My one ESPN+/Insider piece this week named my Prospect of the Year for 2018, with a number of other players who were worthy of the title but couldn’t unseat the incumbent. I answered questions on that and other topics in a Klawchat on Thursday.
Over at Paste, I reviewed the new game Disney’s Villainous, a card game that resembles deckbuilders (like Dominion) in mechanics, but gives you your entire deck at the start of the game. Each player plays as a specific villain, with a unique deck and victory conditions, so you learn each deck’s intricacies as you play.
And now, the links…
- The best thing you’ll read this week is my friend Anthony del Broccolo’s letter to his late wife, who died unexpectedly in childbirth in June.
- Now some longreads: Bleacher Report’s Mina Fader looks at whether concussions from playing football contributed to a 13-year-old’s suicide.
- One of Osama bin Laden’s goals was to mire the west in endless, unwinnable wars in the Middle East. The Nation‘s Tom Engelhardt argues that we have given bin Laden his wish.
- The use of WhatsApp to spread false rumors led to five killings of innocent men in India when those stories told users that there were child murderers on the loose.
- The BBC’s The Inquiry podcast asks is women’s sport in ‘trouble’ as the divide between men’s and women’s sports becomes blurred by scientific advances showing that the split isn’t binary. The podcast rather deftly considers the science of intersex individuals and testosterone production as well as the moral and philosophical questions of fairness and identity, and the ethics of so-called ‘sex verification.’ Castor Semenya, who appears in a new Nike ad just released last month, appears prominently in these discussions, as the IAAF has introduced rule changes that seem to specifically target her.
- The New York Review of Books chose to run a self-exonerating essay by Jian Ghomeshi, a Canadian commentator who has been accused by more than 20 women of sexually assaulting and/or physically abusing them. Their editor spoke to Slate about the decision and, in my opinion, absolutely embarrassed himself in the process.
- Matthew Desmond, author of the incredible Pulitzer Prize-winning book Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, writes in the New York Times that Americans’ belief that jobs are the solution to poverty is wrong. There are structural obstacles to escaping poverty that we must address at the state and federal levels.
- Economist Andrew Zimbalist was a longtime opponent of public funding for sports stadiums, but he changed his tune when he was paid $225 an hour by the city of Worcester for its funding efforts for a stadium to house the Pawtucket Red Sox.
- I reviewed Maryn McKenna’s new book Big Chicken in July, and she wrote on the same topic – the connection between factory-farming of chickens and the rise of antibiotic resistance – in a long read for WIRED.
- Probiotic products – those containing bacteria believed to be beneficial to our digestive systems – are everywhere in the supermarket, the drugstore, the health food store, and more, but they’re probably useless when it comes to boosting your microbiome.
- Salon/Rolling Stone looks at how Jimmy Page assembled the original Led Zeppelin lineup.
- The Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky asks why Sen. Dianne Feinstein sat on the Brett Kavanaugh sexual assault allegations for two months.
- Brian Buelter writes that Kavanaugh’s repeated attempts to mislead Congress, now and in the early 2000s, are reason enough to reject his nomination.
- The Wall Street Journal keeps misreporting the facts and research on gender dysphoria.
- Arizona lawmaker Eddie Farnsworth (guess which party) is about to land a $30 million windfall thanks to a state board of education ruling allowing him to profit off converting his state-funded charter schools to nonprofit status. He’s running for the state Senate this November, and I guess he’ll have lots of cash for more campaign ads now.
- The Guardian looks at how the Koch Brothers support laws like Arizona’s as part of their effort to undermine public education across the country.
- South Carolina did not evacuate prisons in the path of Hurricane Florence, and you can draw your own conclusions why.
- The mayor of a South Carolina town just outside of the state capital of Columbia posted anti-Islam memes and comments on Facebook, but then he met Muslim residents of his town and changed his views. Nothing beats intolerance and bigotry like exposure to members of the targeted groups.
- A Texas school district is pushing ‘Judeo-Christian values’ in a new curriculum that omits Hillary Clinton but remembers the Alamo. I doubt any single-year curriculum could ever satisfy everyone on what is included or excluded, but no public school district should be pushing religious values in its classrooms.
- The Rio Grande, America’s second-longest river, is drying up, and nobody is doing a whole lot to protect it.
- Facebook’s “fact-checking” protocols led a right-wing outlet to censor content from ThinkProgress.
- Iowa’s favorite white nationalist Congressperson Steve King once again retweeted something from another white nationalist.
- The Fix, a site dedicated to stories of addiction and recovery, interviewed comedian and former radio host Jake Fogelnest about his 12 years of sobriety.
- The Athletic has a subscriber-only piece on Dustin Ackley, the #2 pick in the 2009 draft whose career may be over at age 30, with some great comments from Ackley on his own raging against the dying of the baseball light. If this is it for Ackley, who was the consensus #2 prospect in the draft after Stephen Strasburg, he’ll probably end up outside of the top 30 players in that draft class by WAR – he’s at #26 now and I see several guys behind him who will probably pass him within five years.
- If you have the dungeon-crawl board game Clank! In Space!, the Apocalypse! Expansion is now available at retail.
- Asmodee Digital announced they’re porting several popular board game adaptations to Nintendo Switch, including Catan, Carcassonne, and Pandemic.
Here’s a Slate article arguing that the Weekly Standard was correct in flagging the Think Progress piece as false: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/09/thinkprogress-weekly-standard-facebook-fact-check-kavanaugh.html
Thank you for this Slate article. Facts are important, even if they’re inconvenient.
I want to say that it was a terrible idea to let The Weekly Standard do fact-checking, but I feel like this incident has proved me wrong. I believe the ThinkProgress article’s reasoning about Kavanaugh’s intentions, but that headline is flatly false. “I infer Bob means to do X”, no matter how sensible a conclusion, does not justify “Bob said he’d do X.”
I’m also disturbed that ThinkProgress has doubled down, accusing WS of being the one using a strange definition of ‘said’. All they had to do was run a headline of ‘Kavanaugh intends to overturn Roe v. Wade’ and they would have been fine. This has left me with a suspicion that the misstatement was a deliberate attempt to get more clicks with the false implication they they’d found some sort of smoking gun.
Maybe it’s still wrong to let WS do it, but somebody has to.
Thank you for this. Good stuff.
The headlines are almost never written by the writer, but by editors, who are told to make it catchy to try to grab eyeballs. This is beyond a partisan issue – it’s ingrained in the industry.
Herein lies the problem with Facebook’s sledgehammer approach to “Fake News.” The “fact checking” by Weekly Standard was a good counterpoint for the Think Progress piece, but Facebook is squelching legitimate debate here.
With all due respect to Engelhardt and The Nation, I genuinely thought that this was obvious 17 years ago. I don’t mean to glofity bin Laden by comparing him to Alan Rickman, but this was Hans Gruber using his opponent’s predictable and self-defeating reactions to further his own goal.
Why are the Kochs’ efforts to promote competition and accountability in the delivery of publicly-funded education disparaged (particularly when their efforts do nothing to benefit them financially), yet the efforts of teacher unions are not (though their efforts are almost exclusively designed to protect their members’ financial interests–and backed by far more money and political influence)? It’s convenient to demonize the Kochs, but I’d rather see thoughtful analysis of choice and competition in education, rather than suggestions that their efforts are to “undermine” public education; they support reform, which is worth a balanced consideration.
Because you’re completely mischaracterizing (and, I would say, sanitizing) the Kochs’ aims. They are trying to undermine public education, not improve it.
To what end? To hurt kids? To punish the poor? I don’t agree with all of the Kochs’ policy preferences, but I don’t ascribe evil motives to them, as apparently you do, particularly in the absence of any profit motive. Why not debate the subject of vouchers.
There are evangelicals and very religious Jews who believe the Bible proscribes public education; Ephesians 6:1-4 is commonly cited as it commands believers to bring their children up “in the discipline and instruction of the Lord,” which a secular school system obviously can not do.
Crazy Ken Ham’s site explains this view further, although I, of course, think he’s batshit.
Lol at Brandon who is an obvious right wing troll
All unions are evil right dude? And Kochs are the true victims here
There are does not equal Koch bros. Nor does it address the argument.
You asked why people wish to undermine public education, giving some rather ridiculous strawman responses, so I addressed that.
The Koch Brothers have long fought unions in many industries, including their own; they’ve pushed for lower taxation, which has a direct influence on public education; and they’ve opposed government regulations on principle, again including their own industries.
As for vouchers, we can debate them, but their track record is not great.
Also, when David Koch ran as the VP candidate for the Libertarian Party in 1980, he advocated complete abolishment of public education. I don’t think they are being deliberately evil, but just ideologically and empirically misguided. If they got everything they wanted, it would decrease educational attainment and upward mobility for poor and minority communities.
Islanders goalie Robin Lehner wrote an article at The Athletic (free) about his panic attacks, addiction to alcohol, being diagnosed as bi-polar, and thoughts of suicide.
https://theathletic.com/522117/2018/09/13/islanders-goalie-robin-lehner-opens-up-about-his-addiction-and-bipolar-diagnosis-i-could-not-stand-being-alone-in-my-brain/
Thanks for this link – it got caught in the spam filter.
Keith- do you disagree with the Koch brothers on public schools because of their position, their tactics or both? Plenty of people (yourself included) use their money/power/platform to push change. At what point does it become “wrong”?
Fair enough, but the “Koch Brothers seek to . . . “ is akin to appeal to authority, and it distracts from a useful analysis of various types of reform. I know of no evidence to suggest that the Kochs are motivated by theology. Vouchers or other forms of public education reform should be debated on their merits, not the identity of the proponents.
No one, to my knowledge, is for the abolition of public financing of education, though some oppose the near monopoly in the public delivery of education.
I’m far from a right-winger, but I think a fair consideration of education reform is useful, and I don’t assume the Kochs have nefarious intentions.
That’s not an appeal to authority. Not even close.
When public debate on a topic is being unduly swayed or altered by money, that in and of itself is a worthwhile topic for debate – both whether this is desirable, and whether the funders in question have motives or incentives that might conflict with those of the people who’ll be affected by the law or policy changes.
Of course it is. Your inplicit assertion is that the because the Kochs support it, the policy is bad. That’s no different (opposite side of the same coin) than asserting that because the Kochs say it’s good, it is good. You’re relying on the proponent’s alleged authority (lack thereof) as evidence that the policy proposed is bad; this is fallacious.
As an example, road construction contractors always advocate additional spending on road construction, but their interest, in and of itself, doesn’t mean that additional spending on road construction is a bad idea. Their interest warrants additional scrutiny of the evidence they cite in support of their position, but it doesn’t affect whether the underlying position they hold is with or without merit. If the Kochs held a financial interest in private, for-profit schools, I would look at the evidence they cite in support of vouchers with greater scrutiny. Or, if as you suggest, there were any information to suggest that the Kochs oppose publicly-delivered education because they believe it is contrary to some biblical verse (I’d never head that before, and if that is what motivates some advocates of vouchers, I concur they are batshit crazy), I would like to consider that. I am not an expert on the Kochs, but I understand their ideology to be something separate from the religious right on social policy.
The Koch’s only real goal is to lower taxes anyway they can. They aren’t helping the voucher program because they agree with it or think it is a good policy, but because it lowers taxes. If privatizing the military was politically feasible, they’d get behind that. Here, they are trying to privatize education to lower taxes.
addoeh, I do think that the Koch brothers actually believe in privatizing for the sake of privatizing (though they do enjoy lowering taxes as well). They have been extreme libertarians for decades, and at least in the past didn’t believe that the government should be involved in education at all. I doubt their beliefs have changed–they simple see “school choice” as a stepping stone or compromise.
Salty, I definitely agree. Whether their primary goal is privatization or lowering taxes, they reach the same point. They’ve realized a chisel is a lot more effective than a sledgehammer in politics. I have little doubt that if school choice were to become wildly successful, they would soon back efforts to eliminate/reduce it.
Brandon: That’s not an appeal to authority. You’ve simply misunderstood and misused the term.
And no, I don’t say that the policy is bad because the Koch brothers support it. The policy is bad because it harms public education and reduces access for disadvantaged kids. The Koch Brothers’ support of it is a problem because they have the money and the zealotry to make it happen.
People on the evil side of issues like rhetorical debate because the techniques provide cover for, and advantage to, absolute moral garbage.
I said it (to suggest that because the Kochs support it, it is bad) is “akin to” appeal to authority. It is indeed not the same as appeal to authority, but it is close. And publications, such as the one you cited, use this rhetorical strategy all the time, since the Kochs are considered by many to be evil. Others do the same with George Soros. Other commenters obviously ascribe evil motives to the Kochs, thus I suspect they’ve given little thought to the idea of vouchers. I think the Kochs and Soros stand for some good things. In at least one instance, criminal justice reform, they are aligned.
I do not advocate vouchers in all forms. I am for giving disadvantaged kids an opportunity to pursue other sources of education, especially in secular, non-public schools. Currently, only privileged kids have access to alternatives.
Thus, in the broader sense, I see the effort to add incentives for public schools to compete for kids and their per-pupil dollars as worthwhile. Due to a lack of competition, choice, and innovation, (among other reasons, including insufficient funding) publicly-delivered education is flawed. The labor incentives are significantly flawed, with little to no pay differentiation by actual performance or supply of labor.
Medicare is a good example of something roughly like vouchers, where the money is public, but the care is delivered by private providers. It is relatively efficient and effective, and it creates competition for those Medicare dollars amongst private providers of medical services.
If you disagree with those premises, fine. If you believe that vouchers, as practiced to date, have not been wild successes (which is true; though they haven’t been abject failures either), fine. But implicit in your link was that vouchers should be discounted because the Kochs like them, and to the extent that was your aim, I think you’re failing to make your point as well as you can. You often link to some really good, long-form analysis. This one frustrated me because the subject is interesting to me and warrants more thoughtful analysis.
That is all. Keep up the good work and carry on.