes next? Three days before Trump’s inauguration, the neoconservative Bush administration official Eliot A. Cohen wrote that “this will be a slogging match until the end.” He felt confident, however, that “the institutions will contain him and the laws will restrain him if enough people care about both, and do not yield to fear of him and whatever leverage he tries to exert from his mighty office.”

Of those forty-five words of Cohen’s, the most important is “if.” When Cohen wrote his piece, there may have been reason for optimists to hope that the Republicans who control Congress and the conservative jurists who constitute the majority on the Supreme Court, as well as rank-and-file Republicans, would tire of this vulgar burlesque and would find ways to check Trump, to communicate to him that even a president can’t just do whatever he wants.

But what has actually happened over the last year and a half has been the opposite. Two Republican legislators who have criticized him in a way that bared any teeth, Senators Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, are giving up the fight and retiring, while much of the congressional GOP is instead laying the groundwork for an all-out assault on Mueller when a report hits. The Supreme Court, which will presumably soon have two Trump appointees, is far more political and less independent than the Supreme Court that in 1974 ordered Richard Nixon to hand over his tapes. Trump’s base, as long as he is deporting asylum-seekers and inveighing against knee-taking football players and fake news journalists, grows more and more besotted. And undergirding it all is the Fox News Channel, now a pure propaganda network, from which Republicans take their cues and get their talking points. What will they do when Mueller’s first allegations appear?

It’s worth stepping back here to review quickly the steps by which the Republican Party became this stewpot of sycophants, courtesans, and obscurantists. It’s easy to forget these things, but it’s not as if Trump announced his candidacy in mid-2015 and all this self-abasement suddenly happened. In a May 2015 Washington Post–ABC poll, his favorable-to-unfavorable numbers among Republicans were 23 to 65 percent. Then he announced his candidacy in mid-June, warning us about those Mexican rapists. By mid-July, another Washington Post–ABC News poll gave Trump a 57 percent favorable rating among Republicans, with 40 percent seeing him unfavorably—a big improvement, but still far from Dear Leader territory.

That August brought the first Republican debate, at which Megyn Kelly confronted Trump over his “disparaging comments about women’s looks.” The day after that debate, Trump said that Kelly had “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.” The war that resulted between Trump and Fox News foreshadowed his subsequent takeover of the Republican Party as a whole.

Trump had known Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, Bill O’Reilly, and Sean Hannity for years, and occasionally appeared on Fox to natter on about Barack Obama’s birth certificate. Now, however, he grandly announced a boycott of the network and put out a flurry of tweets like this one, which reads strangely (except for the grammatical error) in light of all we know today: “.@oreillyfactor was very negative to me in refusing to to [sic] post the great polls that came out today including NBC. @FoxNews not good for me!” Who knows the extent to which this was all show. Murdoch and Ailes no doubt felt that they had to at least appear to be defending Kelly, their top female star at the time, who has since decamped to NBC (this was months before Ailes was exposed as a serial sexual predator).

It now seems as if what we were witnessing then was really a cautious waltz of alpha-male lions loosed upon an unfamiliar savannah, fighting to determine which one would lead the pride. And Trump clearly won. I’m not sure this qualifies as something for which he deserves credit, but it’s a fact that Trump is the only Republican politician I can think of since the network has been on the air (1996) to take it on and bend it to his will rather than the other way around.

As Trump began piling up primary victories, Republicans started coming around. Some stopped short of endorsing him, but they found ways to signal that they would do nothing to stop him. In late April 2016, Tennessee’s Bob Corker announced his support for Trump. The day before, Trump had given a foreign policy address that Corker praised as “challenging the foreign policy establishment that has been here for so long.” That June, when Trump delivered a racist tirade against the judge (of Mexican heritage) who was presiding over the Trump University case, Senator Lindsey Graham said, “There’ll come a time when the love of country will trump hatred of Hillary.” But for most Republicans—very much including Graham himself, who just three months into Trump’s term announced himself “the happiest dude in America right now” over the administration’s anti-Iran saber-rattling—that time never came.

The release of the Access Hollywood tape in early October 2016 provided another look-in-the-mirror moment for Republicans. More than forty elected Republicans did back away from Trump at that point—a significant number, no doubt, but still a small minority. Big donors like Robert and Rebekah Mercer announced they were sticking with him. The Never-Trumpers, which at the time included those forty, along with a number of conservative writers and intellectuals and conservative TV pundits, stood their ground, but they were overwhelmed and warned by their constituents that they had better fall into line: Trump, Rudy Giuliani, Roger Stone, Julian Assange, and Fox News were now fully in charge of the Republican Party.

None of this was inevitable. I used to argue, in these pages and elsewhere, that the Republicans could have stopped Trump, and I still believe it. Doing so would have required three elements: a bit of leadership from Reince Priebus, then the party chairman and later the easily steamrolled White House chief of staff; an agreement (this was the hard part) among the other major presidential candidates to check their egos and coalesce behind one of them; and a commitment by a few major donors to support that candidate.

But they didn’t do this, and no one stood up to Trump. His only forceful critic was Mitt Romney, who called him “a phony, a fraud” in a scathing speech; but he delivered that speech in March 2016, two days after Trump had swept the Super Tuesday voting, i.e., after he was already well on his way to the nomination. The time for that speech was before the Iowa caucuses. Today, Romney, running for the Senate in Utah, cheerily predicts that Trump will “be reelected solidly.” This is at least the fourth political incarnation of Romney, from the moderate who gave Massachusetts a health care plan in the early 2000s to the “severe” conservative who ran for president in 2012 to the anti-Trump spokesman of two years ago to the capitulator of today.

This is the remarkable thing we have witnessed: the Republican Party has essentially ceased to be a political party in our normal understanding of the term and has instead become an instrument of one man’s will. Fifty years ago, the GOP was an amalgam of different factions that often disagreed among themselves—New England liberals, the heirs of the “Free Soil” moderates, prairie conservatives, Wall Street money people. Then in 1980, the new “movement conservatives” gained the upper hand. Incrementally, they took over. Incrementally, they moved ever more rightward, egged on by the new right-wing media.

All that was bad enough for the country—it led us to a war waged under false pretenses against an “enemy” that hadn’t attacked us and a campaign to dismantle a social compact carved out over the course of a century. But at least through all those phases, the Republican Party remained committed to the basic idea of democratic allocation of power. Since the Civil War, Democrats and Republicans have fought sometimes fiercely over their ideological goals, but they always respected the idea of limits on their power.

No one had come along to suggest that power should be unlimited. But now someone has, and we have learned something very interesting, and alarming, about these “conservatives,” both the rank and file and holders of high office: their overwhelming commitment is not to democratic allocation of power, but to their ideological goals—the annihilation of liberalism, the restoration of a white ethno-nationalist hegemony. They know better than to speak of such things openly, but every once in a while they have allowed a piece of the cat’s anatomy to slip out of the bag, a tail here, a hind leg there. In June 2016, for example, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said:

For all of his obvious shortcomings, Donald Trump is certainly a different direction, and I think if he is in the White House he’ll have to respond to the right-of-center world which elected him, and the things that we believe in. So I’m comfortable supporting him.

In other words, to McConnell, that “right-of-center world” predated Trump, and on most important questions—taxes, deregulation, cultural issues, and the judges who have the power to nullify so many liberal achievements—Trump would do just what McConnell wanted a Republican president to do.

It has often been written, and I’ve written it myself, that the Republicans have been weak in the face of Trumpism. But I’ve come to think that’s wrong. They’re not weak at all. Most of them are perfectly happy to have become Trump’s vassals. They were waiting for just such a man.

Trump’s popularity among Republicans now stands at close to 90 percent. This is a fairly recent development—since the early part of this year. No doubt it is a function in part of certain accomplishments, notably the tax cut and the reshaping of the courts. But I think it’s tied most directly to the increasing awareness of what a serious threat Mueller poses to the president. Hence the ferocious pushback, orchestrated by Fox. Most nights, if I’m watching Rachel Maddow at 9 PM on MSNBC, I’ll flip over for a few moments to watch Hannity on Fox. If you don’t do this, I recommend that you do. It’s like being transported to a parallel universe. Hours continue to be devoted to why Hillary belongs in jail. The Mueller probe is discussed only for the purpose of telling viewers how corrupt it is.

by Michael Tomasky, NYRB | Read more:
Image: Siegfried Woldhek
[ed. I hesitate to pollute this blog with anything Trump-related but sometimes you just can't avoid it. At least this article lays blame where it's deserved: establishment Republicans and media outlets who debase themselves by continuing to support him. See also: We Know Trump Is Guilty. We’re Having a Hard Time Admitting It.]

The Blaze

[ed. Quite a good video. I wonder what the backstory is?]