Monday, June 30, 2025

Lalo Schifrin 1932 -- 2025

Another film buff digression.

Perhaps the most famous piece of music in 5/4 time. 



(At least some of the movies inexplicably rearranged the theme in 4/4, because dumbing things down is what they do.)

Few film composers left more of a mark on popular culture than Lalo Schifrin did in the '60s and '70s

Bullitt - Opening Credits

 



Enter The Dragon


 

 

Most of the Dirty Harry movies.

 

He was already coming off a remarkably successful career as a composer and pianist, both through his solo works...

The Wave by Lalo Schifrin


 

 and his collaborations with Dizzy Gillespie.



Gillespiana (Live On The Ed Sullivan Show, April 30, 1961)





Gillespiana: Panamericana 




 

For a while there, Schifrin and Jerry Goldsmith seemed to be constantly trading off. Goldsmith did the Flint films. Schifrin took over for The President's Analyst. Goldsmith wrote the theme to The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; Schifrin radically reworked it.

Goldsmith was like one of those actors who disappear into the makeup and become entirely different people—Gary Oldman comes to mind. Schifrin, by contrast, was more like Cary Grant. He never felt the need to hide his distinctive style. There is, however, one very notable exception: in the film Cool Hand Luke, Schifrin produced a score of gorgeous Americana, comparable to Goldsmith's Lilies of the Field or The Wild Rovers.


Cool Hand Luke (Main Title)



Cool Hand Luke also produced a piece of stock music that was used for decades after the film came out. Check it out—about two minutes in.

 Tar  




Friday, June 27, 2025

Ed Zitron on remote work, Arthur C. Clarke on remote work, us on remote work

 From "The Era Of The Business Idiot"

A great example of our vibes-based society was back in October 2021, where a Washington Post article written by two Harvard professors rallied against remote work by citing a Microsoft-funded anti-remote study and quoting 130-year-old economist Alfred Marshall about how "workers gather in dense clusters," ignoring the fact that Marshall was so racist they've had to write papers about it, how excited he was about eugenics, or the fact he was writing about fucking factories.

Remote work terrifies the Business Idiot, because it removes the performative layer that allowed them to stomp around and feel important, reducing their work to, well...work. Office culture is inherently heteronormative and white, and black women are less likely to be promoted by their managers, and continuing the existence of "The Office" is all about making sure The Business Idiot reigns supreme. Removing the ability for the managerial hall monitors to look at you and try and work out what you're doing without ever really helping is a big part of being a manager — and if you're a manager reading this and saying you don't do this, I challenge you to talk to another person that doesn't confirm your biases.

The Business Idiot reigns supreme. Their existence holds up almost every public company, and remote work was the first time they willingly raised their heads. Google demanded employees return to the office in 2021 — but let one executive work remotely from New Zealand because absolutely none of the decisionmaking was done with people that actually do work. While we can  (well, you can, I'm not interested) debate whether exclusively working remote is as productive, the Return To Office push was almost entirely done in two ways:

  1. Executives demanding people return to the office.
  2. Journalists asking executives if remote work was good or not, entirely ignoring the people actually doing the work.

The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and many, many other outlets all fell for this crap because the Business Idiots have captured our media too, training even talented journalists to defer to power at every turn. When every power structure is stuffed full of do-nothing management types that have learned exactly as little as they need to as a means to get by, it's inevitable that journalism caters to them — specious, thoughtless reproductions of the powerful's ideas.

 

We were making some similar points eight years ago.

Friday, November 10, 2017

 

Following up on "remembering the future."

Smart people, like statisticians' models, are often most interesting when they are wrong. There is no better example of this than Arthur C Clarke's 1964 predictions about the demise of the urban age, where he suggested that what we would now call telecommuting would end the need for people to congregate around centers of employment and would therefore mean the end of cities.







What about the city of the day after tomorrow? Say, the year 2000. I think it will be completely different. In fact, it may not even exist at all. Oh, I'm not thinking about the atom bomb and the next Stone Age; I'm thinking about the incredible breakthrough which has been made possible by developments in communications, particularly the transistor and above all the communications satellite. These things will make possible a world where we can be in instant contact with each other wherever we may be, where we can contact our friends anywhere on earth even if we don't know their actual physical location. It will be possible in that age, perhaps only 50 years from now, for a man to conduct his business from Tahiti or Bali just as well as he could from London. In fact, if it proved worthwhile, almost any executive skill, any administrative skill, even any physical skill could be made independent of distance. I am perfectly serious when I suggest that someday we may have rain surgeons in Edinburgh operating on patients in New Zealand. When that time comes, the whole world will have shrunk to a point and the traditional role of a city as the meeting place for man will have ceased to make any sense. In fact, men will no longer commute; they will communicate. They won't have to travel for business anymore; they'll only travel for pleasure. I only hope that, when that day comes and the city is abolished, the whole world isn't turned into one giant suburb.


Clarke was working with a 20 to 50 year timeframe, so it's fair to say that he got this one wrong. The question is why. Both as a fiction writer and a serious futurist, the man was remarkably and famously prescient about telecommunications and its impact on society. Even here, he got many of the details right while still being dead wrong on the conclusion.

What went wrong? Part of this unquestionably has to do with the nature of modern work. Clarke probably envisioned a more automated workplace in the 21st century, one where stocking shelves and cleaning floors and, yes, driving vehicles would be done entirely by machines. He likely also underestimated the intrinsic appeal of cities.

But I think a third factor may well have been bigger than either of those two. The early 60s was an anxious but optimistic time. The sense was that if we didn't destroy ourselves, we were on the verge of great things. The 60s was also the last time that there was anything approaching a balance of power between workers and employers.

This was particularly true with mental work. At least in part because of the space race, companies like Texas Instruments were eager to find smart capable people. As a result, employers were extremely flexible about qualifications (a humanities PhD could actually get you a job) and they were willing to make concessions to attract and keep talented workers.

Telecommuting (as compared to off shoring, a distinction will need to get into in a later post) offers almost all of its advantages to the worker. The only benefit to the employer is the ability to land an otherwise unavailable prospect. From the perspective of 1964, that would have seemed like a good trade, but those days are long past.

For the past 40 or so years, employers have worked under (and now completely internalized) the assumption that they could pick and choose. When most companies post jobs, they are looking for someone who either has the exact academic background required, or preferably, someone who is currently doing almost the same job for a completely satisfied employer and yet is willing to leave for roughly the same pay.

When you hear complaints about "not being able to find qualified workers," it is essential to keep in mind this modern standard for "qualified." 50 or 60 years ago it meant someone who was capable of doing the work with a bit of training. Now it means someone who can walk in the door, sit down at the desk, and immediately start working. (Not to say that new employees will actually be doing productive work from day one. They'll be sitting in their cubicles trying to look busy for the first two or three weeks while IT and HR get things set up, but that's another story.)

Arthur C Clarke was writing in an optimistic age where workers were on an almost equal footing with management. If the year 2000 had looked like the year 1964, he just might have gotten this one right.

 

Thursday, June 26, 2025

Fifteen years ago at the blog: We've been making tortured analogies here for over a decade.

Auteur theory (particularly in its most naive, simplistic form) is having a bit of a moment, personified by Richard Brody at The New Yorker, so it seems like a good time to revisit one of our early takes on the subject. 

Friday, May 28, 2010

What Auteur Theory and Freshwater Economics have in common

(the first draft is the dominant genre of the internet. Between the roughness of this essay and my extensive ignorance of criticism and economics, I'm sure there is plenty of room for improvement here. If any readers have suggestions for taking this to the next level please let me know.)

(you might want to read this New York Times piece by Paul Krugman before going on -- it's the best primer I know of for this debate.)

We'll define freshwater economics as the theory that economic behavior (and perhaps most non-economic behavior) can be explained using the concepts of rational actors and efficient markets and auteur theory as the idea that most films (particularly great films) represent the artistic vision of a single author (almost always the director) and the best way to approach one of those films is through the body of work of its author. Both of these definitions are oversimplified and a bit unfair but they will get the discussion started.

At first first glance, these theories don't seem to have much in common, but as we step back and look at them in general terms, fundamental similarities start to emerge in their styles, their ecological niches and in the way they've been received.

Compared to their nearest neighbors, film criticism and economics (particularly macroeconomics) are both difficult, messy fields. Films are collaborative efforts where individual contributions defy attribution and creative decisions often can't be distinguished from accidents of filming. Worse yet, most films are the product of large corporations which means that dozens of VPs and executives might have played a role (sometimes an appallingly large one) in determining what got to the screen.

Economists face a comparably daunting task. Unlike researchers in the hard sciences, they have to deal with messiness of human behavior. Unlike psychologists, microeconomists have few opportunities to perform randomized trials and macroeconomists have none whatsoever. Finally, unlike any other researchers in any other field, economists face a massive problem with deliberate feedback. It is true that subjects in psychological and sociological studies might be aware of and influenced by the results of previous studies but in economics, most of the major players are consciously modifying their behavior based on economic research. It is as if the white mice got together before every experiment and did a literature search. ("Well, there's our problem. We should have been pulling the black lever.")

Faced with all this confusion, film scholars and economists (at least, macroeconomists) both reached the same inevitable conclusion: they would have to rely on broader, stronger assumptions than those colleagues in adjacent fields were using. This does not apply simply to auteurists and freshwater economists. Anyone who does any work in these fields will have to start with some sweeping and unprovable statements about how the world works. Auteurists and freshwater economists just took this idea to its logical conclusion and built their work on the simplest and most elegant assumptions possible, like Euclid demonstrating every aspect of shape and measure using only five little postulates.

(Except, of course, Euclid didn't. His set of postulates didn't actually support his conclusions. The world would have to wait for Hilbert to come up with a set that did. The question of whether economists need a Hilbert will have to wait for another day.)

Given that we have two similar responses to two similar situations, it is not all that surprising to see that both schools of thought have followed similar paths and have come to dominate their respective fields. I don't think that anyone would argue that any institution has had more impact on economics than the Chicago school over the past fifty years and I doubt you could find a theory of film that comes close to the impact of auteurism over the same period.

This dominance was achieved despite serious criticisms and counter-examples. When the writer William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Princess Bride, many, many, many others) heard about auteur theory, his reaction was "What's the punchline?" The sentiment was echoed by many writers who pointed out that many of the elements that the critics discussed were determined, explicitly or implicitly in the script. On related grounds, others pointed out how many of the creative decisions were made in preproduction often before the director was hired (John Huston said that a film was mostly finished once you had the cast and the script). Others talked about films that were "saved in the editing room," a common Hollywood expression for films that are radically changed for the better in post-production, usually after having been taken away from the director. Many (including Goldman) argued that films were the sum of many individual contributions and that changing any of them would result in a different movie.

Critics of classical economics question the realism of the school's postulates. They suggest that the proposed 'homo economicus' would have to be a cross between a lightning calculator and a high-functioning psychic. They point to findings from behavioral economics that show individuals failing to act according to neoclassical principles and historical cases where neoclassical models failed to predict economic events.

Both schools of thought partially address these complaints by arguing that their critics are trying to apply their ideas in cases where the necessary conditions don't hold. For auteurists, conditions included technical competence, recognizable style and a sufficient body of work. For freshwater economists, conditions included symmetry of information, a sufficient pool of buyers and sellers, a lack of externalities and freedom from government influence. These conditions did not refute the criticisms but they did provide defensible positions.

There is nothing unusual, let alone improper about proponents of a theory laying out conditions that have to be met before their concepts can be applied. (I could have written essential the same paragraph about Keynesians or deconstructionists.) What makes this notable is the disconnect between this approach and the way lay people use these ideas.

The dominance of auteurism and the Chicago School is, if anything, greater when you venture outside of academia. Most financial journalists, pundits and politicians take the power of market forces as a given and the vast majority of movie reviewers routinely assume that the director is the author of the film they just saw, but in both these cases with very few exceptions, the lay people using these theories have no idea that the conditions of the previous paragraphs even exist.

The problem with auteurism is compounded by the fact that most reviewers have no idea what a director actually does. This was certainly not true of the original French critics who popularized the theory (who were, themselves, directors) or of its primary American proponent, Andrew Sarris, (who went to great pains to discuss exactly and also set out the definitive list of the conditions I referred to).

Today most reviews will use the possessive form of the director's name then proceed to discuss everything about the film but the direction. The strange result of all this is that directors are both the most overrated and under-appreciated of movie makers. They are given credit for the work of everyone else while their own contribution is generally ignored.*

Obviously, the stakes are higher for economics but the disconnect is just as big. Open up any op-ed page or tune in any news conference and you are likely to find someone using freshwater arguments in situations where any serious freshwater economist would tell you they don't apply. For example, it is easy to pundits and politicians who believe we should let the market forces handle global warming instead of having a carbon tax, despite the pro-tax position of economists like Laffer, Cowen and Mankiw. It isn't that these laymen are consciously disagreeing with these experts; they simply don't know that using taxes to address externalities is a fundamental part of the philosophy they think they are espousing.

Finally, both schools had clear winners and have been aggressively promoted by those winners. Directors were the big winners in auteur theory; they gained power and prestige which in an industry that knows how to reward those attributes. It may not have been entirely a coincidence that the original auteurist critics had their careers as directors enhanced by the rise of the theory.

In economics, there is no question that the rise of freshwater ideas and approaches have been advanced considerably by institutions like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, nor is there any question that much of the funding for these institutions came from companies that directly benefited from the dominance of freshwater economics.

Do these schools deserve their positions of dominance? That's a question for people above my pay grade. I'm just pointing out that widely separated disciplines can be surprisingly similar when you take things to a high enough level.


* For a view of how little influence some directors have on actors' performances check out these comments by Robert Mitchum (cutter in this context means film editor).

note: The Paul Krugman link at the top was added 5/31/10.

 

Wednesday, June 25, 2025

A Temu Waymo

Before we get started, take a minute a watch this. 

 Apologies to regular readers who have heard this all before, but just to review: Elon Musk is unique among the centibillionaires not just because of the size of his fortune, but because of its precariousness. His peers such as Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett hold enormous assets and have run tremendously profitable companies. Musk's wealth is almost entirely due to the most successful stock pump in history. By any reasonable standard, Tesla—and to a degree, SpaceX—should be worth one to two orders of magnitude less than they are currently valued at. Add to that the fact that he has used some of that highly inflated stock to secure loans and, while we don't know the exact terms, we do know that if the stock falls far enough, he will be facing some very ugly margin calls.

Imagine the world's largest castle—not just now, but largest ever—was actually nothing more than a huge bouncy house, and that the moment you stopped pumping air in, the magnificent walls and towering spires would start to lose their shape and collapse. That's Tesla.

You keep a stock inflated through stories. The original narrative that kept things going was that, having established a large early lead in the small but growing field of electric vehicles, Tesla would somehow manage to maintain that market share as EVs became the dominant form of automobile. But that story has since tipped into fantasy due to increased competition, a disappointing second generation of vehicles, Elon Musk's increasingly toxic brand, and—most of all—the fact that no car company could justify the valuation that Tesla now holds.

There are three stories now that keep the castle upright: robotaxis, humanoid robots, and the idea that the Trump administration would pump tens upon tens of billions of dollars into the company somehow. Just to be clear: to justify a market cap of over a trillion dollars, it's not enough that all three of these come true to some degree; they all have to come through at an extraordinary level. It is like a business plan that requires you to hit the lottery three times in a row.

With respect to those government contracts, it is safe to assume that Elon now regrets having called the president a pedophile. This loss of standing puts even more pressure on Musk to make increasingly incredible promises around the remaining two narratives that are still pumping in air.

Musk had to put on some kind of a show, and he especially needed to do something with robotaxis. This was a product he'd been promising for years, and his last event around the it had impressed no one. He needed something that could, by even the broadest stretch of the imagination, qualify as a product launch.

He did have some things working in his favor. Both investors and journalists have shown a tremendous willingness to give him the benefit of the doubt. As long as he came through with the bare minimum, they'd be inclined to even the past—and that's exactly what he did.

 It is difficult to overstate the extent to which the training wheels were on during this demo.

A tiny number of rides in a single, geofenced neighborhood that Tesla had been training on for weeks. Daytime rides —Teslas, being strictly camera-based (unlike Waymo), don't do well at night—with a carefully selected, invite-only crowd of hardcore boosters, an algorithm that avoided difficult routes, a safety monitor sitting in the passenger seat with their hand on the kill switch, and a remote operator ready to grab the controls for teleoperation if something went wrong.

And something certainly did go wrong. The question is will it be enough.


 

 

 Chris Isidore writing for CNN.

A small number of company-owned cars were used and they were existing Model Y vehicles — not Cybercabs, which are not yet allowed on roads, let alone produced on a mass scale. It was not even the most extensive robotaxi service in Austin — a joint effort between Uber and Waymo, the self-driving car unit of Google parent Alphabet, has been up and running in Austin since March.

But the Austin test pressed on regardless.

The rides were made available to a select group of Tesla fans, according to Dan Ives, a tech analyst with Wedbush Securities and an effusive Tesla bull, [If Dan Ives were to be trapped in a burning Tesla, his last words would be a "buy" recommendation. -- MP] and Joey Klender, who writes for the site Teslarati.com. Klender and a member of Ives’ team took multiple rides in a Tesla Model Y robotaxi on Sunday.

...

But it was not all smooth sailing, with multiple videos showing the car making mistakes. In one YouTube video, the robotaxi drove on the wrong side of the road after it attempted and abandoned a left turn, only to continue traveling down the street on the opposite side of a double yellow line before making the left turn on the following block. Fortunately, there were no vehicles driving on the other side of the road.

A separate YouTuber posted a video in which the robotaxi kept driving past its destination for several minutes as he tried to get it to pull over so he could get out.

“Please exit safely,” a screen in the rear seat of the car said, as it continued driving down the road. 

...

But the EV maker is playing a game of catch up. Waymo, a unit of Google parent Alphabet, has been providing paid rides since 2020, and now provides more than 250,000 rides a week to paying riders in Austin, Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco. It soon plans to expand the service to Atlanta, Miami and Washington, DC.  

 



Given the ratio of support staff to robotaxi, Musk's claim that "Tesla will have hundreds of thousands of self-driving cars in the U.S. by the end of 2026," seems a bit dubious.




We need to discuss the concept of "beta"


Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Gods or Ashes

Maybe it's the age of the blog, or maybe it's the age of the blogger, but increasingly I find myself going back to revisit or share an old post, only to discover that I never got around to finishing it—or, worse yet, never even got to the draft stage.

Case in point: I could have sworn that I'd written at least a few pieces on the "gods and ashes" trope, but I can't seem to find anything in either the published or draft folders. What's really annoying is that I plainly remember appropriate art and videos I'd put aside for the topic, and now I have no idea where they are.

So, starting from scratch—around 150 years ago, you start finding references in places like Scientific American to the idea that technological progress was not only following an exponential curve, but that we were far enough along the curve that change would soon be coming at an unimaginable rate. From there, it followed that we were approaching some kind of tipping point that could lead either to humanity evolving to a higher level or destroying itself—especially through war.

Sometime in our children's lifetimes, we would be gods or ashes.

You can find examples in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but the notion didn't really capture the popular imagination until the atomic age. That was when the template was set, and it has been followed ever since. Even as we go from one existential crisis du jour to another—nuclear war, climate change, malevolent AI—each is shoehorned to fit the same story, like remakes that change the cast but stick slavishly to the same plot.

The notion is also inextricably intertwined with the idea to the tech messiah.

Star Trek used it countless times, but the definitive treatment of the post-war era remains Forbidden Planet, a film that holds up remarkably well to this day.


Monday, June 23, 2025

We haven't talked about SpaceX lately








The abundance crowd has been telling us that excessive environmental regulations are holding back innovators like Musk. You have to wonder what lax regulations would look like.

The consequences of actions like these are real, environmental groups say. SpaceX’s launch site is surrounded by a state park and federal wildlife refuge home to hundreds of of thousands of shorebirds, sea turtles and other species. Biologists say the company’s Starship launches are having a measurable impact. A recent report documented how SpaceX’s last launch destroyed nests of a vulnerable population of shorebirds


That's a high price to pay for a type of launch vehicle that's looking more and more like a dead end.

More than two weeks before the latest explosion, engineer turned journalist Will Lockett wrote a withering post on the state of the program. 

Okay, but I can already hear the Musk fans pearl-clutching and screaming, “We learn from failure!” Fair enough. Let’s look at the lessons we can glean from these results.

Firstly, why did SpaceX try a new landing path for Super Heavy, even though they have successfully landed it multiple times? Well, weight. Starship weighs far too much, meaning its possible payload is vanishingly small, and its engines are being overstressed (hence the constant engine failures). SpaceX must make Starship lighter for it to even have a chance of being functional. The heaviest component of a rocket, particularly a self-landing one, is fuel. In fact, there is a double weight-saving opportunity there, but we don’t have time to go into that today. Super Heavy Booster’s previous landing relied almost entirely on retrorockets, making it predictable but incredibly fuel-hungry. This new path attempted to replace the bulk of that fuel requirement with atmospheric drag by allowing the rocket to fall to Earth in a belly flop position, which is far less predictable but much more fuel-efficient. This reduced the fuel requirement and caused the rocket to be significantly lighter.

That was, until the rocket broke up, meaning that it could not handle the stress of this belly flop manoeuvre. Furthermore, it broke apart after its retrorockets reignited, which also suggests that they may have failed, implying that these engines might be pushed too hard to be reliably reused. So the lesson we can take away from this teachable moment is that Super Heavy Booster and its engines need to be heavily reinforced to survive such a landing (especially if it is to be reused, as planned), but doing so would add enough weight to render the entire exercise moot. So, really, the lesson here is that you meet a dead end when you try to make the first stage lighter.

...

SpaceX still has a long way to go before Starship becomes a viable launch vehicle. It still has to successfully land the upper stage, reuse an upper stage, reach orbit, deliver a payload to orbit, reach a useable payload capacity, conduct a cryogenic fuel transfer between two starships in space (which has never been done before), perform a successful long-duration flight test, conduct a successful uncrewed lunar landing and conduct a crewed lunar landing. All of which, for context, was meant to be achieved by January 2025! Nearly all of Starship’s paid contracts are for human spaceflight to the Moon, which requires repeated orbital refuelling and human spaceflight certification. Orbit refuelling is incredibly difficult, and in order to become human spaceflight certified, SpaceX needs to prove that they can successfully land the upper stage almost 100% of the time. It has taken them nine failed attempts and almost $10 billion for Starship to not reach orbit with a fraction of its promised payload and to never land an upper stage or successfully reuse a first stage. How many test flights, dollars and years will it take to actually get this hunk of junk working?

I know I always say this, but it is an important comparison. After nine launches, Saturn V only had one partial, non-destructive failure and had taken three crews to the lunar surface. Sure, it was a less complex rocket than Starship, but NASA achieved this using technology from the 1960s that was much less reliable and accurate. However, here’s the thing: Musk is currently claiming that Starship will somehow reach a payload of 45 tonnes (which is three times what Flight 9 failed to deliver to orbit and less than half of what was promised). That means a lunar starship would need refuelling 33 times in orbit before it can go to the Moon. Even if we assume Starship can be fully reused, that would put the price of a Starship lunar launch at $2.38 billion. Yet, the Saturn V launched 50 tonnes to the Moon for only $1.8 billion in today’s dollars, and that includes development costs spread over its 13 launches (read more here).

Recently, Musk has been talking about skipping the moon and focusing on Mars. As far as I can tell, he has not, however, been talking about giving back the money he took for Artemis. 


Friday, June 20, 2025

If you were wondering why liberals have been reluctantly saying nice things about Tucker Carlson

I highly recommend that you watch these clips, no matter how you feel about either of these men.

Carlson runs circles around Cruz in these clips—which shouldn’t be easy. Though Ted Cruz is famously one of the most despised men in Washington, even in his own party, virtually everyone admits he is a brilliant debater. And yet, he walked into this interview completely unprepared. While, for all we know, this could be a story of distractions at home or a reaction to cold medicine, the smart money so far has been speculating that he did not realize the buzzsaw he was walking into.





For about as long as we've had this blog, I've been meaning to write a post arguing for a moratorium on social science research using the idea of a left–right political spectrum. If you sat down and tried to come up with a metric that was badly defined, uninformative, and created an illusion of understanding, you'd be hard-pressed to come up with anything worse—and if you were looking for the worst possible place to apply this metric, it would be on the issue of war.

Over the past century, we've gone through pretty much every possible permutation involving conservatives, liberals, and the left—including my personal favorite in the late ’30s, when liberals were pro-war, and leftists and conservatives were isolationists.

If that weren't enough, you frequently have periods where the divisions are remarkably bitter but are primarily found within ideological groups.

Especially since the Iraq War, the naïve tendency to equate anti-war with “liberal” has led to some often disastrous results—giving figures like Ron Paul and Tulsi Gabbard an illusion of being something special, and obscuring the role that the anti-war movement played in the rise of Trump.

Trump’s anti-war positions were always more opportunistic than anything else, as Josh Marshall points out here:

The idea that Trump or MAGA is in any sense “anti-war” is something between an absurdity and a misunderstanding. Kate and I had a good discussion of it in this week’s podcast. At one level it’s a simple fraud. Trump claimed he’d always been against the Iraq War at a time when the U.S. had been bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan for years. It was a helpful attack line and it was completely false. Trump wasn’t in politics in 2002 or 2003 and to the extent he said anything, like a lot of people, he was for it when it was popular and against it when it wasn’t.

During his presidency he signed off on the assassination/targeted attack that killed Qasem Soleimani; he heavily involved the U.S. in the Saudi war in Yemen; he maintained or expanded the U.S. fight against ISIS in Iraq/Syria. Those are at least a continuity with the Obama years and in key respects an expansion of it. The one arguable exception is the deal Trump made with the Taliban to leave Afghanistan — a bad deal which Joe Biden was saddled with and followed through on and was endlessly criticized for, by Trump more than anyone else. Afghanistan captures Trump perfectly — his one notionally “anti-war” position was continuity by definition. And he turned against it as soon as he was unpopular. Trump has gotten “anti-war” mileage out of his opposition to Ukraine aid. But that’s pro-Russia rather than anti-war.

So the entirety of Trump’s anti-war-ness is a fiction and one he’s been remarkably adept at selling to a huge swath of the political and journalistic community. He came into politics at a moment of profound public fatigue with unending military commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq and simply passed himself off as against what everyone was sick of. That’s just a subset of most of the rest of Trump’s politics: he’s the diehard against whatever is unpopular and vice versa, rinse and repeat ad finitum, or until the public mood changes.



But that doesn’t mean that the anti-war movement on the right isn’t real, or that it’s trivial or easily dismissed.

One of the many complications here is the extent to which Putin has come to influence MAGA and the Republican Party of 2025, with a significant segment feeling considerable personal loyalty to the Russian dictator. While the situation is enormously complex and opaque, it’s probably worth noting that two of Putin’s most reliable hand puppets—Carlson and Gabbard—have both been on the "leave Iran alone" side.

Does this make it more or less likely that Trump will get us into another war?

Yes.

Thursday, June 19, 2025

Protests and Parades: The Dog That Did Not Bark

We've been going at this thread for a little while, and I'm afraid that if I were reading it rather than writing it, I might be starting to lose patience. At the very least, I'd be asking: What's the point?

That's a difficult question to answer. I certainly don't want to have this interpreted as a broad and simplistic statement about where the country is now. There's nothing simple about this, and it would be a huge mistake to use these protests—however historic—as the basis for some theory about where the country is and where it's headed. By the same token, however, it would be a possibly even worse mistake to formulate theories that ignore the events happening outside your own window.

What are some of the things that a comprehensive theory would take into account? As previously discussed, there's the fact that much of the national press—led by The New York Times and The Washington Post—largely ignored what may be the largest peaceful protest in American history. If you're trying to understand the relationship between establishment media and the rise of MAGA, this is certainly a significant data point. Likewise, your explanations need to allow for both the magnitude and the distribution of the protests. If you're going to tell a Country Mouse, City Mouse tale, it needs to allow for a surprisingly large number of country mice on an unexpected side.

There's one more thing we should add to this list. In addition to what happened and where it happened, we also need to pay attention to what didn't happen. Even in the most solidly red districts, there does not appear to have been significant, organic counter-protests. There were the usual paramilitary groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Front trucked in (in some cases literally). There were, based on published accounts and from what I've heard from friends, one or two disgruntled Trump supporters in places like Atlanta, either grumbling or trying to shout down the crowds. There were lone wolves carrying firearms, and in some cases committing acts of violence.

But I haven't found any accounts of large groups of local Trump supporters forming any kind of substantial counter-demonstrations, even in the reddest of red districts. Did they happen at all? Quite probably. But we can say with some confidence that they were rare.

What does it all mean? I have no idea. I'm not even prepared to advance any theories. All I'm willing to say at this point is that it's surprising and notable—and when the dust settles and we all start telling ourselves stories about what happened back in 2025, we need to make sure those stories include all the significant events and, in this case, non-events—even if they didn't make the front page of The New York Times.


Wednesday, June 18, 2025

Protests and Parades: What do you expect from hotbeds of liberalism like Mississippi, Arkansas, and Oklahoma?

Most of the national media has, at best, a barely concealed disinterest in rural and small-town America. There are exceptions—James Fallows is superb, Marketplace does a very good job, and NPR, partially due to its reliance on member stations to help with reporting, is well above average in general. But you can usually count on places like The New York Times to miss the nuances.

Just knowing the state doesn’t tell you much. There are some reliably Democratic parts of Texas and some extremely red parts of California. You have to go more granular, and look at urban density, demographics, and particularly voting records. With all that in mind, if you look over the map of protests, the most striking thing might well be how well represented they are in unexpected places.

Big cities in red state might tend to run left of the median.



But we're seeing a lot of protests where you very much would not expect them.
 
 





 

While counter protesters may have shown up where you'd expect them, their numbers have mostly been tiny.


If you're not familiar with California, you probably have no idea how red the Central Valley is (a mistake I've seen the NYT make numerous times). 


Oklahoma (where I went to graduate school) got surprisingly large crowds despite thunder storms.

As did Arizona despite triple digit temperatures. 

Some paramilitary Trump supporters tried to crash the parties but they weren't prepared for the size and enthusiasm of the crowds.




The support for the BLM protests was surprisingly broad, but this takes things to another level. And no place illustrates that better than Harrison, Arkansas—often called the most racist town in America.

(Harrison was also the center of anti-Confederate sentiment in the Civil War, but that's another stor and another thread.)

In one notorious incident, a filmmaker from L.A. stood in Harrison with a Black Lives Matter sign for 10 hours, during which he received a constant stream of abuse, profanity, and threats. That should give you some context for this.



For the record, I'm not saying that white supremacist enclaves have suddenly rejected MAGA. What's going on here is complicated and worthy of study. I'm not going to speculate too deeply on what it is, except to say that at this point, opposition to Trump—be it on the grounds of democracy, immigration, or the slashing of the social safety net—can be found pretty much anywhere you look in the summer of 2025.


Tuesday, June 17, 2025

Protests and Parades: just a reminder that the NYT gave more coverage than this to a literal dog-bites-man story

[First installment on our promised thread.] 

 When I was an undergrad back in Arkansas, a journalism professor who also happened to be a retired veteran newsman told the story about an incident in the northern part of the state. This would have been in the 50s or 60s, back when every decent-sized town had one or two daily papers. The sheriff and the mayor had gotten into an altercation that had led to one shooting the other in the middle of the day on the main street of town.

The following day, the paper mentioned the shooting briefly on the third page.

This was very probably the biggest thing that had ever happened in this town. Everybody knew both the killer and the victim. It was certainly discussed throughout the region for ages, but it was not something the editor wanted to talk about. It was unquestionably news; it just wasn't news the editor wanted to talk about.

I can vouch for my source here, but this is still an unverified anecdote, so you should feel free to take it with a grain of salt. Fortunately, I have a wealth of supporting evidence for an example of something very similar and quite recent.





 

 

 Though written days before the No Kings event, this column is remarkably relevant. 

When hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered across the US on 5 April for the “Hands Off” events protesting Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s governmental wrecking ball, much of the news media seemed to yawn.

The next day, the New York Times put a photograph, but no story, on its print front page. The Wall Street Journal’s digital homepage had it as only the 20th-most-prominent story when I checked. Fox News was dismissive; I stopped counting after I scanned 40 articles on its homepage, though there was a video with this dismissive headline: “Liberals rally against President Trump.”

The Guardian, CNN and some local news outlets paid more heed. The cable network offered live video from many American cities and a banner headline: “Millions of people protest against Trump & Musk.”

But overall, there was something of a shrug about the media coverage. It got much more attention from global news outlets than in the US.

The US media will get a chance to atone for these sins of omission this coming weekend when Americans once again get together, this time for Saturday’s “No Kings” day, which organizers describe as “a nationwide day of defiance”.

About that atonement.

 Back to Sullivan.

However, if journalists consistently look the other way, the power of peaceful citizen protests can fade.

In my American Crisis newsletter two days after the 5 April protests, I offered a few theories for why the media may seem so blasé.

First, I posited, much of the mainstream media tend to view this much as Fox News does. The protesters are just the usual suspects – “liberals” – doing the predictable thing.

Second, many large media companies are afraid that prominent protest coverage will be criticized by the political right as partisan, and they can’t bear that label.

Third, corporate media decision-makers, always focused the bottom line, are fearful of losing right-leaning readers and viewers; yes, we’ll cover this, they seem to say, but quietly, since we don’t want to antagonize anyone. In an era in which Trump has attempted to bully the press into submission, through denying access and through lawsuits, cowardice and capitulation are all too common.

 Coming up...

 

What do you expect from left-wing hotbeds like Mississippi, Arkansas, and Oklahoma?

About that 3.5% rule.

The Dog that Didn't Bark.

The Schadenfreude Parade

  

Monday, June 16, 2025

Protests and Parades: Overview of a Thread

Started working on this Saturday evening and soon realized I was going to have way more than a single post’s worth. We’ll be dividing this up into bite-sized chunks over the next few days, but to get it started, here is an overview along with a few articles, quotes, images, general points, and whatever the hell you call tweets on Bluesky.

 The 3.5% Rule

This one's been making the rounds for a little while now. It basically says that once you pass a threshold of three and a half percent of the population engaged in non-violent protest, the government in question will fall. Loads of problems with this from a statistical and poli sci standpoint. If you want to get up to speed on the research, this BBC report is recommended.

While we can go back and forth about the rule itself, Margaret Sullivan's take on the journalistic ethics of downplaying these protests is characteristically solid.

 

Sullivan wrote her piece a few days ago, before things got really embarrassing for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the rest. More posts coming on this, but TL;DR:


The protests were historic. The parade was humiliating.

Elliott Morris—who was always good and seems to have gotten even better now that he doesn't have ABC executives looking over his shoulder—has been working with the No Kings numbers and has come to some striking conclusions.


 

Morris is one of the best people in the field, and I'm inclined to trust his numbers. But even if he's wrong, we can be fairly certain he did a better job than the paper of record.

(I suppose they didn’t say how many thousands.)

The coverage of the No Kings demonstrations—particularly compared to the far smaller and almost entirely astroturfed Tea Party protests of a few years ago—reveals a double standard that even I find surprising, and this is by no means my first rodeo.









 
 
 




 

The New York Times and The Washington Post have also been bending themselves into Gordian knots trying to avoid saying the obvious about Donald Trump's birthday party.


You can see my thread on Bluesky comparing the techniques used by The Washington Post to make the parade look well-attened to the low-budget filmmaking tricks of Roger Corman protégés trying to make a dozen extras look like a crowd of thousands.

(NPR had a huge advantage here, since they didn’t actually have to find pictures and could simply misrepresent through audio.) 

Perhaps my favorite “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” moment came when the news showed clips of soldiers making almost no effort to stay in step. While the voice-overs talked about impressive military displays, the actual visuals suggested soldiers who were either disinterested or were actively looking to show their disapproval.

 Rolling Stone, on the other hand, seems to be getting back to its anti-establishment roots.

Corporate America did its part. “Special thanks to our sponsor Lockheed Martin,” the MC said around 6:30 p.m., shouting out America’s biggest defense contractor. The MC later thanked “our special sponsor Coinbase,” the cryptocurrency exchange. President Trump sure loves crypto — he reported in his financial disclosure Friday that he made $57 million in the final months of 2024 after he and his family launched their own crypto exchange, World Liberty Financial. (That was before he launched his own $TRUMP meme coin.) 

Around 7 p.m., the big screens onstage that displayed the American flags turned to logos for UFC, the mixed martial arts business. Later, the MC thanked “special sponsor Palantir,” a contractor hired to help Trump compile data on Americans across federal agencies. 

More to talk about later, but this should keep you busy for now.