jducoeur

(None of this is thoughtful introspection. It's time to just say a bit of what I feel.)

It's very strange, sitting in my comfortable (if isolated) environment, and seeing capital-H History happening all over the country.

We were in Waltham this afternoon (just to get a bit of ice cream and go for a walk in a slightly less crowded environment), and drove past a single protester, standing silent vigil in the square beside Moody Street, holding a sign. I can't help but think that it was so correct: anger, solemnitude, and protest against the monstrous time we are in.

I have a lot of co-workers in Minneapolis, which is one of my company's main centers -- I won't deny that I'm worried for them.

But my heart is very much with the protesters: the justification here is so real and so deep, and this is bringing to a head so many years of horror, that I don't have a lot of sympathy for anyone who says they should just sit back, shut up, and continue to take it.

And yes, I'm a little horrified by the violence -- but very conscious that a fair chunk of that (quite likely most of it) is almost certainly coming from a combination of poseurs and provocateurs (all too many of them white) who are intentionally egging it on. A few are trying to discredit the protests; I'm sure that all too many are simply trolls who are taking advantage of the opportunity to get their rocks off and do some damage. None of it reduces the reality that enough is fucking enough.

And of course, you have Trump and his master crony Barr (who I halfway feel is an even worse criminal and traitor than Trump, because he bloody well ought to know better than The Great Orange Infant), pouring oil on the flames in order to score political points. A race war would suit Trump just fine at the moment. When even Mitch McConnell sounds downright measured and reasonable compared to Trump (and appears to be trying to distance himself), things are way off the rails and careening into Crazytown.

And there is this uncontrollable sense that 2020 is one of those years that a thousand history books will be written about: when all the insanity and poison and incompetence leading up to this moment came to a head. There have been many such years in history. Most of them aren't happy stories.

And like so many, I'm carried along with events, a frustrated passive observer of moments that matter so much. I don't have anything useful to say, and not much useful to do. But we can't pretend that this is okay, and we can't pretend that this is simply a causeless eruption.

I don't know what is to come, and I don't know what the best possible outcome is. But the current situation is intolerable, on so many levels. These protests are right, and just, and necessary, and I hope that folks manage to come out of them safe and intact...

On a more serious note: while the tragicomic WWE match in Washington distracts everyone, arguably the most important political fights right now are happening at the local level. Much of the current mess is due to decades' worth of effort on the part of the Republicans to gerrymander the bloody heck out of the country. Our best hope to set things right again is to get control of the state houses ASAP, so that the next round of redistricting isn't so abusive.

So I call your attention to the Grassroots Redistrict Project, a national effort to identify and win key seats in a number of states, to ensure that reasonable and fair districts get drawn over the next couple of years. It's an important project, and IMO worth supporting...

No, not of me -- of the Washington Mess.

For those who like to keep up with it all, the folks behind The Daily WTF have taken the software that they've been using to manage the firehose, and turned it into a public website, Current Status.

It's pretty intriguing: basically a one-page listing of the major political articles from the past day or so, ranked based on a combination of actual newsworthiness (it sounds like there are some algorithms involved, but also a human in the loop) and how much it's all being talked about. It mostly draws from the conventional major sources like CNN, the networks, the major newspapers -- basically everybody Trump hates.

There's also a nice sidebar of very-recent stories (past two hours, it looks like) that are too new to rank but might be interesting.

Overall, it looks to be a good overview of the up-to-the-minute political news, complementing the Daily WTF's daily summary. Worth checking out if you're interested and sometimes like to see what's going on.

(And may I just say, I'm appalled that we now live in a world where a site like this is necessary...)

Welcome back to The Review of Obscure Books, my occasional-but-long-running series of reviews of comics that could use some special attention. Having finally finished it last night, some thoughts on a story that is very much not obscure: Marvel's recent mega-crossover Secret Empire. No, I'm mostly not talking about fight scenes -- ultimately, this is about modern politics -- but there's a lot of superhero trope to wade through before I get to the interesting stuff. If that's a turn-off, just skip this one and move on to my next review. (Probably soon.)

A high-level overview of the main plot helps to explain why a lot of people freaked out really badly when this started:

• Due to all the screwups in SHIELD in recent years, Steve Rogers (Captain America) is appointed as its head.
• There occur a set of near-simultaneous crises, nationwide.
• Congress gives him broad emergency powers.
• He reveals himself to be a lifelong sleeper agent of Hydra, and begins immediately converting the country to fascism.

Okay, when you just see that, it's a huge WTF???!!!?? The reality is a lot more complicated, though, and the payoff fairly interesting.

Let's get the silly bits out of the way first. What's really going on here is that the Red Skull (Captain America's arch-nemesis) managed to lay hands on a Cosmic Cube (Marvel's official Uber-MacGuffin, capable of altering reality more or less however you like). Having finally twigged to, "If you can't beat 'em, get 'em to join you", he engineers a magnificently Kafkaesque rewrite of history:

• Steve Rogers was traumatized by the death of his mother when he was young.
• He swore to do whatever it took to protect the people.
• He was taken in by Hydra, and during WWII was one of their greatest agents.
• When Hydra was on the verge of winning WWII (I assume there are Germans involved here somewhere, but they mostly talk about Hydra), the sneaky Allies got their hands on a Cosmic Cube, and rewrote history themselves so that they were winning.
• As part of that, they turned Steve into Captain America, but not before Hydra planted a sort of sleeper spell on him.

So to Steve's new POV, he has always been Hydra, and is essentially waking up from a bad dream of fighting for the wrong side. This person -- let's call him Hydra Steve -- is very much not our Steve Rogers.

The crossover as a whole is, at best, a mixed bag. There are some genuinely good stories in there: this is a "life in wartime" epic for Marvel, and has a lot to say about fascism and politics and stuff. But there was also a lot of Dumb, and wasn't entirely helped by being so earnest. I mean, Secret Wars was idiotic, but it reveled in its own ridiculousness, and managed to fit a lot of silly fun in its kitsch. This one would have been much stronger if they'd limited it to the writers and stories that had both the talent and enthusiasm to really tackle a harder tale.

Anyway: in the end, the various heroes manage to bring "our" Steve back to reality; he fights Hydra Steve (yeah, yeah -- Cosmic Cube lets you do nonsense like this) and wins; yay, freedom prevails. So much for the superhero bits.

But the payoff (and the reason it's worth talking about) is the final issue, Secret Wars: Omega. As so often, the best comics aren't fight scenes, they are issue-long conversations. This one is what happens when Good Steve confronts Hydra Steve in prison.

The beautiful hell of it is, Hydra Steve is not a villain. Quite the contrary: somewhere mid-story, he executed the Red Skull, his supposed ally, precisely because the Skull was very much a villain. By his own lights, Hydra Steve is, without the slightest doubt, the hero in this story.

The thing is, he's still Steve Rogers -- but he's a Steve Rogers whose life was slightly different, and thus whose priorities are different.

Since the 1980s, Marvel has been very clear that Captain America cares about people, and would give his life to protect them, but his highest priority is Freedom. (The original Civil War, much more clearly than the movie, was primarily about that.)

Hydra Steve doesn't oppose Freedom per se, all other things being equal -- but his highest priority is Protecting the People. And that little difference of priority, followed through, turns him into a true-believer Fascist (and, largely, Totalitarian). He is trying to build a world where the people are safe and happy, and he believes that requires imposition of Order. But he is quite sincere that Order is merely a means to an end, and to him the assumption of power is genuinely a burden (he spends a fair amount of Secret Empire agonizing over it) -- but it's what he needs to do in order to protect the country from itself, so he does it. He was groomed to be, essentially, a good King, and he's going to fulfill this responsibility.

Moreover, he is genuinely angry with Good Steve, and with the Avengers, for their weakness. He is more than happy to point out The Superhero Paradox: that if you aren't willing to stop the bad guys -- and by this, he means quite permanently -- then you are complicit in their later crimes. He lays the deaths of a lot of innocents on Good Steve's shoulders, because The Avengers Don't Kill.

And because of the way the story is structured, Good Steve and Hydra Steve literally cannot agree on history and facts. Hydra Steve knows perfectly well that he has lost (for now), and that he is living in Good Steve's reality, but he also knows to the core of his being that this reality is a corruption of the "real" one that he comes from.

Most damning, he points out (semi-accurately) that he has committed no crimes -- worse, the people welcomed him. He was handed power in full accordance with law, and when he rolled Hydra out as, essentially, a nationwide paramilitary political party, hordes of people flocked to him. He restored their pride, promised them protection, and gave them a sense of unity in something greater. He knows, and says quite explicitly, that this is his real victory: that Good Steve may have won for the moment, but the next time things go wrong, a lot of people will begin to remember the greater dream of Hydra. It is not at all clear that he is all that defeated, in the end.

Yes, it's ferociously creepy, and the metaphor is as dense as a fruitcake, but it's beautifully on-target. I often note that the silver lining of our current political moment is that at least we wound up with as inept a fascist as Trump in the White House: a greedy idiot whose ideals can be summarized as, "MineMineMine". But Secret Empire envisions the opposite: America being seduced by a brilliant, charismatic and idealistic fascist, who is far more effective. It's a story worth keeping in mind -- while we like to think that we are simply Good and they are simply Bad, it looks very different from the other perspective.

So -- despite all the above, I can't actually recommend reading Secret Empire. It's loose and sloppy, full of the stupid, with way too many threads and a story that is baroque even by Marvel standards. But there is a central spine in there that is utterly relevant to our times and very well-designed. I suspect that the same story, told in a tenth as many issues with a tenth as many plots, could have been truly great...

Mind, I largely agree with the decision, at least for now. But let's not lose sight of the obvious attempt to distract away from more contentious matters...

The Science Fictional Singularity is when Artificial Intelligence begins to create new ideas, and Science begins to advance faster than conventional biological humans can conceive.

The Political Singularity is when a Great Orange Artificial (lack of) Intelligence begins to create new scandals, faster than conventional media can conceive.

This commentary brought to you by both Amy Siskind and Jon Oliver remarking on a week incomprehensibly chock-full of scandals, any one of which would have undone a conventional President...

The Guardian is continuing to impress the heck out of me with their investigative journalism. Here is their followup story, this one considerably shorter and more comprehensible. It continues to point to evidence that Brexit happened because of a literal conspiracy -- and that it may well have been a deliberate dry run for the election of Trump.

I'm immensely curious about how this plays out. I hope that this starts a real drumbeat for proper investigations into the Brexit vote, and the apparently illegal financing behind it. And the really interesting question is, if it turns out that the Leave campaign did break the law, allowing an American billionaire to illegally spend a lot of money to subvert British democracy -- what then? Everyone's been assuming that the referendum happened, and that the results must be adhered to, but if illegal means were used, that reasoning becomes a tad shaky.

As an entertaining counterpoint to all that, I'll add this delicious article-cum-memoir about Brexit from Dominic Cummings, one of the leaders of the Leave campaign. (Thanks to mindways for pointing me at it.) It's immensely long (I'm only halfway through), but a fun read if you enjoy politics. It's a (presumably enormously biased) account of what things were like inside the Leave campaign, redolent of the richest sour grapes -- this is the winner of the campaign describing in gory detail just what a fuckup the whole thing was, and how close they came to losing, not least because of just what a jackass Nigel Farage is.

But beyond that, it's a very readable treatise on practical politics, with a general thesis that anybody who says that anything in politics is certain is either lying or deluded. He repeatedly talks about "branching histories", to show just how essential both luck and a few key mistakes by David Cameron were to the victory of the Leave campaign.

Well worth reading, even if you just take it as a sort of primer in how on-the-ground campaigning really works. Regardless of the Guardian's reportage, and whether Cummings was in on this apparent conspiracy, he gives a good sense of what it takes to win in politics. It's not pretty, but it's kind of fascinating, and rather educational...

Thanks to cvirtue for pointing me at this impressive piece of reportage from The Guardian, published a few days ago.

I won't kid you: this is long, dense, and hard to quite absorb. But it's one of the most important articles I've seen this year. In it, they dug into the details of why Britain voted to leave the EU, when all the polling had indicated a narrow win for the Remain side.

Slightly to my surprise, this story is not primarily about Russia, although there are hints of their involvement. Rather, this is the story of a couple of rather shadowy military-tied companies named Cambridge Analytica and Aggregate IQ, and an American billionaire named Robert Mercer, doing what appear to be some pragmatic experiments in just how far you can sway a populace simply by crunching the data and manipulating them directly. And yes, Steve Bannon is right at the heart of the whole thing, as the sometime VP of Cambridge Analytica.

This is a story about Brexit rather than Trump, but they don't shy away from drawing the connections there: indeed, this is one of the first times I've seen direct connections between those stories, rather than claims that they reflected some sort of zeitgeist.

I can't say I've digested all of it yet, but the general takeaway seems to be that this is an example of weaponized propaganda, being driven by the American corporate world as much as anywhere. And the evidence of last year is that, yes, it can tilt the playing field at least a few critical percent.

Of course, last week also had the comforting news of the French election, where these tactics (deployed late in the game) seem to have entirely failed. That suggests that this stuff can't entirely swing the game -- Le Pen was losing badly, and she still lost badly. But in a close election (which describes damned near everything at the national level in the US nowadays), it can be solidly effective.

Bookmark it, read it, and stick it in the back of your mind. We can't let it distract too much from the Russiagate scandal, but this is a strong indication that the Kremlin are by no means the only bad guys here. If we're going to be effective in fixing things, we need to understand the full scope of the battlefield...

This week's been an interesting one. Not happy-making, by any means, but slightly less ulcer-inducing, not least for the omnipresent leaks that Steve Bannon may be out of favor with His Imperial Orangeness. So I shouldn't be surprised that Trump's core supporters are apparently beginning to freak out. From the sound of things, they are beginning to believe that -- the terrible truth dawns -- Donald Trump might not have been entirely honest with them!

The situation still sucks, and we need to keep the pressure up. But for now, I'm quietly enjoying the view of these assholes panicking because they aren't getting to destroy the country as efficiently as they want...

It's been a hell of a week in national events. Some thoughts about how all the pieces fit together.

I will admit, even I didn't expect Trump to play the Wag the Dog strategy (Wag the Dog = start a war to distract everybody) quite this soon, although I was certainly expecting it sooner or later. In this particular case, I have to say that it was actually a bit clever.

Trump's core problem at the moment is that a narrative has been brewing, that he is actively a pawn of Putin. Distractions entirely aside, I suspect that's the real motivation for the Syrian strikes: they're not just starting a war, they are starting a war with Russia on the other side. Memetically, this is all about showing that he is his own man, and thereby defusing the Russiagate controversy. The message is essentially, "So they got me elected. So what? I don't work for them." That's a fairly smart message for him to be sending to his wavering supporters right now, and plays cleverly into the general understanding that he's a changeable crook.

It might even be true. Let's assume for the moment that this isn't a truly Machiavellian plan on Putin's part, sacrificing the pawn of Assad in the name of broader strategic objectives. (I think it is entirely possible that that is what's going on, but a bit beside my point.)

There's an interesting question that not enough people are asking: what is the game here? What are Putin's strategic objectives?

I mean, sure -- you can assume that he's just a villain out of a Bond movie, sitting in the back and twirling his invisible Stalin mustache. But I suspect that's too simplistic.

My guess is that controlling the US would be a fine goodie for Putin (why not?), but his primary aim is to neutralize the US. To that extent, the goal of backing Trump was only secondarily getting him elected -- the primary objective was to hurt Hilary as much as possible, throw the US into chaos, and make it ineffectual on the international stage. Which, note -- Mission (largely) Accomplished.

What Putin mainly wants, I figure, is to be able to secure his borders, in the sense of turning everybody around Russia into client states again, as in the Good Old Days. And of course, for his murderous kleptocracy to be able to do what they want, with minimal interference.

To that end, we should be clear that it is quite possible that Trump is just a Useful Idiot, not actually being controlled by the Kremlin. It's possible that he is, of course, but don't delude yourself that it's a clear certainty. Even if that was true at the beginning, he's not a complete moron, and it's clear that he has figured out that that's a bad image for him. So he's going to focus for now on making clear that he's not a puppet. Which is good -- aside from raising the likelihood of Stupid Nuclear Holocaust a step higher.

But the other thing to keep in mind (and the cause of the title here) is, we shouldn't feel too comfortable in our own certainties. I was starting to think about this essay last week, and then hit the latest episode of Full Frontal -- with the interviews claiming that Sanders supporters were also being manipulated by the Russian alternative-media machine.

Which is entirely what I would expect: if their goal was to cause chaos and discredit American democracy, just manipulating one side is silly. Instead, you should be playing all of the sides against each other. I lack evidence, but would guess that they were trying to stir up the Clinton camp as well, simply because it fits the goals.

The point is, alternative narrative is a tool, and can be used in any and all directions. This crap is not just effective on the uneducated and credulous -- it works precisely because the world is complicated, and humans prefer to seek easier answers. (Heaven knows there is plenty of similarly silly nonsense that is believed by many wealthy, well-educated left-wingers.)

It's easy to get paranoid, and I'm not advocating that -- melting down into a puddle of helplessness is kind of what the Putinites want you to do. But it does mean that serious critical thinking is a necessity if you're not going to be easily manipulated. Facts aren't true or false simply because they come from the mass media, or the Internet, or your neighbor: you have to keep a well-balanced diet of information sources, always examining what their agendas are (because everybody has their own agendas -- that's just human) and keeping an open mind to the possibility that you're being misled.

It's a tricky game, and easier to just avoid altogether. But if you really care about civics and doing the best thing, it's going to be a part of modern daily life, I suspect...