Stick to baseball, 8/4/18.

For Insiders this week, I had a slew of trade writeups:

I also held a Klawchat on Wednesday before I headed off to Gen Con 2018. You can see some of the photos I took there, the country’s biggest board gaming convention, on my Instagram. The writeup will come later this week.

I’ve been better about sending out my free email newsletter lately after slacking a bit during the spring (in large part because I can’t use the site’s editing function on an iPad), so, you know, do that signup.

And now, the links…

Longreads first: The hard-to-believe true story of how an ex-cop led a conspiracy to rig the McDonald’s Monopoly game.

The Guardian rank a lengthy excerpt from a new book on denial and denialism, Keith Kahn-Harris’ Denial: The Unspeakable Truth. The excerpt covers a lot of ground, describing why denialism is more than just the denial of truth, why facts tend not to stop or change denialists’ minds, and the dangerous new phase of denialism before us.

The Verge has a longread on the gaming of Amazon’s listings and sales system by self-published romance authors. It’s just a bizarre subculture, and has led to a lawsuit over two authors’ use of the word “cocky” in their books titles. The journalist who wrote this piece, Sarah Jeong, just joined the New York Times editorial board; Vox, which owns the Verge, has a great piece on the non-troversy that alt-right trolls used to try to get her fired.

The Rumpus’ editor Lyz Lenz writes that writing still matters in the age of despair. Write like a motherfucker, as Cheryl Strayed (Wild) once wrote.

Why would the University of Michigan allow the presentation of “research” on homeopathy? Homeopathy is woo. After you dilute the substance in question that many times, all that remains is bullshit.

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune editorial board called on the state to crack down on doctors who spread anti-vaccine lies, as California is trying to do.

There’s a huge Dunning-Kruger epidemic in the anti-vaccine community, which has also managed to diverted time and funds away from more important vaccine research towards needless studies debunking claims like the nonexistent vaccine/autism link.

Spike Lee accused the President of giving the green light to the KKK and other hate groups during a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian about his upcoming film Black Klansman.

Gizmodo details how two strangers tried to wreck an Alabama realtor’s life by spreading a false story about the realtor sleeping with someone else’s husband.

The Washington Post looks at the board game Twilight Struggle’s new relevance in this political environment. I happen to find the game wildly overrated; it’s long, hard to set up, and requires intimate knowledge of the two player decks to play it well.

This Psychology Today essay assailing the ‘lack of resiliency’ of today’s college students seems to me to paint with an excessively broad brush, and contradicts the message we give our kids today to reach out when they need help. I’m also a little skeptical of the veracity of some of the stories – they sound like they were crafted for viral tweets – but even if they’re true, I’d rather too many kids ask for help than too few.

The anti-LGBT group Alliance Defending Freedom has been working to undermine basic protections for LGBT citizens, especially trans youth, using disingenuous and even dangerous language.

Former big leaguer Adam Greenberg, whose MLB career consisted of two PA, one in 2005 and one in 2012, is now running for Congress in Connecticut as a Republican. The fact that he’s turning to politics is interesting in itself, but the NY Times author here, John Altavilla, spends almost no time on Greenberg’s policy positions.

Would-be populist – and clear Islamophobe and race troll – Ben Shapiro is backed by a wide network of billionaire conservatives, many of whom also support more reviled figures like Ann Coulter and the Breitbart site.

Turning Point USA, the hard-right conservative group founding by diaper-clad college students, has been courting and praising anti-Semitic troll Bryan Sharpe, who has denied the Holocaust occurred and uses the triple-parentheses notation favored by white supremacists to identify or out Jewish people.

These QAnon people are batshit insane.

The Pennsylvania gun rights lobby watered down a bill aimed at keeping domestic abusers from obtaining guns.

The Washington Post profiled New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, although the piece doesn’t question him enough about their opinion pages.

An Astros fan wrote an open letter to the team’s GM, criticizing the decision to acquire Roberto Osuna.

There’s a new shape in town – really, totally new to mathematicians and physicists, but something that appears in nature: the scutoid.

An “Instagram star” – seriously, how the fuck is this a thing – is in hot water after her cookbook included ‘recipes’ likely to sicken or kill people who try to eat those dishes. One example that would be obvious to anyone who knows food is the advice to forage for and eat raw morels. A good editor is important; a bad one can lead to a PR disaster. Also, maybe don’t give someone who just takes nice pictures a cookbook deal.

Jack White (ex-White Stripes) is now the co-owner of a baseball bat manufacturer.

And finally, a video, as comedian Aamer Rahman explains why there isn’t any such thing as “reverse racism:”

Comments

Tim

Aug, 6 2018 / 11:00 am

I’m very confused why people are so quick to come to Sarah Jeong’s defense. She sent hundreds of tweets which showed, at the very least, an anti-white bias – and at worst a bigoted attitude towards white men and women. Few are suggesting her comments are as bad as racism against minorities. However, it seems imprudent to paper over her comments as “counter-trolling” like her current and previous employers just did. I think Jonah Goldberg put it rather well in his piece: “the net effect of [her] “counter-trolling” is that it leads to the opposite of [her] stated goal: You are making white people feel threatened, and, as a result, you’re making at least some of them more racist. You are making whiteness a thing.”
- keith
  
  Aug, 6 2018 / 12:07 pm
  
  Whiteness has been a thing for a few hundred years, at the very least. She didn’t make it one.
- sansho1
  
  Aug, 6 2018 / 12:24 pm
  
  How does writing a book titled “Liberal Fascism” and featuring a smiley face with a Hitler moustache on the cover fit into Goldberg’s theory of unintended consequences?
- Tim
  
  Aug, 6 2018 / 12:54 pm
  
  Sansho1 – you haven’t addressed any critique above. Changing the subject doesn’t harm my argument.
- sansho1
  
  Aug, 6 2018 / 12:57 pm
  
  I’m not debating you, I’m deriding your quote source as a hypocrite.
Tim

Aug, 6 2018 / 12:51 pm

I think you only partially address the main critique – that this behavior creates a divisive society that is white people vs. everyone else. Allowing upstream hate/disparaging comments to prevail and become mainstream because of past colonial wrongs furthers the notion that some of us are born ‘in the wrong’ and others are born with the right to say whatever demeaning rhetoric about their ‘oppressors’ they want. For instance, her comments that suggest white people’s online opinions are like ‘dogs pissing on fire hydrants’ are quite despicable, context or not. If someone directly referred to your opinions that way, they’d be blocked as fast as possible. The fact remains you and I have done nothing to incite such sweeping statements by Ms. Jeong and we sure don’t deserve it.

But, if you find her comments – like the one above – to be totally harmless or that you deserve that vitriol, I don’t think there’s much else I can say. If, however, you don’t – she deserves at least some of the criticism that’s come her way.
- keith
  
  Aug, 6 2018 / 12:58 pm
  
  that this behavior creates a divisive society that is white people vs. everyone else
  
  White people created this divisive society through slavery, mass incarceration, and systematic oppression. If you watch the Youtube clip at the bottom of my post, he has a rather thorough response to this kind of ‘reverse racism’ claim.
  
  Have you and I done nothing to deserve such statements? I can’t say I haven’t. I’m sure I’m guilty of various microaggressions in my adult life, of submitting to unconscious biases based on race or gender that I have to actively work to defeat. The divisions predate you, me, and our great-grandparents. We’re fighting to undo them. Silencing people who point those divisions out does not help matters.
- Drew
  
  Aug, 7 2018 / 1:21 am
  
  Not sure how the term “reverse racism” became a thing, but it makes no sense to me. And I honestly don’t know if the term is designed to excuse the supposed reverse racist or make the person look worse.
  
  If I visit Senegal or Japan and look down on the people there, am I the primary racist, or is that reverse racism because I’m in their home, and perhaps they are denigrating me first? Who is the primary racist and who is the reverse? And why should it matter? Neither is ok. That’s why the term makes no sense. You can either have racist views or not, regardless of what you look like, your heritage, or where you were born.
  
  Simply put, if your behavior toward an individual is based on how they look or on their heritage, by definition, it’s racist, regardless of who you are.
Tim

Aug, 6 2018 / 2:16 pm

I did watch the Youtube clip. I’ve read the Vox piece too. Their arguments don’t elude me. However, semantic arguments about ‘reverse racism’ don’t further the discussion. Historical wrongs are well documented and I’m not oblivious to them.

My issue is that she isn’t pointing out division. She’s deriding a class of people she has no (apparent) respect for. She’s not arguing from a historical perspective. There is no attempt at disguising her tweets as some sort of commentary about the way things are/ought to be. This is a form of retributive justice – “your parents did my parents wrong – thus, I get to call you whatever I want.” This, unfortunately is a zero sum game.

As for what you and I’ve done. Your guilt is yours, I can’t speak to it. I’ve made mistakes and was once a young man of limited vision or virtue. But I’ve generally paid for my mistakes and have done a full accounting the things I’ve said. I can get carried away and am too quick to defend myself, but I’ve never publicly called anyone a dog or suggested we #cancel____people. I’m trying day by day to see each person for what they bring to the table, whatever genetic code they were give. She might be trying to do that too. But for 4 years, she didn’t.
Landon

Aug, 6 2018 / 6:15 pm

Everyone knows you have to cook morels in a pan, preferably with butter and apple cider to maximize your points.

Stick to baseball, 8/4/18.

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