"Armageddon Surfer Girl, Rock On..."
Hello, again. I hope you’re all doing well. On the one hand, Republican members of Congress and a small cadre of galactic-brained Democrats have abdicated their role in government and nullified Article I of the American Constitution. On the other, baseball season is upon us. We are a land of contrasts.
If you want to read the novel I wrote, you can request a free digital copy here, and you can read an excerpt here. Seriously: it's free!
More or less, this blog/newsletter is a collection of various things on my mind and publishes monthly (for now!).
Recently, I’ve been thinking about the particular flavor of American fascism at this moment, the uses and limitations of AI tools, “Crimson Tide,” a relatively obscure power pop singer-songwriter, and more. LFG.
If You Think Trump is a Fascist...
Is Donald Trump a fascist? The only arguments against it might be that “fascism” today means something different from its historical meaning, or that we cannot know Trump’s true thoughts and feelings on political matters. However, if we accept that what was meant by "fascism" decades ago is what is meant by "fascism" today, that what Trump says in public represents his thoughts, and that the actions his government undertakes and that he publicly supports represent his thoughts, then he is fascist.
That said, the label alone won't shame conservatives into not being fascist, themselves, and yet a certain number of Democratic politicians sure seem to believe stopping just short of labeling Trump an anti-constitutional fascist and taking symbolic stands against him means their job is done.
This is, to use a technical term, bananapants bonkers wrong and a symptom of many national Democrats’ inability to conceive that they might change voters in addition to reacting to voters’ existing preferences. Simply apply Democrats' current logic to any historical example of fascism or other authoritarian regime and see how it stands up. Wearing a purple tie to protest fascism might be something a relatively powerless person can do to signal their political position; a member of Congress limiting themselves to symbolic resistance is rolling over and showing their goddamn belly to the maniac playing with dynamite and matches.
Performative, but Worthwhile, Conservative-Squishing
If you haven’t seen the clips or full video of The Majority Report host Sam Seder “debating” 20 young conservatives one-by-one, it’s worth scrolling through.
My main takeaways are threefold: First, Hair Bun Guy desperately needs to read a book. Second, it’s wild what the true freaks say in public, and that “What’s the problem with xenophobic nationalism?” didn’t prompt an immediate boot. And finally, acknowledging that these 20 people may not be representative, it’s deeply troubling to see so many relatively normie people happily reveling in politics of grievance, fear, dominance, and scarcity.
I’m not sure this does much beyond making Seder look good — so good, in fact, that a bunch of conservatives on X convinced themselves he must be on their side — but if just a few people see the emptiness in his interlocutors’ flailings, then godspeed.
Relatedly, here are a couple different examples of how to talk to people about racist conservative politics these days:
1) Baseball Prospectus - Jackie Robinson and the Twisted Mirror
2) FightinCowboy, a games streamer, tells a racist commenter to fuck off
Don’t Talk to the Police
I have no idea why I this keeps popping into my head, but unless you’re the person calling police for help, don’t talk to the police. Again: Don’t talk to the police. If you need help remembering this principle, it's simple: Don’t talk to the police.
If Art is not Political, it is not Art
Among the many vulgarities of this Trump administration, his shivving the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees, making himself chair, and stacking it with people who despise art in favor of propaganda is a relatively minor one. But it still made headlines when Lin-Manuel Miranda and others behind the musical “Hamilton” responded to Trump’s moves by pulling out of a planned run at the Kennedy Center.
It’s worth remembering that “Hamilton” is the perfect representation of the Obama Democratic ethos because it presents itself in a way that seems carefully designed to offend no one. A few years ago, I went pretty long with this argument and why I think “Hamilton” does not challenge its audience.
Which brings us to today, and the statement the production released announcing their withdrawal. What reasons do you guess the people who made “Hamilton” would offer for putting a halt to their Kennedy Center run? If you guessed they would say the Kennedy Center should be “protected from politics” and it’s not Trump and his politics that are the problem, but Trump politicizing the administration of the Kennedy Center, then I guess you win some brownie points.
It makes perfect sense that the producers of the most Obama-era piece of popular art would avoid confronting a fascist head on, proclaim themselves above and outside politics, and insist that an institution dedicated to the arts be politically neutral, even though the piece of art they created and steward is freighted with political meaning — meaning that they are apparently uncomfortable owning.
I’m not sure any American popular art is up for fighting fascism, and this definitely ain’t it.
Martin Luther Lennon
There is a power pop singer-songwriter whose work I came across on Spotify and I’ve been digging a lot of it. The nom-de-music is Martin Luther Lennon, and the first song of his I heard was “Armageddon Surfer Girl.” For whatever reason, it hits me in just the right way.
As of this writing, Spotify says he has 92 monthly listeners, and I started looking up more information about him, but after a couple minutes I realized I probably don’t want to know anything beyond that Martin Luther Lennon released a couple albums in the late 1990s and they both rock.
"I Have the Con"
Count me among the people who watched “Crimson Tide” for the first time shortly after Gene Hackman’s death. And count me among the crowd affirming that it kicks ass.
Putting on my English Major Movie Nerd hat, the main reason it kicks ass is because the plot and the stakes are exceptionally clear throughout. You can dig in a bit on whether Hackman’s character, Capt. Ramsey, is “good” or not — I think the movie tips its position that he’s bad by having him resort to punching Hunter when he doesn’t get his way — but we wouldn’t be able to get there, as viewers, if we couldn’t understand basic mechanics of who is doing what and why.
Even simple, un-clever things like dramatizing a missile launch drill early in the movie in order to show what must happen later on in order to actually launch missiles serves to keep the audience fully informed so that when things get chaotic for the men on the sub, we still have a firm grasp of everything that’s happening. In a meta way, that clarity is reflected by how procedures and orders on the submarine are made crystal clear so that when confusion arises the men know what must happen next. Officers state aloud, “I have the con,” whenever they assume command of the vessel. Throughout the movie, we get treated similarly by the filmmakers.
Compare to a movie like “Mickey17,” the new Bong Joon-Ho film starring Robert Pattinson and based on a book I really like. Pattinson is great fun playing multiple kinds of weird guy, but the movie is so overstuffed with sheer plot and subplot that it’s never quite clear how each of the characters in an isolated colony on a distant planet actually relate to each other or their circumstances. I left the theater thinking it should have been a 10-hour limited series, or half the plot and half the characters should have been cut in order to tell one actual story instead of the many multiple stories “Mickey17” tried to tell. (I like how FilmCritHulk describes it as “7 different movies crammed together.”)
With “Crimson Tide,” it finishes in just under two hours with neither too much nor too little story. You go on a ride where you are right there for every moment. It achieves satisfaction.
Want to Make the Most of AI Tools? First, Become an Expert in Something
Again and again, I find AI tools only really work if the user already has a certain level of expertise. Using AI prevents novices from becoming experts because for the most part it is used as a black-box shortcut and not a process which the user can learn to understand, and thus be able to check and refine their work. Worse, on a societal level, if enough people embrace these tools, there’s a real chance that it will obstruct and slow our ability to learn the skills the AI is supposedly obviating. And if that happens, then the AI tools will lose their efficacy because then there won’t be humans to validate their work.
This may seem overly simplistic or obvious, but just as it’s a bad idea to let students learn math by handing them a calculator on day one, it’s a bad idea to let students — or anyone learning anything — use tools that are a shortcut to using their brains on day one. I’m happy to read any stories about students who innately understand that using AI to generate papers for them is creating bullshit and not helping them learn, never mind that “AI search” is simply the wrong tool, providing sketchy answers, for many searches.
None of that is to say that I think LLMs and AI tools generally have *no* value. I think the most promising formulation I’ve heard came from Sendhil Mullainathan in conversation with Pablo Torre, who said (paraphrasing), that AI is most useful not when it’s leveraged to do things that humans already do well, but when it’s leveraged to do things humans are bad at doing. I wished I could interject in a bunch of spots during that conversation, especially to ask about the primary problem of how using AI only makes sense when it can be validated, but at the least, it’s a thought-provoking and sane discussion.
The Artistry of "Court of Gold"
“Court of Gold,” the six-part documentary about the 2024 Olympic men’s basketball tournament now on Netflix, delivers on just about everything you could reasonably want from it — with the prominent exception of LeBron James’s total cooperation — given that it’s a production of the Olympic Channel and has Barack and Michelle Obama as executive producers.
I was struck, in particular, by the sheer artistry of the editing in several moments. There’s Moritz Wagner beside himself, sobbing, after Germany was eliminated. Virtually everything from Kevin Durant was poetry, perhaps none more poetic than, “That chemistry gonna help you when you gotta guard Steph?” But it was a very on-the-nose juxtaposition near the end that made me catch my breath: Cameras caught Durant leaving the floor at the end of the gold medal game in order to embrace his mother with a mixture of satisfied relief and joy, followed by shots of Victor Wembanyama leaving the floor to hug his mother through his tears of disappointment.
This thing is basically an ad for the Olympics, but if you go into it with clear eyes about that, the very human stories it tells are well worth watching.
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Thanks for reading, you crazy kids. Let’s do this again, sometime.
(Photo: "Smack a Fascists" [sic], by frankieleon. Used under CC BY 2.0 license.)