REVIEW: Watchmen (HBO) – Further Thoughts

I am writing this piece in reference to my original review of Damon Lindelof’s adaptation of Watchmen for HBO, namely in light of recent episodes and a recent discussion I had about where the last few episodes seem to be going.

Specifically, there was a lot of discussion of episode 6, “This Extraordinary Being”, where it was revealed that Will Reeves, who killed Angela’s mentor Judd Crawford, was not only her grandfather but none other than Hooded Justice, the first costumed hero in the world, a revelation that addressed the whole premise of how black people could get justice in the United States. Even in the short time that the episode has been out, it has gotten a lot of praise for its storyline.

Yeah, but unfortunately this is one of those areas where the right-wingers bashing the “woke” agenda of this series almost have a point.

Mind you, I can understand WHY the producers took this route, since if Alan Moore’s original story had one blind spot, it was that it had no black principals in a story that was all about American politics and culture. In some respect that is the result of an Englishman doing a deconstruction of a white-dominated medium. In other respects, it’s kind of the point. The original series was about a community of costumed heroes in New York whose common element was Captain Metropolis, a charter member of the World War II Minutemen who tried to get the new generation of heroes together in the 1960s in a meeting that ended disastrously. In the background material, Hollis Mason (the original Nite Owl) said that Hooded Justice had made certain pro-Nazi statements in the World War II period, and Captain Metropolis hadn’t really disagreed with them. In the 1960s meeting, Metropolis has a series of cards on the map addressing issues for superheroes to address such as “Promiscuity” and “Black Unrest.”

Under the Hood, the in-story autobiography of Mason also implied that Metropolis (Nelson Gardner) was having an affair with Hooded Justice (and that Silk Spectre I was Justice’s ‘beard’). The total impression being that the two men were a couple and were also united in their racism, even if Metropolis was less overt with it. In retrospect, this might explain the lack of black vigilantes in the original story; they simply weren’t let into the “community” by Metropolis.

“This Extraordinary Being” can be reconciled with Moore’s story, but only to some extent. Given that he is seen in closeup as a Caucasian, it was an interesting point to have Will’s wife suggest he wear makeup under the hood; it conveys the point of a black hero having to wear a mask under the mask. (It also parallels Angela’s use of face paint in addition to a hood to conceal her features as Sister Night.) And Hollis never actually did see Hooded Justice without the mask, so we cannot establish that HJ is NOT Will Reeves. Except: in the comic (drawn by Dave Gibbons) Hooded Justice is depicted as a LOT larger and more muscular than the average man. In the TV show, Jovan Adepo (who plays Reeves in the ’40s) is above average physique, but not that large. For another thing the character has a secret identity as a policeman, and while he would have stood out in that day for being black, he would have stood out even more for his height. This is why, in Under the Hood, Hollis deduced that Justice was actually Rolf Muller, a German-born Bundist and circus strongman who is pictured side-by-side in contrast to a picture of Hooded Justice. Hollis also ascribes racist motives to Hooded Justice that obviously aren’t depicted in the Will Reeves character.

This gets to one more problem in the identification of Hooded Justice with Reeves. Episode 6 does include the idea of Hooded Justice and Captain Metropolis having an affair, but it doesn’t include the one scene in the comics where Hooded Justice actually appears. In this scene, the Comedian (then a young punk) attempts to rape Silk Spectre I, her “boyfriend” Hooded Justice accidentally comes across them and proceeds to thrash Comedian, at which point Comedian deduces his real secret: that he is a sadomasochist who gets off on beating men up. Shocked, Hooded Justice just tells Comedian to get out. The Nelson-Will relationship has some rough-sex elements, but it doesn’t seem as dark as the relationship implied in the comic, nor does the TV Nelson seem racist except in the sense of Nelson telling Will that racial oppression is Will’s problem and not his.

And then the fact that the Comedian is not a factor kills one of the implications of Moore’s Watchmen: That everything happens in cycles. It is implied that once Hooded Justice refused to unmask for the House Un-American Activities Committee he was disgraced and eventually tracked down and assassinated by the Comedian as revenge for his prior humiliation. In the main storyline, Comedian is beaten and killed by Ozymandias, not only because he beat up Ozymandias in their first encounter but because Comedian destroyed his illusions by sabotaging Captain Metropolis’ hero meeting in the ’60s.

And this gets to an overall problem with the series. A recurring motif is the use of Jeremy Irons as a now-elderly Adrian Veidt (Ozymandias) who for reasons unexplained has been exiled to somewhere else in the solar system after his plot against New York was exposed. I think that if the Zack Snyder version of Watchmen fell down anywhere, it was in its effete depiction of Ozymandias, whose motives are central to the story. (And for another thing, if they were going to make Ozymandias openly gay, then why didn’t they let him wear lavender with gold trim?) You have a similar issue with the Irons character, who is an unqualified bad guy. Now, from the racial angle, the ethnically-German Veidt is an Aryan superman, but if you are a right-winger (like Rorschach) you could interpret him as the ultimate example of leftist altruism gone wrong, someone who was willing to kill millions for the sake of the “greater good.”

Thing is, because Moore is a leftist, and specifically opposed “black and white” morality as represented by Rorschach, he didn’t make things as simple as making Veidt an unqualified bad guy, however terrible his actions are. Indeed, Moore set events in such a way that Veidt’s choice seems like the only one to make.

For one thing, the mere presence of Jon Osterman (Doctor Manhattan) as an agent of the US government tipped the superpower balance such that the US could win the Vietnam War, among other things. This parallels the leftist critique that the USSR balanced the USA as well as vice versa, and that since the fall of the Soviet Union, the unipolar world order under America has been neoliberal dystopia at best. (Watchmen was actually written before the fall of the Soviet Union.)

Veidt also deduced that with the humiliation and containment of Russia under this unipolar order, this would actually increase tensions (in a way that they did not in our world) and that the only thing stopping nuclear war was Dr. Manhattan. He further deduced that as Jon (who is like God, only with less people skills) became more alienated from humanity, he would eventually leave it altogether. And after Comedian destroyed Captain Metropolis’ meeting by burning his map to show how nuclear war was inevitable, Ozymandias decided to “save the world” and to top Comedian, decided to do so by what he described as a practical joke: convincing the two superpowers there was a greater threat. And while Veidt deduced that Jon was going to leave Earth anyway, he arranged events to make that outcome more likely, so that he could proceed with the rest of his plan. So while Lindelof’s Watchmen has been both provocative and subtle in addressing the racial politics of America, it has not been nearly as good at depicting the global struggle that Moore addressed in his comic and that informed Ozymandias. Most of what we see proceeds logically from what has been established: Rorschach and Comedian are dead. Nite Owl II is in jail and Laurie, the last Silk Spectre, is working within the government in hopes of getting him out. But what we see of Veidt is a rather hollow depiction of the original character, and if he is not believable, then the premise of Moore’s story collapses, and if there isn’t a payoff in regard to the main plot, then there is little reason for Lindelof’s series to depict him.

Which leads to the last character from the original series. The show had been leaving little hints that if Manhattan was on Earth he was in fact Angela’s husband Cal. For one thing, Laurie is attracted to him. (Though as a strictly hetero male, I will concede that Yahya Abdul-Mateen is hot.)

The last episode established not only that Cal is Jon, but that Angela has been aware of this the whole time and Cal has not. It was also established that Senator Keene’s Seventh Kavalry plot was in fact an elaborate attempt to find Dr. Manhattan and steal his power. As Lady Trieu put it, “can you imagine that kind of power in the hands of white supremacists?” So Angela raced home and actually killed Cal, in order to pull a device out of his skull that was suppressing his true self.

So a few days ago, my Facebook friend Robert asked me, “so where do you think this Watchmen plot is going?”

And I said, “did you ever see a Doctor Who storyline called The Family of Blood?”

In this story, a race of asshole aliens, who cannot survive very long outside of their hosts, decided to steal The Doctor’s Time Lord essence in order to live forever. They were about ready to destroy the TARDIS, so the Doctor and his companion Martha decided to lay low in 1913 England. And because the aliens were able to track his essence, the Doctor used the “Chameleon Arch” of the TARDIS to contain that essence in a pocket watch, actually transforming his biology to human and creating a whole new identity and history that he believed was real. Thus, he couldn’t reveal himself to his pursuers. What the Doctor didn’t anticipate was that he would settle down and fall in love. So when the aliens came to the town and started terrorizing the people, Martha told “John Smith” the truth and he was forced to choose between becoming the Doctor and his happy normal life. Eventually the Doctor used the pocket watch as bait to get into the aliens’ spaceship and destroy it, and once he did he punished his enemies by locking them in individual moments of space -time. “We wanted to live forever. So the Doctor made sure that we did.”

The Family of Blood storyline encapsulated a theme that the producers of Doctor Who had been running with ever since the 21st Century reboot and especially during the David Tennant era. That theme being: The Doctor is not an eccentric but kindly Englishman who just happens to have been born on another planet. He is an Elder God who just happens to be on the side of the Good Guys, and if you get him sufficiently pissed off, you will literally regret it for all eternity.

I predict that we are going to get a similar resolution in Watchmen, but again with a deliberately racial angle, given that you have a racist conspiracy going against Doctor Manhattan, who is now a black man. The difference being that Manhattan’s superpowers make the change in identity a more plausible retcon than with Will Reeves.

Again, it’s a great story. It’s just increasingly removed from the one Moore actually wrote.

The reason I don’t cry more is because of a certain irony that I don’t think Alan Moore himself wants to admit. He’s been bitching for years that DC took his characters and used them for commercial purposes that he didn’t intend, but the whole point of Watchmen was to be a politicized retcon of someone else’s work – specifically, the Charlton Comics line up of heroes that DC Comics had just obtained. And Dick Giordano, a former Charlton staffer who helped obtain the characters, asked Moore to produce a story with these new intellectual properties, and had to reject the first proposal where Peacemaker was killed right off the bat, The Question was a whackjob (as in, BY Objectivist standards) and Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt was the mastermind of a plot that killed half of New York.

REVIEW: Pathfinder 2nd Edition (Part Two)

Last time I went over the first six chapters of the Pathfinder Second Edition core rulebook. Since I’m off on Thanksgiving, I am releasing the second half of the review, since this book, like the Thanksgiving feast, is a bit overstuffed.

Chapter 7 is Spells. There are several changes in how spells work. Some of these are just clarifications to terminology. In addition to the nine schools, spells are classified on “the four essences” of Matter, Spirit, Mind and Life. For example, Enchantment and Illusion spells almost entirely deal with Mind. Then you have four magical traditions: Arcane (Wizard, basically), Divine (Cleric, but also anything dealing with the Outer Planes, which actually makes demons and devils divine casters), Primal (Druid) and then Occult. So far, Bards are the only example of Occult casters (‘The practitioners of occult traditions seek to understand the unexplainable, categorize the bizarre, and otherwise access the ephemeral in a systematic way.’) but if they ever bring psionics back into the system, it will most likely be under Occult. As mentioned before, a Sorcerer could follow any of these traditions depending on their bloodline.

They also changed the spell slots so that most spell levels, even 1st, only get a max of 3 spell slots a day, although some classes get around this. Specifically, most casters have a focus pool that starts with 1 point that can only be used to cast a specific spell or group of spells (for instance a Champion uses the focus pool to cast lay on hands, and specialist Wizards gain a focus pool that can only be used to cast their specialist school spell.) This focus pool can be added to but can never go above 3 points. In addition, casters still have cantrips, basic abilities that don’t use up spell slots. Characters are also able to cast heightened spells, which means casting a spell with a slot higher than its base level. For instance, casting 1st-level heal as a 2nd-level spell increases the damage it heals by 1 die. The book also states that cantrips are automatically heightened to half the caster’s level rounded up, so that the cantrips of a 5th level caster count as 3rd-level spells.

In terms of actually casting, this is defined in game terms as the Cast a Spell activity, which takes a special number of actions based on the spell’s description. Usually material (or focus), verbal and somatic components are each separate actions, so a spell that requires three components takes three actions (of the three allowed in the round).

The spells themselves are either buffed or nerfed compared to previous editions, depending on how you want to look at it. For instance magic missile is a 1st-level spell, that still does 1d4+1 base damage, but this goes up by one missile for each action taken to Cast the Spell, so a full-round cast can throw 3 magic missiles. Each 2 levels of heightening means you shoot one additional missile for each action used. On the other hand, wish is now an example of a 10th-level spell that can only be cast at the highest experience levels, and generically speaking it allows a Wizard to duplicate any other spell of 9th level or lower.

Pathfinder 2 also has ritual spells, which require some material/gold piece outlay and more than one caster, taking at least an hour. However, they also have long-lasting effects. Creating undead, controlling the weather and consecrating a holy site are examples of rituals.

Chapter 8 is The Age of Lost Omens. This is a mini-gazeteer reviewing the realms on one continental area on the planet Golarion. Prior to the events of the previous edition, the two most important parts of world history started with “Earthfall”, ten thousand years prior, in which a meteor swarm destroyed civilization, and the rise and fall of Aroden, a mortal-turned-god who had lived in the time before Earthfall. Aroden became known as the patron god of the Human race as well as the god of prophecy. However, Aroden was killed, and this event also killed the reliability of prophecy- thus, the time since is called The Age of Lost Omens.

This chapter deals with the regions of the “Inner Sea” surrounding Aroden’s former home on the island city of Absolom. The regions are broadly defined, where for instance “Old Cheliax” refers to the territories around the kingdom of Cheliax including the countries that declared independence from it. It’s mentioned that as time advances in the real world, so it also advances in the game history, such that the official calendar as of 2019 AD is 4719 AR (Absolom Reckoning). Chapter 8 discusses the events that have changed the world since the publication of original Pathfinder (some of which are described in the previous Adventure Path modules), such as the old empire of Taldor, after a period of long decline, entering a reformist era with the rise of its first female monarch. However the main world-shaking event for adventuring purposes was the recent return of Tar-Baphon, “the Whispering Tyrant”, an arch-lich who destroyed the frontier nation that was set up to guard against his return. Though he was prevented from immediately conquering the rest of the area, Takofanes – uh, Tar-Baphon – is now the “Big Bad” of the Pathfinder setting.

Chapter 9 is Playing the Game. This goes into greater detail on all the basic concepts that were briefly described in the Introduction. Again, there are three modes of play. “The most intricate of the modes is encounter mode.” In addition to the previous rules for dice tests, and degrees of success or failure, there are also certain combat modifiers. There is a multiple attack penalty, which normally is -5 for a second attack per turn and -10 for “the third time you attack, and on any subsequent attacks”. Given that characters only get three actions in a turn, this would seem to indicate that you can use a basic Strike action with multiple attacks if you’re willing to take the penalty. It’s mentioned that you can do this with spell attack rolls, but given that most spells require at least two actions to Cast a Spell, it’s doubtful you can use a multi-attack with more than one spell a round.

Most of the rules for “encounter mode” (combat) are in fact discussed before describing the various modes, because they’re rather brief compared with the rules for what you are able to do in combat and what happens if you get damaged. In addition to various damage types from weapons (slashing, bludgeoning, etc.) you have damage types based on magic or the environment (such as fire or electrical). In some cases a target of damage may modify it based on immunities, resistances or weaknesses: Immunity is flat-out immunity to a damage type, resistance is a category (fire resistance 4 means you reduce any fire damage by 4 points) and weakness is like the opposite of resistance (if you have weakness 5 to fire, any fire attack does +5 damage).

There are also conditions that describe other effects of damage or failing to resist a spell. How many conditions are there? Let’s see, on page 454, there are… … …43. Yes. This page is simply a summary of a more detailed glossary of conditions in the back that goes from pages 618 to 623, for example, Wounded: “You have been seriously injured. If you lose the dying condition and do not already have the wounded condition, you become wounded 1. If you already have the wounded condition when you lose the dying condition, your wounded condition value increases by 1.

If you gain the dying condition while wounded, increase your dying condition value by your wounded value.”

Of course some of these conditions are actually terms used to describe an NPC’s base opinion of your character (‘Unfriendly: An NPC with this condition doesn’t like you.’) but that kind of gets to a big problem I have with Pathfinder 2 compared to the previous version or other games: It is heavily dependent on gamespeak. And depending on gamespeak to the degree that it does, in my opinion, causes PF2 to lose its “immersive” quality in the way that Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition did, where your character felt less like a character and more like a game piece. Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition has its own large glossary of conditions at the back of the Player’s Handbook, but the text is about half as long, partially because D&D 5 is more prone to use simple and concise English. More on that comparison later.

After some length, Chapter 9 actually gets to the modes of play. Encounter mode (combat) starts with the roll for initiative, which in PF2 is normally a Perception check, although the Game Master may have players roll another skill (for instance a social encounter could use Deception or Diplomacy checks). Notably if a player’s roll ties with an NPC, the adversary goes first. In addition to Stride (move up to your Speed score) and Strike (attack) this section goes over various other actions, which include Crawl, Drop Prone and Stand (‘You stand up from prone’) which are all helpfully marked with trait markers like “Move.” After this there’s a relatively concise explanation of using movement points (Pathfinder characters are assumed to be moving on a square grid where each square is 5 feet, so a Small character with a Speed of 20 moves up to 4 squares per Stride). There are also brief but effective rules for combat in unusual environments, like underwater, which leads to rules for drowning or suffocating.

Exploration mode is self-explanatory; it “lacks the immediate danger of encounter mode, but it offers its own challenges.” Instead of measuring movement in tactical 5-foot squares, it is measured in feet or miles. The characters’ Speed (which is 20 feet for Small races, 25 for most races and 30 for Elves) is converted on a table to the number of miles one can travel per hour or day (a Speed of 25 is 2 1/2 miles per hour). Difficult terrain reduces the rate. There are certain activities that are only done in exploration mode (and of course are labeled with the Exploration trait) and there are also skills that can be used in this mode, such as using Survival to track creatures. Notably, encounter mode includes “preparing” after the nightly rest, preparing including memorized spell slots, and equipping armor and weapons, including “investing” any magic items.

Finally, there is downtime mode. This is just the game time between combat or travel scenes. Normally characters who rest each night recover Hit Point damage at a rate of 1 (or Constitution modifier) times level; long-term rest in downtime mode doubles that natural healing rate but assumes the character is resting the entire day. An experienced character can also “retrain” and swap out certain abilities like feats or skill increases. There is a brief list of skills that can be used in downtime mode, namely to earn income or survive off the land, or perform long-term medical care.

Chapter 10: Game Mastering is the point at which the corebook becomes the “Dungeon Master’s Guide” (which is why the Pathfinder game book is so thick, cause it’s both the ‘player’s handbook’ and GM manual). It includes a few gaming tips like “drawing a line” or allowing a player to tap an “X-Card” to limit or edit descriptions of disturbing or objectionable material. It also describes the concept of “social splash damage” if the game is being hosted in a public place; basically have respect for your hosts or the people nearby. There is also a sidebar for using disabled characters – even though basic rules don’t describe how battle injuries could create permanent disabilities. Some of this advice is politically correct, but still generally useful.

In more concrete terms, this chapter includes the tools for creating an “XP budget” for encounters. The figures used for XP are relatively small numbers because the XP system is not based on linear numbers (a creature is worth X number of experience points and higher level creatures are worth more XP) bur rather in scale with the party’s average character level. If for instance the party is a party of four 4th level characters, a “moderate” encounter would be a budget of 80 XP with a 4th level creature (or ‘Creature 4’ in the language of the game) being 40 of that 80 and “lackey” creatures being 20 each. Parties of greater or larger size have an adjustment to the XP budget; in the case of the 80 XP budget, each player more than four adds 20 to the budget and each player fewer than four subtracts 20. Note that because of the divisor the XP award to the individual characters doesn’t change- in this case each PC would get 20 XP for the encounter. All this goes back to the first chapter of the book: On page 31, “Leveling Up”, each experience level is exactly 1000 experience points. When characters reach or exceed 1000 XP, they level up and then subtract 1000 from their total and carry over any remaining. Thus this system greatly compresses the “unit economy” for totalling XP and makes the numbers a lot simpler for the GM.

In this regard, the chapter also goes over how to award XP if that whole pre-planned encounter was avoided by player choices. The GM may have to move the encounter to a different location if it is truly necessary for things to proceed, otherwise they may award the full XP for the encounter if the party avoided it because of ingenuity, diplomacy or other deliberate means. There is also guidance for social encounters that involve role-playing and skill, such as trying to persuade a mob or a judge of a person’s innocence. This usually relies on the Society skill for initiative and requires skill rolls to persuade the opposition.

It’s also mentioned that in exploration mode, the GM will be making judgment calls on almost everything that happens. Part of what’s involved is typical D&D type stuff like marching order and setting watch overnight, and since “rest” for game purposes means 8 hours, they have a little chart as to how long a watch period would be depending on how many people are in the party. The chapter also goes over downtime, and it is possible for player characters to use downtime mode for several long-term events.

Chapter 10 also has a GM guide for setting the Difficulty Class (DC) for certain rolls. For instance, some tasks require a minimum skill level (like Expert) to even succeed. This is not necessarily known to the player, so they can still attempt it (‘after all, she needs to have a chance to critically fail’). Chapter 10 mentions character rewards. Hero Points (described more thoroughly in Chapter 9) can be used to re-roll a d20 or save a 0 Hit Point character from dying. The book recommends handing out 1 Hero Point per each real hour of play after the first (for instance, 3 for a four-hour session). There are also guidelines for XP awards for miscellaneous accomplishments other than victory in combat. The chapter closes with the rules for environmental conditions, and hazards (including dungeon traps) since after all, characters can take damage from sources other than themselves.

Chapter 11, Crafting and Treasure says: “Characters acquire treasure from the glittering hoards of their foes, as rewards for defending the innocent, and as favors from the grand personalities they treat with.” The actual treasure tables are on page 508 in Chapter 10 (which is another problem I have with this book: It really isn’t well laid-out) but this chapter includes not only magic and alchemical items but the rules for using them. It’s mentioned that some items have to be “invested” in order to be fully active (similar to attunement in D&D 5th Edition) and most characters can only invest 10 magic items at a time, which the book says should not be an issue until characters are high level. A character can change out which items are invested on a given day during daily preparations.

The tables that follow list special items by level, and in addition to alchemical items include other “consumables” such as magical talismans. Thus the tables are separated by “Consumables” and “Permanent Items.” While most of the miscellaneous items are similar to those in Pathfinder 1 and Dungeons & Dragons, the rules for weapon and armor enchantment are different. The enchantments on these items are done through runes; runes for adding straight to a weapon’s hit bonus or damage are called fundamental runes, and more exotic runes (like to create a flaming weapon) are called property runes. Engraving runes uses the Craft skill. Furthermore with fundamental runes there is a distinction between potency runes (which increase the base bonus), resiliency runes (which add to a suit of armor’s bonus to saving throws) and striking runes, which actually add to the weapon’s damage dice. Potency runes only go up to +3 and also determine the number of property runes that can be added (resiliency and striking don’t count against the limit). Thus a +3 weapon could also have a “major striking rune” causing it to do four (instead of one) die of the weapon’s normal damage type. This is interesting for two reasons: One, the use of striking runes means that a Fighter’s weapons can “scale” with level similar to how a spellcaster’s combat magic does, and the use of runes as an element is an interesting setting element that distinguishes Pathfinder 2 from other D&D-based games where these enchantments are generic and unexplained.

However while most of these items only matter once characters are high-level enough to get them (assuming the GM is properly generous), some of them are tools actually created by characters on a regular basis. Specifically, the crafting of consumable items is the whole schtick of the Alchemist class, and Rangers also have the ability to create snares (which of course are their own category of item with the ‘snare’ trait). So while spellcasters have to flip from Chapter 3 to Chapter 7 to look up spells, Alchemists have to flip from Chapter 3 all the way to Chapter 11. Which is another issue with layout: if you got this book as a PDF off the back of a virtual turnip truck, you could just use Ctrl+F to flip to the right page, but I assume that Paizo, like most publishers, wants to make its sales off hardcopy books. And not only is this book expensive as I’d said before, it’s friggin’ BIG.

CONCLUSIONS

If all this makes it seem like I am ambivalent about Pathfinder Second Edition, well, I am. Every thing they do to radically simplify the system (combat action economy, encumbrance, the experience system) is outweighed by something that over-complicates things compared to previous Pathfinder (almost everything else).

At this point, since we’re dealing with a comparison of Pathfinder 2 to the first edition, and this in turn leads to a comparison of the Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition (which inspired Pathfinder) and the D&D that came after it, I need to bring up a concept from the latest edition of D&D: bounded accuracy. https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Understanding_Bounded_Accuracy_(5e_Guideline)

See, in D&D 3rd Edition (and therefore, Pathfinder 1st Edition), most abilities progressed equal to level. Level cap in most products is 20. A 20th level Fighter in D&D3/PF1 has a Base Attack Bonus of +20 before counting any other modifiers at all, which means that any opponent has to have an equally ridiculous Armor Class difficulty to not get hit routinely. D&D 4th Edition curbed this somewhat with the concept of the “level modifier” – where all characters got a modifier of half their level, rounded down. Thus, a 10th level Fighter only has a +5 to hit. The newest version, Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, refines the concept even further. The term “bounded accuracy” isn’t in the rule books, but it is in the various online discussions, including some from Wizards of the Coast designers. In player character terms, it comes down to most abilities being based on a proficiency bonus that starts at +2 at 1st level and peaks at +6. This mechanic applies to even class abilities; a Fighter and a Wizard of the same level have the same proficiency bonus, but a Fighter has that bonus with most weapons, and a Wizard only gets it with the limited number of weapons he is proficient with. However the Wizard (and other spellcasters) apply the bonus to attacks made with spells as well as the difficulty numbers to save against (resist) those spells.

There’s also a separate mechanic in D&D 5 that further compresses the number crunching. It’s called advantage vs. disadvantage. Simply, if you have advantage on a d20 roll (for instance, flanking an opponent) you get to roll the d20 twice and apply the better of two rolls. However if you have disadvantage (for example, a Dark Elf forced to fight in sunlight), you have to roll the d20 twice and take the worse of the two rolls. Most of the little situational modifiers that were used in previous editions of D&D (and some other non-d20 games) are replaced with this mechanic.

There are various reasons why the Wizards developers went with these methods (discussed in the link) but from the player perspective it is simply a matter of not having as many numbers and modifiers to deal with. This makes D&D 5th a relatively simple game to learn and teach to others.

Pathfinder 2, by contrast, goes in the opposite direction, taking the level-scale approach of prior Pathfinder and turning the amp up to 11. It’s specified that if you have Trained proficiency with weapons or non-combat skills, the proficiency modifier includes your level in addition to the bonuses you get for Trained, Expert, Master or Legendary level of skill. This would mean that a 20th level Fighter who has Legendary skill with weapons is now at +28 to hit. Before other modifiers.

Generally, I think Pathfinder 2 takes the same wrong turn that Wizards of the Coast took with D&D 4th Edition and that Hero Games took with HERO System 6th Edition – throwing in a whole bunch of new elements that veterans of the previous edition do not need and that will not make the game easier for new players. Even if the actual core of the game is quite simple, there’s so much “cruft” that it’s hard to see.

I could be wrong, because again, this game does a lot to clean up the basics of play, and there seems to be positive buzz so far. This just isn’t the direction I would go, and if I did want to do a root-to-stem rewrite of Pathfinder, it would probably look more like Starfinder than this game does.

GAME REVIEW: Pathfinder 2nd Edition (Part One)

A while ago I had reviewed the Starfinder role-playing game from Paizo Publishing, mentioning at the time that it was part of a design process that Paizo was using for a new edition of its signature game, Pathfinder, which was originally based on Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition. Well, Pathfinder Second Edition is now out. A friend of mine tipped me off to a sale at Barnes and Noble and I picked up the last available hardcopy that was 20% off sales price. That still made it over 50 dollars with tax, by the way. I’m not quite sure if it was worth it.

The hardcopy is a large book, 642 pages. Wayne A. Reynolds (‘WAR’) is still the signature artist for Pathfinder, but more of the pieces (including the cover) are painted rather than inked, and I don’t think the results work as well somehow. The text is is larger print than the original (PF1) and includes sidebars and explanations, but I don’t think the font is easier to read.

Overview

Chapter 1 (Introduction) is actually very important, because it reviews the basic premises of game play. There are three modes of play in Pathfinder Second Edition (PF2): long-term travel and negotiations with non-player characters are the exploration mode. Combat (or non-combat situations that can lead to combat) are in encounter mode. Even more long-term descriptions of game time, in which characters train, build things, and develop their craft, are in downtime mode. These concepts were already implicit in earlier D&D paradigm games, but PF2 makes them explicit game terms, which is in keeping with the rest of this book.

Encounters work similarly to PF1. The main difference is a clarification of the “action economy.” Characters get 3 actions in a 6-second round. It’s not quite as simple as that, of course; some things are “free actions” that don’t count against your allowance, while other actions are “activities” (such as casting a spell or doing another activity that could take two actions or more. Each character also gets one reaction that they can perform per round, but only in response to another activity, and only if it’s part of their abilities. For instance only Fighters get an Attack of Opportunity at 1st level, and other warrior-types don’t get it until at least 5th level. That simplifies combat right there.

One critical part of this whole setup is on page 17 with the Format of Rules Elements. This includes a sidebar with the various little symbols used in the rest of the book, with “reaction” being represented by an arrow circling on itself, and a single action being a black arrowhead. A “Three-Action Activity” is three black arrows atop each other and a Free Action is a clear arrowhead. This is simple enough once you grok the symbol format, but you NEED to grasp the symbol format to grasp this game.

The Introduction chapter likewise goes over the format of the various skills, feats, etc. These show what the ability is, what category it belongs to (Feat, etc.), what level you are eligible to get it (e.g. Feat 2) and other aspects of the ability. For instance, reactions and some free actions operate on a “Trigger,” like an Attack of Opportunity, which is allowed only when another character within your reach takes a move action or a “manipulate” action like casting a spell. The stat block format also includes various traits that the ability belongs to. Some skills, for instance, have certain traits like Downtime, such as where most Craft abilities can only be used in downtime. Again, this can be quickly learned, but if you obtain or get to read a copy of this book, you need to learn the text block format in Chapter 1, because this is what ALMOST THE ENTIRE REST OF THE BOOK looks like.

After the Introduction, Chapter 2 gets into the first steps of making a character, Ancestries & Backgrounds. There was of course some grousing from older gamers that they replaced the term “race” with “ancestry.” I’m not sure what difference it makes, except that in the premises of fantasy the term “race” is a bit more clear than it is in the real world where “race” really is a misnomer in that we’re all the same species. If there’s any oldthink game term that really ought to be adapted, it’s “class.” Character class has nothing to do with class in a psuedo-medieval world; a Fighter could be either a peasant or an aristocrat. In “meta” terms, your class is the role you play in the group, like your position in a football team. The concept would be more accurately defined as “profession”, “role” or “to be what one is not and to not be what one is,” but I’m not sure most gamers read Sartre.

So I’m cool with “ancestry.” I’m also okay with Half-Elves and Half-Orcs being simply variant “heritages” of the Human ancestry, given that they were mechanically presented as such in PF1 anyway. What I didn’t like was turning Goblins into a player character race. Uh, ancestry. Yes, I know that in their First Edition products, Paizo made Goblins their cute little mascot characters, but transitioning them from joke villains into potential heroes strains my sense of disbelief. I also don’t like when producers take loathsome creep characters and try to give them a “face turn” by suddenly making them as sympathetic as possible. Sorta like Andrew in Buffy Season 7.

In any case, Ancestry is the start of the character creation process, and that includes the mechanics. See, characters start with a string of 10 in the six “D&D” attributes. Each ancestry starts with two “ability boosts” for +2 in two specified attributes, and a free boost in a third attribute of choice. Each also has an “ability flaw” that reduces one stat to 8 (except Humans, who get two free boosts where they choose with no flaws). Goblins get a boost to Dexterity (which makes sense) a flaw to Wisdom (which makes sense) and a boost to Charisma (which makes no sense at all).

In this section you also get Backgrounds, which in combination with ancestry and class can create interesting character premises. Your background gives you another assigned ability boost and another free boost, plus at least one relevant skill and one feat. The Warrior Background, for instance, gives a boost to either Strength or Constitution, a free ability boost, Trained in Intimidation and Warfare Lore skills, with the Intimidating Glare skill feat (a feat that modfies a skill, in this case Intimidation).

However, the Ancestries & Backgrounds chapter also displays the real emphasis in creating a character in PF2: the selection of feats. If you look at the options of ancestral feats, you can only pick one at 1st level. Comparing to the first edition Pathfinder, some of these abilities are what used to be considered default racial features. A Dwarf, for instance, used to have both familiarity with Dwarven weapons and Stonecunning ability by default. In PF2, these are both feats, so you have to choose. You also get an additional ancestry feat at every 4 additional levels (5th, 9th, 13th and 17th), but there are also higher level ancestral feats for 5th, 9th, and 13th level, some of which have prerequisite ancestral feats.

Chapter 3 is for Classes. There are now 12 “core” classes in Pathfinder, which is much reduced from where PF1 was after all its various sourcebooks came out with supplemental classes. One of those supplemental classes, the Alchemist, is one of the PF2 core classes, perhaps because the “iconic” example Alchemist in the game is a Goblin. Which does make sense, given that both Goblins and Alchemists like to mix chemicals, play with fire, and blow shit up. The other big change in PF2 classes was with the Paladin, which is now generically referred to as the Champion, on the quite logical basis that deities of other than Lawful Good alignment would have their own champions. In PF2 core rules, Champions are limited to Good alignment, which is probably for the best. You can still play a standard Paladin (lawful and militaristic), but you can also be a Chaotic Liberator, who can help other characters break restraining effects, or a Neutral Good Redeemer, who actually takes an oath to try and redeem evildoers before killing them. (!) Also, they’ve decided that since Sorcerers can get their powers from non-arcane sources (like fey and demons) they can draw power from non-arcane sources, such that a Sorcerer could cast divine (‘cleric’) spells if they have the right bloodline.

The structure of how classes are written shows an even greater reliance on feats than ancestry abilities. And again, these sometimes replace what were class abilities. The Paladin’s Divine Health ability, for instance, is now a Feat 4. In addition, most characters get a class feat every even level, a skill feat every even level, and a general feat at 3rd level and every 4 levels thereafter.

Notably, this chapter includes Archetype options, which are similar to where older Pathfinder sourcebooks would offer options to characters in certain classes by trading off some of their class features. What’s significant about the PF2 approach is that Archetypes (or archetype feats) are now the only way your character can multi-class. For example, Alchemist Dedication is a Feat 2 that gives some of the basic Alchemist abilities. Taking it requires using a class feat. Once taken, the character is then eligible to use class feats to take other feats in the archetype tree, which allow the non-Alchemist to pick Alchemist feats or increase the potency of Alchemist abilities. To me, this is the part of the game that most resembles D&D 4th Edition; whereas D&D 3rd Edition was extremely liberal with multiclassing (such that every time you leveled you could add a different class and simply add each class level together, such that a 2nd-level character could be a 1st-level Fighter and 1st-level Wizard, for example), D&D 4 simply assumed that you always stayed in the same class and could only simulate branching out using a feat system very similar to this one. This kills a lot of the class flexibility that Pathfinder had allowed, and given that you have to cross-reference your secondary abilities via the main class, I’m not sure that the result is less complicated than multiclassing in PF1.

Also, the phase of picking a class also affects one’s ability scores in the character generation process; each class has a key ability score, which is usually fixed but sometimes variable. For instance, Intelligence is the key ability for Alchemist. A 1st-level Alchemist therefore gets an ability boost to Intelligence. Once ability adjustments are made for ancestry, background and class, a character gets four boosts in different abilities, meaning no more than +2 in any one stat. If you follow the process, you’ll see that it is possible for a character to have exactly one ability at 18 to start – 10 base, +2 from an ancestry, +2 from a background, +2 from a class and +2 from the last set of four free boosts. And given that (as with multiclassing) the new game prefers specialization to generalization, the results tend to favor characters with one excellent stat and a few fair ones, or maybe 2 scores of 16 and the rest more like 12. And after this point, the real number-crunching begins.

Class 4 is Skills. The base works like other d20 System games: Roll a d20, apply modifiers (such as an ability score) and try to beat a Difficulty Class (DC), with higher numbers representing greater difficulty, so you always want to roll high. The previous version of Pathfinder gave characters a certain number of skill ranks per level based on class (modified by Intelligence). These applied directly as a modifier to the skill roll, and you could only have 1 rank in a skill per character level (a 5th-level character could only have 5 ranks in Stealth, for instance). You also got a +3 “class skill” bonus if that skill was one of the ones approved for your class (Stealth being a Rogue skill, for instance). This is simpler than the D&D 3rd Edition skill points system but still requires keeping track of the points.

Pathfinder Second Edition changes this system in at least two significant ways. Characters get a certain number of skills per class. These are not point-based, these are proficiency ranks. You are Untrained in a roll unless otherwise skilled. An Untrained roll only allows the character to add their ability modifer and they can only perform minimal actions with that skill no matter how high they roll. Selecting a skill during character creation places it at the Trained level, which is a bonus of character level +2 (so a 1st-level character’s skills will be at +3). In some cases a skill may be raised to the next level, Expert (level +4). At 3rd level and every 2 levels thereafter, a character gains a skill increase. This can be used to take a previously unselected skill to Trained rank or raise the rank of a previously bought skill. At 7th level one can use a skill increase to take an Expert skill to Master rank (level +6) and at 15th level one can raise a Master skill to the Legendary level, which is level +8 bonus.

The other change is that this skill mechanic is how pretty much every d20 roll works in Second Edition. For instance, d20 games usually have 3 categories of saving throws, Fortitude, Reflex and Will. Instead of a class providing a certain bonus to these, each class describes the skill rank that the element is trained to. For instance the Ranger starts at 1st level as Expert in Fortitude and Reflex and Trained in Will. This is also the system used for skill proficiency with weapons and unarmed attacks, which stands to reason, but it also includes proficiency with armor, including unarmored defense. For instance, the Monk starts as Untrained in all armor but Expert in unarmored defense. Also, each class has certain abilities with a “class DC” that is the number the opponent rolls to resist the effect. Characters start as Trained in their class DC. Each class describes at which level the proficiency ranks for saves, attacks, class DC and defense increase; these do not require skill increase picks.

There is also a third element in this d20 system, which is varying degrees of effect. Almost all rolls (not just combat) can have a critical success (‘hit’) or critical failure (‘fumble’) and this is not necessarily a natural 20 or natural 1 but a margin. When a check meets a DC by 10 or more that is a critical success. When a check misses by 10 or more that is a critical failure. Needless to say, this can cause a certain variation in results if either the skill bonus or the DC are extremely high. (And at some point in the game, both will be the case.)

Otherwise, within these premises, the skill system is pretty straightforward. Certain skills have a common use (like using X Lore to Recall Knowledge within the field of the Lore skill’s title). Others, like Craft, are used during downtime to make items, including magical items. Skills can sometimes be used in combat; in fact the Athletics skill is now used as an opposed roll to cover all the unarmed “Combat Maneuvers” from the first edition. No more Combat Maneuver Bonus? Well, there’s one reason to endorse this game right there!

Chapter 5 is Feats. As in, the general feats that aren’t in the separate lists of class feats and can be bought by all characters. There is also a separate category of skill feats; as mentioned above, characters get skill feats every even level. “When you gain a skill feat, you must select a general feat with the skill trait; you can’t select a general feat that lacks the skill trait.” This quote, incidentally, is a taste of what the text usually reads like. There are exactly 17 feats which are general feats that do not apply to skills (like Toughness, which increases Hit Points and durability). All the other general feats are applied to skills, and some have a prerequisite that you have to be at a certain skill rank (e.g. Expert in Lore). As mentioned, each Background includes an assigned feat in addition to background skills, which means you really want to shop for your Background, because (as in other d20 games) some of these feats are better than others, and in this game some can provide special benefits when selected for the creation of a 1st-level character. For example, Bargain Hunter (a skill feat for Diplomacy that requires being Trained in Diplomacy) not only allows you to earn income in downtime by hunting for bargains at the bazaar, if you take this feat at 1st level, you start play with an additional 2 gold pieces.

This leads to the subject of Chapter 6, Equipment. All characters, even those who don’t wear armor, start with 15 gold pieces (GP). Lest that seem piddly, Pathfinder Second Edition is a silver piece economy – 1 GP is actually worth 10 SP. Lest that seem generous, chain mail is 6 GP and a longsword is 1 GP. PF2 directly lifts the Starfinder system for Bulk to determine encumbrance – a character can freely carry up to 5 Bulk plus Strength modifier. This is on a scale where a small item (like a piece of chalk) is “negligible”, a dagger or similar weight is “Light” bulk (each set of ten light items equals 1 Bulk) and larger items like swords and suits of armor are whole numbers.

The benefits of armor are less than they were in PF1. For instance, chain mail only provides +4 to Armor Class. However the new player has to factor in the aforementioned armor proficiency bonuses. Most characters are considered Trained in at least one type of armor (or ‘unarmored defense’) so that a 1st-level character who is unarmored or just wearing clothing, with no Dexterity or other modifiers, is at AC 13 for Trained proficiency. (If it’s a Monk with Expert proficiency, the AC is 15.) Thus a character who is Trained in chain mail (Medium Armor proficiency) increases the base AC to 17, and it will go up further if the proficiency level is increased. It also goes up automatically with level. Certain armors create a specialization bonus, which a character can only take advantage of with a certain feat or class feature. Chain mail for instance can absorb some of the effects of a critical hit.

Likewise weapons have a whole bunch of specialty features in addition to just doing damage. For example “Deadly” adds an additional damage die on a critical hit. This is distinguished from “Fatal” which means that on a critical hit the weapon’s base damage die increases to the listed die code. (A Pick that does 1d6 has the trait Fatal d10, which means a critical hit does d10 instead of d6. A Rapier that does 1d6 has the Deadly d8 trait, so it does a d8 on a critical hit in addition to standard crit damage.) All this is in addition to critical specialization effects, which again vary by weapon type and require certain qualifications to use.

Very conveniently, page 289 features “class kits” showing what a character of each class would best spend their 15 GP on, although even heavy armor characters like Champions and Fighters end up with a lot of extra GP because they’re only using hide armor. Basic gear lists include consumables like alchemist bombs, potions, and short-term talismans.

NEXT: Overview of Chapters 7 through 11! No! This isn’t done!

REVIEW: Jojo Rabbit

I have to confess: I’ve always thought Nazis were cool.

There is a certain theme in culture where people identify with Evil. In some cases it’s because of image (or as one supervillain called it, PRESENTATION!). We think of great villainy as being cool, badass and invincible, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxL8bVJhXCM

When in point of fact, villainy is usually a lot more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU

If you actually read about history, especially Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, you’ll see that most of the Nazis were pathetic mediocrities, and even the ones who had brains, like Albert Speer, essentially gave up their free will to become robots operating on faulty programming. Why? Fear. Fear of the people they hated, certainly, but also fear of themselves: fear of making a mistake, fear of taking responsibility for bad or unpopular decisions. Far better to join a personality cult where the Leader says he can do everything.

And if you wonder how, in Nazi Germany, one-third of the country could exterminate another third while the last third looked on, it’s because that last third was in fear of what the bad guys would do. You can see the psychology even now. Friday November 15, former Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovich, was giving her public testimony to Adam Schiff’s Congressional committee, as to how and why she was fired by the Viceroy for Russian North America. During the session, that person currently running the occupation government tweeted, “Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him.” Apparently he didn’t know (or care) that Schiff’s people were reading Twitter in real time and gave Schiff the tweet to read to Yovanovitch. Even Ken Starr, who knows a thing or two about impeachment, told Fox News, “The president was obviously not advised by counsel in deciding to do this tweet. (It was) extraordinarily poor judgment.” But after Schiff read the tweet to Yovanovitch, he asked what she thought, and she replied, “It’s very intimidating… I can’t speak to what the president is trying to do, but I think the effect is to be intimidating.”

Well, enough of that. Half of the reason this is going on is because a third of the country is intimidated by people that we can all perceive to be incompetent clowns, and the other half is because another third of the country identify with said clowns and think they’re badass. What we need is to let the air out of their tires. We need to go back to the approach of Mel Brooks and Hogan’s Heroes.

We need to Make Nazis Funny Again.

Jojo Rabbit is a film by New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi (most famous in this country for Thor: Ragnarok). It is about Johannes “Jojo” Betzler (Roman Griffin Davis), a 10-year old going to youth camp with the Deutsches Jungvolk, or junior arm of the Hitler Youth. This was a literal Nazi Boy Scouts where kids were expected to learn manly fascist pursuits like hunting and military exercises, as opposed to suspicious activities like reading and thinking. Jojo is a short unpopular boy whose sister has died of illness and whose father is presumed missing in action on the front, and so for companionship he has turned to an imaginary friend – Adolf Hitler (Waititi himself).

At first, Waititi’s character seems like a wonderful playmate for a 10-year old boy (apart from the whole Hitler thing). But after his peers brand him as “Jojo Rabbit” because he refused to kill a bunny rabbit with his bare hands, Jojo’s imaginary friend inspires him to a reckless act that renders him unfit for military training. Thus, he has to go back to live with his free-spirited mom (Scarlett Johannson) and soon discovers that Mom has sheltered a Jewish teenager (Thomasin McKenzie) in the walls of the upstairs room. And as with other stories about Jewish girls being forced to hide from the Gestapo, wackiness ensues.

In addition to Waititi using Hitler as the chorus of Jojo’s subconscious, the film has a whole slew of absurdities, like Aryan clones, the inevitable “German shepherds” joke, British rock songs and American actors using contemporary slang and fake German accents as they talk about “blowing schtuff up.” In short, Jojo Rabbit takes Nazism with all the seriousness it deserves, which is to say, none.

I mean, yes, there is a very sad turn of events in the last act, but you can’t set a movie in the last two years of Nazi Germany and expect it to be a complete barrel of laughs.

And at the end, what is the moral of the story? Some might say: “Love conquers all.” Others might say: “Don’t assume that your imaginary friend always has the best advice, especially when he’s Hitler.” My take is: “Don’t turn your government over to racist Know-Nothings who are only going to get people killed.” You would think we wouldn’t need to hit people over the head with that message, and yet, here we are.

Well, that’s the review. So until next time:
“Heil Hitler, guys.”

Oh, By The Way, Fuck You, Rand Paul

Fuck You, Rand Paul.

This is the first time in this essay that I have used the words: Fuck you, Rand Paul. There will be many more.

Because Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky appeared with Donald Trump on Monday night at a rally to get out the vote for Republican Virginia Governor Matt Bevin – and you already know where this is going – and decided to impress his boss. He told the crowd, “We know the name of the whistleblower,” referring to the hitherto anonymous White House insider who first reported Viceroy Trump’s call to the president of Ukraine – and later told reporters, “I’m more than willing to (name the whistleblower) and I probably will at some point…There is no law preventing anybody from saying the name.”

So let me begin my remarks with the words: Fuck you, Rand Paul.

I say this because as at least one journalist pointed out, Rand Paul HAD said, in 2014, ““We’ve got so many millions of government contractors that when they see something wrong, they should be able to report it without repercussions”.

The Daily Beast reported on November 6: “Shortly after Sen. Paul tweeted out an article that speculated in considerable detail about the identity of the whistleblower—with a photograph, a name, and details about the purported political history of a CIA professional—Russian state media followed suit.  As if on cue, the Kremlin-controlled heavy hitters—TASS, RT, Rossiya-1—disseminated the same information. But unlike Rand Paul, one of the Russian state media outlets didn’t seem to find the source—Real Clear Investigations—to be particularly impressive, and claimed falsely that the material was published originally by The Washington Post. “

According to Politico, within American media, “only a small cable TV channel supportive of the president and an ostensibly nonpartisan news site have each published the purported name of the whistleblower.”

So fuck you, #redpaul.

If I ever got one of those deep interview shows like Bill Maher or Henry Rollins or Zach Galifinakis, and I got the chance to interview Rand Paul, the first question I would ask him is this:
Senator, at what point in the Trump Administration did you decide that libertarianism equals kissing Donald Trump’s ass?

That isn’t even the worst of it. Rand Paul has been a dillhole for reasons completely unrelated to Trump. Most conspicuously, just this July Rand Paul and Mike Lee (R.-Utah) put a procedural hold on a bipartisan bill to help cover the medical costs of 9-11 first responders on the grounds that it was adding to our growing deficit. Jon Stewart, who has spent much of his time since The Daily Show advocating for 9-11 firefighters in Congress, told journalists, “He is a guy that put us in hundreds of billions of dollars in debt…. And now he’s going to tell us that a billion dollars a year over 10 years is just too much for us to handle? You know, there are some things that they have no trouble putting on the credit card, but somehow when it comes to the 9/11 first responder community—the cops, the firefighters, the construction workers, the volunteers, the survivors—all of a sudden, man, we’ve got to go through this.” In response, Paul referred to Stewart as “a scalawag and a ragamuffin.” (That’s another question I’d like to ask: ‘Senator Paul, on the scale of 19th Century insults, is ragamuffin a more or less insulting word than mountebank?’)

When I try to tell people that we’d be better off with a more libertarian approach to government, their usual reaction is that the premise of libertarianism is not freedom and tolerance for everyone, but “Fuck You, I’ve Got Mine.” And you know why they think that? Because YOU, Rand Paul, the most prominent elected advocate of libertarianism, think this penny wise-pound foolish approach to spending is an example of fiscal responsibility.

You cut off that aid – knowing that you couldn’t do so for long but that every day you did hold it up would cost those men medical care – and THAT is the hill that you choose to fight for fiscal conservatism and saving money? When you don’t say Jack over squat about the fact that Trump is on track to rack up more money in taxpayer-funded golf trips in four years than President Obama did in eight?

Fuck you, Rand Paul.

It is time for the libertarian movement to admit that Rand Paul is to libertarians what Kanye West is to black people. Seriously, he’s just like Kanye West: all it takes is a big fat ass to change his mind.

Which gets to the other relevant subject.

As we know, incumbent Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin lost his race to Democratic challenger Andy Beshear, son of the previous Governor. Which meant voters said not only Fuck You, Rand Paul, but (obviously) Fuck You Matt Bevin, Fuck You Mitch (the Bitch) McConnell, and especially FUCK YOU, DONALD TRUMP. And Bevin is of course trying to contest the results, likely by expecting the still-Republican held legislature to back him up, except that a lot of those Republicans are publicly trying to cool down such talk. And that might because while Bevin only trails Beshear by a little over 5,000 votes, Libertarian gubernatorial candidate John Hicks got 28,425 votes.

In response to the event, the official Facebook page of the Libertarian Party did this piece, most likely written by Nicholas Sarwark: https://www.facebook.com/LPKentucky/posts/10157252121401936

“In an ideal world, we elect Libertarian candidates and advance liberty. Failing that, we push mainstream candidates towards liberty to advance the cause.

But if we can’t do those things, we are always happy to split the vote in a way that causes delicious tears. Tonight there are plenty of delicious tears from Bevin supporters.

Had Matt Bevin not ditched his liberty Lt Governor for a Mitch McConnell picked anti liberty, corrupt running mate who has tried to eliminate Kentuckians jury trial rights, had Matt Bevin not presided over a huge sales tax increase, had Matt Bevin supported any of our key issues on criminal justice reform, marijuana legalization, expanded gaming, cutting taxes, or acted with the least bit of civility, we probably would not have run a candidate. Of course, he did the opposite. And here we are.

We split the vote. And we could not be more thrilled. If our friends in the major parties do not want this to happen again, they should think about passing ranked choice voting. And supporting our issues.

In the meantime, thank you to John Hicks, Ann Cormican, Kyle Hugenberg, Josh Gilpin and Kyle Sweeney for running. Your effort was appreciated.

For the Bevin supporters, your tears are delicious.”

And the comments on said Facebook page were amusing to say the least. One guy said: “What a joke. Truly embarrassed to call myself a Libertarian. Way to push people back to the two party.” Response: “Libertarian Party of Kentucky Triston Myers we looked up your voter registration. Please do not claim to be a libertarian when you are a registered Republican. Thanks for playing.”

Which pretty much sums up the “conservative” pushback in that thread.

Let’s go over this. One of the other alleged sympathizers in the thread posted, “Making the statement that you find the tears of hundreds of thousands of Kentuckians delicious shows that not only will your party never actually win an election, but that you the writer of the post are a poor excuse for a human! To relish in anyone’s pain is closer to fascism than democracy!” My response: “Yeah, I’m sure all those kids in the detention facilities will be glad to hear that conservatives don’t relish in anyone’s pain.” And another person posted: “Pain? It’s politics. If it means that much, maybe government and politics is too large.”

“Well, I’m never supporting the libertarian movement again.” Bitch, when did you EVER?
Did you vote for a Libertarian candidate? No? Are you a member of the Libertarian Party? NO? Then who cares what you think about the Libertarian Party? You have just as much right to call yourself a libertarian as Bernie Sanders. Get out of the city!

There’s a difference between a socialist who says “I vote Democratic because that’s the most practical option I have in the system” and a libertarian who says, “I vote Republican because that’s the most practical option I have in the system.” The socialists are actually moving the Democrats to socialism. The Republican Party is far less libertarian than it was even four years ago. And we know this because Rand Paul is far less libertarian than he was four years ago.

Oh by the way, fuck you, Rand Paul.

And fuck all y’all who think that the Republicans are libertarian or even the “lesser evil.” You’re the people who are making MY job harder.

You’re the people telling America, and the rest of the world, that a “small government” just means a government small enough to fit in your uterus. You don’t like abortion? Don’t get one. And by the same token, you don’t like gun control? Here’s a great way to discourage gun control AND prove you’re pro-life: Stop shooting so many people. Cause with the conspicuous exception of James Hodgkinson, most of the people who shoot up public places, mosques and synagogues aren’t fans of open borders and AOC.

You’re the people who make a fetish of tax cuts but let the Republicans pass a tax bill that primarily benefited their donors and cut state tax deductions in a lot of states. Like the man said, Governor Bevin refused to cut taxes in Virginia and passed a huge sales tax increase. And you’re accusing us of letting the pro-tax party win? I assume that you’re the anti-tax party? Prove it.

You’re the people who want us to get out of foreign entanglements but cheer while Trump betrays the Kurds one week then next week resettles our troops in north Iraq and Saudi Arabia to get everybody’s oil.

The libertarian Republican has a fat Venn overlap with the Good Christian(TM)Republican: they both profess to a philosophy that holds a higher value than the state but give greater power and authority to the state over the individual every chance they get, and never more so than under this Republican president. For example, Rand Paul.

On a related subject, fuck you, Rand Paul.

When you say, “I’m a libertarian, and I love Trump”, it’s like saying “I’m an Orthodox Jew, and I love bacon cheeseburgers.” Clearly, one priority outweighs the other.

And if you’re going to badmouth libertarians because we don’t worship Trump and don’t agree with you on abortion, or your endorsement of Republican policies that lead to less liberty and civil rights, don’t tell us that we’re letting the bad guys win. Our priorities are not yours, and when you tell the rest of the world they are, you do more to undermine the Right and give the Left a victory that they could not have achieved with their own limited imaginations and strategy.

Why, it’s ALMOST AS IF the Republican Party had been taken over as a long-term project from an ex-KGB chief to undermine the primary opponent to Russian hegemony and make the left spectrum of politics look more attractive in comparison.

And don’t whine at us cause we took votes you didn’t deserve. Cause I distinctly remember one Trumpnik friend whining after the election even though his team won.

“Nevada would have went to Trump if he had received the votes that Gary Johnson received. Colorado would have went to Trump if he had received the votes that Gary Johnson received. New Mexico ditto. Minnesota ditto. Maine ditto. Popular vote total ditto.” And then he went, “I am glad that your (Libertarian) votes didn’t allow Hillary to win, but that last entry would at least have kept some of her supporters from being so disruptive.”

And I wrote: “Thank you so SO much. I am going to bring up this point EVERY SINGLE TIME some liberal wants to read me the riot act cause I voted for Gary Johnson. Because we all know that if Hillary had won the Electoral College, your side would be calling me an Antichrist and their side would be buying me a beer.”

Fuck You, CNN

You know how I could say that? Because years before Trump, there were close state elections in Nevada where the Democrat won by less points than the Libertarian vote, and I heard Republicans howl like scalded cats for losing votes that they wrongly took for granted, just as the Democrats whined in 2016. And I knew that if the tables were turned and Republicans again lost a race by the third-party margin, Republicans would howl just as loud as the Clintonistas did in 2016. And wow, wouldn’t ya know, I was right.

I know that libertarians aren’t good at appealing to the center and quite a few of us take a delight in scaring the straights. Starchild. That guy who took colloidal silver and turned his skin blue. And of course, Nicholas Sarwark. But none of those guys want to separate migrant families and put them in cages. And contrary to liberal belief, the government hasn’t been run by Milton Friedman nerds for the past three years. Because the first thing those people would have told Trump is, tariff wars never work.

Now I know that liberals and conservatives might think that people like me and Nicholas Sarwark are flippant and “glibertarian,” but really, we’re just trying to make you grow the fuck up. Both “real” parties assume that the worst thing in the world would be the other party taking charge. And face it: you both have good reason to think so. In 2016, Donald Trump won Wisconsin and other states by less than the margin of Gary Johnson’s votes, and liberals wailed that the theo-fascists would take over Washington. And so they did. And this week, the “conservatives” are wailing that because of John Hicks, the socialists and gun-grabbers and baby-killers will take over in Kentucky. And they will.

Here’s the joke, neither one of your parties deserves to win, but as long as you insist that we can only vote for the two of you, one of you WILL win any given election. So the punch line is that one of you was going to win this election, and one of you was going to lose. And if Libertarians ARE an unpopular outlier, if Matt Bevin did win the last time, and he didn’t win this time, that means at least one of three things: Libertarians got more votes than last time, Democrats got more votes than last time, or fewer people voted Republican than last time. Quite likely all of the above.

Which is exactly what happened to Republicans in 2012 when Mitt Romney ran against President Obama and what happened to Hillary Clinton in 2016. It would have happened whether Libertarians and Greens were in the race at all. So I’m not exactly shaking in my boots at all you whiners who say you’re leaving the libertarian movement because we’re not “conservative” enough for you. The reason Bevin lost is because a lot more people who used to vote Republican are leaving YOUR party, and you will continue to lose elections this way until you run out of elections to lose.

Apropos of nothing, fuck you, Rand Paul.

The fact is, Libertarians ARE the common-sense middle. Republicans think that Democrats want to turn America into a socialist nanny state. Democrats think that Republicans want to turn America into a corporatist banana republic. Libertarians think they’re both right.

At some point, the “greater evil” is going to win an election, unless one party succeeds at turning America into a one-party banana republic. And if it seems like me, and a lot of the Libertarians on Tuesday night, seem to be sliding towards the Democrats, it’s only because the Republicans are far more likely to desire that outcome. To paraphrase David Frum: If democracy interferes with the conservatives’ agenda, they will not modify conservatism, they will abandon democracy. But in the meantime, Democrats are going to win elections, just as Republicans were killing Democrats (figuratively) until everybody saw how incompetent they were. Is this the end of the world? Cause it’s happened a lot. I think back to that guy in the forum who said: “Pain? It’s politics. If it means that much, maybe government and politics is too large.”

Because after all, we are Libertarians. We have survived the end of the world more times than you can count. So in between these races, we have to live our lives as though the world didn’t end.

In fact, I would say that’s one implicit point of the libertarian movement: the idea that politics, conquest and domination are not the be-all and end-all of existence.

Because as we have seen, there are worse things in the world than losing. You could proverbially win the whole world by selling your soul. You could seize power by hook or by crook (emphasis on the crook) and once in charge become such insufferable, cretinous goons that the rest of the country got over how much they hated Those Other Guys and voted for them to flush you out because they hate you that much more. And so the “worst thing in the world happens” because you practically begged for it.

And that’s what happens when you confuse libertarianism, small government and small-r republicanism with the anti-liberty, Big Government and anti-republican agenda of the personality cult that is currently animating the shell of the Republican Party like a pack of rats inside a week-old corpse.

In conclusion, if you the reader remember only four words from this essay, I want them to be these:

Fuck You, Rand Paul.

REVIEW: Watchmen (HBO)

Watchmen, written by Alan Moore, is quite likely the greatest story ever written for comicbook format. It started when DC Comics obtained the rights to use old characters from the Charlton Comics company (including Steve Ditko’s The Question) and then hired Moore to write for those characters. When Moore proposed a murder mystery where at least one of DC’s new characters got killed, his editor proposed that he make slightly altered versions of those characters in a new setting- which had no continuity with the universe of Superman and Batman. The result was both very adult and very philosophical, in which Steve Ditko’s Objectivism was transmuted into Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism: in an apparently random universe, the only thing that gives life meaning is the responsibility of making a moral choice. Even if that means putting on a mask to fight crime.

The thing is, Moore and artist Dave Gibbons also wrote Watchmen on the condition that the rights would revert back to them once the comic series was no longer in publication – which given its success, means never. So Moore was so pissed he now refuses to let his name be associated with any of the work he did for DC- even though the Watchmen characters he made were themselves based on someone else’s material. In any event DC continues to exploit its intellectual property for all it’s worth, such as Zach Snyder’s semi-successful adaptation of the Watchmen story, a recent comic book crossover where Moore’s universe was in fact merged with the DC Universe, and now this TV series by Damon Lindelof (Lost, The Leftovers).

Given that the comic was a complex limited series with 12 issues, with sex, profanity and a FUCKTON of violence, a lot of us thought that a Watchmen adaptation should have been a limited series on HBO in the first place. But since the story was already done by Snyder, DC actually decided not to reboot something they’d done only a few years before (like Batman) and instead went in a totally new direction.

Whereas the original story was set in the 1980s, the Watchmen series goes into 2019, meaning that Lindelof’s story is set in the same universe, over 30 years after the events of the comic. What makes this piece interesting and valid is that it takes the background universe and uses it to present a setting that actually has some relevance to the current situation. For instance: Latter-day critics of Moore’s Watchmen point out that despite the series being set in 1980s New York, there were no black characters among the principals. (In that respect, it was sort of like Friends, if Friends was a R-rated drama about murderous vigilantes.) This series is set in Tulsa, Oklahoma, with a multiracial police force and a cast of characters centered around Regina King, who plays a police operative called “Sister Night.” Now, why cops have to have secret identities and costumes is a background element that isn’t immediately explained in the pilot, nor is the connection between King’s character and the bloody massacre of Tulsa’s black community by racists in 1921. Presumably this is the sort of thing that gets drawn out and explained over the course of the series, in the same way that the comicbook drew the reader in by gradually explaining details, like how Nixon became president-for-life partially because another superhero won the war in Vietnam.

So given that the story starts in progress (as it did during the comic) it really isn’t necessary to have read Moore’s Watchmen to see this series, although the tie-ins are important for anyone who has. In the comic, the vigilante Rorschach left his journal with a right-wing publisher, hoping to expose the main plot of the story after he was killed. Well, in the ensuing period, his journal apparently became the inspiration for a masked racist goon squad called The Seventh Kavalry who seem to be the main bad guys of this series. (Historically, the 7th Cavalry was the unit under General Custer that got trashed at Little Big Horn.) And this was one of the things I didn’t like about the TV pilot. Rorschach in the comic might have been a right-winger with a LOT of issues (namely misogyny) but he never seemed actively racist. Now again, that might be because the main characters weren’t interacting with black people much at all. But given how many heroes in this setting (especially from the World War II generation) had racist opinions, Rorschach didn’t seem like that type. Given his other positions though, he didn’t seem like he was directly opposed to racism, which may be the point. This wouldn’t be the first time that racist goons took the writings of some dead person and interpreted them to support their position whether it fit or not.

In this respect, the other thing that distinguishes Lindelof’s project from the comic is that this world seems to be the mirror image of liberal fears of conservative dominance and the ultimate expression of the conservative paranoia that drives them to seek dominance. Since Nixon died, Robert Redford has been president for over 30 years, racial reparation is called “Redfordations” and gun control is so strict that cops have to go through bureaucratic procedure just to access their pistols in the field.

The one bit of this production that rings false is the median scenes featuring Jeremy Irons as “Lord of a Country Estate.” Because if he is supposed to be Adrian Veidt, the script does him even more of a disservice than it does Rorschach. It’s always fun to watch Jeremy Irons chew the scenery, but his character actually is a Republic Serial villain. In the comic, Veidt would freely kill people as a means to an end, but not as gleefully as Irons does. Plus, Veidt was supposed to be an American of German background. Producers have so far cast him as a decadent Eurotrash played by Matthew Goode and now Irons. Whereas the original dialogue and artwork conveyed more a plain-spoken American type. If anything, the elderly Veidt should have been played by Robert Redford himself, or maybe Brad Pitt.

But if nothing else, you can say that Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen is timely (so to speak). So far, I’d say this is like a couple of other bastard progeny of Alan Moore’s DC Comics work: The Sean Connery version of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (LXG) and the Constantine movie starring Keanu Reeves. If you went into them assuming they had anything to do with the source material other than the starting premise, it would only make your head hurt. But if you looked at them as their own things, they were surprisingly entertaining. I think of Watchmen the same way, and who knows, it might actually have something to say at the end of it.

REVIEW: Joker

“Dying is easy. Comedy – THAT’s hard.”

This Saturday, one of my friends wanted to see Joker with me, my roommate and another friend. And after we saw it, I said, “remember Gary, this was YOUR idea.”

Professional critics have pointed out that director Todd Phillips (The Hangover) has taken some pretty obvious inspiration from two of the classics Robert DeNiro made with director Martin Scorsese: Taxi Driver, in which a complete loser succumbs to his dark side and achieves a kind of ascension, and The King of Comedy, in which an even bigger loser becomes a supervillain because he completely fails at standup comedy. These elements are actually linked in the character played by Robert DeNiro in this movie, a local late-night talk show host in Gotham City who is an inspiration to the main character, Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) who struggles with mental illness and poverty even as he writes standup comedy and works as a hired clown, because he sees his life’s mission as “spreading joy and laughter to everyone.” So already you know this isn’t going to work out.

The reputation of this film has far preceded it, with said professional critics bagging on Joker not so much for its quality as a movie as for the message they think it’s sending. Gotham is clearly a stand-in for the failed administration of New York in the 1970s, prior to Rudy Guiliani (MY, how times have changed). In this age of disturbed “incel” gunmen, an unpopular and mentally disturbed person who turns to violence to make an impact seems to be too close to home. And as Bill Maher said months before, in regard to the remake of It, “if you’re trying to make a movie about a badly-painted clown who terrorizes the neighborhood – you’re a bit late.”

Reviews frequently use phrases like “numbing” and “empty.” Kevin Fallon at The Daily Beast called Joker “meaningless.” One review went into political analysis, describing the pivotal event that turns Arthur into a murderer (like that’s spoiling anything), getting on the subway in costume after getting fired from his clown job and being harassed and beaten by three drunks. He shoots them all in a scene that the critic describes as evoking the 1984 subway shooting by Bernhard Goetz of non-white teenagers. At the same time, critic Richard Brody admits that the drunks in Joker are white, but doesn’t point out that the men turn out to be connected to a certain millionaire’s company. He presents Joker as “an intensely racialized movie” in which the overt aspects of racism are “whitewashed” (as in the subway scene), but if anyone seems “racialized,” it’s Brody himself, who sees Joker as being a parody not of a Scorsese film, but of none other than Black Panther.

A lot of the backlash seems to be less the film as it actually is than the perception that critics brought to it in advance. So why is Joker such a threat to the culture? Why is this Todd Phillips/Joaquin Phoenix Joker somehow more offensive or dangerous than the Christopher Nolan/Heath Ledger Joker?
Well, for one thing, Joaquin Phoenix makes the Heath Ledger Joker look like Mr. Spock.

For another thing, the Heath Ledger Joker was never intended to be a character study. The whole point was that he was a character without a past. (Or as the Alan Moore Joker put it, ‘I prefer (my past) to be multiple choice.’) He is somehow easier to accept as a character who came into being ex nihilo as an Agent of Chaos.

Arthur Fleck, on the other hand, is presented as a product (if not a victim) of circumstances: child abuse, class struggle, an unfeeling or hard-pressed government that cuts social services, the works. The fact that there are violent losers in the real world who could claim such circumstances (and do use them to justify anti-social acts) makes the stakes seem that much more real to some people. Indeed, this movie goes so far into “realism” that it makes Christopher Nolan’s unrelentingly grim take on the Batman mythos look as wacky and family-friendly as Batman ’66.

Moreover, The Dark Knight is a movie where Good wins. Batman (and Lucius Fox) bet that the people of Gotham will not do the evil thing to save themselves under pressure, and because they do not, the Joker’s scheme is foiled. Joker is not nearly so optimistic. Arthur/Joker is simultaneously leader and follower of a stochastic wave of violence, in which an aristocratic class that thinks it knows better than the common rabble are pitted against a “kill the rich” mob determined to prove them right.

The Dark Knight was in 2008, only 11 years ago. I wonder what changed since then?

Joker is a good movie, in the sense that it is a unique personal vision that is perfectly executed. It’s just not a very uplifting one. Joker does NOT put the “fun” in “funeral.” As my friend Don said, “It was deeply disturbing, and then it was deeply disturbing over and over again.” We also agreed that it was more disturbing than the before-the-movie trailer for Doctor Sleep, which is the sequel to The Shining.

Still, Joker isn’t as disturbing as the trailer to Cats.

Nothing is more disturbing than that.

Ukraine Clown Posse

(credit for title to Virginia Bauman on Twitter)

Just a little over two weeks ago, September 21, I went on Facebook and posted a little tweet by Libertarian Party Chairman Nicholas Sarwark: “Nancy Pelosi is one of the most experienced House speakers of the last century. She’s only 70 votes short of an impeachment inquiry. She knows how to whip a vote. She doesn’t want impeachment. She wants a Democratic President to able to abuse the office like this one.”

And it got flak from some of my mainstream liberal Facebook friends, the kind of people who think that Nancy Pelosi actually knows what she’s doing. I was told “she also seems worried that an impeachment battle in DC will boost (Trump’s) approval ratings and help get him reelected. I really loathe to say it, but she might be right about that.” I said “the only reason she’s even Speaker is because voters wanted to put a check on this Administration.” I was told, “and what mechanism would stop him without awakening the beast and getting him elected again? The only thing that will work is get him out of office and try him for his crimes.”

You know, the same old scaredy-cat posture of learned helplessness, where Democrats assume that it’s better to do nothing than antagonize an enemy who’s already out to get them.

But what a difference a week makes, huh?

The Democrats are all, “What gives? The poll support for impeachment has closed the gap! It’s actually popular! We would have done this earlier if we’d known there was more support! What changed?”

And my answer is, “your party finally grew some balls.”

The flak I got was on the basis that there are certain rules that necessarily apply and can be predicted. The whole premise of Democratic passivity – which differs from but does not contradict Sarwark’s suspicion that Pelosi just wants the next Democrat to have Trump’s level of unchallenged power – is the naive assumption that Trump is just a mutation that will be resolved in the next cycle, and it would be better to just wait out the next election rather than antagonize the other party, which as we know, is going to be antagonized whether one does anything or not. This is of course based on the belief that there is going to be a free and fair election. In the fact of Donald Trump’s pressuring a foreign head of government for opposition research, it should be clear – even to Democratic leadership – that Trump has no intention of having a free and fair election, and neither does his Party. Thus, whether Pelosi wanted to or not, she had to act. And pretty typically, the Democrats only got off their asses once their own power and privileges were threatened.

And even more typically, Republicans use the same language that Democrats used during Bill Clinton’s impeachment, like what he did “doesn’t rise to the level” of impeachment and removal from office. Well, if perjury over sex rises to that level (so to speak) why does withholding military aid from a country under subversion from its neighbor – a neighbor that Trump just happens to have begged for opposition research in the past, and that he just happens to have handed intelligence from our allies while president – on the condition of a “favor” to research Ukrainian connections to a cyber-research firm that exposed Russian hacking of the Democratic Party and to research Hunter Biden’s connection to Ukrainian business NOT rise to the level of an impeachable offense? As far as the Party of Trump is concerned, the real scandal is that Burisma paid Hunter Biden 50,000 dollars. Sure. Eric and Donald Jr. are running a business that is clearly not a blind trust. Ivanka is attending meetings of NATO countries with her father. And her husband is running diplomacy with Saudi Arabia, when nobody in the Republican Party can tell us what Jared Kushner’s JOB is or what he is actually tasked to do. But sure, let’s get our undies in a wad over Hunter Biden and his FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS.

Cause that’s the way you’re supposed to say it now. At least if you’re a Republican on TV. Loudly and righteously. As in, “I’m sorry your husband got shot, Mrs. Lincoln, but can we focus on the fact that Burisma paid Hunter Biden FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS??”

Thing is, as much as Democrats have cause to regret their bargain with Bill Clinton now (in this politically correct age when a grown man can’t manipulate a girl into sex in the privacy of his own Oval Office), they did at least get something out of it. He was popular. The economy was actually good. They got a lot of legislation done, and some people other than rich donors liked it. What exactly are Republicans getting by fighting so hard for Trump? Why is this fatty orange hill the one they want to die on?

On September 27, Trump twitted:

“To show you how dishonest the LameStream Media is, I used the word Liddle’, not Liddle, in discribing Corrupt Congressman Liddle’ Adam Schiff. Low ratings CNN purposely took the hyphen out and said I spelled the word little wrong. A small but never ending situation with CNN! “

Or, “I’m going to nitpick your misspelling of a word I made up, and I’m going to do so by exposing the fact that I can’t tell an apostrophe from an accent mark from a hyphen.”

See, this is why, even now, I find it hard to call Trump a Nazi. Not that he isn’t just that evil and racist. Not that he doesn’t intend to turn America into a one party thug regime. It’s just that he’s so fucking BAD at it. I mean, look at this, he can’t even do Grammar Nazi right.

And yet, this is the level of mastermind that Republicans think is presidential. And it always causes one to ponder the question, why is it that people who are NOT dumber than wet camel shit continue to worship someone who is? Well, I may have finally found the answer.

I have said, more than once and in more than one place, that the secret to Donald Trump’s political success is that Donald Trump is what the average Donald Trump voter would be if they had money. Well, it turns out there is a new study out that makes much the same assertion, only with academic credentials.

It’s detailed in a recent article for The Atlantic, appropriately titled “The Most Dangerous Way to Lose Yourself.” Essentially, people will do certain things to preserve their sense of identity, even counterproductive things, if their sense of self is essentially negative. They may also display a certain amount of “team spirit,” like if you grew up as a Dallas Cowboys fan way back in the day and then Jerry Jones took over and the first thing he did was fire Tom Landry and every dumbass thing that happened to the team since proceeded from there, yet you still go along with what Jerry Jones wants because you’re a Cowboys fan, and what are you going to do, quit being a Cowboys fan?

But the article takes this sense of identification and goes deeper.

“Over the past decade, a new conceptualization has gained attention. It began with the seeds of an idea after the attacks on 9/11, (William) Swann says, in that the terrorists’ actions seemed to him to be driven by unusually powerful group identities. A willingness to die—and to kill thousands of others in the process—goes beyond simple allegiance. He reasoned that these people had essentially taken on the group identity as their own.

“Swann gradually developed the concept and deemed it “identity fusion.” Along with a collaborator named Angel Gómez, he defined it in 2009 as when someone’s “personal and social identities become functionally equivalent.”

“When people are fused, your personal identity is now subsumed under something larger,” says Jack Dovidio, a psychology professor at Yale. One way researchers test for fusion is to ask people to draw a circle that represents themselves, and a circle that represents another person (or group). Usually people draw overlapping circles, Dovidio explains. In fusion, people draw themselves entirely inside the other circle.

“…By a similar token, pundits often chalk “radical” behavior up to pathology, or simply to a vague “mental illness” or religious or political extremism. But fusion offers a framework that involves an ordered thought process. It is thought of as distinct from blind obedience (often assumed to be the case in cults and military violence), in which a person might follow orders and torture a prisoner, either unquestioningly or out of fear for personal safety. In fusion, people become “engaged followers.” These people will torture because they have adopted the value system that views the torture as justifiable. Engaged followers do so of their own volition, with enthusiasm.

“…The fusion might explain some apparent contradictions in ideology, Dovidio says. Even people who typically identify as advocates of small or no government might endorse acts of extreme authoritarianism if they have fused with Trump. In fusion, those inconsistencies simply don’t exist, according to Dovidio: Value systems are only contradictory if they’re both activated, and “once you step into the fusion mind-set, there is no contradiction.”

“…Fundamentally, fusion is an opportunity to realign the sense of self. It creates new systems by which people can value themselves. A life that consists of living up to negative ideas about yourself does not end well. Nor does a life marked by failing to live up to a positive self-vision. But adopting the values of someone who is doing well is an escape. If Donald Trump is doing well, you are doing well. Alleged collusion with a foreign power might be bad for democracy, but good for an individual leader, and therefore good for you. “Fusion satisfies a lot of need for people,” Dovidio says. “When you fuse with a powerful leader, you feel more in control. If that person is valued, you feel valued.”

Even if the identity fusion theory did not exist to describe the current phenomenon, we are clearly looking at a situation where Trump is where he is because a critical percentage of the country wants him there, and they want him there because they identify with him to a truly bizarre level. They think he “fights” for them, even when that just means he’s telling them what they want to hear. (When ARE we going to lock Hillary up, anyway?) They think he’s one of them because even though he isn’t, in broad measure he is – an aristocrat whose crassness means he has never been fully accepted as such, someone who despite his background shares many of the beliefs of “flyover country.” A man whose persecution complex and inflated sense of victimhood almost approaches that of his fan club. And to the extent that he doesn’t share their beliefs, he knows that his survival depends on telling them what they want to hear, even when they themselves know he’s lying.

This is why people who are by no means stupid end up becoming Trumpniks. In a certain sense, they’re self-programmed. And now, these people believe in Trump under the impression that he’s invincible, not realizing that the reason he’s been untouchable is because his “base” has made it politically unprofitable to confront him. What they also don’t realize – or don’t care about – is that growing numbers of Republicans in the Congress are retiring, because some of them are not victims of identity fusion, they just know which way the wind is blowing. And without a party in Congress, it is that much less likely that the Republican Party will get anything done. What exactly are “conservatives” fighting for, if all they’ve got to fight for is Trump? If a Party consists only of Trump and his ever-changing moods, is it even a political party?

It’s like a dog that chews a bone and tastes the marrow. He chews even harder and breaks the bone, splintering it. The marrow comes out and he chews even harder. The splinters break his gums. He fixates on the taste and digs in deeper, not realizing he’s tasting his own blood.

It really is a sort of faith. There is a critical difference between “conservatives” (read: Trumpniks) and Christians, however.

At the Last Supper, Jesus predicted that even Peter would betray him three times before the cock crowed in the morning. After the Romans arrested Jesus, Peter was recognized by a servant girl, but he denied knowing Jesus. She asserted “he is one of them (the followers of Jesus) but again Peter denied it. At one point, Peter was spotted by one of the High Priest’s men, and again he denied knowing Jesus. And at that point the rooster crowed.

Whereas over the past three years, Republicans have learned more and more about how ungodly their Leader is, and how much his position as leader makes a mockery of their claims to piety. And still, none of the party “leadership” will speak out against him, and the redcaps in social media are if anything more defiantly supportive than ever.

So congratulations, conservatives. You’ve proven that you’re more loyal to Trump than you are to Jesus.

Somehow I don’t think this cult will last as long, though.

Gary Busey for National Security Advisor

To the extent that there is a real difference between Donald Trump’s fan club and the pre-Trump Republican Party, Trumpniks tend to share leftists’ and libertarians’ disdain for America’s perpetual military commitments overseas. So a lot of otherwise anti-Trump people saw the new president’s disdain for war and neo-conservatism as a silver lining in his election. And then he hired John Bolton to succeed National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, when Bolton was one of the architects of the Bush Administration’s Iraq invasion, the exact sort of neocon adventure that Trumpublicans are supposed to be against.

During his tenure (starting April 2018) Bolton did indeed clash with Trump on a lot of foreign policy issues, even if he reinforced the Trump team’s hawkish stand against Iran. As it turned out though, Bolton had the right take on Trump’s dovish relations with North Korea, pointing out that the North Korean regime was testing new strategic missiles, countering Trump’s statements to the contrary.

But, according to the usual Beltway gossip, what actually killed this marriage made in White Trash Hell was Bolton’s objections to Trump’s secret negotiations with the Taliban on the month of the 9-11 anniversary. Said conflicts may have prompted Trump to announce that the hitherto unrevealed negotiations were being cancelled, allegedly on the grounds that the Taliban had killed one of our soldiers, as opposed to all the other days when they aren’t trying to do so. And while Trump apparently wanted to spring this as a stunt to convey the message that he was standing up for our troops, the rest of Washington got the opposite message from the fact that the Taliban were even invited to Camp David. The former US Ambassador to Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, told The New Yorker: “We basically turned on the government, (we’ve) said, ‘It’s your fucking fault that we’re losing.’ ” He said that the optics of shaking hands with people still killing every American soldier they can are “mind-boggling” for the U.S. military, too. “The Pentagon would be in a fury: you kill our soldiers and get invited to Camp David.”

I mean, yes, we basically have to cut bait in Afghanistan, but the Trump Administration position seems to be just as optimistic as it is with North Korea: we withdraw all our forces and trust that the Taliban will peacefully co-exist within the elected Afghan government. And if you believe that, Henry Kissinger has a Nobel Peace Prize he’d like to sell you.

My friend Don looked at this week’s news and told me, “the White House has a turnover rate worse than a McDonald’s.” I said, “Donald Trump is like the guy who goes to the counter at McDonald’s and says, ‘I want to speak to your manager.’ And the counter boy says, ‘Sir, you ARE my manager.'”

But in the wake of all this, our accidental president has told us that he’s going to have a new National Security Advisor next week. Clearly the challenge (as seen with both Bolton and McMaster) is to have somebody who can get along with Donald Trump and still present himself as a persuasive figure on the world stage. And if I may presume, I think I have the perfect candidate for the job.

Gary Busey.

As we know, Gary Busey and Trump go way back, with Busey appearing on two seasons of Celebrity Apprentice in the last decade, before Trump left the “reality TV” business to develop a more lucrative career by screwing the country as a politician. The two men are also fairly similar politically; indeed, Busey actually preceded Trump in showing that you could still have a career after proving to be mentally unhinged.

And actually, as a government official, there would be quite a few points in Busey’s favor.

I’m pretty sure that Gary Busey is at least as qualified for diplomatic work as John Bolton.

North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un seems to have a real affinity for eccentric extroverts.

The post of National Security Advisor does not require Senate approval. Which is good, because even Mitch “the Bitch” McConnell might gag if he had to bring Gary Busey on the floor.

And Gary Busey always has an ambitious, positive approach to the world, which would be a contrast to Donnie and his Resting Trump Face.

But you might say, “wait.” You might say, “James. Isn’t Gary Busey, like, actually brain damaged?” And I say, So? Was anybody who voted for Trump afraid of a little brain damage? Would brain damage be a problem for working in this Administration? I would argue that it’s a plus. At this stage, what person in their right mind would work for this Administration? The last two National Security Advisors were dignified, rational men. And Donald Trump has shown us that he does not care for rationality or dignity. Fortunately, Gary Busey has left rationality and dignity far behind. He already has a rapport with Trump, and besides, anybody who voted for Trump clearly wanted a government that “works” like Celebrity Apprentice, so you might as well just admit it.

What is that remaining hesitation you have? You know what that is? That is FEAR. And do you know what FEAR is? FEAR is False Evidence Appearing Real. You know who said that? Gary Busey. And if you can’t trust Gary Busey, you can’t trust ANYBODY.

Totally Brexited Up

The Conservative government of Great Britain, prior to the resignation of Prime Minister Theresa May, had declared that, deal or no deal, they are going to leave the European Union on October 31. This position was arrived at by party insiders and “hard Brexit” advocates including Boris Johnson, who has since become Prime Minister (in an internal Conservative Party vote). Having gamed the opportunity for the power to enforce his policy, Johnson as Prime Minister has since rapidly cemented his reputation as a Donald Trump who can actually speak English.

In an implicit acknowledgement that the whole Brexit is no longer very popular, Johnson first decided to “prorogue” Parliament for five weeks to forestall debate on the terms of departure, which is legal by parliamentary rules but alienated members from all parties, including some Conservatives. Perhaps as a result, Johnson lost not one, not two, but three votes before the suspension of Parliament, with the House of Commons first voting to pass a bill requiring approval for a no-deal Brexit. A vote to pass the bill on second reading succeeded the next day, and Johnson’s request for a general election failed to pass a vote. Several Conservatives voted against their own party on these measures. Johnson attempted to enforce party discipline by threatening dissident Conservatives with expulsion, only to have many members call his bluff, resulting in the ouster of several, including not only Mr. Soames (Winston Churchill’s grandson) but Johnson’s own brother. Even before that, his parliamentary majority consisted of only one vote, and with the purges, that majority is now gone.

And yet, because of that parliamentary setup (which makes the chicanery of American politics seem simple and easy to follow), there is still a chance for Boris to come out on top. This is the thesis of Andrew Sullivan’s latest weekly column in New York magazine. Sullivan is an old-school (C)onservative who knew Johnson back in the day, and he believes that a general election will be called in response to Johnson’s gambit (although not necessarily on his terms) and that this will in effect be a second Brexit referendum. “This time, the choice will be starker than in 2016: a no-deal Brexit or staying in the E.U. And this week, by firing the dissenters, Johnson has succeeded in making the Tories the uncomplicated “Leave Now” party. By clearing up any confusion, Johnson will thereby stymie the threat to Tory seats by the Brexit Party, which stormed to victory in the recent European elections. … And that is a Tory strength, as it stands. Just before Johnson won the leadership, Labour and the Tories were roughly even: around 26 percent each. Right now, the Tories have recovered under Johnson, as Brexit Party voters have come home, and have a clear ten point lead over Labour: 34/24 percent. The Brexit party still has 13 percent. Now that the Tory position on Brexit is the same as the Brexit Party’s, they form a no-deal bloc of 48 percent of the vote. The unabashedly pro-Remain party, the Liberal Democrats, have 18 percent, the Greens 5 percent, which added to the Labour total, gives the anti-no-deal bloc a total of 46 percent. It’s still close however you look at it.” Sullivan sums up: “Johnson has a clear case: that he stands for respecting a democratic vote to leave the E.U., that his opponents are elitists trying to defeat the will of the people in favor of a foreign entity, the E.U., and that Jeremy Corbyn cannot be allowed into Number 10.”

Yeah, I’m not so sure. It is quite true that Labour leader Corbyn, simply by being Corbyn, has miraculously squandered the immense advantage he has in the unpopularity and fecklessness of the Conservatives, since in this environment, he could have been the Prime Minister now. It is also true, as Sullivan says, that Labour itself is feckless, largely because it has never been as strong in support of “Remain” as the Conservatives are in support of “Leave.”

Way back at the time, I had said that the results of the Brexit referendum (in which 37% of Labour voters backed Brexit) indicated that there is a substantial group of people that rejects the closed-off, neo-liberal, “globalist” establishment, and that in the case of the Labour statistic, this group isn’t limited to right-wingers. I had also said that the Brexit vote (in the summer of 2016) could be a warning to those who think they know what “the people” want and what’s best for them. And this turned out to be the case. Trump got elected president, and we have had alt-right parties gain success in Germany and elsewhere. And the fact that the anti-establishment sentiment is actually a common cause of both the nationalist Right and the socialist Left means that an anti-globalist policy isn’t necessarily a reactionary and racist position. Nobody thinks that Jeremy Corbyn is a racist. Unless you’re Andrew Sullivan.

The problem, especially in the cases of the US and the UK, is that discontent with mainstream liberalism doesn’t mean that the conservative wing of the country knows what it’s doing, and since they don’t, people have to live with a government that is both malicious and incompetent. Which means that the conservatives currently in charge have to present themselves as the last defense against Evil Socialism, when all they have to recommend them is malice and incompetence. Now, we’ve seen that this is actually the selling point for the Trump Administration, but in the case of Brexit, it may not be enough, especially because of that unacknowledged Labour influence on the Leave vote.

Sullivan’s bet is that people are more sick of Corbyn and the Left than they are of the Conservatives, but the history of Brexit itself undermines the case. The referendum was first proposed by then Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, because he was actually in favor of remaining in the European Union under re-negotiated conditions, but was pressured by hardline Conservatives and the UK Independence Party (UKIP). The Brexit referendum was intended as a defense of the moderate, negotiated position, and when the Leave vote won, Cameron resigned his seat. This is how Theresa May became Prime Minister. She herself had supported Remain, but felt obliged to uphold the Conservative position that a Leave vote meant that the government should enact a plan to leave the EU. After almost a year in office, having previously said there would be no general election, May made a “surprise statement” announcing a snap election to seek support for the Conservative position. As a result of the 2017 election, the Conservatives actually lost seats, and while Labour failed to capitalize, the Conservatives needed to form a coalition with the hard-right Unionist Party of Ulster to keep their majority. The main reason May’s government held up as long as it did is that it took this long to build up a consensus for a successor.

The pattern thus far has been that Conservatives want to promote a policy which is both controversial and has a real level of support. In order to bolster support, they use the election system in the hopes of increasing their majority and reinforcing a mandate for the policy. And the end result causes them to lose seats and by implication, support for the policy. This was the case with Cameron’s referendum, it was the case with May’s snap election, it has been the case with Johnson’s parliamentary votes, and there is no reason to believe that that will not be the case with another snap election.

Why? It might have been a lot easier if the people who are always going on about enforcing the choice of the Leave voters actually had any sort of plan to do so. If they’d had any sort of time table to work within a deadline, as opposed to setting a deadline and hoping somehow a time table would come to them before then. If they’d considered that they still had to work with European Union negotiators who now have that much less reason to deal with the Conservatives. If they’d considered the other practical consequences of their policy, namely the fact that the United Kingdom still has a land border because of Ulster, which means that a “hard” Brexit could restore a hard border with Ireland since the two nations will no longer be in the same economic community, and the economic and social consequences of that could lead to the result that British foreign policy has been trying to prevent ever since the Irish state was founded – the loss of Ulster and the reunification of Ireland.

This leads to another point. It has been said that a crucial advantage of the Right in politics is the idea that they don’t want more government. They have an advantage over the Left in that the Left does want more government, so gridlock is usually to the advantage of the Right. This also applies in political terms, because the average voter who isn’t concerned with political affairs or “social justice” takes the current situation as the given and is often suspicious of anything that would change that, even an ostensibly good reform proposal. But in this situation, it’s the Conservatives who are the radicals. In his column, Sullivan quoted a pro-Brexit blog using the phrase “By Any Means Necessary” with a picture of Malcolm X. “When a Conservative Party cites Malcolm X as a role model, it seems safe to say it is no longer conservative in any serious meaning of the word.” Which again would not be a bad thing if the proposed reform were actually good and it were not in fact destructive to the current order, with no real benefits. I return once again to the example of our “conservative” party in America, which wailed and moaned about the “radical” agenda of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (which had its antecedents in the pro-market Romneycare of Massachusetts and a Ron Bailey article in Reason magazine) and when the ACA was the new idea being forced into the system, it was easier to make a case against it. But by the time the Republicans actually got a Republican president who would sign one of their numerous repeals of the ACA, it was clear that they didn’t have anything to replace the ACA with. Which was bad enough. But in the interim, enough people had gotten real benefit from Obamacare that we had to consider the consequences of going back to the status quo ante, which would have cut a lot of people off from medical coverage. In the current situation, the radical and destructive position is to remove the “socialist” (actually business-oriented) reform of the ACA, and if people had actually wanted to go back to the prior standard, it would not have been changed in the first place. Republicans have not succeeded in repealing the ACA, despite valid criticisms of the program, because they don’t have a better idea, and everyone knows it.

Likewise, despite real support for the idea of leaving the EU, Conservatives have not been able to capitalize on that, because they don’t have a real plan other than “crash out” by default, which has consequences that no one really wants. Sullivan’s thesis is that Labour is sufficiently unpopular (and disorganized in its own priorities) that Johnson’s government will prevail anyway, which discounts the point that the Conservatives are the ones endorsing the radical and destructive policy. It discounts the point that in this context, all that the Labour-led opposition needs to do is to endorse the default status quo. To endorse the policy of not changing. You know- the conservative position. There’s also one factor here that doesn’t exist in America, which is that the flexibility of parliamentary politics means there actually IS a viable third party in the UK, called the Liberal Democrats. They have some things in common with Conservatives on economics, but are basically like the old Liberal Party that existed before the Fabian Socialists of Labour took over the opposition to the Conservatives. The LibDems might not be socially conservative enough for some Tories, but they provide a real choice to those who want an alternative to Conservative whackery and the socialist whackery of Labour. Which again provided an escape valve for Johnson’s internal opposition and allowed them to call his bluff. Even Sullivan says, “if Labour were to win, or go into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats, they could keep the U.K. in the E.U. without appearing to be acting directly against the wishes of the people. Or they could hold a second referendum. Either way, some kind of resolution would happen — and through a democratic process like a general election.”

In any event, the parallels continue: if the original Brexit vote was a sign that the liberal establishment was not invincible, the three years afterward have demonstrated that for the Right to actually take advantage of that and create positive change, they have to have a plan to do so. The problem has been that they don’t have a plan to do so, because at heart, they don’t believe in positive change. This has already had bad results for the “conservative” movement, despite the weakness of the Left, and that lack of foresight will continue to undermine them in the future.