Let England Shake

It history, they talk about the "Great Man" theory, which is the idea that most of history is guided by a few strong individuals. Given that no one has bothered updating it to "Great Person," You can surmise that it's not a very popular view anymore. Today, historians are more likely to see the path of history guided by big movements among many people. For instance, both world wars were, on the surface, triggered by individuals. But both wars were the result of much bigger societal and economic forces, and probably would have happened eventually anyway, even if they weren't triggered as they were.

But I still find it interesting to look for those times when an individual makes a decision that impacts history. I mean a situation where the decision is not pushed by outside considerations, but instead is an individual's judgement. I'd say one example would be the Cuban Missile Crisis, where Kennedy and Khrushchev could have taken any of a number of actions, and that could have had huge impacts on the course of history.

Another example would be Brexit. I know, that sounds like the complete opposite of what I'm taking about. It was a referendum of a large country, not an individual's decision. But it was an individual - Prime Minister David Cameron - who decided to hold the referendum. It wasn't because of a recent change in support for the European Union in Britain; it was a calculated strategy.

British politics in general, and the Conservative Party in particular, have always suffered from the distraction of euroskeptics, those who dislike and demonize the European Union. The intention with the referendum was to get the public to agree to remain in the EU, thus disarming euroskeptics in the future, since the country would have very publicly endorsed membership in the EU.

Of course, it didn't go at all according to plan. The public surprised everyone by voting to Leave. What I find interesting in this is that Cameron's gambit has changed the direction of modern Britain, and it's all due to nothing more than timing: young people were disproportionately in favour of staying in the EU, Britain's membership in the Union would get more popular. So if Cameron had chosen a different strategy for dealing with euroskeptics, there never would have been a referendum for another decade or two. That hypothetical vote would have gone the other way. Today's young people, who mostly wanted to Remain, will eventually be the majority. But they'll live the rest of their lives in a more isolated country outside the EU, even though that wasn't their choice.

This all comes to mind because the Brexit referendum seems to have changed the entire mood in Britain. You may have already seen the reports of a troubling increase in racist attacks since the referendum, as the nation's bigots seem to feel empowered. The country's already nationalist newspapers were all-too happy to make their biases more open. But on top of that, the new post-Cameron Conservative government has embraced the anti-foreigner feeling, with disturbing promises to name and shame companies employing non-Britons.

So essentially, Cameron's strategy not only failed, it actually worked backwards: instead of discrediting the euroskeptics, the referendum discredited those who believed in a more international, interconnected country. I don't know how long this new attitude will last, but for now it appears that the entire country is going quickly in a new direction. And it's a direction that it really didn't need to go.

It certainly seems hard to stop. While all this has been going on in government, the opposition Labour Party is having its own crisis. It's currently lead by Jeremy Corbyn, who seems to be Bernie Sanders without the endearing anti-charisma. He's not popular with fellow politicians or - according to polls - the general public. But he's super popular among left-leaning people, so they put him in the position, then confirmed him when his own caucus tried to kick him out.

Of course, this sort of situation comes up a lot in politics: should the party choose the middle-of-the-road candidate the general public will like, or the ideologically-pure candidate the party members want? Essentially, both American political parties struggled with the same choice in the primaries. Yet with Labour, there seems to be no one arguing for moving to a leader that's more palatable to the electorate. Of course I don't know all the nuances of the situation, but in the discussion online, I've noticed that when anyone argues for centrism, Corbyn's supporters are quick to invoke the name of Tony Blair.

Their view seems to be that Blair made the deal that if the party moved to the centre, they could get into power, even if they didn't get everything the membership wanted. That worked, until he made the uber-blunder of joining George W. Bush's war in Iraq. That move wasn't merely unpopular, it was everything the party membership hated. Honestly, it was worse to them than anything Margaret Thatcher ever did. So Labour Party members felt like they'd been tricked into electing a might-as-well-be-Conservative government. That's poisoned the concept of moving to the political centre, and it is a non-starter among party members. Every liberal party may have is hardliners who say that moderates like Hillary Clinton are no better than their conservative opponents, but at Labour, they appear to believe it.

So all together, it seems like the United Kingdom has really lost it. But really, the crumbling seems to be concentrated in England. Scotland had far less problems with post-referendum hate crimes. And they voted solidly to stay, so now they're eying the exits. And people started talking about Irish reunification. And you know things are bad when even Wales is talking about leaving. But that's where they make Doctor Who. Great, another British institution that could pay the price.

England's problems are deeper than politics and economics; it's beloved soccer team has been a sort of metaphor for the country recently, first getting booted from the Euros by small but united Iceland, then losing their new coach after just one match thanks to bizarre bragging about rule-breaking. It's hard not to come to the conclusion that England has Jumped the Shark. Or, whatever the national equivalent of jumping the shark is. Actually, this could coin a new phrase. I suspect that centuries from now, people will be saying that China is no longer the country it once was, and that maybe it's "Voted to Leave."

These Memes Won't Turn Anyone On

I'm kind if surprised that people are still using homosexuality as a putdown.  For instance, I've seen a few variations on the graphic to the right.

As you can see, it makes pronouncements about how various musical jobs will affect a man's ability to attract women.  For the most part it shows the hierarchy we'd expect, putting the singer and guitarist at the top.  Although in my experience, people are quicker to slag the drummer than the bassist, but either way, neither gets the respect they deserve.

But it's disappointing that they use the implication of gay men to deliver the ultimate put down to the keyboardist.  Yes, I know, homosexuality has been devalued forever, this shouldn't be news.  But with its increasing acceptance in society, you'd think the people who still see it as an insult would be aging legislators who don't know how to use the Internet.

So it worries me that a lot of the acceptance of homosexuals may be shallower than we think.  People have gotten to the point of accepting their existence, or their lack of evilness at least. But perhaps they still haven't gotten to the point of seeing it as equal to any other sexuality.

Like I said, I've seen a few variations on it.  One was to insult different types of cars.  Unfortunately I couldn't find it when I just went looking, but the same point can be made with these graphics that reflect demonizing of gay men, or possibly straight women:

And of course it reasserts my point that the Chevy/Ford rivalry is just a meaningless lobbing of the same insults back and forth.

But the breaking point that prompted me to write this was when I saw the meme applied to programming languages:

I assume that if you aren't familiar with programming, then this looks rather surreal, a bunch of unfamiliar names arbitrarily assigned to implications of virility. Well let me reassure you that even if you are familiar with all these languages, it looks about the same.  I really have no idea how they decided on these, other than that it was obviously put together by a PHP programmer. As the oldest and least-forgiving language there, one would think that C will make you attractive to others. Maybe Perl if you're looking for someone particularly kinky. But the point is, that shows how silly this all is. People are just flinging outdated insults at others, but all they're doing is exposing their own bigotry .

Peace Offering

Sunday night, a Republican campaign office in North Carolina was firebombed. We don't yet know who did it, but graffiti at the scene showed it to be a targetted act. Even in this particularly bitter campaign, that is taking things to a scary new level. Some Democrats were also troubled this, so they set up a crowd funding campaign to raise $10,000 to fix the office. News of the campaign spread quickly, and the money was raised within hours.

That funding campaign seemed like a nice thing to do. After all, no civilized person wants to win because of violence, whoever committed it. So offering a helping hand goes a little way to revelling the playing field. But I've found a number of left-leaning people on the Internet didn't like it. Certainly, no one endorsed the bombing, but the fact is that the gesture is just symbolic, since the Republicans presumably have insurance.  And of course, it's an expensive gesture; ten grand may seem like a drop in the bucket in billion-dollar campaigns, but it still could have made a big difference for individuals.  And much as we'd all like to view political opponents as honourable and respectable, the fact is that Trump's Republicans have caused real harm to large numbers of people.  And this is North Carolina, where state republicans pushed through anti-LGBT legislation earlier this year.

So was it a good idea to give money to someone who's actively working to make many people's lives worse?  To me, it still seems intuitively like it is.  Though I have to point out that, in the tiny sample size of people I read on line, the people in favour were generally straight-white-able-bodied-cis-males like myself. Those who had problems with the monetary gift usually had one or more traits that put them in the Republicans' crosshairs.  So perhaps I'd see it differently from that perspective.

It would be nice to believe that we could do something that would ease the reconciliation after the election.  I know, that sounds naive, but at some point, people have to get along. I'd like to think that a gift like this would help the process, though I realize it may not work out. Playing up the bombing will reinforce Trump's us-against-the-world narrative, and his supporters will probably never hear about it on conservative media.  Still, I hope it made an impression on someone that there was an effort to restore a little fairness.

Voices Carry

I was just reading a transcript of a speech by President Obama, and realized I was reading it in his voice.  I'm sure in not the only person who does this, especially for people with distinctive voices.  I first became conscious of the phenomena when I read something written by Stephen Hawking, and just couldn't get through it without hearing it in his computer synthesized voice.

In some cases, reading in another's voice is inevitable, if they have a distinctive way of putting words together. It's easier to read Donald Trump's words in his voice, because that's the way we're used to hearing those meandering parades of sentence fragments.

Surprisingly,  I don't often read tweets in other's voices,  though that's because of the strange fact that I have heard little if any spoken words from the folks I follow.  So many of them are people I've found on twitter or elsewhere on the Internet.  The one exception is sportscaster Vic Rauter who tweets in the same spurts of phrases that he talks in, so I find it impossible to read them any other way.

I've tried to think back to remember if I did this reading quotes in the past, but I don't think I did.  But it occurs to me that we didn't really read the words of others very often.  Books and newspaper articles were written by people we'd never heard the voices of. Famous people spoke on TV,  but we didn't really have the chance to read anything they wrote. The most was perhaps reading a quote,  say in a newspaper. But they were often edited for grammar, and weren't very long.  Actually reading things written by famous people is a unique feature of our age.

Try To Keep Up

Today I saw a news bite that Jamie Lee Curtis had criticized Donald Trump for his attack on Lindsay Lohan.  I was like, wait, what?  I thought it was Marlee Matlin that he had criticized.  Oh, that was earlier today, leaked from Celebrity Apprentice. The loan insult was from an old Howard Stern. That's it, even for a person like myself, who tries to keep up with current events,  even with our 24 hour news cycle, the scandals are coming to fast to digest. We have reached the scandal singularity.

The reaction to accusations of sexual assault against Trump have followed a predictable pattern. You may have heard of Lewis' Law "Comments on any article about feminism justify feminism." I think we need a new law: People's reaction to women finally coming forward to talk about sexual assault is why women are so reluctant to talk about sexual assault.

On the one hand, there seem to be more people willing to listen instead of dismiss the allegations. Some of it is because people are finally getting experience and understanding of the issue. Though I suppose it's also because the allegations square with Trump's public personna more easily than they did with Bill Cosby. It's also easier to understand their desire to keep quiet given the accused's quickness with litigation. But on the other hand, the partisan nature of this issue had meant that people ate dug in on both sides, so the fight is going to be extra toxic. But it's further evidence that people are coming to accept this election as the referendum on civility that I always saw it to be.

Do Rats Get Adorable Little Lifeboats To Abandon Sinking Ships?

You've probably heard about the tape of Donald Trump saying Trumpy things. And now, at long last, it seems he has Finally Done It. Yes, as predicted by so many, he has Gone Too Far, and Republicans are making the decision of whether or not to jump ship. So if you choose "jocular discussion of sexual assault" in your Trump self-destruction pool, congratulations.

Observing liberals online, this lead to 24 hours of rejoicing, followed by anger that none of the other disgusting things he's done was enough to trigger such anger. If you are wondering why this was the final straw, here are some ideas:

• When you read or heard Trump's remarks you probably involuntarily pictured him doing the things he was talking about. And depending on your life experience and the literalness you took the remarks at, it was somewhere between bizarre and horrifying. But think back to that mental image and ask yourself, what colour is the woman?
• Notably, Trump made it clear it didn't matter if a woman was married. That allows old-fashioned men to take it personally, in a way that his insults against women don't.
• Republicans have been caught in a kind of Emperor's New Clothes situation with Trump, in which he holds so much sway over the party's voters that no one wants to point out that he's naked. This incident is the first that's big enough that people have the confidence to believe they won't be the only ones involved in the coup. Even as it is, we're seeing the wrath of Trump Nation. Republicans that criticised him are getting rude receptions at campaign events, and accusations of treason, and that's the ones that didn't actually pull their support.
• This leak is a great example of the "October Surprise." Elections are in November, and dropping big negative news just before the election gives the opponent little time to recover. What must have Republicans worried is that this leak came out on October 7, implying that there's plenty more to come. Indeed, people from The Apprentice claim there are.
• Keep in mind that the politicians will know things about the campaign that we don't. For instance, it's important to remember that the polls we see in the media are cheap things that are often not that accurate. The parties themselves do polling that's of much higher quality (which they keep to themselves.) So it's possible that Republicans knew the situation was bad even before this incident - say since the first debate - and had been looking for an excuse to jump ship.
• There were already several allegations of sexual assault against Trump, but they weren't getting much play in the media. We saw in the Bill Cosby situation that there was a turning point when the allegations went from being assumed unfounded and ignored, to widely believed. So there's a possibility of that pattern repeating itself with Trump, especially if anyone else feels empowered to step forward now.
• Keep in mind that Americans vote for lots of things at once, so voters will be selecting not only the president, but also representatives, and possibly senators, governors and other lower positions. Party leaders have to be concerned about Trump's effect on the other races. Even if he can ride an alt-right wave to victory, that would still turn people off of Republicans in general, or discourage traditional Republican supporters from showing up to the polls, thus hurting the party in all those other races. There's already word that the party is diverting money and effort away from the presidency and to other campaigns.

Give Up Truckin'

There's a movie coming called Monster Trucks. It won't be out until early next year, so you normally wouldn't be hearing about it so early. But it made the news not in the entertainment section but the business section. Apparently, the movie is so bad that the studio's accountants are taking a $115 million write-down on the movie, which is accounting-speak for "this movie's gonna bomb, so we'll just write all the negative numbers in the budget right now." And it's all under the assumption that it will bomb at the box office.

You might think that a movie about monster trucks would be a slam-dunk for Americans. And it stars the guy from the new MacGyver, who I was surprised to see is not also one of the guys from Supernatural. The idea is that this particular truck is possessed by an actual monster. See, this is what they call a "high concept" film, where there's a simple premise, which is explained in the title.

This preemptive panic by the studio had invited people to start piling-on the criticism. A movie about a monster living in a truck? What a silly idea, of course it's a failure. It gets worse when people find out that the movie was inspired at least in part by a studio exec's five-year-old. Again, cue the amateur critics, tut-tutting the idea.  But really, it's not that different from Cars, which was wildly popular. And Disney even managed to wring more money out of that concept with Planes, which you have to think would be a flimsier idea that going with trucks.

And the exec's son? Was it really such a dumb idea to get a kid's input on a kids' movie? After all, that little consultation could have prevented Mars Needs Moms. I don't understand why the same public that notices, or even revels in, the stupidity of movies, thinks that it's obvious which movies are going to be popular. And also, give the public a little credit for being open to oddball ideas.  Can you really say Monster Trucks is an inherently worse idea than Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs?  

I'm not saying it will be a success.  Though studios are sometimes surprised by bombs, if they know the movie is in trouble this early, they're likely right. Having seen the trailer, it looks like it could be dumb fun, though not nearly what I would expect from a movie whose two defining concepts are "monsters" and "monster trucks."  So I have no doubt the write-down is correct. But don't fire that exec's kid just yet.