I had one post this week for subscribers to The Athletic, about what lessons we can learn from MLB, the NBA, and the NHL (and other pro leagues) after they completed seasons during the pandemic. I spoke to numerous epidemiologists about the leagues’ approaches, from the full bubble of the NBA to MLB’s more open approach with all US-based teams playing at home, and of course the hoaxers were in the comments before the electrons were dry on the article.
Over at Vulture, I wrote about eleven board games you can play over Zoom while you can’t (or shouldn’t) see your friends and family, which seems more relevant with potential lockdowns looming in most of the country.
My first book, Smart Baseball, got a glowing review from SIAM News, a publication of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. You can buy Smart Baseball and my second book, The Inside Game, at any bookstore, including bookshop.org via those links, although Smart Baseball has been backordered there for a while. You can check your local indie bookstore or buy it on amazon.
My guest on this week’s episode of The Keith Law Show was Bill Baer, talking with me about the state of baseball and what he hopes the Phillies will do with their front office openings. My podcast is now available on Amazon podcasts as well as iTunes and Spotify.
I sent out the latest edition of my free email newsletter on Monday, and hope to send another one before the holiday.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Cal Newport, the author of the superb book Deep Work, writes in the New Yorker about the problems with personal productivity in the age of the knowledge worker. Our business world is very poorly built for the current environment of remote work and associated challenges like child care and remote schooling.
- Also from the New Yorker, Shane Bauer looks at how a violent police force ruled Vallejo, California, killing residents (usually people of color) with impunity.
- The Guardian describes how the Colombian army killed thousands of innocent civilians and claimed they were insurgents, a scandal known as falsos positivos (false positives) that have turned a former military hero into a villain.
- Rebecca Solnit argues that Democrats should not meet those who advocate racism, misogyny, homophobia, and authoritarianism halfway. When the LA Times turned its editorial page over to letters from Trump supporters – under the disingenuous claim that we hadn’t been “listening” to those voices – Fox News and the Federalist did not and were not pressured to give time to Biden supporters.
- Jezebel looks at how the online wellness community, already pushing various forms of woo, has latched on to the hoax conspiracy theory QAnon.
- There’s a new study out of Denmark that deniers and other anti-mask loons have been citing as evidence that masks don’t work against COVID-19, but they’re completely – and deliberately – misinterpreting that study’s methods and conclusions. Among other things, the study didn’t even look at whether wearing a mask prevented transmission to other people, which has long been the main reason cited for mask recommendations.
- Sen. David Perdue (R), fighting Jon Ossoff for re-election in a January 4th runoff, made tens of thousands of dollars by helping a defense contractor in which he owned shares via a bill that directed Navy funds to the contractor.
- Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is accused of multiple abuses of power, including an ongoing indictment for securities fraud charges that is now five years old, but impeachment is very rare in the Lone Star State.
- Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State says fellow Republicans, including Sen. Lindsey Graham, have been pressuring him to exclude legal ballots. The whole party appears to have gone down the same bottomless pit.
- Christian nationalists are becoming a more important voting bloc, backing Donald Trump and Republicans in huge numbers in 2016 and 2020. My own hypothesis is that as overall religiosity continues its decades-long decline, the percentage of religious Americans who identify with these authoritarian beliefs will increase.
- Trump’s foreign policy people are reportedly trying to set as many “fires” as possible so that Biden’s Administration is hamstrung the moment they take office, unable to push new initiatives because they’re trying to put those fires out.
- Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs tweeted about death threats she and others in her office have received in the wake of this year’s election, where Joe Biden and Mark Kelly, both Democrats, won the majority of ballots in her state.
- Raw Story spoke to a neuroscientist about how Americans can recover from the harm four years of Trump has caused. I think he said something along the lines of “Lock him up.”
- Ian Millhiser points out just how undemocratic the United States Senate is, where a minority of the population controls a majority of seats.
- LA Times food critic Patricia Escárcega tweeted about how she lost a grievance over the fact that she’s paid less than her male colleague who does the same job that she does. Both were hired in the wake of the death of their legendary food critic Jonathan Gold. UPDATE: she just tweeted another thread in response to the LA Times‘s public statements about the case.
- A new marine sanctuary around the archipelago of Tristan da Cunha in the southern Atlantic will be the world’s largest.
- A peer in the United Kingdom’s House of Lords referred to Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris as “the Indian” in a tweet, but won’t be sanctioned for it.
- Defector has the dope on Bill Simmons’s efforts to thwart the Ringer’s union, while the New York Times looks at how the Ringer is using contractors to reduce the importance of full-time employees.
- Donald Clarke of The Irish Times asks why all these terrible films are being called classics, citing Hocus Pocus and The Family Stone.
- McSweeney’s presents Olivia, the COVID-19 era American Girl doll.
- BBC Radio 1 announced they will no longer play the original version of the Pogues’ Christmas song “Fairytale of New York,” which includes a homophobic slur.
- Morrissey claims he was dropped from his record label due to “diversity,” not because he’s a racist, Islamophobic asshole.
- Zach Hayes explains the case against Curt Schilling for the Hall of Fame on PitcherList.
- The Chicago Public Library eliminated fines for overdue books last year, and saw missing materials return while patronage increased.
- The BBC has a primer on the brewing civil war in Ethiopia, where Tigrayan and Oromian people have been at odds since the fall of Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1991.
- A wrongful death lawsuit claims that managers at a Tyson Foods plant in Iowa placed bets on how many workers would contract COVID-19 after those employees were ordered to report for work even in unsafe conditions.
- My former employers at Disney have been accused of withholding royalty payments to author Alan Dean Foster for books he’s written in the Star Wars universe.
“My former employers at Disney…” now that is a great way to end the links.
As a friend who used to write free-lance for them said, oh, the mouse…
With regards to the composition of the US Senate, there’s no easy solution.
The ten smallest states are actually equally divided 10-10 (Vermont, Delaware, Rhode Island, New Hampshire each having two Dems, Maine & Montana split, and Alaska, Wyoming, N. Dakota, and S. Dakota having two GOP Senators).
Likewise, the ten largest states are currently split 9-9 depending on the outcomes in Georgia…(California, New York, Illinois, and Michigan each having two Dems, Pennsylvania being split, and Texas, Florida, Ohio, and N. Carolina having two GOPers).
The composition of the House is based on population. States are given equal representation in the Senate so that large states don’t dominate small states in both chambers. If representation in the Senate were based on population, it wouldn’t be needed. Here is one way to think of it. Citizens living in different parts of the U.S. have different priorities. The Senate helps to ensure that laws aren’t written to benefit the areas of the country with large populations at the expense of the less populous states.
I had 3 comments about this subject in the most recent chat. I am sure that Keith is tired of me.
I answered those comments, explaining why your argument here is specious.
On my page right now, underneath the Disney/Star Wars link, is an ad for Star Wars fine jewelry.
Been playing Dominion over Zoom all quarantine. Works great, would recommend.
Well, if you want to be precise, Senators were originally appointed by state legislatures. As with the Electoral College, the Founding Fathers instituted this in fear of a tyranny of the majority. It counterbalanced the direct election of members of the House. Direct election of Senators didn’t happen until 1913 with the ratification of the 17th Amendment.
Side note. Are you planning on the “traditional” spatchcock the turkey Periscope chat this week?
The Rebecca Solnit piece reads like a great piece of satire. I don’t even know where to start.
She essentially argues that everyone who voted Republican is a nazi. Anyone who truly believes that there are 70 million Americans who have nazi beliefs has no touch with reality.
She then attacks nearly everyone else: “misogyny and racism are baked into a lot of liberal and centrist as well as right-wing positions”. So I guess she feels that only very far left ideals are ok, and those are the only ideals that should be allowed to discussed.
Despite our differences, the great majority of Americans share a lot of beliefs. Essentially, she’s saying that the great majority of us who are not very far left idealogically should just go sit quietly in the corner. It would be funny, except that she’s serious.
The people who are more extreme on both the left and the right also are the loudest through social media channels, and have dragged a lot of people to more extreme positions with them. Arguing that not talking to people because they voted for a different guy or have some different political beliefs will only isolate people more, and more likely push them to even more extreme positions.
It’s also fascinating to me how fairly recently someone described as “liberal” was accepting, open-minded, and willing to engage in dialog. This is shifting to what Solnit argues, where a “liberal” person demands that others agree with them, or else they act as if the other people are completely beneath them, without any interest or regard for how those people actually treat others and live their lives. Even less than a generation ago, I think it would have been impossible to predict that shift.
I don’t think we read the same piece. She makes her thesis quite clear:
Seventy-two million Americans just voted for a man who refused to condemn white supremacist, who has himself been accused multiple times of rape and assault, who inspired (directly and indirectly) a man who shot up a synagogue in Pittsburgh, whose first main acts in office involved attempts to ban immigrants from Muslim nations, and who rolled back numerous protections for LGBTQ+ people. They voted for four more years of his policies and philosophies. I certainly do not share many beliefs with them, if I share any at all, and I do not wish to compromise with anyone who thinks that women, or Black people, or indigenous people, or gay people, or any group is somehow secondary in rights or importance to cis white men.
I don’t agree with Drew’s specific argument because it’s very weird in a way that I can’t immediately pin down. What I will say is that Solnit’s argument seems to implicitly paint the animating factor of all Trump voters as racism, but that doesn’t fly for me when the other option was the author of the crime bill who is now floating Rahm Emanuel for a cabinet position. Her argument not to compromise with evil is 100% valid absent this context, but I don’t see how it applies when our president-elect is the personification of that compromise.
Two-thirds of the Congressional Black Caucus supported that crime bill, as did many other Black leaders at the time. It’s been spun into a piece of racist legislation that pandered to the fears of white voters, but the truth is more complicated than that. I agree with you on Rahm Emanuel, though. They’ve done so well so far with other nominations that it was jarring to see one that tone-deaf.
@Mike, For me at least, Drew’s argument evokes the “paradox of tolerance.” Anyway, it’s hard to get around the myriad studies showing that racial resentment and/or xenophobia explained the 2016 Trump vote better than economic “anxiety” or outsiderism. And a substantial fraction of current Trump supporters are okay with GOP legislatures overturning the popular vote totals in their states to re-elect Trump, which frankly would constitute an un-democratic coup. I see know way to compromise with those people, even though they number in the many millions.
Yeah I don’t really buy that framing of the crime bill. There was plenty of opposition at the time and even some of the CBC members that did vote for it weren’t particularly supportive. See here for one rebuttal: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/13/opinion/did-blacks-really-endorse-the-1994-crime-bill.html
And anyway, regardless of how the bill was viewed at the time, it might be the one biggest piece of specific legislation contributing to existing systemic racism. Anyone involved in its creation that at the very least doesn’t want to tear it apart is responsible for its continued harm to our country.
To say 72 million Americans are nazis (Solnit), evil (Mike above), or made their decision solely due to racist and bigoted philosophies (paraphrasing Keith above) is unrealistic, dishonest, and injurious. The vast majority of Americans, regardless of who they voted for, are good people.
Of course we shouldn’t engage with nazis. There are, essentially, no nazis in America. (Sure there’s a few wackos, but the number of people who truly wish to round up millions and systematically murder them is statistically insignificant.) To say all Trump voters are nazis is nonsense. That’s why Solnit’s article reads like satire.
It’s completely reasonable to listen to the viewpoint of everyday Americans who voted for Trump for any number of reasons, whether it be foreign policy, the economy, abortion, a dislike of the Democrats’ platform, or any number of other reasons that people voted for. To not want to have a discourse with them is bad for society.
The vast majority of Americans, regardless of who they voted for, are good people.
Citation needed.
Frankly, all your claims here need some evidence, even those about what makes a person a “Nazi.” Hitler’s support and popularity with Germans was not primarily due to his racist policies, but due to attacks on the system and economic promises, which in turn led voters to ignore the part where he was going to round up and kill Jews, Roma, gays, and other enemies of the state. Millions of Germans voted for him and the Nazi Party – 14 million in July 1932, then over 17 million in March 1933, the last free election before Hitler banned all other political parties.. Do we absolve them of their complicity in his crimes, and their willingness to overlook his overt goals of the “annihilation” of Jews, because they thought he’d help the failing German economy? I sure as hell wouldn’t. If you voted for Hitler and the Nazi Party, you were a Nazi, and some of their blood is on your hands, even if it was only “economic anxiety” that motivated you.
“To say 72 million Americans are…evil (Mike above)”
I explicitly argued against that premise when I said it was clear there was not a righteous choice on the ballot. Not sure why you would interpret what I said as that.
“The vast majority of Americans, regardless of who they voted for, are good people.
Citation needed.”
That was good – that made me laugh. Of course that’s impossible. I just believe in the fundamental goodness of this country and it’s people.
I would not say that for Germans in Hitler’s era. They had recently gotten done with one world war that they started, then within a generation started another. It’s pretty clear that Germany in the first half of the 20th century was a messed up place with messed up people, and I don’t think economic anxiety explains that away. Of course blood should be on all their hands.
If Trump had tried to begin world domination or the rounding up and killing of millions of Americans, it would be the fastest impeachment possible. To believe otherwise is crazy. Nazis and Trump voters have essentially nothing in common, and the comparison is harmful nonsense.
Hitler received those huge vote totals well before he actually moved against the Jews – Kristallnacht was in 1938, for example. He preached hate, but people, including leaders of other nations, thought it was all just talk.
Trump has, however, refused to condemn white supremacists and mass murderers who explicitly support him, presided over many needless deaths and the possibly permanent separation of 545 immigrant children from their parents thanks to xenophobic immigration policies, and sat on his hands while a pandemic killed 1 in every 1275 Americans and disproportionately hurt communities of color. He referred to developing nations as “shitholes,” rolled back laws protecting LGBTQ+ people, and continued a decades-long history of racist statements and views. And 72 million Americans said, “Yep, that is the man I want in charge.” I have nothing in common with those Americans, if only because I believe everyone, regardless of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation deserves respect and equal rights before the law.
I’ll end my side of the conversation with this – he did all the stuff you listed. He also did nothing to go so far as to equate his voters to nazis, which is basically the worst insult one can throw out. You see this is very black and white. Other people do not. And Solnit’s argument for writing off 72 million Americans to not find out why that is the case is harmful to society.
Have a good day and happy Thanksgiving!
I agree that we’re not likely to agree on this. I think his tenure as President was one of constant dehumanization of anyone who isn’t white, straight, and male.
Have a safe and happy Thanksgiving as well!
Mike – sorry if I misinterpreted, but I took “Her argument not to compromise with evil is 100% valid absent this context” to mean that most Trump voters were indeed evil, though Biden was flawed as well, causing some to vote for Trump instead. Sorry if that’s not what you meant.
I don’t see the point in painting every Trump voter with the same brush. It’s an elitist approach to grappling with our nation’s divisions — if you summarily dismiss all of them based on a forced choice (to the extent one might feel compelled to pick solely between D and R), you fail to engage with many of their lifetimes of experience with the Democratic party and how they may believe they’ve been played for suckers. If you want to make an enemy, false promises are a good way to go about it.
From Solnit: “The truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie, the fact and the delusion, the scientists and the propagandists.”
This is an especially devastating and potentially lasting effect of the Trump presidency, as he has shown the power of calling even the most visible of facts into question, over and over again, until we no longer have a basis to engage in a good faith discussion. I don’t believe the vast majority of politicians truly believe most of their own nonsense — I don’t think they truly doubt the science between climate change, face masks, election results, or hurricane paths, to name a few examples. Instead, they’ve found they can harness the conflict and uncertainty into anger and resentment toward the other side and thus maintain a loyal voting base.
So we have 72 million voters who have seen the constant stream of lies and have decided they are okay with this and somehow demand that the other side try harder to understand their point of view – which is, again, based on a foundation of lies, delusions, and propaganda. These voters have decided to abandon the shared foundation of facts that we need if discussions requiring nuance, regarding say race or gender, can be expected to have a productive outcome.