Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 684
August 19, 2016
The ballad of “Swim Shady”: Ryan Lochte’s Rio fiasco is more proof that male athletes are a protected class
Ryan Lochte (Credit: AP/Martin Meissner)
It must be a heady thing to have all the privileges of a male athlete. You can pretty much do anything before you’re held even remotely accountable — and then when you do have to face any consequences, you’ll get a nice chorus of despair about your lost opportunities. In what other realm could the misdeeds of a 32-year-old man be gently passed off as the antics of “kids?”
Oh, to be you, Ryan Lochte.
Early this week, reports emerged that the blue-haired Olympic medalist — along with three other members of the U.S. swim team — had been “robbed at gunpoint” early Sunday morning. USOC spokesperson Patrick Sandusky issued a statement saying that while heading toward the Olympic village, “their taxi was stopped by individuals posing as armed police officers who demanded the athletes’ money and other personal belongings. All four athletes are safe and cooperating with authorities.”
Lochte himself gave an eminently Lochte-ish account of the event, telling NBC, “They pulled out their guns, they told the other swimmers to get down on the ground — they got down on the ground. I refused, I was like we didn’t do anything wrong, so — I’m not getting down on the ground. And then the guy pulled out his gun, he cocked it, put it to my forehead and he said, “Get down,” and I put my hands up, I was like ‘whatever.’ He took our money, he took my wallet — he left my cell phone, he left my credentials.”
And the the tale began to change. On Thursday, Brazilian police said that “It seems that they lied. No robbery was committed against these athletes. They were not victims of the crimes they claimed.” Instead, it appeared the swimmers had vandalized a gas station — USA Today reports “one of them broke down the bathroom door and police found damage to a soap dispenser and a mirror” — leading to a confrontation with armed security guards and a payoff, possibly to cover the damages. The AP reports that “police said the swimmers were unable to provide key details in early interviews, saying they had been intoxicated.”
The response to these hijinks has been generous, to say the least. Rio 2016 spokesman Mario Andrada shrugged Thursday, “Let’s give these kids a break. Sometimes you take actions that you later regret. They are magnificent athletes. Lochte is one of the best swimmers of all times. They had fun. They made a mistake. It’s part of life. Life goes on. Let’s go.”
I guess if you’re “one of the best swimmers of all times,” you can do whatever the heck you want! P.S. This “kid” is 32.
A Time story on the incident, meanwhile, observes that though he may now suffer fallout, “Ryan Lochte Has Never Played by the Rules.”
In a Friday morning statement, Lochte still seems to stick close to his original narrative:
“It’s traumatic to be out late with your friends in a foreign country, with a language barrier — and have a stranger point a gun at you and demand money to let you leave,” but adds that he apologizes for “not being more careful and candid in how I described the events.”
Two days ago, Lochte was retweeting fans who say, “I am from Brazil and I believe Ryan. I was robbed in the bus. Drivers are working with robbers.” Fernando Veloso, chief of Rio’s civil police, said Thursday that when the swimmers were having belligerently, a security officer showed them his weapon but that “there was no way” they could have mistaken the incident for a robbery.
Tragically, as several news outlets have noted, Lochte stands to lose some plum endorsements from all of this. But compare his experience during these games — the jokey, lighthearted way his hashtaggable actions have been treated — with that of gymnast Gabby Douglas, whose unforgivable crime in Rio was not putting her hand over her heart during the playing of our national anthem. For that, she’s been the target of vitriolic online abuse. “She’s had to deal with people criticizing her hair, or people accusing her of bleaching her skin. They said she had breast enhancements, they said she wasn’t smiling enough, she’s unpatriotic,” her mother told reporters this week. “Then it went to not supporting your team mates. Now you’re ‘Crabby Gabby.’ You name it and she got trampled. What did she ever do to anyone?” Well, for starters, Douglas wasn’t born a goofy white guy.
If you’re a “promising” Stanford swimmer, you can sexually assault a woman and have newspapers weep for your “tarnished” career. If you’re an Olympic runner, you can kill your girlfriend and have a judge call you “a fallen hero.” You can literally murder two people and eat a victim’s face, and if you’re a football player, a newspaper can call it a “fall from grace.” And if you’re Ryan Lochte, you can disgrace yourself and just be a “kid” who made a “mistake.”
August 18, 2016
Patty Hearst’s America: What “American Heiress” gets wrong (and right) about an insane time and place
Patty Hearst leaves the San Francisco Federal Building, Feb. 13, 1976, during her trial on bank robbery charges. (Credit: AP)
One thing I learned from Jeffrey Toobin’s book “American Heiress” that I hadn’t known before was that Patty Hearst always preferred to be called Patricia. Her father, newspaper publisher Randolph A. Hearst, repeatedly addressed her by the family nickname when speaking to reporters in the driveway of his mansion in Hillsborough, California, an exclusive suburb south of San Francisco. So she became Patty in the national consciousness forevermore. (Her grandfather was the legendary William Randolph Hearst of “Citizen Kane” infamy.)
Almost everything else about the Patty Hearst kidnapping of 1974 and the alternate universe of the San Francisco Bay Area in that decade, when implausible and apocalyptic events became routine, is so seared into my memory that reading Toobin’s book was a dreamlike experience. Running across certain details of Hearst’s ordeal or tidbits of information about the Symbionese Liberation Army, the band of self-appointed revolutionaries who abducted her, I would ask myself, How could Toobin have possibly known about that?
The answer is that Toobin knows such things because he is a polished delivery system for judicious but fast-paced nonfiction bestsellers. His best-known books are probably “A Vast Conspiracy,” about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and “The Run of His Life,” which became the basis for the TV series “The People v. O.J. Simpson.”
But that answer is not personally satisfying to me. On the level of conscious knowledge, I understand that Patricia Hearst is a real person, as were Donald “Cinque” DeFreeze and Patricia “Mizmoon” Soltysik and the rest of the SLA members whose exploits I devoured in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Berkeley Barb. What those people did has already provided the fodder for numerous books, movies, magazine articles and half-baked tabloid TV specials.
But on some deeper level, I don’t perceive them as historical figures but as artifacts of my childhood, local characters my parents almost knew or might have known, whose significance I have exaggerated. One of my high school classmates, who went on to become a writer and performance artist in San Francisco and New York, did a “Tania” impersonation while running for student council sometime around 1979, going onstage at a school assembly wearing a beret and carrying a toy machine gun. That, I suppose, was exactly the moment when revolution turned into revolutionary kitsch. (If you’ve encountered that anecdote somewhere else, yeah, it’s still mine.)
While reading “American Heiress,” I began making lists of all the points of random intersection. Patricia Hearst was kidnapped from an apartment building on Benvenue Avenue in Berkeley, where my dad bought a 1968 Opel Kadett from another resident a few years later. (It cost $250; I’m still mad at my brother for blowing out the engine.) She briefly worked a summer job at Capwell’s department store in downtown Oakland; so did I, about a decade later. Soltysik worked as a janitor at the Berkeley Public Library, where I went after school several times a week. Most of the SLA’s core members met at a state prison in Vacaville, about 50 miles east of Berkeley; today my brother is a chiropractor there, treating the workplace injuries of corrections officers.
But the milieu that makes the SLA and the Hearst kidnapping seem like a mythical or fictional phenomenon goes beyond childhood memories. Those things belong to a vanished era when “The Lord of the Rings” and “Dune” largely remained the provinces of disreputable geek subculture, when the internet (not generally called by that name) was available via teletype printout at the Whole Earth Access store on Shattuck Avenue, and when owning even one David Bowie album marked someone as almost certainly as gay or bisexual. Those may seem irrelevant or trivial correspondences, but I don’t see them that way.
When the SLA kidnapped Patricia Hearst from the Benvenue Avenue apartment in February 1974, it was, as Toobin has made clear, a shocking political crime nearly without precedent in American history. (One has to go back to the “Lindbergh baby” case in 1932 to find anything similar.) It was also a landmark cultural event, a symbolic event in the true meaning of that word — which is an aspect that Toobin perceives less clearly.
As the book’s title suggests, Toobin has presented Patricia Hearst as the central protagonist in a story of abduction, captivity and survival, and he has done an exemplary job of treating the unanswered questions about her fairly. Was Patricia’s transformation into “Tania,” the SLA bank robber and revolutionary, voluntary or coerced? Was it Stockholm syndrome or a desperate impersonation? Was her intimate relationship with Willy “Cujo” Wolfe, one of her kidnappers, consensual or a matter of rape and sexual enslavement?
As Toobin says in the book, by contemporary standards, no reasonable level of consent exists for a person who has been abducted, blindfolded and imprisoned in a closet for several weeks. If Hearst is taken at her word, she was compelled to have sex with Wolfe and also raped by DeFreeze. (Bill and Emily Harris, the only surviving members of the SLA, have denied this.) Concerning the larger question of “Tania’s” authenticity, Toobin has delicately ducked the issue, suggesting (correctly, I would say) that there is no clear yes-or-no answer. Hearst later insisted that she never believed in the SLA’s goals and methods, let alone its crackpot mishmash of revolutionary ideology but suspected the group might kill her if she didn’t play along.
But there is no evidence that even DeFreeze, the SLA’s unstable leader, ever contemplated murdering Hearst: He understood clearly that she was invaluable as a potential trade commodity and then as a propaganda tool. Furthermore, he must have known that his life, and those of his entire group, would be forfeited if Hearst came to harm. Considering what happened on May 17, 1974, when DeFreeze and five other SLA members died in a massive firefight with police in South Central Los Angeles, that was a highly reasonable belief. That shootout was the first such event carried on live television in the United States, so it was a turning point in media history as well.
Patricia Hearst did not cooperate with Toobin during the writing of “American Heiress” and has expressed her unhappiness with the book. Among other things, Toobin referred to letters Hearst wrote after her release that suggested she still subscribed to the SLA cause and still had feelings for Willy Wolfe, who had died in the L.A. shootout. But in the book Toobin never takes the position that those letters, or anything else Hearst said or did, prove anything in particular, except that a young woman from a privileged background who had been abducted at age 19 and spent a year and a half in a far-left underground cult group was extremely confused about the world and her place in it.
But Patty or Patricia or Tania is not the real protagonist of this story, I would argue. Although he did not get any important facts wrong, Toobin’s book has managed to put the cart before the horse at least a little. Hearst herself is less important than the SLA, and that malignant revolutionary army with no followers was the product, even perhaps the manifestation, of a specific time and place. If America in the 1970s seems like a fantasy universe, incomprehensibly different from the country of today, the Bay Area was a fantasy inside the fantasy. Another world was possible, as a later generation of radicals would put it, and some people believed they were living in it. Whether that world was a nightmare or the first faint glimmers of a stillborn utopia is entirely a matter of perspective, as it was at the time.
While the Hearst kidnapping transfixed the Bay Area in 1974, and to a lesser extent the entire country, Toobin’s contention that it was a unique or anomalous event doesn’t entirely ring true. If one were to stack each of the crazy things that happened in California in the ’70s one on top of another — any one of which would spark a national panic today, followed by the immediate dissolution of Congress and the imposition of military dictatorship — one gets a stack of crazy reaching to the moon and back.
This was the era of the Zodiac killer, who wrote taunting letters in code to San Francisco police (and who was not, I believe, Ted Cruz), and the “Zebra killers,” militant Black Muslims who murdered white people at random. The Vietnam War had come to a humiliating end less than a year before the Hearst kidnapping, and Richard Nixon would resign in disgrace six months later. Gas lines stretched for miles, especially in car-crazed California; the federal government tried to contain runaway inflation with mandatory wage and price controls. Within two years, a massive statewide drought would compel water rationing. Two years after that would come the Jonestown massacre in Guyana, and the shootings of Harvey Milk and George Moscone at City Hall in San Francisco.
In other words, by the time my friend Jennifer performed her Tania shtick on the stage of the Berkeley Community Theater — where I also saw the Clash perform, probably that same year — the story of Patty Hearst really had receded into the background clutter of California insanity and become kind of a joke. The earnest but deranged Berkeley radicals of the SLA (all of them white except their supposed leader, a career criminal whom Toobin calls a “junior varsity” version of George Jackson, the prison prophet of 1960s) were a joke. So was their ludicrous vision of revolution — along with the simultaneously hysterical and incompetent reaction from officialdom. The bewildered finishing-school princess with a submachine gun was a joke, and so were her anguished old-money parents, Manhattan-via-San Francisco socialites who were not nearly as wealthy as the world supposed. (Randolph Hearst nearly bankrupted himself trying to fund the food giveaway program demanded by the SLA and had to beg the Hearst Corporation for financial support.)
On a larger scale, America felt like a big joke too, a vibrant but decadent nation that had careened off the rails, where any damn thing could happen and probably would. It was also the decade of maximum white flight and maximum urban blight, when the whole nation saw the South Bronx burning on live TV during a World Series game at Yankee Stadium. When I consider the strange combination of nihilism and idealism in my demographic slice — the disaffected middle class of the Patty Hearst generation that came of age with disco, punk, Watergate and AIDS — I’m inclined to be forgiving.
Toobin has been too careful to issue any final verdict on the Patty Hearst moment and what it all meant. But if his book helps drive some reconsideration of that transformative era, he has performed a public service. Many in my generation failed to see the backlash coming or perceive how strong it would be. We thought that the idiotic former Hollywood actor-turned-governor of California who berated the Hearst family for negotiating with the SLA, was a joke, too. His presidential campaign in 1980 was another laughable effort by the old order to assert control over a situation of near-total anarchy. Well, that joke was ultimately on us, and it’s had a very long tail.
TV finally gets mental illness right — by laughing about it
"Bojack Horseman," "Lady Dynamite" (Credit: Netflix)
It was the Q-tip moment. If I had to point to one moment that changed how television depicts mental illness, I’d give it to the March 2013 episode of “Girls” in which Hannah (Lena Dunham), her OCD flaring up, pokes a Q-tip into her ear — and just keeps going. It was a hiss heard round the world.
Writing in The Daily Beast at the time, Kent Sepkowitz wrote he hoped shows like “Girls” could demonstrate “that real mental illness is not eradicated by a pill or a better diet, by three visits to a shrink, or by a thoughtful walk along the beach.” Who would have thought then that mental health awareness would owe a debt to a scene that Rolling Stone called a “WTF” and that Hollywood.com nominated for “the Most Disgusting TV Moment Ever?” It’s been a long time coming.
My daughter was not yet 1 month old in the winter of 2004, when “Scrubs” aired the first of a two-episode arc introducing Dr. Kevin Casey, a brilliant surgeon with a frustrating obstacle: his obsessive-compulsive disorder. Yet when she watched the episodes on Netflix several months ago, my kid saw something she had never seen on television before. She saw someone like herself.
“I think I have OCD,” she announced at the dinner table soon afterward. What has followed for her has been life-changing; there’s a word for what goes on in her head, an understanding why she does some of the things she does. Cognitive behavioral therapy has dramatically reduced her distress, even though she has a much milder form of her condition than Michael J. Fox’s character had to deal with. And it’s all because of a sitcom. Thank you, TV. And thank you especially, comedy.
Twelve years ago that “Scrubs” OCD story line was somewhat of anomaly. Sure, television also had “Monk,” but that was a show that portrayed its main protagonist as a “defective detective” and his OCD and many phobias, in the words of author Fletcher Wortmann, as “hilariously inconvenient, painfully superficial, improbably untreatable.” For years mental health issues have been ignored and treated as an easy television punch line, or even worse — as sappy melodrama. But ever since that Q-tip entered Hannah Horvath’s ear canal, characters with a spectrum of mental health issues are all over the damn place, even on some of the best shows on television right now, in all their complicated, exasperating, often absurd glory.
Melanie McFarland, Salon’s TV critic, said this recent crop of comedies is different from those of the past because the current shows “don’t treat psychological disorders as ‘very special episode’ fodder or an arc that is written through and never returns to the main plot.” She added, “In ‘BoJack’ it isn’t even specifically mentioned. Instead they’re just part of the character and the story, which is tougher to pull off because it runs the risk of alienating people who show up to watch a comedy and get a view into depression instead.”
Perhaps you’re no stranger to depression or substance abuse but have you met the expansive casts of self-destructive, often well-meaning characters on “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” “BoJack Horseman” and “You’re the Worst?” In the last season of “You’re the Worst,” Gretchen finally (and believably) copped to her clinical depression, admitting, “My brain is broken.” On “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” impulsive, anxiety-ridden Rebecca sings and dances her way through a depression that’s nothing like the “sexy French” kind in the movies, channeling her “overindulgent self-loathing” into a ballad to herself called “You Stupid Bitch.”
The eponymous main character of the animated series “BoJack Horseman” is an equine actor plagued by depression, self-doubt and neediness. Speaking to The Huffington Post last winter, the show’s creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg admitted, “It was never our top priority to be the voice of depression.” Yet moored in BoJack’s undeniable, undiagnosed condition, the show also reveals the horse’s profound humanity. It’s BoJack who says, in the show’s stunning third-season undersea episode, “In this terrifying world, all we have are the connections we make.”
As those of us familiar with the wide, wide world of mental health issues know, there’s more out there than just depression and anxiety. “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” is about a hopeful young woman emerging after 15 years of captivity and dealing with post-traumatic stress from her abduction. On an episode in Season 2, Kimmy meets Keith, a combat veteran who assumes that she is one as well because, as he says, “You’ve kind of got that look.” That line resonated strongly: See Mika Doyle’s powerful essay on “Kimmy” and the language of sexual assault survivors.
“You’re the Worst” also addresses PTSD through the ongoing story line of supporting character Edgar. Writer and creator Stephen Falk has said he drew from the experiences of real veterans and “the sense of humor that they do have about themselves, and the ability to joke about some of it.”
In Netflix’s brilliant “Lady Dynamite,” comedian Maria Bamford serves as the inspiration for the character Maria Bamford (also a comedian), who lives with bipolar II, suicidality and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The first season shuttles between different timelines in Maria’s life, anchored by her psychiatric history. In one episode, she performs a stand-up routine about her obsessive thoughts, asking her audience, “Have you ever had a creepy thought? Like, ‘What if I ever licked a urinal?'”
Bamford said via email that this moment in comedy is just the latest in a long history of comedians being candid about mental health. “So many artists — including comedians Richard Lewis, Jonathan Winters and Cathy Ladman, just to name a few — have/had always been very open in talking about their experiences with mental illness.”
“There’s so much acceptance that there is a quarterly magazine called BIPOLAR (of which I’m a subscriber),” Bamford wrote. “When there’s a full-color quarterly magazine with Richard Dreyfus and Demi Lovato on the front page (full disclosure: I was featured in a back-page column), you’ve go to know there’s so much more acceptance.”
“Catherine Zeta-Jones made bipolar the new gladiator sandal,” Bamford added.
Dr. Andrew J. Pierce, a psychologist in Gainesville, Florida, meanwhile, knows the real-world value of visibility. He sees it in his practice. “Comedy allows all of us — with disorders or not — to look at subjects that are taboo or we’re afraid to talk about,” he said. “These things have been stigmatized and driven into the shadows. Comedy is taking these disorders that can be devastating and humanizing them in a way that’s approachable. It’s allowed people to come to my office who wouldn’t have otherwise, because it allows us to have a conversation about what mental health is.”
I know from experience that people who deal with mental health issues — including my own kid — can do it with a sense of humor about themselves and their conditions. Watching characters like themselves on TV, they see that they’re not the butt of the joke: They’re the star.
“Dangerous precedent for free speech”: NJ Gov. Chris Christie signs law punishing boycotts of Israel
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (Credit: AP/Mel Evans)
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has signed bipartisan-backed legislation that will punish groups that endorse a boycott of Israel in protest of its violations of Palestinian human rights. Christie, who is one of the most outspoken supporters of far-right Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, signed the bill on Tuesday.
It requires the New Jersey government to identify companies that support a boycott of Israel, raising fears that it would create a “blacklist” of institutions that back the growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, or BDS, movement.
Under the new law, the State Investment Council, which manages more than $80 billion in pension assets, is legally obligated to divest from these blacklisted companies.
Legal groups say the legislation is likely unconstitutional.
The state branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, blasted the legislation as “a dangerous precedent for New Jerseyans’ free speech.” It warned that the bills, S1923/A925, raise “serious constitutional concerns.”
“The ACLU-NJ strongly opposed this blacklist bill, and we now strongly oppose this blacklist law,” said Alexander Shalom, a senior staff attorney at the civil liberties group, in a statement.
“This legislation requires the state to punish companies because of the beliefs people there hold rather than any action they have taken,” he explained.
Shalom added, “Now, the New Jersey government will be authorized to open investigations into people’s speech and beliefs to tell whether a company’s choice not to do business with Israel was based on political beliefs or other reasons, and to punish companies based on what they find.”
Civil liberties groups have been monitoring the wave of anti-BDS legislation that has grown across the country, with the support of pro-Israel groups. The language in many of the bills is often very similar to that used in materials created by pro-Israel organizations.
There is a largely bipartisan consensus in support of these potentially unconstitutional bills, coming from both sides of the aisle. Gov. Christie is a hard-line Republican, but New Jersey’s Democrat-led legislature passed the bill by a sizeable majority in June.
Legal advocacy group Palestine Legal, which has been closely watching the government’s anti-BDS trend, slammed New Jersey’s new law.
Rahul Saksena, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal, told Salon the legislation “will require the state of New Jersey to investigate political viewpoints and withhold investments from companies based on those political viewpoints. In doing so, it will unconstitutionally punish and chill First Amendment-protected activity.”
“The right to speak out and to engage in robust debate about important political issues — including through boycotts — is a cornerstone of democracy and is enshrined in our Constitution,” he said.
Saksena added, “It’s alarming that Governor Christie has so eagerly trampled on this right.”
Christie stood by his decision. While signing the bill on Tuesday, he said, “Israel is the beacon of democracy in a region that is constantly in turmoil.” The governor noted that New Jersey does $1.3 billion in trade with Israel every year, and called it the U.S.’s “one, true and best friend.”
Supporters of the BDS movement say otherwise. Since 1967, Israel has maintained a military occupation of Palestinian territories, in blatant violation of international law. Moreover, hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers continue to illegally colonize the occupied Palestinian West Bank.
In periodic wars, the Israeli military has killed thousands of Palestinians. And Israeli occupation forces, as the U.S. State Department has recognized, use excessive force against and torture Palestinian civilians, including children; destroy Palestinians’ property; and impose “severe restrictions” on their freedom.
Even within Israel, Palestinian citizens face extreme forms of institutionalized discrimination. Israeli rights group Adalah has documented more than 50 laws, enacted since the country was founded in 1948, that “directly or indirectly discriminate against Palestinian citizens of Israel in all areas of life.”
Supporters says the BDS movement is the only way to pressure Israel to cease violating Palestinian human rights and abide by international law.
The U.S. government, however, “strongly opposes” the BDS movement, as President Obama said in a statement in February. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has made it clear that she is a staunch opponent of the BDS movement, and has publicly demonized it.
The U.S. gives more than $3.1 billion in unconditional military aid to Israel every year — more than to any other country, by far. And the Obama administration is poised to increase it by a least an additional annual $1 billion.
Christie is by no means the only prominent U.S. politician to take action in an effort to punish human rights activists who support the BDS movement.
In June, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, signed an executive order that creates a blacklist of institutions and companies that support BDS and requires government institutions to divest their money and assets from these blacklisted groups.
Legal groups harshly condemned the new policy, calling it “McCarthyite” and unconstitutional.
Civil liberties advocates point out that the wave of anti-BDS measures is very clearly politically motivated, and poses a threat to Americans’ constitutionally protected forms of expression.
“Government investigators should not have free rein to spy on New Jerseyans’ political beliefs to check if they match the political opinions of lawmakers. No matter your viewpoint or opinion on the conflict in the Middle East, our constitutional rights to freedom of speech and protest must come first,” ACLU-NJ’s Alexander Shalom explained.
“The United States, as well as the world, has a long history of using boycotts as a form of political protest,” he pointed out.
“Governor Christie undermined not only boycotting as a political tactic, but our founding principles of free speech and free association.”
Hashing out the end of “The Nightly Show” with Franchesca Ramsey: “You can’t force people to have conversations they’re not ready for”
Franchesca Ramsey on "The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore" (Credit: Comedy Central)
Watching “The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore” over the last few days has felt less like attending a funeral and more like participating in a rally — a rally with a full-stocked minibar, thanks to Wilmore’s former colleagues from “The Daily Show,” Samantha Bee and Stephen Colbert, both of whom sent the staff copious amounts of alcohol on Tuesday and Wednesday. But it was a rally nonetheless.
Contributors have been on fire during their segments, while Wilmore has cheekily imbibed during his monologues. In front of the cameras, the “Nightly” people are heading into the cancellation with bright punch lines and sharp sarcasm as always. But while “The Nightly Show” host has spoken to a number of outlets about the talker’s cancellation, we thought it would be interesting to speak with one of the show’s staffers about the mood during its final hours.
After all, when the lights go out on “Nightly,” Wilmore will still be an executive producer on upcoming HBO comedy “Insecure.” He won’t lack for opportunities. His staff, including contributor Franchesca Ramsey, is much more, shall we say, available.
Ramsey is a relative newcomer to “The Nightly Show,” having joined as a writer and contributor in February after previously appearing as one of its guests. Her regular segment, #HashItOut, showcased biting analysis of social media idiocy, a subject she’s all too familiar with thanks to her work on the MTV News web series “Decoded,” which she’s hosted since 2015.
Salon spoke with Ramsey the morning that “The Nightly Show” finale was to air to find out what the mood’s been like behind the scenes and to discuss the show’s legacy. (Note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.)
Take me into what it was like in the writers’ room, when you all found out what had happened.
We all found out as a staff. It wasn’t just the writers. They brought in everybody. You know, it was one of those things where we got an email the night before, telling us to not come in for our regular morning meeting, to come in a little bit later. I feel like that’s when we knew something was up. Because we knew that we would get news about the show being picked up, but we didn’t know what the news would be. From that, we kind of guessed it wouldn’t be positive.
It wasn’t just the writers, or the contributors. It was the entire staff, which includes the crew working in the studio — all of the editors, all of the graphics people, all of the administrative team. . . . It was really nice for all of us to be together and kind of just reflect on all of the great stuff that we’ve done, in addition to kind of taking in the news that we wouldn’t be moving forward after this week.
Let’s say the show had been picked up. Did you as a team have any specific stories or goals for coverage? For instance, did you say, “Within the next couple of months leading up to or even after the election, I would like to cover X?”
No, I think the fun and the challenge of our show is that we really react to what’s going on in the world. We’re really informed by whatever’s going on, whether that’s positive or negative. And this election has been very trying and confusing. So we were doing a lot of coverage of the election and, as much as I’ve been kind of nervous about this year’s election, I’ve been looking forward to us finding creative ways to really analyze what’s been happening, and maybe kind of bring some levity in a time [when] I think a lot of people are stressed and confused and really worried about the direction our country is going in.
One of the things I’ve noticed in the last few shows is that it seems like there has been a sort of freewheeling atmosphere around the roundtable. Has the energy [behind the scenes] changed at all? Is there a notion of “All right, if we’re going to go out, we’re going to go out like this?”
We’re kind of doing what we’ve always done, which is being honest and poking fun at ourselves. That’s what we’ve been doing every night, whether it’s starting the show reflecting on the fact that Stephen Colbert sent us a ton of alcohol, you know, and people were drinking on the panel and making jokes about that. And Sam Bee sent us a whole bunch of wine, and Larry was drinking wine the whole episode on Tuesday.
We’re just kind of laughing at the fact that it’s sad that we’re ending. But we’re going to do what we do best. Especially because it feels like there are more people watching this week, which is one of the bittersweet consequences of being cancelled. It seems like we have more eyes right now, and so we really want to show people that, you know, this is unfortunate. We are good at what we do, we’ve been good at what we were doing, and I think we’re just kind of proving that we will be missed in this space.
What I’ve found remarkable about Larry Wilmore, just as a viewer — and I don’t mean just with “The Nightly Show,” I’m also referring his work on “Black-ish” and especially with Issa Rae — is that I have not seen a producer promote women of color as prominently as he has.
No. For me, that’s one of the things that I’m most disappointed about, us leaving the show. We also have Grace Parra, who is a Latina. We don’t have this level of diversity in late-night television, in television period. I mean, there’s three black women as contributors. Holly [Walker] also used to be a writer, but Robin [Thede] and I are writers. Robin also started off with the show as the head writer. She was the first black female head writer in late-night television. Those are huge, huge risks. Our director is black. We’ve got a super-diverse crew actually in the studio. It’s a very mixed, racially, office which is really, really refreshing. And I think it was a testament to the type of show we wanted to produce and the type of environment that gave us a chance to highlight a lot of voices you don’t often see in late-night television.
One of the things that I observed in writing about “The Nightly Show’s” cancellation is that it may be difficult for a mainstream, broad audience to come to a late-night show that has so many conversations about race from so many different angles. Looking at all the coverage, what has been your impression of how people have interpreted the reason that it was cancelled?
There’s a lot of things. We didn’t shy away from conversations about race on our show. But even more recently, we really focused on the election. And with what’s been happening in our world, we had so many stories about police violence. And we’ve had so many stories about sexual assault, and we’ve covered all of those in the most critical and honest and comical ways that we could while still being respectful to the stories.
So I don’t think necessarily that we went looking for stories about race. There just happened to be a lot of them, and we felt compelled to address them.
What was interesting to me — and this is something that I hear about my work a lot that I don’t think is a fair criticism — is that people at times view that as hating white people. That just talking about inequality and talking about racism, talking about these issues [is] somehow blaming all white people. We have a large white audience in reality.
With some people, their guilt gets in the way of being able to absorb some conversations and realize that they’re not being blamed. No one’s being blamed at all.
And I mentioned my work in this: I host a show [“Decoded”] where I smile and make jokes, and I’m sarcastic the whole time. And the response I get is, “You hate white people,” “you want to kill white people,” “you want segregation to happen; you’re just as bad as the KKK.”
People call me Hitler. I never, in my life, encouraged hating anyone or separating myself from anyone. But you can’t force people to have conversations they’re not ready for. And as much as I think having these conversations is really important, there are some people who are never going to be ready for them.
So, I think there are people who were resistant to the content for that reason and then assumed, maybe just from getting a taste of it, that that’s what our show was about. In reality, we did have episodes where we did not talk about racial issues or we just focused on the election or we just covered LGBT issues or women’s issues.
Again people were clouded by the times we did talk about race and maybe felt judged or turned off as a result.
Plus, if you actually were a racist, and you won, you’d have to go home to your husband and say, “Well, that’s it for us!”
Yeah! And here’s the thing — I’m glad you brought that up, actually — because personally, I hate when people bring up my husband because there are racist white people who sleep with people of color. There are people who have their own internal biases, who raise children of color. And they don’t realize that.
Sometimes people are confused by the fact that my husband is white. But I don’t bring him up to justify that I’m not a racist. It’s inconsequential of who you sleep with. The ability to have sex with someone of another race does not mean you are not a racist, the same way that rapists have moms and sisters and date women and are still misogynists who hate women.
If you are accused of something, your ability to back up your beliefs should be enough rather than [saying], “I have a black neighbor!” or “I work with white people!” I don’t take that as an excuse from someone who defends their racism, so I would never use that as an excuse when someone tries to accuse me of being racist.
What’s next for you, at this point?
I don’t really have anything concrete, and this just happened on Monday. It’s only Thursday! I still host my series for MTV News. We just kicked off Season 4 yesterday. We’ve got 11 more episodes in the pipeline. So that’s something I usually work on on the weekends. Now I’m going to be able to work on that during the week a little bit more, which is nice.
I do a fair amount of public speaking, but I had to pull back because I had a full-time job. I’m writing a lot. I have a writing partner who I’ve been developing a scripted series with. And we’re just in the process of trying to kick that around and see if there’s an opportunity for that to find a home on television, or find a home online. We’d be very happy with either of those possibilities.
Going back to auditioning. Before I was working here I’d be auditioning pretty regularly. Those are things I still want to explore. I still want to be on television as a writer or performer or both. When the right opportunity comes along, I hope that I’ll be able to seize it and make as much of an impact as I was able to do here on “The Nightly Show.”
War in the media age: Hysteria over Trump’s supposed Russian ties made headlines, but the “story” is remarkably flimsy
Vladimir Putin; Donald Trump (Credit: Reuters/RIA Novosti/Brendan McDermid/Photo montage by Salon)
From one week to the next, I note with mounting anxiety the media’s habit of using innuendo, loaded suggestion, assemblages of proximate facts, implication short of assertion and omission to avoid factual news reports. We, the reading and viewing public, are invited to draw conclusions about major events with ever-increasing degrees of uncertainty. Forget enlightenment.
Just as alarming are the numbers of us who are perfectly willing to take part in this pervasive ruse. Shrill conviction follows, and a dangerous undertow of fear, animus and belligerence follows.
There is nothing new in this. Americans have been easy marks for those practiced in the manipulation of crowds at least since newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst provided President Theodore Roosevelt with the righteous frenzy he needed to start the Spanish-American War. But things are far graver now. There is incalculably more at risk. This nation faces large, consequential decisions but insists on rendering itself ever less capable of making them.
That is what it comes to. Consider the distance, in numerous recent events, between what occurred, what we know, what we are told we know (less in each case) and what we are then duped into assuming. It is large. And it is consequential.
Three weeks ago we had the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s electronic mail: The Russians did it. Last week we were warned that Russia is amassing troops and matériel in Crimea in response to a Ukrainian incursion: What incursion? President Vladimir Putin must be planning an invasion of Ukraine.
Now we are treated to a Swiss-cheese review of Paul Manafort’s business dealings in Ukraine prior to the U.S.-cultivated coup in 2014: Trump’s campaign manager must be some kind of under-the-table agent working on behalf of Moscow and an assortment of Russian oligarchs. On Monday Trump gave a foreign policy address that was reckless once again. Never mind that Trump’s thinking amounts to a reprise of Bush II’s — which was endorsed by the very newspapers now intent on “scaring hell out of the American people,” to borrow an infamous Cold War coinage.
The press, with the, in my educated opinion, government-supervised New York Times conspicuously in the lead, builds sandcastles atop each of these events. Each is somewhere along the progression — no, regression — described in this space after the DNC’s mail hack: An unsubstantiated assertion with useful political implications is followed by intimations, then more adventurous insinuations. These devolve into a probability, then a belief. After more innuendo, the blur between truth and suggestion is sufficient to state the still-unverified assertion as simple fact.
Who is not complicit? Too many of us accept not-facts as facts, even as nothing has been established and little is actually known.
For the record:
While we still have no evidence about who hacked the DNC’s mail — and probably never will — all goes quiet, as you may have noticed. This is because the job is done: Nobody is talking about the committee’s corruption, and — high art — the Clintonians have managed to tie Trump to our reigning Russophobia.
Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, now distributes nickel-plated proof that extremist Ukrainian militias barely under Kiev’s control attempted (another) sabotage operation on the border with Crimea. The Germans saw it Monday; you never will. You are instead offered a rolling barrage of fact-free innuendo to explain Moscow’s decision to take defensive steps. Any kind of implausible skullduggery will do — and we must read Vladimir Putin’s name by the second sentence — to avoid the perfectly logical explanation of recent events.
Paul Manafort is nothing more than your standard mercenary who flacks for anybody. Such people have no politics. Yes, Manafort worked for the ousted Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine — and also for Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, Bush I and for Bob Dole. They surely served as Manafort’s references when Trump hired him. The Ukrainian regime that now alleges his complicity in corruption is more corrupt than Yanukovych’s. As to Kiev’s “evidence”— the best it has is a scribbled page of numbers that does not even bear Manafort’s name. (The Times reproduced this Sunday, of course.)
Trump’s foreign policy speech was remarkably unremarkable. It promises a vigorous revival of Bush II’s “war on terror” and refines — if this is the word — his position on barring immigrants from “the most dangerous and volatile regions of the world.” So what? This is nothing more than a variant of what the U.S. is already doing as a matter of routine. All you have to do is not vote for it — without forgetting that Trump declares against the Pacific trade pact (persuasively, unlike Clinton) and is willing to work with Russia to resolve the Syria conflict (also unlike Clinton).
One more thought on all this: How dare the Times publish some of its worst-ever flimflam on every one of these developments, given its record of supine compliance with Bush II after the Sept. 11 events and its demonstrably dishonest coverage of Ukraine since the 2014 coup? In an astonishing confessional published on Page One last week, our friends on Eighth Avenue acknowledged that they are incapable of covering Trump with any objectivity. So much for the Times, one has to say. (Who drives the bus over there, I wondered when I read that piece. The copyboys?)
“The information age is actually a media age,” John Pilger, the noted Australian-British journalist, said in a late-2014 speech. “We have war by media, censorship by media, demonology by media, retribution by media — a surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.”
Washington’s enemies du jour are the targets in this war. But so are we, readers. If the Vietnam War taught the policy cliques anything — a debatable proposition — it was that they cannot conduct foreign adventures in the interest of empire without domestic consensus. The media’s task devolves into nothing more than securing your consent by any means necessary. And the truth generally does not do it.
There are casualties, as there are in all wars. One is sound judgment on any given question. A short-term deflecting of attention from the DNC’s political chicanery, for instance, renders us less able to understand how cooperation with Russia is by far the wiser course. “Wouldn’t it be great if we got along with Russia!” Trump exclaimed not long ago. That it would is perfectly obvious, but only to those few who do not partake of the Kool-Aid.
The press is a casualty, too, but no tears here. Abjectly short of guts, members of our media long ago surrendered any notion of themselves as an independent pole of power in deference to political (and corporate) power. In the current context, I hope these people (and myself, too) are still around when — or if — the time comes to embarrass them for all the hyperbolic dishonesty they now indulge in.
The national conversation is poisoned to the point it is no longer a conversation and bears little relation to reality. We can neither hear nor think. This is what I mean when I assert we disarm ourselves in the face of tasks that will determine our success or demise in the 21st century. Never mind Trump: He is merely the flower of the American right’s 30-odd year revival.
We must all read or reread our Edward Bernays, given our predicament. Bernays, the diabolically cold-blooded flack who made collective mind control into his life’s work, was 30 years away from publishing “Manipulating Public Opinion” when Hearst got Americans hopped up for the war against Spain. High among Bernays’ many debased undertakings was his role in doing the same thing as the Dulles brothers did in preparing us to topple the Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954.
Bernays, the pioneer of public relations, invented the game as we have it. There are no rules in the game. There is no room for principle or detachment. Public space is turned into a littered chaos. Has it ever been more important that we know the game and how it’s played so that we reject our positions on the game board in favor of salvaging our crippled democracy?
U.S. State Dept. Pokémon Go tweet about unexploded bombs sparks backlash
The official Twitter account of the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs sparked backlash this week with a tweet about bombs left over from past American wars which references the popular new video game Pokémon Go.
It tweeted a photo of a person in a safety suit clearing up unexploded ordnance, with the text, “Playing Pokémon Go in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam? Beware of landmines or anything that looks like an old bomb!”
Playing #PokemonGo in #Cambodia #Laos #Vietnam? Beware of #landmines or anything that looks like an old bomb! #UXO pic.twitter.com/BDJnlMrefI
— PM Bureau, DoS (@StateDeptPM) August 15, 2016
Some people found the tweet tasteless. Greg Grandin, a historian at New York University who specializes in the Vietnam War and the secret U.S. bombing of Laos and Cambodia, told Salon he found it to be “another example of the memory hole when it comes to reckoning with the consequences of U.S. intervention.”
“Tens of thousands of people have lost their lives in Laos and Cambodia since the Vietnam war ended, as a result of the unexploded bombs the U.S. illegally dropped on those countries,” Grandin explained.
“And here, a spokesman for the State Department is making a silly joke about it, treating the unexplored ordnance as if they were part of nature, like puddles left behind by a rainstorm,” he added.
The State Department itself, however, stressed to Salon that the tweet was misinterpreted and was not meant as a joke. “We take this responsibility to own up to our historical legacy very seriously,” Bureau of Political-Military Affairs spokesperson David McKeeby said.
“The real scandal here is the fact that we have to tweet Pokémon characters to get anyone’s attention about it!” he added.
In the ’60s and ’70s, the U.S. military dropped hundreds of millions of bombs on Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia.
In a secret CIA operation to destroy North Vietnamese supply routes and kill local communist militants, from 1964 to 1973, the U.S. dropped more than 270 million bombs on the tiny country of Laos.
In nearly 600,000 bombing missions, the U.S. dropped the “equivalent of a planeload of bombs every eight minutes for nine years, or a ton of bombs for every person in the country — more than what American planes unloaded on Germany and Japan combined during World War II,” Mother Jones noted.
“Laos remains, per capita, the most heavily bombed country on earth,” Mother Jones added.
Some of these bombs were cluster munitions, which are now widely banned (although the U.S. is not party to the international treaty banning them). From 1965 to 1975, the U.S. dropped at least 456,365 cluster bombs on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.
One-third of the bombs dropped by the U.S. did not explode. This unexploded ordnance, or UXO, kills 500 civilians per year, on average — many of whom are children and farmers.
Laos, which has a population of just 7 million, “has suffered more than half of the confirmed cluster munitions casualties in the world,” according to the organization Legacies of War.
According to a 2008 study in The BMJ, a peer-reviewed medical journal, there were 3.1 million violent war deaths in Vietnam between 1955 and 1975. These deaths continued after the war, with 700,000 more from 1975 to 2002.
Given the horrors of the Vietnam war, the State Department tweet sparked backlash.
“Why are there landmines there?” wrote one. Another joked, “Ask Henry Kissinger to clean them up,” referencing the former secretary of state who oversaw the American war effort in Southeast Asia — and what critics say were extreme war crimes.
“Pretty funny that impoverished civilians still die and are maimed by landmines 50 years after the war,” wrote one user. “Very good joke.”
Another noted that a lot of the unexplored bombs were “dropped by the Americans, blighting the lives of villagers for decades after the horror of the war.”
The State Department replied, acknowledging that this is true, but added that it has worked with Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam since the 1990s “to clear our wartime UXO.”
This wasn’t the only tweet, however. The Bureau of Political-Military Affairs wrote another Pokémon Go tweet two weeks earler, making light of unexploded ordnance clearance efforts in the former Yugoslavia.
US support for #landmine #UXO clearance makes countries safer for civilians and #Pokemon alike .@PokemonGoNews pic.twitter.com/mve4erWWf3
— PM Bureau, DoS (@StateDeptPM) August 1, 2016
Salon reached out to the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs with a request for comment.
In response, State Department spokesperson David McKeeby explained that the earlier tweet, published on Aug. 1, is a photo of activities in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Many unexploded remnants are left over from NATO-backed wars in former Yugoslavia.
McKeeby said the Pokémon Go tweets were part of “a series of Twitter postings we’ve done this month to help draw attention to the dangers of landmines and unexploded ordnance around the world.”
Another tweet links to the announcement of a partnership between the U.S. and Vietnam, on the 40th anniversary of the end of the war, to “clear unexploded ordnance and provide support to those who have been injured by them” [sic].
The State Department, McKeeby said, “is leading international efforts to address this serious humanitarian challenge.”
“This work clearly takes on added significance” in Southeast Asia, McKeeby conceded, “given that unlike many of the countries where we operate conventional weapons destruction programs, we are dealing primarily with U.S. origin munitions.”
He noted that President Obama plans to visit Laos in September, and efforts to clear UXO are among the items on his agenda.
“We’ve got a long way to go in ‘cleaning up our brass,’ as my friends across the river at DoD would say,” McKeeby added. “We remain committed to supporting this work in years ahead, which is made possible by both broad bipartisan support from Congress and the generous support of the American people.”
According to “To Walk the Earth in Safety,” an annual State Department report, most conventional weapons destruction funding from 1993 to 2014 went to Afghanistan — where the U.S. has been at war since 2001, and where it backed extremist rebels in a war against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
The second-largest recipient is Iraq, which the U.S. backed in its war with Iran in the 1980s, bombed heavily during in the Gulf War of 1991 and invaded in 2003.
Next on the list are, respectively, Angola, Cambodia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Laos and Vietnam.
NATO began air intervention in the war in Bosnia in 1993. In 1995, it launched a bombing campaign known as Operation Deliberate Force.
In 1999, NATO carried out a much longer war in the former Yugoslavia, killing hundreds of civilians and dropping cluster bombs on civilian areas. Many of these cluster munitions were left over after the war, and Yugoslavia was partitioned into multiple nation-states.
Amnesty International released a scathing, detailed report that accused NATO of violating international law in its bombing campaign.
A 1999 Human Rights Watch report condemned NATO’s use of cluster bombs in Yugoslavia, which it noted are highly indiscriminate weapons.
Conceding U.S. involvement in such bombings, McKeeby defended the U.S. role in helping clear UXO. Since 1993, he said, the U.S. has spent $2.6 billion on efforts in more than 95 countries “to reduce the harmful worldwide effects of at-risk, illicitly trafficked and indiscriminately used conventional weapons of war.”
McKeeby also said the majority of the unexploded ordnance the U.S. helps to clear was not originally left by American military forces.
He added, “Then again, once unexploded remnants of war are on the ground, regardless of origin, it prevents families from safely returning home, humanitarian aid from being delivered, kids from getting back to school, farmers from working their fields, goods getting to market — and ultimately [prevents] post-war countries from rebuilding and recovering.”
“An electoral disaster waiting to happen”: Demographics expert predicts Trump loss even “if 99 percent of white, non-college-educated men turned out to vote”
(Credit: AP/Charles Rex Arbogast)
For over a decade, political experts have observed demographic shifts in the U.S. and concluded that a mostly racially homogenous Republican Party will be left in the wilderness during national elections. The browning of America, if you will, doesn’t bode well for would-be conservative inhabitants of the White House.
Rehashing the quaint notion of a “silent majority” and recycling Ronald Reagan’s “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan, Donald Trump defeated 16 other GOP competitors with the pitch that his brand of brash celebrity and overt racial scapegoating can get disaffected white voters to the polls in numbers that will overwhelm the diverse coalition of voters rival Hillary Clinton would have to rely on to win in November.
In 1980, white voters were 88 percent of the electorate. By 2012, the white vote was down to 72 percent.
While his campaign implodes, with the the third shift in campaign leadership in as many months this week, a new New York Times report outlines just how improbable a win on the back of white voters will be for Trump in 2016.
The last Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, held a 27-point edge among white men to carry the male vote over all, despite losing the election to President Obama. Romney won white men who have a college education or higher, a group that votes at a higher rate than those without college degrees, by 21 points. In one crucial swing state, Ohio, Romney won men in Ohio by seven percentage points on the strength of the white male vote and still lost the state, 48 percent to 51 percent.
According to the Times, the situation is looking even worse for Trump.
“If Mr. Trump is only doing as well or worse than Mr. Romney did with white men, he will never make up the votes he is losing among women and nonwhites,” the Times reported.
A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll had Clinton with 43 percent support among men to Trump’s 42 percent. While a Bloomberg Politics survey showed Trump with a low-single-digit lead among men.
“We’re looking at a margin among college-educated white men for him that’s less than half what Romney won,” Gary Langer, an independent pollster who conducted an ABC News/Washington Post survey this month that showed Trump losing over all to Clinton, told the Times. “And that is problematic for Trump given his need to appeal to whites.”
Republican pollster Whit Ayers sounded an even more dire alarm for Trump.
“If you set out to design a strategy to produce the lowest popular vote possible in the new American electorate of 2016, you would be hard-pressed to do a better job than Donald Trump has,” Ayres told the Times. “This is an electoral disaster waiting to happen”:
William H. Frey, a demographics expert with the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank, conducted several simulations that tried to determine how much the turnout among white men without college educations would have to increase for Mr. Trump to win. He used the most recent ABC News/Washington Post poll of registered voters that had Mrs. Clinton beating Mr. Trump in a nationwide two-way race, 50 percent to 42 percent. It was among the better polls for Mr. Trump lately.
Mr. Frey tested different turnout assumptions, including improbably optimistic ones, like if 99 percent of white, non-college-educated men turned out to vote. None of the chain of events produced a Trump victory.
In fact, even if virtually all of the white, non-college-educated men eligible to vote did so, Mr. Frey found, Mrs. Clinton would still win the popular vote by 1.1 million.
WIRED endorses presidential candidate for the first time in its 23 year history
Hillary Clinton (Credit: Reuters/Chris Bergin)
In its 23 years of operation, the tech magazine “WIRED” has never endorsed a presidential candidate — at least, it hadn’t until now.
Editor in Chief Scott Dadich announced today that the publication would be endorsing Hillary Clinton because its “founders — Louis Rossetto, Jane Metcalfe, and Kevin Kelly — all supported a strain of optimistic libertarianism native to Silicon Valley.” Perhaps it is because that endorsement itself sounds strained that Dadich goes to great lengths to demonstrate that it’s not.
“Right now,” he argued, “we see two possible futures welling up in the present.”
“In one, society’s every decision is dominated by scarcity. Except for a few oligarchs, nobody has enough of anything. In that future, we build literal and figurative walls to keep out those who hope to acquire our stuff, while through guile or violence we try to acquire theirs.”
“In the other future,” Dadich continued, “the one WIRED is rooting for, new rounds of innovation allow people to do more with less work — in a way that translates into abundance, broadly enjoyed.” He added that while “[o]ur sights might not be perfectly aligned, but it’s pretty clear Hillary Clinton has her eye on a similar trajectory.”
Lest Dadich be accused of only offering an affirmative argument for Clinton, it’s worth noting how deep his distrust of Trump runs. “[I]t’s impossible to judge Trump’s claims as actual statements of belief or intention,” he wrote. “We don’t know if President Trump would totally renege on that Paris commitment or actually pursue his policy of Muslim exclusion; but we have to assume he’ll try.”
“Here’s the thing about Donald Trump: In his 14 months as a political candidate, he has demonstrated an utter indifference to the truth and to reality itself. He appears to seek only his own validation from the most revanchist, xenophobic crowds in America. He is trolling, hard.”
Uber to introduce self-driving fleet in downtown Pittsburgh later this month
FILE - In this Dec. 16, 2014, file photo a man leaves the headquarters of Uber in San Francisco. Uber and Volvo announced, Thursday, Aug. 17, 2016, a $300 million deal for Volvo to provide SUVs to Uber for autonomous vehicle research. Eventually the Volvo SUVs will be part of the self-driving fleet in Pittsburgh.(AP Photo/Eric Risberg, File) (Credit: AP)
Uber announced this week that by the end of 2016, residents of downtown Pittsburgh will be able to summon autonomously piloted Volvo XC90 sport utility vehicles in what is the first step in eventually replacing human Uber drivers.
For now, however, those drivers are safe, as they will be required to supervise the self-driving vehicles. The idea, three years in the making, of creating a fleet of self-driving vehicles is the brainchild of Uber co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick, who hired the former head of Carnegie Mellon’s National Robotics Engineering Center, John Bares, to make it a reality.
As Bloomberg’s Max Chafkin reported, Kalanick insisted that “this can’t just be about science,” and that “we are going commercial” — and commercial they are going, with the first vehicles set to hit the streets of downtown Pittsburgh this month.
Uber’s deal with Volvo isn’t exclusive, and unlike its competitors in the self-driving car industry — Google and Tesla foremost among them — the company doesn’t plan on manufacturing its own vehicles. Instead, it will focus on its mapping and routing systems, both through the aggregation of information gleaned from human riders and drivers, as well as through partnerships with companies like Otto, which is in the process of designing a more advanced laser detection system than is currently available on the market.
For the moment, passengers will be able to ride in the automated vehicles for free, but as the technology proves its worth, Kalanick anticipates raising the rates to the standard $1.30 per mile.