The MLB winter meetings were a bit slow this year, but I did have five new Insider pieces this week, covering:
• The Dodgers/Atlanta salary swap and the Matt Moore trade
• The Santana and Cozart signings, plus the Galvis trade
• The Piscotty and Kinsler trades, and the Shaw/McGee signings
• The Marcell Ozuna trade
• A quick take on a few interesting Rule 5 picks
• The Giancarlo Stanton trade
My ranking of the top ten new board games of 2017 went up at Paste on Sunday evening. My latest game review for the site covers Ex Libris, a fun, light strategy game that’s extremely well balanced, and made my top ten as well.
The holidays are upon us! Stick a copy of Smart Baseball in every stocking.
And now, the links…
- Longreads: WIRED looks at the three Minecraft-playing entrepreneurs whose DDoS botnet caused the October 2016 Internet outage in the eastern United States.
- ESPN’s Outside the Lines and ESPN The Magazine, an investigation of how adidas money took over the University of Louisville.
- The Boston Globe Spotlight team looks at the evidence behind Boston’s reputation as a racist city and finds that … yep, it’s racist. I lived in the Boston suburbs for about 18 years, including my time in college, and my personal experience was that the city was highly segregated: There was a large black population, but they all lived Somewhere Else. Diversity in whiter neighborhoods was limited to people from east or south Asia, but rarely included African- or Latino-Americans.
- Also from WIRED, a look at the big money effort to build a professional e-sports league around the game Overwatch.
- A former sharecropper in Lowndes County, Alabama, a majority-black county with a population just over 10,000, spends every Election Day encouraging and driving her neighbors to the polls, one of the many great stories emerging after Doug Jones’ surprise victory over the Ayatollah of Alabama on Tuesday.
- Slate argues that the new concealed-carry reciprocity law is unconstitutional. It was also widely opposed by law-enforcement groups, and the inevitable lawsuits to stop it are going to waste a lot of everyone’s time and money.
- The Trump Administration told the Centers for Disease Control they can’t use the words fetus, diversity, transgender, evidence-based, or science-based in upcoming budget request documents. That’s yet another reason to support efforts to elect scientists to public office, such as 314 Action.
- Salon calls the Republican Party the American Taleban in response to the party’s massive rollback of policies of previous administrations, with the goal of keeping a portion of the population “undereducated.”
- New York‘s Jonathan Chait claims that the Mueller investigation is in great peril; I’m just not informed enough to know if this is valid, melodramatic, or a bit of both.
- USA Today‘s editorial board, hardly a bastion of the left, called out Trump’s implication that Senator Kirsten Gillibrand would trade sex for campaign donations, saying “A president who would all but call Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand a whore is not fit to clean the toilets in the Barack Obama Presidential Library or to shine the shoes of George W. Bush.” You’d think Republican women in Congress would be outraged, but nah.
- The New York Times compared the blatant falsehoods told by Presidents Obama and Trump, finding that Trump is offering lies at 60 times the rate of his predecessor, telling more lies in less than a year in office than Obama did in eight. (They list the specific falsehoods, if anyone wants to cry “fake news.”)
- The US Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a hospital worker fired for refusing a flu shot can’t claim religious discrimination, as the court ruled that anti-vaccination beliefs are not religious in nature, and that the scientifically accepted view is that vaccines are not harmful.
- Celebrity chef & Food Network icon Mario Batali has now been outed as a sexual harasser & groper, and has been fired by The Chew as a result. He issued a weak apology that ended with a cinnamon roll recipe.
- Ken Friedman, the co-owner of West Village restaurant The Spotted Pig, has been accused by several former employees of harassment and assault, another great piece of investigative work from the New York Times. The Spotted Pig is co-owned by chef April Bloomfield, who is accused of blowing off complaints from female employees about Friedman.
- Salma Hayek’s piece on how Harvey Weinstein harassed her and nearly derailed her career in retaliation is just brutal to read. Director Peter Jackson revealed that Weinstein forced him to drop Mira Sorvino and Ashley Judd from the Lord of the Rings movies in further retaliation against the women for rejecting his advances.
- Thrillist’s Dan Gentile listed the 21 best coffee roasters in the country, and based on my experience it’s quite a credible list. I’ve tried nine of these, and would probably not have included La Colombe of those on the list, but would vouch for the rest. I’d also add Archetype (Omaha), Cartel (Phoenix), and Bird Rock (San Diego/La Jolla).
- In July, the podcast Startup interviewed the Yemeni-American behind the $16 cup of coffee that made headlines in 2016. His story is remarkable, as he’s had to educate Yemeni farmers and then process and ship the beans out of an active war zone.
- In the wake of the Keaton Jones story (and the milkshake duck epilogue), Teen Vogue looks at how the traumas of young black girls don’t get the same kind of public empathy. She also argues for greater mental health treatment for traumatized young kids, which is a core tenet of the book I reviewed yesterday, The Body Keeps the Score.
- Yet another former Facebook exec has come out against the power and effects of his old employer and social media in general, saying it’s “ripping apart society.” I agree social media is showing some rather pernicious effects, but I also feel like this talking point is a very good way to make money on the speakers’ circuit when you used to work there.
- This New York Times story on the alt-right’s attempts to build a parallel social media world is mostly funny but a bit scary that they could even find funding for all of these failed efforts.
- Paste posted its ranking of the top 30 video games of 2017. I’ve heard of maybe five. I did just buy a new laptop that’s supposed to be quite good for gaming, so maybe I’ll dive in this year.
- Thames and Kosmos has two new titles out just in time for the holiday with Legends of Andor: The Last Hope and the Ken Follett-inspired A Column of Fire. I probably won’t be reviewing these, but do have a stack of games to review to take me well into February; that should include Majesty: For the Realm, the brand-new title from the developer of Splendor.
I’ve been known to write a little bit about American politics from time to time. I read the Chait article, and I don’t find it to be particularly compelling. His argument boils down to: “There’s nothing that Trump won’t do, and the GOP is scared to stand up to him.” He has no particular case beyond that.
While it is true that the members of Congress have been willing to look the other way on just about anything and everything The Donald does, it’s also the case that they were doing so in order to get tax “reform” done. Now, that’s (almost) over. At the same time, Trump’s base is fraying. I think that if the choice is between Trump and Constitutional crisis, there’s very good reason to believe the members will toss The Donald under the bus. And even if they don’t, there’s at least some chance a different Party will be in control of Congress in 11 months.
I don’t know. I watched the Rosenstein hearing, and the GOP congressmen spent their time basically arguing that Mueller is completely biased, and the investigation compromised. Until they stand up to Trump, I see no reason to believe they will actually conduct meaningful oversight of the administration. I’m also not sure I’d say this is all to pass tax cuts (or reform, as the GOP describes it). I suspect the GOP is aware of the Faustian bargain it made to gain the levers of power, and now has no clue how to control what they’ve unleashed.
I’d also argue that this is a party that doesn’t seem overly concerned with causing constitutional crises. Case in point – refusing to seat, or even meet with, Merrick Garland. The GOP held open a seat on the Supreme Court for nearly a year in a (successful) effort to steal a seat. And several member of the senate, such as Ted Cruz, openly talked about holding the seat open indefinitely, until a GOP president was elected. These are not the actions of a party that concerns itself with uncomfortable constitutional questions.
Ok, here is a considerably better written version of that editorial:
http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/17/opinions/mueller-investigation-attack-opinion-zelizer/index.html
Yeah – that is absolutely a better distillation of the viewpoint.
Hello Keith,
I’m in the market for a new laptop myself. What laptop did you buy?
Fine, I signed up for ESPN Insider again so I can read your content!! Chats and the rest weren’t enough. Dangit Keith, when are you gonna get your own platform and just rake in all that $ for yourself? ;-p
Happy Holidays and thanks for all of the great content.
Not to be petty, but it is a flu shot not a fly shot. Thanks for these links every week.
It’s not petty at all, but in our autocorrect-enabled world, it has become a part of writing life. Thank you.
So in the 200 plus years before Obama took office, we were under the rule of the American Taleban without the policies Obama put in place? Do you hate the orange boogeyman that much?
Strawman.
How so? The rhetoric in that article is the rhetoric of a fringe kook and not a rational person. Does that person who wrote the article know what the Taliban did and stood for?
I know salon plays to a certain audience but they could have made the point better to a wider audience by not comparing Republicans to the Taliban
First of all, sometimes a point is best made with an eye-opening comparison, even if the comparison seems a little strong.
Second, there is much in common between Taliban governance and current Republican governance, including disrespect for gender equality, disregard for democracy, war against “liberal” culture, imposition of legal standards informed by religious texts, efforts to silence or discredit dissenting opinions, and disdain for science. There may be a difference in degree, but I’m sure the Taliban was less aggressive at the start as well.
I think we have reached the point where it is apropos to sound alarms like this one, as the United States is currently headed down a very worrisome path. A path more worrisome than anything we’ve seen since the 1850s, I would say.
You do realize that conservatives were using the same type of rhetoric ( saul alinsky tatics, war on conservative culture, disregard for democracy etc. during the 8 years Obama was in office)?
Republicans think Democrats want America to be socialist China and Democrats think Republicans want to bring back Nazi Germany. Both sides are wrong about the other side. The rhetoric is so inflammatory that neither side works together to bring the country together. It doesn’t have to be this way. It wasn’t thar long ago that we could disagree on policy but still work together to better the country
Bothsidesism is not a valid argument about anything.
That conservatives used such rhetoric during the Obama years is not a counterpoint to the validity of such concerns today. Much as it may be tempting to claim “both sides do it,” that is demonstrably false in today’s political environment. The methods of the Democratic Party pale in comparison to the GOP of today. And, as a liberal, I don’t believe Republicans and conservatives want to make the US ito nazi Germany. I just believe that they have cast aside logic and morality (not to mention principles) in pursuit of further aggregating the nation’s wealth in the hands of the ultra rich.
So you genuinely believe the republican party is just like the Taliban but in America?
Again, strawman.
You are not going to answer the question? What are you trying to say?
Speaking of not answering the question, are you going to respond to my remarks? After all, I did you the courtesy of answering your question. And let me say, before you answer:
1. I did not read the article in question; I am responding to the general argument, which has validity. A badly-written article does not change that.
2. It’s true that the GOP has been doing some of these things for a while now. It’s also true that their tactics have become more aggressive in the last three or four years. As others have pointed out, that does not in any way counter the basic argument.
3. Similarly, and as others have pointed out, “Democrats do it, too” is not an argument. An argument is supported with evidence. Ergo, if you have evidence in support of your argument, please present it.
Josh is not going to accept that he was presenting a false equivalency and I doubt if there is anything someone can say here to drag him, kicking and screaming, towards that realization.
I am not trying to equate anything to anything. My point is that equating the republican party to the Taliban is irresponsible and quite frankly, idiotic. Thats the kind of crazy stuff you expect from Infowars and not meadowparty. Keith is usually well informed on his takes but I think this one goes way off the deep end. If that is where meadowparty is at now though, then I will just move along somewhere else
Since you just equated my site to InfoWars, yes, please, move along somewhere else.
If thats the price for objecting to being called a member of the American Taliban because I support the Republican party, which is probably close to half of the people who come here, then so be it
It would seem that the substance of Josh’s argument is: Nuh-uh!
I have not seen him say a single word about my list of the parallels between the Taliban and the modern GOP. I take that as prima facie evidence that he has no counter-argument, and so is implicitly acknowledging that I am correct.
So you are calling republicans the american taliban too?
The entire article is one big unsubstantiated crazy conspiracy theory with the only supporting evidence is that the author’s friend told him they will admit it off the record
The GOP and Taliban have some similar approaches to governing — authoritarianism and reliance one religion as supreme to name two. Turning that statement into “Are you calling them the Taliban in America” is, indeed, a strawman, since that’s not what is being argued. But if you’re going to equate infowars and meadowparty, clearly you are trolling and not interested in a rational discussion. We’ll miss you.
Scroll up to Keith’s post
“Salon calls the Republican Party the American Taleban in response…..”
He didn’t say compare, he said called
My god, man. Are you really hanging your hat on the choice of a single word? I mean, I’m sure it’s a fair bit of effort to compile these links posts, and that as Keith tries to summarize each of the links he’s sharing, he doesn’t pore over every single word choice like he’s Ernest Hemingway writing “The Sun Also Rises.”
So, let us forget the article that is linked. Let’s even forget how Keith summarized the article. The basic proposition is this: There are concerning similarities between the Taliban and the current leadership of the Republican Party. I’ve laid out some of those similarities above, the other Josh has concurred. If you disagree, then I would like to hear why.
If your next response is another nitpick about wording, however, or another straw man, then I will join the others in concluding you’re a troll, and will stop responding.