I had one Insider/ESPN+ piece this week, scouting notes on Tampa wunderkind Wander Franco and some Yankees & Rangers prospects, and held a Klawchat on Thursday.
I reviewed the gladiator-themed deckbuilding game Carthage for Paste this week. That’s the last of my pre-Gen Con reviews; I believe everything I review the rest of the year will either be from games I got/saw at Gen Con or that were released afterwards.
I’m about due for a fresh edition of my free email newsletter, to which you may wish to subscribe if you enjoy my ramblings.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: ESPN’s Jackie McMullen has an excellent piece on the NBA’s progressive efforts to help players battle mental health issues, interspersed with insights from Kevin Love, Paul Pierce, and other players who’ve dealt with anxiety, depression, and panic disorder.
- The Guardian looks at TripAdvisor at a crossroads, beset by fake reviews and dealing with many of the same questions of responsibility for content that affect larger tech outfits.
- Ten billion dollars a year goes to ‘charities’ who aim to shape public policy, which can both alter public discussion and political votes on topics while also depriving the U.S. Treasury of tax revenue from the associated income. That’s just one revelation in Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker piece on the new era of philanthropy, where the wealthy have more power than ever and often wield it through their foundations.
- Radiolab looked at Facebook’s own problems with regulating hate speech in a recent podcast episode that I found very thorough – it doesn’t let Facebook off the hook, but does a solid job of explaining some of the difficulties they face in making decisions on what content to allow and what to delete.
- The BBC’s The Inquiry podcast asks if we might see another AIDS pandemic as global health initiatives slow and major aid donors (notably the U.S.) reduce their funding. If our government continues its lurch towards theocracy, you can bet AIDS research and international aid for AIDS treatment will drop.
- Russian trolls/bots may have been spreading vaccine denialist views on social media, although Dr. David “Orac” Gorski argues that the media coverage has overstated its prevalence.
- Orac was busy this week, with another post on how the Australian edition of 60 Minutes ran a puff piece on a quack stem cell clinic. So-called stem cell therapy has become the next big thing in separating gullible or desperate patients from their money, but the science itself is unproven and very much in its infancy.
- Harvard Law Professor Jack Goldsmith writes in the conservative Weekly Standard that there is sufficient grounds for impeachment, and that may lead Trump to try to fire Mueller and any other investigators working on the collusion case.
- How do microscopic plastic particles end up in our food chain? Researchers have found so-called microplastics in water supplies, in beer, and even in aquatic creatures we consume, with unknown consequences for the ecosystem and our bodies.
- The multi-level marketing scheme known as Herbalife has been around, and been accused of being a scam, for decades now, but somehow they always skate by. (They’re a major sponsor of the LA Galaxy soccer team, and as good an argument as you’ll see for not putting corporate sponsor names on jerseys.) A new lawsuit alleges that Herbalife’s system of paid seminars misleads attendees by promising wealth while siphoning off their money.
- Uganda, one of the few African countries where baseball has a presence, may be about to descend into chaos as a popular singer turned rising opposition politician has been jailed and beaten by agents of dictator Yoweri Museveni. Protests against the detention and Museveni’s oppressive rule continue to grow.
- Corruption in Louisiana: The state’s Senate President, John Alario, has twice spiked a bill legalizing ride-sharing services to help his friend, who sells insurance to cab companies. This story appeared on ProPublica two days ago; it hasn’t been picked up by any local Louisiana news outlet since.
- New EPA rules, relaxing regulations on clean, beautiful coal, will lead to 1400 more deaths per year and up to 15,000 additional cases of respiratory problems, including asthma, due to the fine particulate matter emitted by coal mining and production.
- Brooklyn-based pizzaiolo Paulie Gee has been talking about opening a New York-style slice shop for years now, but it appears it will finally open at Franklin & Noble this month.
- N.K. Jemisin won her third straight Hugo Award for Best Novel for The Stone Sky, and her five-minute acceptance speech is well worth your time, as it’s by turns funny and inspiring.
- My Twitter friend Parker Molloy wrote for the Guardian how she can’t root for the Cubs after their decision to acquire Daniel Murphy, who has expressed anti-gay views without ever retracting or revising them.
- Asia Argento, a prominent victim of Harvey Weinstein’s predations, now stands accused herself of statutory rape of a 17-year-old boy; we can believe her claims on Weinstein but still hold her accountable for her own transgressions.
- Kelli Ward is running for Jeff Flake’s Senate seat in Arizona on a platform of pro-Trump, white nationalist talking points; she’s even been campaigning with Weird Mike Cernovich, the conspiracy theorist who gained an audience by pushing the bullshit Pizzagate story.
- Blake Fahrenthold resigned from Congress over a sexual harassment scandal that U.S. taxpayers helped clear up for him, but blames everyone except himself for his career’s demise.
- Georgia’s GOP is trying to suppress the black vote in November by closing polling stations, using the Americans with Disabilities Act as its justification. Majority-black Randolph County did reverse its plans to close seven of nine polling stations after the public outcry. If you live in Georgia, make sure your elected officials know you support voting rights and oppose any attempts to suppress the vote. And voters in other areas should know this is part of a broader, national vote-suppression effort using the same flanking maneuver.
- The Washington Post‘s Elizabeth Bruenig argues that it’s time to stop thinking of ‘socialism’ as a dirty word in a piece that argues largely for ‘democratic socialism,’ which is a poorly-named platform of social welfare policies that by and large doesn’t actually require socialism. Socialism has a specific historical meaning: government ownership of major means of production and distribution. It’s been tried all over the world, and it has failed, as it wipes out many of the incentives that drive human decisions in the marketplace. If you want to argue for a stronger social safety net and for policies that strive to reduce structural discrimination and inequality, that’s a debate worth having, but it’s not ‘socialism.’
- The New Republic‘s Sarah Jones writes (in a piece from April) that the real campus free speech problem is on the right, not on the left, highlighting cases of punishment for views handed down by evangelical Christian colleges.
- A Kansas City TV station suspended a reporter for sharing an article on white privilege on her Facebook page. The incident may also have led to her termination; a KC Star editorial argues that the station was in the wrong. The reporter’s lawsuit against KSHB is still pending.
- Amazon appears to have set up a slew of astroturfing Twitter accounts to fight news coverage of poor working conditions at its warehouses.
- Researchers at MIT and Harvard have developed a genome test that may help identify patients at greater risk for diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer, and a few other common, often deadly diseases.
- The longstanding hypothesis on the cause of age-related cognitive decline has been neuron death and insufficient replacement of those cells to make up for the loss. New research may counter that, showing that the cause might be lost neuron plasticity, which was reversed in mice using the drug fluoxetine, better known as Prozac.
- Hua Hsu writes in the New Yorker about the ‘end point’ of representation and the hit film Crazy Rich Asians, the success of which has brought the term representation (back) into the mainstream conversation. Representation matters to the people who haven’t been represented, and if that inconveniences you as someone who has never had to think twice about seeing people who look and sound like you on the big or small screens, well, tough.
- Red Raven Games has a Kickstarter running for the second edition of their game The Ancient World.
The problem with socialism is that it now has a lot of definitions to it, more than the classical definition I see it as. In some people’s minds, it is any system of government that is even a little bit left of our’s. That’s why you see a poll that says millennials that lean Democratic prefer socialism to capitalism. I don’t think (maybe hope?) that what they want is what Venezuela has, but is closer to what Scandinavian countries have. For the first time, I’m also starting to see more people on the right argue that Scandinavia isn’t socialist but capitalist. So are they now arguing that we need to do more for our citizens? Although it should be noted that the Norweigan government does control the state oil company, Equinor (the old Statoil).
Instead of using the word socialism, start using a new word that would promote a stronger safety net for citizens while also keeping a strong commitment to capitalism. Maybe use something like universalism, where all citizens have access to basic needs like education, health care, food, housing.
“Socialism has a specific historical meaning: government ownership of major means of production and distribution. ”
It doesn’t REALLY have a specific historical meaning, first of all. Lots of different ideas have been tied to socialism, and this dates back over 150 years. I’m going to link to wikipedia (Which I know isn’t the most ideal source, but its pretty good), because at least according to Marx, your definition is not right, and lets you set up a straw-man.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_mode_of_production
Socialism doesn’t mean government ownership of means of production and distribution. It means worker owned means of production. One method of doing that is through government. But it also exists, for example, in Germany where workers control have the seats on the board of corporations, which is socialism, but is not government control. And it works very well. Likewise, many developed nations have socialized health care, where the government actually does control the health industry, and, again, it works well. There are many examples of cooperative business where ownership is by the people working in the business, and these models work well, usually better than capitalist models, and are, again, socialist.
These brief remarks of yours, unfortunately, are part of a fairly consistent strain in your power bracket that ensures that people in lower power brackets stay disenpowered.
Paul: That was a great comment until the last sentence, which I don’t think added anything to the discussion except to swipe at me.
What you describe sounds a lot more like syndicalism, with or without the unions (technically syndicalism is ownership by workers’ unions, but that was also conceived at a time when unions were more powerful and prevalent). And there are certainly significant worker-owned corporations doing very good things across the country. I believe King Arthur Flour is one. The model can increase transparency and eliminate or reduce the pay gap between top executives and rank-and-file employees. But the government doesn’t need to be involved in that in any way, and I’m not sure why that would be part of a politicians’ platform unless there are regulatory obstacles to ESOPs I don’t know about.
Thank you for the links to articles debunking all the pseudoscience and wellness trolling going on in the world. Kara Swisher had an excellent interview with Dr. Jen Gunter, the doctor debunking Goop’s products it peddles and the lack of science behind many of their claims.
https://www.recode.net/2018/8/20/17760186/jen-gunter-goop-gwyneth-paltrow-medicine-health-wellness-conspiracy-theories-kara-swisher-podcast
Thanks! I’ll add this to next week’s roundup. Dr. Gunter is great.
“which I don’t think added anything to the discussion except to swipe at me.”
Its a swipe with purpose. “Socialism,” was turned into a dirty word by conservatives whose economic agenda is to keep working and middle class people in those roles, and who wanted to minimize the power of those people. The media was complicit in that, in part by doing exactly what you just did: Narrowing socialism to the small percentage of cases where socialism failed, instead of looking at what socialism was supposed to mean, and how that meaning has been implemented in a variety of successful ways. EXACTLY what you just did is a huge part of why our medical care, and safety net in general is lagging behind most of the rest of the developed world.
I hope instead of getting defensive, you’ll take some time to reflect. You have a wider reaching voice than the vast majority of Americans.
No, it was a swipe without purpose, that ignored the thrust of my message: That what “democratic socialists” advocate is not socialism, and calling it that – when the word itself has a negative connotation going back a century – harms their ability to reach people with their platform because such people will dismiss the ideas out of hand. Call it something else, especially since what they advocate is not the economic system known as socialism. They want a wider safety net, less unequal distribution of income, and vastly differing priorities in the federal budget. Again, that’s a debate worth having. When they call what they’re proposing “socialism,” regardless of modifier, they will lose a portion of the audience from the word ‘go,’ while also doing a disservice to the ideas they wish to propose and implement.
What are your thoughts on The Ancient World? I have never played the first edition, but I am a big fan of the Laukat games I have played (Above & Below and Near & Far).
If your defense of capitalism is the sanctity of “incentives that drive human decisions in the marketplace,” I am curious how you square that with something like the story below, where those in charge had every incentive to gut a successful company with no regard for anyone except those in power.
https://www.thepitchkc.com/news/feature-story/article/21019526/dst-systems-and-the-gutting-of-a-hometown-kansas-city-company
You lost me at “sanctity.” Sorry, but I never said that, or anything close to it.
Regardless of my word choice, that was your only specific criticism of socialism in your bullet point, so it’s clearly of central importance to your economic worldview. Given that, I am honestly curious to understand how you reconcile that with the consequences of those incentives.
Keith, taking a pedantic stance should be beneath you. Address the substance. Sanctity is close enough to what you said: “government ownership of major means of production and distribution. It’s been tried all over the world, and it has failed, as it wipes out many of the incentives that drive human decisions in the marketplace.” Clearly, you state here that socialism has failed, and the reason for that failure is the elimination of incentives. Whether that can best be described by “sanctity” or some other word that indicates a necessary condition is irrelevant.
I clarified. The “sanctity” claim, or whatever word you want to substitute, is a strawman. I said, in essence, a system that ignores the power of incentives, or assumes they don’t exist, will fail. That in no way, shape, or form indicates a preference for a system that allows incentives to operate without limit or restraint.
Your question simply doesn’t work. Socialism, as I defined it above as a national economic system, involves removing or ignoring those incentives through regulation. You have now presented an example where people operate totally unfettered, free of regulations that might stop or provide some disincentive for this behavior – but I never advocated anything like that. So-called ‘perfect competition’ can’t exist in reality for numerous reasons. A capitalist economy can’t function without regulation – for example, so consumers have sufficient information on goods or services they buy to make rational choices, and avoid being exploited or cheated by producers. Your question implies, strongly, that I somehow opposed regulation. I don’t.
1. When I said “sanctity of incentives,” I was not implying that the incentives themselves were unlimited. I’ve read/followed you for some time and fully understand that you aren’t a hard-liner against regulation. What I was trying to reflect was that in your worldview, maintaining some sort of capitalist incentive structure is absolutely necessary to the functioning of society. So what I am struggling with is understanding what regulation will meaningfully address situations like the story I shared while still respecting that.
2. I disagree with your assertion that socialism disregards incentives. Instead of eliminated, they’re re-oriented. Under capitalism you’re incented to do what capital will pay the most for, so that you can afford the necessities/luxuries of life. Under socialism you’re incented to what has the most inherent value to you, so that you can achieve the necessities/luxuries of life. Obviously this is an over-simplification, but I do not feel it is misleading or inaccurate, and given that dichotomy I choose the latter.
This article on Daniel Murphy is ridiculous. Why isn’t Murphy entitled to his views as a religious Christian? The co owner of the Cubs who is openly gay along with Billy Beane seem to have no issues with Murphy. I’m sure there are many athletes who share similar and unpopular views on race and religion. I pity this writer who is going to remain angry and outraged at every person they encounter who doesn’t fully accept her. I’m a Jewish man myself and well aware of antisemitism both latent and obvious. I’d be naiive to think that there weren’t players on some of my favorite teams who held anti semetic views. It doesn’t mean I’m going to stop watching a team because of a few ignorant players. At a certain point hopefully soon, society needs to stop wagging their finger and shaming people who won’t embrace them for who they are.