I had two columns this week for subscribers to the Athletic, on the George Springer signing and the Joe Musgrove trade. My top 100 prospects ranking will appear on Thursday, January 28th, with the org rankings and team top 20s running the week of February 8th.
For Paste, I reviewed New York Zoo, a light tile-placement game from Uwe Rosenberg, the designer of Patchwork, Cottage Garden, and Agricola.
I’ll send out another edition of my free email newsletter this weekend, with some exciting personal news. You can still buy The Inside Gameand Smart Baseball anywhere you buy books; the paperback edition of The Inside Game will be out in April.
And now, the links…
- Longreads first: Harvard magazine looks at the loneliness pandemic, which predated the COVID-19 one but has been exacerbated by the last ten months of shutdowns and isolation.
- California’s public utilities regulator fired an employee who found $200 million due to disadvantaged state residents had gone missing.
- Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in the Atlantic that now that Trump is gone, we need to reckon with how he got into office in the first place.
- A vaccine-hesitant mom rushed to vaccinate her kids when the pandemic hit, and she talked to NPR about how she ended up hesitant based on bad information she found onilne.
- Trump and a Justice Department lawyer were planning to oust the Attorney General and try to force Georgia to invalidate Joe Biden’s win there.
- Some notes from the right-wing terrorist attack on the Capitol: Black police officers described the racism they faced and heard during the assault, while members of several well-known hate groups were spotted among the rioters. A non-participant who was in the crowd documented what he saw in words and pictures. The farthest-right groups are trying to use Telegram to further radicalize new recruits disaffected by Biden’s win – perhaps some of the QAnon adherents in “disarray” after their long-awaited Storm never happened.
- One of Delaware’s Senators, Chris Coons (D), argued in the New York Times that we need to hold Trump accountable for encouraging the terrorists through his words and tweets.
- Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC) has lied to the public about many things in his very short life, and the latest is that he’s been lying about being a contender for the Paralympics in wheelchair racing.
- Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) has been lying about having experience as an Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan.
- Why in the actual fuck did the federal government give PPP money to anti-vaccine groups in the middle of a pandemic?
- Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is an intelligent person and he’s wasted it backing Trump.
- The Washington Post looks at the investigative journalism outfit Bellingcat, which helped crack the secret of Alexei Navalny’s poisoning, and their unorthodox methods.
- The federal government executed Lisa Montgomery among their rush to kill as many prisoners as they could before Trump left office, in spite of her documented history as a victim of horrendous sexual and physical abuse. (Trigger warning.)
- Uganda President Yoweri Museveni has stayed in power for 35 years, despite frequent claims of oppression, malfeasance, even spending international debt relief on a private jet. He appears to have won re-election this week, although his main opponent claims there was voter fraud.
- Slate has an argument of why Parler getting wiped off the internet is bad for everyone. I don’t agree, but it’s a thought-provoking read.
- Twitter bots have become a major source of disinformation on climate change, just as Pres. Biden has made fighting climate change a core policy.
- I really liked the documentary Boys State, which is only available on Apple TV+, and one of the main participants wrote about attending the event in a New York Times editorial.
- Board game news: The Kickstarter for the worker placement game Darwin’s Journey ends in five days.
- Umbra Via, which won an award for unpublished games in 2019, is now available for pre-order from Pandasaurus.
- Eagle-Gryphon has a Kickstarter for two new two-player games, Illumination and The Road to Canterbury.
- Bézier Games posted a look at their games due out early in 2021.
- Quined restarted its Kickstarter for the new game Carnegie, which looks like a heavy economic and routebuilding game from the designer of Troyes.
- Casual Game Revolution is holding voting for the best casual game of 2020, with the candidates My City, Calico, and Back to the Future: Back in Time.
1. A number of congressional members just sent a letter to Biden asking him to commute all prisoners sentenced to death.
2. Coates is really interesting but I feel like he emphasizes race and de-emphasizes economic problems. Trumps populism was talking about rebuilding Americans economic circumstances and the racism was an added bonus as though “they” took it away. But I’m white, he’s black and so it goes
FWIW, there have been quite a few studies showing that Trump voters were more motivated by “racial resentment” than economic populism.
If I remember correctly, something like 67% of Trump supporters have higher-than-median incomes. And anecdotally, it seems to skew even higher among his most vocal supporters (e.g. boat parades and the “operator” LARPers who sacked the Capitol and then spent the night at the Grand Hyatt).
I think the synthesis of these two points is that while some trump voters were driven by specific racial animus, there’s also a large enough block of former dem voters (most notably in the rust belt) that shifted red due to the diminishing returns of the democratic party of the past ~40 years. This “alliance” was then enough to give trump victory in 2016 and get him close in 2020.
Both of Trump’s campaigns very deliberately targeted “unlikely” voters, and he received very high turnout in presidential elections (and the GOP received much lower turnout when he wasn’t on the ballot in 2018). Democrats had very high turnout as well in 2020, which in part led to their victory. I’m sure that there are quite a few former Democrats who started voting Republican once Obama was elected, but I’m skeptical that their *real* motivation was caring about their “diminishing returns” from the Democrats. IMO, the “alliance” was between long-time conservatives and previously politically disengaged MAGA enthusiasts, and I would need to see data to be convinced otherwise.
Let’s face it, most modern presidential elections are close enough that you can choose your villain or hero to the exclusion of other factors and be at least somewhat justified in your belief. Structural issues (the electoral college blunting Democrats natural popular advantage; our horse-race preoccupied mass media; the political operative class arbitraging messaging to maximize their personal incomes; the entrenchment of the two-party system itself) conspire to keep the races close and voters in the highest possible sustained dudgeon. By the end of the cycle, millions of people probably would not even recognize themselves.
Slate’s enduring editorial stance is to bolster progressive policies while taking issue with most of the tactics employed to acheive them, hence the satirical headline “Slate: You’re Doing ______ Wrong”. So now I guess we have “Slate: You’re Silencing Seditionists Wrong”.
Seriously. Cotton is a seditionist who is also entitled to wear “Ranger” on his uniform. And Salon runs a blistering piece on him about …. how he’s a liar for calling himself a Ranger? (Because he’s only technically a Ranger and not a “real” Ranger, if you don’t want to give them underserved clicks.) That’s really the best they could do? Substantive criticism of Cotton should not be hard.
Cotton represented that he served as a Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is very much not what he did. He had meritorious miltary service, and yet still felt the need to lie about it. It’s absolutely legitimate to ask why that is.
Thank you for posting the piece on loneliness. I´m a teacher, and I think myself and a lot of my colleagues are feeling exactly that this year. Moreso than many professions, ours relies on connectedness that we cannot experience this year.
BTW, congratulations!