Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 91

Macron delivers stinging rebuke to Trumpism

AP/Etienne Laurent

This article originally appeared on Raw Story

Macron began his speech by discussing the shared history of the United States and France and then moved into a full-throated defense of globalism and freedom.

Macron said the solution is "the opposite of deregulation and extreme nationalism."

 Throughout, he received warm applause from the assembly, including a standing ovation when he said that "the illusion of nationalism" should not be allowed to force the Western world back into the Dark Ages.



He got specific, too.

"I believe we can build the right answers," he said, "by negotiating through the World Trade Organization... We wrote these rules, we should follow them."

Peak superhero? Not even close: How one movie genre became the guiding myth of neoliberalism

Marvel Studios/AP Photo

If you could invest in superheroes the way you can invest in stocks or commodities, 1998 would have been the time to buy. Back then, superhero movies — the entire genre — seemed left for dead. Marvel Entertainment was a shell of its former self; having emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the cash-desperate comic-book publisher offered to sell most of its character roster to Sony for $25 million. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Sony thumbed its corporate nose at the chance to buy the full complement. It only wanted one property: Spider-Man.

Whoever at Sony turned down the chance to buy most of Marvel’s superhero movie rights at a bargain-basement price is probably still losing sleep over it. Over the past two decades, studios have fallen all over themselves to acquire superhero properties, which are now worth hundreds of millions. Disney spent $4 billion to acquire Marvel in 2009, though due to complicated contracts, movie rights for certain superheroes remained in the hands of Fox (X-Men, Fantastic Four) and Sony (Spider-Man and his universe). Recently, Disney merely bought most of 21st Century Fox for a cool $52.4 billion, bringing nearly all the Marvel superheroes under the Mouse’s thumb. Sony continues to milk its Spider-Man properties for all they are worth; in addition to an upcoming movie based around the supervillain Venom, the studio reportedly considered making a whole film about Spider-Man’s aunt, who has no superpowers whatsoever. (Not that that should be perceived as a slight against Aunt May; it merely shows the mundane depths of the corporate imagination.)

Something strange has happened since Marvel’s 1998 nadir. Superhero movies didn’t just increase in popularity; they did so in a specific way that is intimately tied to our political situation. Moreover, everyone in the past 20 years who predicted that pop culture had finally hit “peak superhero” turned out to be wrong. Indeed, it’s not just that superhero movies are popular; they are actually accelerating in popularity. To analogize to finance, superhero stocks are experiencing a long bull market.

Consider the evidence: In 2017, seven of the 20 highest-grossing domestic films were superhero movies. As of this week in April, 26 percent of all domestic box office revenue thus far in 2018 had gone to a single superhero movie, “Black Panther.” This inequality in box office receipts is astounding: There have been 735 movies released in 2018 so far, and slightly more than one-fourth of all the box-office receipts went to a single one.

It’s a new-ish trend: go back in time more than a decade or two, and the popularity quickly diminishes. I built a chart, going back to 1980, counting how many superhero movies ranked in each year’s top 20 for box office revenue. Note the remarkable arc upward:

[Chart shows the number of superhero films each year that ranked among the top 20 highest grossing films in the domestic box office. “Superhero” is interpreted liberally, and includes a few films, like “The Matrix” trilogy, that featured many of the tropes of the genre (flying superhumans with special powers!) and other movies that were clearly superhero movies yet which lacked the history of comic book serials (e.g., "Megamind" and "The Incredibles"). Note that the exponential-seeming arc would look even more dramatic without "The Matrix" trilogy (released 1999, 2003 and 2003) included. Data via BoxOfficeMojo.]

I don’t think the trend toward superhero movies — or the acceleration of their production — is mere coincidence. It is not simply that superhero movies are growing ever more popular; it is that their content and their themes are the ultimate reflection of this era in economic history, which we might call neoliberal capitalism.

Moreover, I would argue that superhero movies, and their increasingly expensive productions and complicated universes, are more than just reflective of our world: They are necessary to the perpetuation of neoliberal capitalism. Though the studios that pump them out almost certainly don’t know this, these movies are the political equivalent of an immune system response to a growing populist tide. The superhero genre embeds within itself the values and beliefs that make neoliberalism function.

Governance by supermen

If you have read one too many thinkpieces on the oft-hazy term “neoliberalism,” you can skip the next three paragraphs. If not, the term neoliberalism (sometimes called late capitalism, depending on the critic) refers to the specific epoch of Western capitalism that became ascendant in the 1980s, and especially so after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Specifically, it means an economic and cultural system characterized by sweeping privatization, the financialization of the economy, the rise of technocracy over democracy, and the normalization of itself as the only possible system of organizing society.

“So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology,” writes George Monbiot in the Guardian. “We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution.”

Thus, the social welfare state in neoliberal economies becomes increasingly privatized, while politics consigns itself to debates over identity that mirror consumption habits. Websites like BuzzFeed, stores like Whole Foods, and social media and dating sites (all of them) epitomize the neoliberal notion of a “marketplace of identity,” where the consumer views their consumption as an innate part of their identity, and eventually even starts to see themselves as a consumable brand.

“Neoliberalism construes even non-wealth generating spheres — such as learning, dating, or exercising — in market terms, submits them to market metrics, and governs them with market techniques and practices,” scholar Wendy Brown said in an interview published in Dissent. “Above all, it casts people as human capital who must constantly tend to their own present and future value.”

In neoliberal economies, this obsession with individual consumer choice dramatically weakens democracy, as the market becomes the “real” place where politics are litigated — people vote with their dollar rather than with ballots. (You can see one glaring flaw already: If dollars are votes, it means those with more dollars have more say.) Moreover, individual consumers learn to obsess over their purchases and said purchases’ implications: Buying this product makes me more “green,” this product more of a “conservative,” etc. In the 2010s, these culture wars play out constantly in the internet-mediated media sphere, where every corporate decision, public figure or new product is immediately consigned to one “side” of an imagined debate. Neoliberalism “holds that the social good will be maximized by maximizing the reach and frequency of market transactions, and it seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market,” writes David Harvey in his seminal book “A Brief History of Neoliberalism.”

The doctrine of individualism played itself out in an attack on labor unions and a concomitant shrinking of the middle class. Historically, the percentage of unionized workers is directly correlated with income distribution. Hence, you can see through charts and graphs how neoliberalism has changed the economy. For instance, observe the evolution of CEO pay through the neoliberal epoch:

Or, you can also consider income inequality:

In 1980, average income for the bottom half of the US income distribution was $16,000. It's still $16,000 today. https://t.co/llPQhSMrYL pic.twitter.com/GU0jxYCb8o

— Gabriel Zucman (@gabriel_zucman) December 6, 2016

And finally, the decline in labor union representation and corresponding increase in income inequality that accelerated with the dawn of neoliberal economics:

The charts have intriguing parallels to the graph of high-gross superhero movie volume.

In any case, the result of the inherent income inequality that stems from neoliberal economic policies is that private actors gain more political power and are viewed almost as demigods by ordinary people. Politics are partly achieved by appealing to the largesse of the rich, the Gateses and the Musks and the Clinton Foundations of the world, rather than through voting or democratic participation.

Benjamin Kunkel, in a 2008 essay for Dissent, mused over neoliberalism’s predilection for producing dystopian narratives. “Every other month seems to bring the publication of at least one new so-called literary novel on dystopian or apocalyptic themes,” Kunkel wrote.

Likewise, as scholar Fredric Jameson wrote in the New Left Review, “someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. … We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.” Here I diverge from both Jameson and Kunkel. It’s not just dystopian art that neoliberalism generates; it produces its own utopian narratives too. Those find their fullest expressions in superhero movies.

You can probably already see how the tenets of neoliberalism fit perfectly into the superhero genre. First, the anti-democratic view of society: In both neoliberalism and superhero movies, politics and big political decisions happen because the elite (politicians or superpeople or supervillains) make them happen. Society is ruled over by benevolent philosopher-kings (plutocrats or superheroes or both) who watch over us and aid only when needed; much of the superhero-movie narrative is devoted to litigating the benevolent philosopher-king’s specific ideals (“with great power comes great responsibility”), and how they might work out best for the people at large.

Obversely, this is precisely how politics functions in neoliberalism: Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were presented as branded superheroes, who believed they knew what was best for us, and sought to install their elite wonks to enact their benevolent (to them) policies. There’s a relatively two-dimensional view of the world at work: there are good and bad people; they are generally born that way and seldom change. The state in neoliberalism and superhero movies is almost entirely devoted to oppression and surveillance. If the state overreaches, heroes must fix its excesses; if it fails to protect its citizenry, heroes must make up for its shortcomings. In either case, its social welfare function is invisible: because people are innately good or evil, there are no social workers or teachers or other welfare-state employees whose duties might prevent villainy (or supervillainy) through social work. Superheroes are, by definition, more powerful and more important than the state.

More importantly, the superheroes’ work may save lives, but it never inherently changes the relationships of production: If the people are poor, they’re likely to stay poor. They don’t participate in redistributive politics except to attack the sort of universally detested social relationships about which there is broad consensus — for instance, slavery. Superheroes can’t and won’t save the middle class; many of them are rich anyway and stand to benefit from the kinds of inherent economic injustices that, say, Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn fight against.

Evidently we never tire of these movies, even as they trot out the same old tired tropes about human nature, criminality, justice and the relationship of the elites to the rest of us. Regardless of the studio or the brand in question, superhero films all follow the same arc: a lone, self-made superhero, or a hero and their band of allies, will face an evil villain. Mid-movie, they will come close to defeating the villain and fail. The look of the villain may change slightly in the process, perhaps move to an ancillary character, or the villain will be humanized in a novel way. There is a “hope is lost” moment where things look impossible for the hero: He or she is lying face-down in a trash truck (“Deadpool”) or has lost his throne (“Black Panther”) or is about to die in space (“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2”). The villain comes back to face the hero, sometimes with an army (“Black Panther” or “Captain America: Civil War” or the new Avengers movie), but somehow the villain and the hero will face each other alone, one-on-one, in the end. It must be this way. In an era defined by individualism and our individual identities, there is no “we,” only “I,” to paraphrase Ayn Rand or Margaret Thatcher. We have to do things alone, just as we are the superheroes of our own imagined story arcs.

Likewise, within superhero movies, there are a series of right-wing, Thatcherite myths about society that flicker through the script, as predictable as the sun’s arc through the sky. There will be a scene in which one character dangles off a (sometimes metaphorical) ledge at some point, symbolizing the individual’s struggle and perseverance. The United States government will sometimes have internally complicated politics within the movie, but is always ultimately a force for good. The moral of the superhero story always fits into a weak, inherently problematic liberalism: People are capable of living together in harmony — strong and weak, rich and poor, super- and non-supermen — though the innate antagonisms between the aforementioned classes are ignored.  The democratic whims of the populace are ancillary at best; the big political and social decisions in the superhero narrative are made by elites — politicians or superheroes themselves or the royalist societies from which they spring.

This is why so many superheroes spring from nobility: from “Wonder Woman” to “Superman” to “Thor” to “Black Panther,” super-ness and individualistic societies are interlinked; there will never be a superhero who originates from a robust democracy or an anarchist commune, because those societies don’t create individual hero myths. Those kinds of societies favor collectivism over individualism — and collectivism is anathema to the superhero genre, aside from the teams they form.

Big, sweeping changes in the world occur because of the superheroes and supervillains’ battles; the rest of us are window dressing, doomed to die randomly at the hands of super-evil. When the non-super populace appear in superhero movies, they’re useless. In “The Avengers: Age of Ultron,” the people of the city of Sokovia would die without the heroes’ abilities to save them; ditto the fleeing Russian peasants in “Justice League”; ditto the hapless masses in “The Avengers: Infinity War,” whom we see only for maybe 30 seconds.

Darkest of all, superhero movies posit that humans need authority figures — that we cannot survive without policing. It is a troubling moral in an era in which a militarized police force routinely carries out sprees of racist violence on people of color. In “The Dark Knight Rises,” a version of Gotham City purged of police becomes a site of chaos and horror. I’m not sure why the Blue Lives Matter crowd didn’t rejoice more at that film’s script, as it reified Spencerian, 18th-century sociological beliefs, long since disproven. Without hyperbole, one can say that Christopher Nolan’s fairytale is totalitarian with a capital T, inasmuch as it hints that humans need authority to function at all, though there are plenty of societies, both Western communes and indigenous cultures, that attest to the untruth of that.

Finally and most importantly, the heroes always labor to make their gear and technology themselves, or with minimal help; a normalized trope of the superhero film is that the labor force is invisible. Superman’s ice castle, Iron Man’s suit, Wakanda’s intricate mining system, Batman’s gear and vehicles -- in the real world, these things might take decades to construct, and would require the collective labor of thousands if not millions of human beings.

There is an exception to the rule of labor being invisible, and that is when the villain needs labor to produce something. Villains are allowed to use coercive labor, which the viewer may see on the screen: toiling orcs or slave armies building weaponry or Thanos’ cruel treatment of Eitri. Not so for the heroes; they pull themselves up by their bootstraps, design things themselves, or with the help of assistants who are well-treated or are themselves computers (e.g., Iron Man’s Jarvis), or in other cases are made by superpowers and/or magic (e.g., the temple in “Doctor Strange”). I would argue this is by design: The fact that heroes must work alone while villains use coerced labor is a dodge that intentionally misrepresents the nature of capitalist civilization at large, which is that there are always those who toil for the rich and those who profit from their labor. Superhero movies are obscurantist: in presenting the myth of the self-made (super)man, they conceal the hard economic facts of the labor that, in reality, such supermen would require.

Some readers may object to my painting of superhero films as universally embodying conservative ideals. After all, wasn’t "Black Panther" a paragon of diverse casting? Wasn’t “Wonder Woman” equally empowering for women? Indeed. The socioeconomic moral and the cultural politics of superhero films are like Superman and Iron Man: they exist in separate universes. Indeed, in our everyday reality, progressive identity politics and authoritarian politics already exist separately; that’s how the left was able to win the culture war in the United States while losing the political war. Superhero movies may be great on identity politics — reflecting the larger culture-war arena where the progressive left continues to win — but terrible on larger political ideas.

Superheroes of Silicon Valley

There’s a strange reflection between the superhero myths and the myths at work that drive Silicon Valley. Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and other techies are depicted in mass media and pop culture in the same reverent tones normally reserved for superheroics, as though they alone toiled to produce their companies’ products. Musk doesn’t single-handedly design his Teslas, of course — huge armies of workers, who have documented the horrors of working for him, are the ones who create cars, rockets and solar panels. Like many of Silicon Valley’s übermenschen, Musk likes to present others’ ideas as his own; when he proposed his evacuated tube transit system, the so-called Hyperloop, he was hailed as a genius — even though comparable designs have been floating around for decades and a near-identical system was conceived by the RAND corporation in the 1970s. No matter: RAND didn’t have the mythic status of Musk, so no one noticed that he stole its idea.

The relationship between superheroism and Silicon Valley is more apt than you might think. Mark Zuckerberg designed a digital personal assistant to resemble the A.I. assistant in “Iron Man.” Robert Downey Jr. has said that he based his Iron Man character in the Marvel movies on Elon Musk. These men imagine themselves in the mold of superheroes, and society at large imagines them just the same — the screenwriters insert their tropes into their films. Do an internet search for “Elon Musk will save the world” if you want to rot your brain with thinkpiece after thinkpiece about his singular brilliance.

The technological triumphalism that Silicon Valley extols — believing “tech” to be synonymous with human progress, without a closer examination of what that means — is innate to all movies in the genre. Wakanda is supposed to be in Africa, but the way its people bandied about the word “tech” — as in “sharing their tech,” etc. — was pure Silicon Valley, a Western understanding of the phrase. “Tech” is what makes civilization better, whether you’re in central Africa or San Jose. As Eliran Bar-el writes in the Los Angeles Review of Books’ blog, the “real ideological message” of “Black Panther” “is the fantasy that only ‘technology will save us,’ coupling ancient wisdom of a benevolent king with communal science outreach.”

Likewise, just as tech critics suffer scorn for being luddites, neoliberalism has its own immune-system response against those foreign bodies who buck the precepts of superhero politics. I’m always amazed by the reaction and vitriol that arises, like a white blood cell attacking its host, whenever someone online is critical of superheroes both metaphorical and literal. Last year I wrote a short take arguing that superhero films are bad for democracy that was met with more vitriol than anything I had ever published; I had naively believed that the idea that cultural products have symbols and politics of their own that rub off on us was relatively uncontroversial. Liberals’ current culture war over representation in television and film is undergirded by an assumption that culture matters, that what we see on TV has an ideological and political and self-esteem effect on us. And whatever they may claim to believe, conservatives clearly feel the same way, and value seeing conservative tropes about patriotism, militarism and so forth in movies or on TV.

This is agreed upon on both sides, and it is also the fundament of much of the humanities — the idea that politics and culture are intertwined, inseparable. I thought it was pretty obvious that superhero movies’ common politics were, in a sense, undemocratic — characterized by hierarchy, nobility, a myopic view of crime and criminality, and libertarian notions of entrepreneurialism and self-realization. Saying this out loud, though, rankled the internet. The conservative vitriol was understandable, as the inconsistent philosophies of the right are not generally rooted in rhetorical logic; but many self-respecting liberals joined in to hate on a pretty self-evident hot take that an undergraduate English major could have written.

I see the same gut reaction whenever anyone online dares to criticize our modern superheroes, the tech elite. The scions of Silicon Valley are particularly tied to the superhero trope; criticizing Musk results in a reaction from neoliberalism’s autonomic nervous system, lashing out to quash its critics.

This isn’t necessarily the fault of those who are angry at critics. The trolls are as much neoliberal subjects as anyone, and they hold no fault for being raised in a society that teaches them that there is no alternative (to paraphrase Thatcher) to a sort of privatized, inherently unequal liberal faux-democracy. You have to look far outside the margins to see any alternative. Indeed, most pop culture nowadays posits that there is no alternative future: either we will meet our untimely end soon (something foreshadowed by the current glut of dystopian art), or we let a few benevolent “supermen” — be it Bill Gates or Donald Trump — lead us unilaterally to a world they control and manage.

I’d like to propose an alternative way of viewing superhero movies: They are the sustaining creation myths of neoliberalism. They celebrate and rehash the underlying tenets that keep neoliberalism’s subjects from revolting. These include the idea that technology is inherently progressive; that the elite can be trusted to regulate and rule over us; that police are ultimately good; that some people are born or created superior and that we should trust in them; that there are benevolent rich people who can undemocratically rule over us, a situation that is made OK because they donate to charity sometimes; and finally, that democracy isn’t always good, because some people are inherently criminal or evil, and thus the commoners need strong leaders to control and rule over us.

Superhero movies are like a fount, springing forth from a dying economic model ever-faster as it nears an inevitable collapse. If, as French critic Jean-François Lyotard wrote, postmodernism is defined by a lack of guiding social or biblical myths (“metanarratives,” in his pleonastic prose), then superhero movies are the closest we get; they are a full expression of the sociological myths of capitalist empires.

Neoliberalism spits out superhero movies because they epitomize the only means by which neoliberalism posits that society will progress: The good-natured elite rise up and conquer an ethereal, politically confusing evil — but on a private basis, without interference from the people. Likewise — and perhaps in an admission to those who understand that such a dictatorial utopia os a fairytale — neoliberalism simultaneously generates dystopian movies and literature, as the only other future its subjects can realistically envision. By providing these two poles and these two poles only, neoliberalism traps its subjects by repeating the myth that the future will consist of either A) more neoliberalism, managed by figurative supermen, or B) the apocalypse.

It’s a trap. Just as a child who has not tasted chocolate does not crave it, these poles limit our imagination and stifle us, preventing dissent or even a means of imagining an alternative. Stock up on kryptonite. Kill the supermen.

Trump administration accelerates military study of artificial intelligence

Reuters/Tim Wimborne

This article originally appeared on publicintegrity.org.

The Trump administration is keenly interested in using artificial intelligence to help the military perform some of its key tasks more effectively and cheaply, the Defense Department’s second most senior official told defense reporters in Washington on April 24.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, a former Boeing aircraft executive, said artificial intelligence or AI — the use of computer systems to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence — could aid the department, for example, in making better use of the voluminous intelligence data it collects.

He also said AI could enhance military logistics, the task of supplying the right parts and gear to soldiers and maintenance crews at the right time. And it could facilitate wiser decision-making about providing health care for service members, producing future cost savings.

Already, the Pentagon is preparing to create a Center for Excellence — possibly within the next 6 months — that would pull together multiple existing military programs related to AI applications and bring added coherence and impetus to the work, he and other senior defense officials have said.

Shanahan’s remarks to the Defense Writers Group came on the same day, however, that the Rand Corporation — a longstanding Pentagon contractor — issued a public warning that the application of AI to military tasks may have worrisome downsides. Among them: the possibility that AI could heighten  the risk of nuclear war, by subtly undermining one of the key pillars of nuclear deterrence.

The report, entitled “How Might Artificial Intelligence Affect the Risk of Nuclear War,” put questions about the benefits and risks of using AI to three panels of nuclear security professionals and AI researchers, who met in May and June of 2017.

They looked at what might happen by the year 2040, and warned that by then, AI could allow a superpower — the United States, for example — to process sensor data so quickly and creatively that it could locate with high precision an enemy’s mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles, meaning those moved around on trucks or carried by submarines.

This capability would undermine nuclear deterrence, the Rand report noted, because the elusiveness of mobile missiles makes it difficult for attackers to destroy them all in a first strike, and knowing that a nuclear retaliation is possible causes countries to be wary of launching such a strike, according to deterrence theory.

But if AI enables a nation to destroy those previously elusive missiles with fast-flying conventional weapons, the country feeling this threat might become nervous enough to use those missiles early in a crisis, leading to what specialists call “inadvertent escalation.”

“Such escalation could happen because the adversary felt the need to use its weapons before being disarmed, in retaliation for an unsuccessful disarming strike, or simply because the crisis triggered accidental use,” the report states. While this scenario is most likely to play out in strategic competition between Russia, China, and the United States, it could also affect competition between regional nuclear rivals, such as India and Pakistan.

The report adds that AI might bring some good to the battlefield as well. As AI improves, RAND researchers suggest, it “might be able to play aspects or stages of military wargames or exercises at superhuman levels.” Adversarial nations thus won’t have to rely on human decision-making alone to assess whether nuclear war can be avoided in a crisis.

The report categorizes panelists’ reactions to such scenarios in two ways: those of the “complacents” and the “alarmists.”

Complacents, the report describes, foresee an AI winter — an extended period during which AI innovations fail to make significant progress. Alarmists, on the other hand, view an AI winter as unlikely, and see the kind of superintelligence that defined Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator character as inevitable.

“At present, we cannot predict which — if any — of these scenarios will come to pass,” the report says, “but we need to begin considering the potential impact of AI on nuclear security before these challenges become acute.”

In other words: Don’t freak out just yet. There’s still time to think through how an AI disaster might be avoided.

Joy Reid: “I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things”

AP/Colin Young-wolff

Joy Reid denied accusations claiming she had made homophobic remarks on her now-defunct blog a decade ago on Saturday morning. The comments were part of an apology she made while she opened her MSNBC show, “AM Joy."

"Many of you have seen these blog posts circulating online and on social media. Many of them are homophobic, discriminatory and outright weird and hateful," she said. "I spent a lot of time trying to make sense of these posts. I hired cybersecurity experts to see if somebody had manipulated my words or my former blog, and the reality is they have not been able to prove it."

"I genuinely do not believe I wrote those hateful things because they are completely alien to me,” she added. “But I can definitely understand based on things I have tweeted and have written in the past why some people don't believe me."

"Those tweets were wrong and horrible," she said. "I'm heartbroken that I didn't do better back then."

"I have not been exempt from being dumb or cruel or hurtful to the very people I want to advocate for. I own that. I get it. And for that I am truly, truly sorry," she added.

Reid spent 30 minutes of the show with a panel of LGBT rights experts.

Separate blog posts were resurfaced late last year where Reid used offensive language to mock former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist. Reid again apologized for her self-described “insensitive, tone deaf and dumb” remarks. The latest alleged comments surfaced by Twitter user @Jamie_Maz are far more serious. "Couldn’t go see [Brokeback Mountain] either, despite my sister’s ringing endorsement, because I didn’t want to watch the two male characters having sex. Does that make me homophobic? Probably,” a post read.

The Daily Beast suspended Reid's column following allegations. Noah Shachtman, executive editor of The Daily Beast, sent a memo to the outlet's staff announcing the decision: "We’re going to hit pause on Reid’s columns," the memo said.

"As you’re well aware, support for LGBTQ rights and respect for human dignity are core to The Daily Beast. So we’re taking seriously the new allegations that one of our columnists, Joy Reid, previously wrote homophobic blog posts during her stint as a radio host," Schactman added.

The news was first reported by CNN's Oliver Darcy.

Daily Beast exec editor @NoahShachtman sent this note out to staff today regarding the @JoyAnnReid situation. He says reporters @kpoulsen and @maxwelltani are investigating her claims and examining her history: “In the meantime, we’re going to hit pause on Reid’s columns...” pic.twitter.com/eJwwFeHSCn

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) April 25, 2018

The posts were discovered through Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine; the website disputed Reid's claims Tuesday.

"When we reviewed the archives, we found nothing to indicate tampering or hacking of the Wayback Machine versions," the Internet Archive post said. "We let Reid’s lawyers know that the information provided was not sufficient for us to verify claims of manipulation."

 

Why victims’ advocates are calling this “the golden age of sexual assault reform”

AP/Rick Bowmer/Salon

Excerpted with permission from Shattering Silences: Strategies to Prevent Sexual Assault, Heal Survivors, and Bring Assailants to Justice by Christopher Johnston. Copyright 2018 by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

Every two minutes someone in the United States is sexually assaulted, and each year there are nearly 300,000 victims of sexual assault. But survivors are no longer silent, and new practices by police, prosecutors, nurses, and rape crisis professionals are resulting in more humane and compassionate treatment of victims and more aggressive pursuit and prosecution of perpetrators. My book, "Shattering Silences," is the first work to comprehensively cover these new approaches and partnerships.

* * *

Compassionate professionals in a variety of fields have been promoting rape reform for decades. They were often working on their own as individuals or groups of advocates and activists, social workers or counselors, or staff at bellwether organizations such as the rape crisis centers in Cleveland, Boston, the District of Columbia, Oakland, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco.

Fortunately, we are now in the midst of a growing movement that began to coalesce through a synergy of events: the advent of DNA testing in the early 1990s and the subsequent launching of the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) database in 1999 that greatly facilitated suspect identification; the revelatory research of people like Rebecca Campbell, PhD, who brought training on the neurobiology of trauma studies that lucidly explain the sometimes erratic behavior and memory of victims of rape and sexual assault in a way not previously known to many of the professionals in the field; the discovery in the first decade of the twenty-first century of backlogs of an estimated 400,000 untested sexual assault kits (SAKs) in police property rooms and warehouses throughout the United States and the ensuing decisions by an enlightened cadre of attorneys general, county prosecutors, district attorneys, and law enforcement leadership to test and investigate the cases. Much credit goes to the investigative reporters who wrote about the neglected evidence and brought it to the public’s attention.

However, the federal Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (SAKI) in 2014 represents the culmination and true turning point in the rape kit test­ing and processing and rape culture reform movement that’s crossing the country now. It provides financial, technical, and training support crucial to furnishing jurisdictions with the resources and knowledge to identify and disseminate best practices for this endeavor.

In fact, Kevin Strom, program director in the Research Triangle Institute’s Center for Justice, Safety, and Resilience—this nonprofit organization oversees the SAKI project—labels this era “The Golden Age of Sexual Assault Reform.”

“We’re still on the front end of this, but there is a lot of optimism that things are changing and improving,” Strom says. “We did things incorrectly for a long period of time, but there are a lot of good peo­ple out there improving the way we treat sexual assault, so it’s very inspirational.”

I first learned of these significant changes and improvements when, in November of 2009, I got involved in the case of serial rapist and murderer Anthony Sowell, who had been arrested in Cleveland on Hal­loween after murdering eleven women and burying them in his back­yard and house. A good friend and fellow journalist, Robert Sberna, asked if I would be interested in coauthoring a book about the case. I wasn’t sure. Mainly, I wanted to see whether my hometown swept it under the rug or stepped up and said, “No more.” So, I did some preliminary interviews with people in Sowell’s neighborhood—police, urban affairs professors, and so on—and then later covered the trial with Robert. He writes a lot more about the crime beat than I do, so he went on to pen the definitive study of the case: "House of Horrors: The Shocking True Story of Anthony Sowell, the Cleveland Strangler" (The Kent State University Press, 2012).

Along the way, though, I began to meet people who were responding to this terrifying, soulless criminal by improving the way sexual violence victims and cases were handled in Cleveland. They were the solution providers to this ancient problem of cruel victim-blaming, ignoring and disregarding rape and sexual assault victims, and allowing many of the predators committing these crimes to roam freely.

Professionals such as Elizabeth Booth, RN, a Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner (SANE) at the MetroHealth System, or Megan O’Bryan at the Cleveland Rape Crisis Center (CRCC) or then Lieutenant Jim McPike, supervisor of the Cleveland Police Department’s Sex Crimes and Child Abuse Unit, became my initial guides into this world. Ever since then, they and many others I have met along the way have continued to help me understand the chal­lenges their organizations were facing, the tribulations of survivors try­ing to recover, and the radical new approaches and initiatives that were starting to be implemented not just in Cleveland, but also in Detroit, Houston, Memphis, and now many other cities.

In 2016, I wrote a cover story for the Christian Science Monitor on what Cleveland had learned in responding to the “Cleveland Stran­gler” and how that had blossomed into a set of innovative and effec­tive approaches. Just as important, the key players had all come out of their silos to work together on this insidious phenomenon, and their camaraderie was apparent at press conferences or meetings and in the friendly way they related to each other as colleagues. Because I knew it was happening elsewhere, and that Cleveland, Detroit, and Memphis have partnered their Sexual Assault Kit Task Forces (SAKTFs), I felt there was need for a compelling book that would explore the successes and challenges of this movement, as well as the professionals who were committed to doing the right thing and spreading the good word.

The history of how SAKI originated is an interesting one, with some roots in 2009. Two years prior, the National Institute of Justice (NIJ)—the research, development, and evaluation agency of the US Department of Justice—funded a study by Research Triangle Institute of why law enforcement agencies did not take sexual assault cases seri­ously or send evidence forward to initiate prosecution of offenders. The study found that often they didn’t understand the complex dynamics around sexual assault cases, nor did they understand the victims; law enforcement thought they were lying or partially to blame for the assault. Some didn’t fully understand the value of DNA evidence yet or believed it would cost too much to test the evidence in sexual assault kits.

That set the stage for a distinctive federal response in 2009, when Human Rights Watch published its report on the backlog of 12,669 untested SAKs found in Los Angeles that were the property of the Los Angeles Police and Sheriff ’s Departments, which shared a criminal evi­dence laboratory.

The report quoted Marta Miyakawa, a detective for the Los Angeles Police Department Cold Case Robbery and Homicide Division: “If people in Los Angeles hear about this rape kit backlog, and it makes them not want to work with the police in reporting their rape, then this backlog of ours would be tragic.”

The report triggered an avalanche of public, private, and journalis­tic responses. According to a source I spoke to who was working there at the time but who asked not to be named, NIJ reached out to the LAPD and Sheriff ’s Department and the crime lab directors they had exist­ing relationships with to offer any help or guide them to any resources they might need to resolve the untested kits issue. The law enforcement departments were both open to disclosing what the situation was, and NIJ used it as an opportunity to research the problem in what they call a “natural experiment,” where something is already happening so they take advantage and study it. LA allowed NIJ to perform random sampling on 370 backlogged kits to see what evidence they could reap from the testing. Subsequently, NIJ published the “Sexual Assault Kit Backlog Study” in June 2012.

Concurrently, other jurisdictions started reporting enormous collec­tions of untested kits in their property storage, and everyone began to realize it was a more widespread problem than initially thought. In 2011, NIJ decided to solicit one of their “Action-Research Projects” to get to the root of why jurisdictions were experiencing these massive numbers of untested kits. Detroit and Houston were selected as the test sites. The objective was to have researchers and practitioners in those jurisdictions work together to understand and solve the problem. If they couldn’t solve the problem with their current methods, they could make “mid­course corrections,” providing an evolutionary type of research project to uncover solutions and generate protocols for other jurisdictions to follow.

Both cities developed safe, effective means of handling victim noti­fication. Houston devised what they called a “whole-time justice advo­cate,” embedding advocates in their police department to work directly with victims and investigators. Both cities began to deploy funds to hire victim advocates, investigators, and prosecutors specifically to address the backlogged rape kits. NIJ credits that project with creating the groundswell of best practices and protocols, many of which other cit­ies, counties, states, and jurisdictions continue to implement. Addition­ally, according to my source, the former NIJ staff member, the number one lesson learned was the importance of having a multidisciplinary approach to take on the untested kits and resulting criminal cases.

At roughly that same time, NIJ had another opportunity to perform a “natural experiment” in post–Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, when the police there revealed—along with other serious criminal justice issues—a backlog of more than seven hundred untested kits. Mayor C. Ray Nagin, the sixtieth mayor of New Orleans, requested assistance from NIJ, which provided financial support for testing the kits and launched a pilot project known as CHOP, or CODIS Hit Outcome Project. The NIJ earned about the backlog of untested kits through involvement with DOJ working group and responded with a solution. The goal was to test a new system that notified police departments when there was a hit in the national DNA database, so that they could follow up on investigating those cases to prevent them from falling through the cracks.

In 2009, upon entering office, Vice President Joe Biden appointed the first White House Advisor on Violence Against Women, Lynn Rosenthal. (Nearly two decades earlier, Senator Biden had introduced the Violence Against Women Act in the US Congress in June 1990, and it passed in 1994.) When Rosenthal left to become Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at the National Domestic Violence Hotline, Biden replaced her with Caroline “Carrie” Bettinger-López in May 2015. Biden had also decided untested SAKs would be one of his signa­ture issues, along with campus sexual assaults. He became the first vice president to publicly address the issue of sexual violence.

Under Biden’s leadership, Lynn Rosenthall and the Office on Vio­lence Against Women worked closely with NIJ and other organizations such as the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) and its Office for Victims of Crime to obtain a Congressional appro­priation for SAKI to consolidate all the lessons learned from Los Ange­les, the Detroit and Houston action research projects, New Orleans, and other research to create the Sexual Assault Kit Initiative. Angela Williamson, PhD, was named by BJA to administer the SAKI program, after she was hired in 2014 as Senior Policy Advisor (Forensics) at the Bureau of Justice Assistance, Office of Justice Programs.

In September 2014, Vice President Biden and Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced the $41 million FY2015 SAKI program. (Cy Vance, the Manhattan District Attorney, was also part of this announce­ment, as he released $35 million in New York City asset forfeiture funds as additional support for kit testing nationwide.) The initial awards went to twenty jurisdictions across the United States to fund kit testing, enhance investigations and prosecutions, and develop victim-centered protocols for notifying and interviewing victims.

Thus far, Congress has approved $131 million for the thirty-two jurisdictions that have now received SAKI grants, including $40 million that was expected to be disbursed in fall of 2017 that would bring the total of SAKI sites to forty. The FY2018 budget Congress is considering has not been passed as of this writing, but the proposal includes another $45 million to help eliminate rape kit backlogs nationwide. SAKI’s mis­sion is to ensure that kits get tested and to provide the sites the resources they need to fully investigate and solve these violent crimes while always keeping victims as the focus of the cases and making sure their voices are heard and they are treated with the respect and understanding that they deserve.

SAKI grants stipulate that only 50 percent of the funding may be used for testing. The rest must be applied to investigation and track­ing down offenders for prosecution. Research Triangle Institute (RTI) received $11 million to serve as the training and technical assistance (TTA) partner. They assembled a team of experts who travel to any of the sites requesting assistance or any of the District Attorney of New York (DANY)–funded sites to help them implement a tracking system, investigate a cold case, understand the victim’s response through the neurobiology of trauma research, train Sexual Assault Nurse Examin­ers, and so on. Key members of the TTA team include Dr. Rebecca Campbell and James Markey.

“We meet with a site and create their TTA development plan,” explains Patricia Melton, PhD, codirector of the BJA National Train­ing and Technical Assistance Program. “We outline and identify all of their training and technical assistance needs at that time, but it’s a living document that keeps getting evaluated and modified. Then we build the subject matter expert team they need to provide their TTA, and that continues throughout the period of their grant.” The SAKI TTA website provides virtual training and support resources, too, she adds. That site is public, so the training resources are available to any law enforcement agency in the United States.

In August 2017, the NIJ published the “National Best Practices for Sexual Assault Kits: A Multidisciplinary Approach,” which includes thirty-five recommendations that provide a guide to victim-centered approaches for responding to sexual assault cases and better supporting victims throughout the criminal justice process.

In the end, there are two primary missions of this national effort to combat sexual violence. “We want to send a message to the perpetra­tors that they’re not going to get away with this,” Williamson informs me. “But the SAKI project also sends an even more important message to the victims that they do matter, and that’s who we’re doing this for. My hope is that it changes the way everyone addresses the crime of sexual assault.”

Strom and Melton concur. “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Strom says of this Golden Age of Sexual Assault Reform. “We need to look back twenty years from now and say, ‘This was just the start.’”

Of course, there are numerous advocates who I haven’t examined as thoroughly, SANEs, Sexual Assault Forensic Examiners (SAFEs), police, participating prosecutors, and organizations such as Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network (RAINN), the nation’s largest anti–sexual violence organization, but are doing important and far-reaching work. That was a good problem for me to have, as more and more professionals and volunteers step up to help these victims who for mil­lennia have been left alone in their suffering and silence. There are also specific populations where the prevalence of rape and sexual assault is at such epidemic proportions that I couldn’t fairly or adequately cover them: college students, human sex trafficking victims, military person­nel, and prison inmates. Perhaps in the future.

One final note on the terminology I used for people who have been raped or assaulted. At one of the breakout sessions I attended at the Sexual Assault Kit Task Force Summit in Detroit in September 2016, one of the presenters—I believe it was Kim Hurst, SAFE and direc­tor of the Wayne County SAFE program in Detroit—explained in an inside-baseball way that law enforcement agents, prosecutors, and our criminal justice system refer to these individuals as “victims”; rape crisis advocates refer to them as “survivors” or “clients,” if they have a rela­tionship with a rape crisis center, and nurses call them “patients.”

Essentially, on the law enforcement and legal side, those profession­als have to refer to them as victims, because that’s what they are in the eyes of the law. However, rape crisis advocates refer to them as survi­vors, whether they were assaulted two hours ago or twenty years ago. I was chided a couple times for referring to someone as a victim, even though I was talking about it in a legal context, so advocates are vehe­ment proponents of always using the word “survivor.”

What I also found, however, is that some people in the field refer to someone as a victim if they have been assaulted recently or if they are involved in the prosecution of their assailant. Once they are on the other side of that, especially if they have made strides in taking their lives back through counseling, therapy, moving, getting a new job, exercise and fitness, etc., then they are more likely to be considered survivors.

There is no exact definition or timeline, so I have tried to use the word that best fits their status at the time I was writing about someone.

Each one of the survivors I met and spoke with, and numerous oth­ers I have read about or learned about from the professionals I inter­viewed—stands as a model of courage and heroism, even if they were still struggling with their recovery. Similar to veterans suffering from PTSD, whom I’ve also gotten to know in writing about Vietnam veter­ans or meeting veterans of the Middle East conflicts, there is no cure to the trauma they have suffered. They must find ways to recover their lives and move ahead for as long as they live. Some fare better than others.

After eight years of researching, reporting, and interviewing about rape and sexual assault, I am more convinced than ever that it is our absolute responsibility as human beings to offer any survivors the sup­port, compassion, respect, and dignity they deserve and do everything in our power to ensure that we hold their assailants accountable and put them where they belong: prison.

Shigir Idol could be oldest piece of monumental art: study

Wikimedia

When did the notion of art begin? What is the first piece of artwork to be created by a human? These are questions that have long been debated among archaeologists and anthropologists. However, a recent study published in the journal Antiquity, makes the case that there are  compelling reasons to believe that a statue known as the Shigir Idol—which was discovered in 1894 in Russia—is being reconsidered as one of the oldest examples of monumental art.

According to researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences and the University of Göttingen, a new analysis calculated that it could be nearly 11,600 years ago. To put it in context, the Ice Age ended about 11,700 years ago. It was previously on display at a Russian museum. Researchers thought it was only a few thousand years old, but the recent round of radiocarbon dating suggests otherwise. Additional examination reportedly discovered new markings on the statue that once stood 16 feet tall.

As the abstract of the study explains:

“Recent application of new analytical techniques has led to the discovery of new imagery on its surface, and has pushed the date of the piece back to the earliest Holocene. The results of these recent analyses are placed here in the context of local and extra-local traditions of comparable prehistoric art. This discussion highlights the unique nature of the find and its significance for appreciating the complex symbolic world of Early Holocene hunter-gatherers.”

“We have to conclude hunter-gatherers had complex ritual and expression of ideas. Ritual doesn't start with farming, but with hunter-gatherers,” Thomas Terberger said, via Science magazine, an archaeologist at the University of Göttingen in Germany and a co-author of the study.

Science magazine writer Andrew Curry reported that the first radiocarbon analysis of the statue suggested the piece was 9,800 years old. The age of the piece caused controversy because some scientists reportedly claimed that hunter-gatherers couldn’t have created such a piece of art. The researchers from the latest study took samples from the piece in 2014 which helped discover its new age.

“The further you go inside, the older [the date] becomes—it's very indicative some sort of preservative or glue was used” Olaf Jöris, an archaeologist at the Monrepos Archaeological Research Centre and Museum for Human Behavioural Evolution—who wasn't involved with the study—told Science magazine.

Peter Vang Petersen, an archaeologist at The National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen (who also was not involved with the study) explained to Science magazine that prehistoric art changed as Earth transitioned out of the Ice Age.

“Figurative art in the Paleolithic and naturalistic animals painted in caves and carved in rock all stop at the end of the ice age. From then on, you have very stylized patterns that are hard to interpret,” Petersen said. “They're still hunters, but they had another view of the world.”

Coauthor and archaeologist Mikhail Zhilin of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow told Science magazine the piece of art could depict local forest spirits or demons.

Little is known about the society that carved the idol though. According to Science magazine, Zhilin has returned to the site to excavate. Zhilin and his team have reportedly found small bone points, daggers and elk antlers with carvings of animal faces. He also commented that their knowledge on how to handle wood is impressive.

“They knew how to work wood perfectly,” Zhilin said.

Thomas told the magazine “Wood normally doesn't last.”

“I expect there were many more of these and they're not preserved,” he said.

 

Meet “The Trumpslayer”: Comedian Cate Gary says we should “keep calling Nazis Nazis”

YouTube/Getty/Salon

Excerpted with permission from Punching Nazis: And Other Good Ideas by Keith Lowell Jensen. Copyright 2018 by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

One of the things I love most about comedian Cate Gary is how much she gleefully fits the right’s caricature of a lefty. Reading snarky tweets about us liberals and our radical life­style choices, I feel downright boring, sober, pajama-wearing het­ero married to another white person that I am. Oh that for even a weekend my life could be half as exciting and scintillating as talk radio hosts and YouTube “experts” imagine it to be. While I know for a fact Cate and her partner also spend plenty of boring nights together watching TV, they are, on paper at least, exactly the right-wing nightmare of what us evil liberals would like to enforce as the mandatory new normal.

Just imagine the talk jock getting excited to the point of yelling (they’ll apologize afterward, dear listeners, as if it doesn’t happen at least once per show) describing Ms. Gary’s home life. “This ‘comedienne’ billing herself as The Trumpslayer, lives in Califor­nia, of course she does, and she works in tech, surprise. She’s in a relationship with another woman, but she didn’t used to be. She didn’t leave her husband or boyfriend for her lesbian lover, oh no, her lover left their own gender! Her partner Robin Tran used to go by Robert. I’ll let that sink in. Robin realized she was Robin a couple of years ago. And they parade this! They hold this up as something to be proud of with their ‘comedy’ show "Un­conventional Lesbians." Robin indeed jokes about telling her hard­working, immigrant parents that she was transgender. She jokes about this, people!”

I love it. And Cate and Robin love it. They do indeed tour their show "Unconventional Lesbians" and tell their story, hilariously and proudly. I asked Cate to tell me more about taking her and Rob­in’s relationship to the stage.

They met in the open mic comedy scene where they were both young stand-up comedians struggling to find stage time and de­velop their comedic voice. “When we originally went out, we were just two open micers in love in what we presumed was a het­erosexual relationship.” The couple were still new when Robin began to transition, and, much to her relief, Cate didn’t seem to think it was much of a big deal for their relationship. “We’re both comedians; our first thought was ‘Hey, why don’t we try to make this into a stage show?’ because we have no shame!”

Despite the self-effacing tone, Cate did see a real value in her and Robin’s tale. Having heard many weepy tales of couples torn apart by transgenderism, they were excited to have a happier story to tell. And the response has been great, with profiles being done by Pacific Standard magazine, and OC Weekly, as well as a short documentary about Robin called "Tran."

Their shows have also been well attended. People are curious, enthusiastic, and Cate says, “We’re both really fucking funny.”

Part of what makes their story so interesting is how little im­pact Robin’s transition seemed to have on their relationship and their life together. Cate is candid and graphic describing how lit­tle impact it had on their sex life. “That’s the big hang-up people have, like ‘Oh the dick was really important with our fucking’ and we weren’t even using it,” she says, laughing.

Facebook fans saw Robin going on her first exhilarating shop­ping trips to buy dresses, blouses, and skirts, usually with Cate, who does not dress particularly femme herself, coming along for the assist. And there was the pronoun shift. Once again, Cate didn’t see a problem. “I’m like a grammar nerd, so that was just a fun exercise to me.”

I imagine Robin nervous all day prepping for a really heavy, difficult coming-out conversation, and Cate responding with “You’re trans? YES! I gotta call my agent. This is fucking gold!”

Cate laughs at this and considers what a boring stage show it would be if they were just an interracial, hetero couple.

With this background, nobody will be surprised to hear that Cate Gary is not a Trump supporter, but she has earned herself a reputation even among the radical left for her strong opinions, and pugilistic manner of expressing them when it comes to the forty-fifth President of the United States. When I type Trump’s name into a Facebook search, Facebook auto-fill suggests I may be looking for Cate Gary, The Trumpslayer.

Observing from afar, Donald J. Trump would seem to occupy most of Cate’s thoughts over the last year and a half.

“Ha ha. You think I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about 45?”

I don’t. I worry too many of us don’t give this disaster of a presidency enough of our time and attention, but the reality of burnout and depression steps in and requires us to take breaks to watch some cute animal videos or maybe indulge in some com­ics or cartoons that keep the cynicism and nihilism more com­fortably vague and abstract. Cate doesn’t struggle with this same fatigue.

Even when she does take a break, it’s more likely, she explains, that life just got too busy. She assures me she is still thinking of her nemesis. “I just don’t have time to get on the phone and com­pose something that’s not just a string of capital letters and ob­scenities. It takes a little bit of artistry to keep the anti-Trumpism fresh.” She remembers that even as an entertainer with a mis­sion, she is still an entertainer.

But what of the ceaseless negativity flowing back toward her? She leaves her posts open to public comment, making herself ac­cessible to Trump trolls around the clock.

“Oh yeah. It’s like the walking dead. There’s a certain absurdity to them.” But the comedian’s greatest struggle where the hateful at­tacks are concerned is just worrying about herself, and whether it’s healthy that she finds them so amusing. “We have been taken over by a large group of people who are not intelligent enough to realize how incompetent they are and that they are willingly giving people the tools to their own destruction. I find that hysterical,” she says with a laugh. “I’m weird like that. It’s a very dark gallows humor to me.”

Is there a use to this countertrolling, beyond entertain­ment? Cate says absolutely, feeling that her egging them on prevents them from maintaining any mask of civility. They show themselves for what they are as they post explosive, hate­ful screeds at her, full of homophobia, misogyny, and a mind-bogglingly poor grasp of the grammar and spelling rules of the language they want to insist all immigrants speak. Keep­ing this vitriol on display makes it harder to play down their angry potential.

There are those who take countering the alt-right a step fur­ther, like those who, when confronted with a proud and blatant racist like Richard Spencer, respond with a punch to the face. Cate approves. “Heroes! They’re the true patriots.”

Cate has jokes about the effectiveness and legitimacy (and pleasure) of calling Trump supporters Nazis. So, is it okay to punch anyone in a MAGA hat?

“You know . . . ” Cate pauses. “I want to say yes, that’s my first impulse [laughing] but I’m thinking, oh, little old lady, so, it’s really . . . it depends. Are they also actively endangering peo­ple, out there trying to intimidate people? You know, are they like wearing a MAGA hat by a PRIDE parade, and representing that they’re going to start some shit?

“Then, yes, punch, punch away. If they’re one of the propa­gandists talking about whatever Richard Spencer calls genocide, you know, like quiet riot or whatever he likes to call it, they’re propagating the idea. Punch them, absolutely.”

Cate says, with a laugh, she would not go to an Internet Trump supporter’s house and punch them in their sleep. “But when they get up, and put their MAGA hat on, and go out and start shit, yeah, then they’re punchable.”

During the 2016 campaign when Trump referred to Mexican immigrants as being criminals, drug dealers, and rapists, when many immigrants and their allies showed up to throw eggs at Trump supporters and otherwise confront them with what they were supporting and the damage they were attempting to in­flict, many of us lost friends if we were unwilling to condemn this.

Cate is unconcerned with the word “Nazi” losing its effective­ness from overuse. “Generations of men have been terrorized into toeing the toxic masculine line for fear of being labeled gay, which means name-calling has a tremendous impact on shap­ing the culture. So keep calling Nazis Nazis. Let’s make the term so widespread that even children in schoolyards start using it against their protofascists.”

While I generally stick to discussing the morality of punch­ing Nazis, Cate sees a possible legal justification in the definition of fighting words. She mentions a case where teenager Justin Carter was arrested in Texas for saying on Facebook, sarcastically according to him, that he’d shoot up a kindergarten.

“So, if you piss off white parents, fighting words, the state can bash in your door and take away your freedom. I would apply the same standards to, yeah, you talk shit about Mexican people, he says he’s going to rip families apart and deport in record num­bers, yeah, fuck yeah, them are fighting words.”

It’s a great irony that many of the same people who will get upset at you for saying you don’t condemn or disagree with these acts of violence will threaten violence in response. Cate has re­ceived vague threats, like comments about throwing liberals in ovens, as well as pictures of nooses. “Just pictures of nooses, like I’m gonna fuckin’ piss myself. They’re very passive-aggressive about it.” And she keeps herself ready in case she is doxxed, some­thing she doesn’t live in great fear of. “I want to leave this shithole anyways,” she says with a laugh. “I’m mentally prepared.”

Luckily, and despite the way it sometimes looks, the major­ity of Trump’s online harassment army are not skilled hackers. “I’ll be arguing with a Nazi and he’ll go to my LinkedIn page and be like, ‘Oh, I see you live in San Diego.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, a swing and a miss, fucker.’”

And while she is proud to display her extensive collections of enraged alt-right fanboys, there is a level of anger that can send her reaching for the Block button. “I’m not trying to get murdered.”

That she’ll meet one of them “in the real world” is of course a real and present danger. As stand-up comedians, our schedules and whereabouts are, by necessity, public. Cate’s YouTube vid­eos cheering on “Nazi” as the long-awaited “n-word” you can use to upset white people is seeing a constant inflow of comments, many of them threats. She mostly dismisses the threats as empty, and delivered by cowards acting brave behind keyboards. She de­scribes becoming numb to them after a while. “But I’d be an idiot if I didn’t have in the back of my mind that one of them might [make good on their threats]. I’m gonna learn how to fire a gun.”

While Cate’s partner Robin faces the risk of harassment and violence just for existing openly, her style is considerably less pugnacious. I wonder if she worries about Cate antagonizing such angry and often unhinged people.

“I think she’s worried, more worried than she’ll let on. But she knows I’m not gonna stop so she tries to be supportive.”

It does seem most online threats are idle, as they are hast­ily made, and if you wait them out, you slowly drop down the troll’s enemy list as new names are added hourly. But occasion­ally things heat up, especially when mobs attack online, egging one another on and rousing one another up, and they doxx, and sometimes, they do in fact kill.

“They’re so much fun to rile up, so I’m willing to roll the dice on that,” Cate says, dismissing the risks with a shrug and a laugh. And she delights in their angry, over-the-top reactions, collecting screen caps like scalps, each one a notch in her gun. “If they didn’t get upset, I’d consider that joke a failure.”

Cate understands that not everyone has the same energy and stamina for going one-on-one with the worst people in our soci­ety, and she doesn’t judge. “Honestly, as long as you’re not tap-dancing for Nazis, I try not to judge too harshly. No appeasing, but you don’t have to throw a Molotov cocktail into their house, either.”

And it’s not all hate and veiled threats—Cate is getting her share of fan mail, also. Every day she receives messages from people, many of whom express that they’re not in a position to tell their racist brother he’s a jackass, or their misogynist boss that he deserves the anger and loneliness that are consuming him, and they’re glad that Cate is willing to be their voice.

Does it happen that they occasionally offer a challenging re­buttal, or some satisfying discourse? Not so much. She’s getting the same tired and retread arguments. “They’ll say ‘You use Nazi and it loses its power’ or ‘You know who the real Nazis are?’ and it’s Hillary Clinton. I’ve never been surprised by the freshness of a rebuttal from them, never. I would eat my hat if someone ever said something halfway witty in response.”

Comedian Kathy Griffin recently posed a challenge for the Trumpslayer crown when she posted pictures of herself holding Trump’s bloody head, causing much uproar, even among liber­als. Cate loved it. “Hilarious. I thought when that photo came out that she was doing what I’ve been hoping someone on the left was gonna do, stepping into the role of Ann Coulter of progres­sivism. Just straight up, ‘I’m going to offend Nazis and with any means possible,’ with plausible deniability so you don’t get ar­rested, like finding that line and walking it.” Ultimately, though, Griffin stepped away from that line but has not completely dis­owned it (her current tour utilizes photos in the same outfit hold­ing a globe in place of Trump’s head and is titled “The Laughing Your Head Off Tour”). Cate suggests Griffin may have pissed off a Nazi who signs big checks.

Cate does not see Griffin or anyone else who goes after Trump as her competition. In fact, she is glad that harassing Trump and his supporters has become such a popular pastime and welcomes any and all to join the jokers’ brigade in resistance to Trump and the alt-right. “Comedy is a wrecking ball. You don’t even need to be able to play an instrument, or have any idea about how to pitch your voice. So many people can do it, and we need an army of people doing it.”

She is certainly not looking to take Griffin’s place. “I don’t want to host the New Year’s Eve Show. I would rather try to build a following and a career on the path that I’m on now without re­lying on wealthy Nazis to write my checks.”

R.E.M.’s first ever show: Opening band at a birthday party in a church

I.R.S Records/Bloomsbury Publishing/Salon

Excerpted from “R.E.M.’s Murmur” by J. Niimi (Continuum, 2005). Reprinted with permission from Bloomsbury Publishing.

It was back in Macon that Bill Berry first encountered Mike Mills, a fellow high school student. Mills is arguably the band’s closest thing to a “native” Southerner: though he too was born in California, like Buck, Mills’s parents moved to Georgia while he was still a baby. As a teenager Mills was a clean-cut straight-A student, while the teenage Berry was something of a long-haired stoner, and the pair did not get along well until the day they both happened to show up at the same band audition and reluctantly decided to bury the hatchet (as Berry had already set up his drum kit and thus couldn’t bail out of the rehearsal). The two ended up becoming best friends, playing together in a few different bands (including one called the Frustrations, which included a local guitarist by the name of Ian Copeland). The duo eventually moved to Athens together in 1979 to enroll at UGA.

The four future members of R.E.M. were finally introduced to one another by Kathleen O’Brien in the fall of 1979. It was a less than auspicious beginning: Stipe was put off by Mills’s falling-down drunkenness, but he did like Berry’s now-famous monobrow, which Stipe credits for tipping the scale in his decision to join up with the two Maconites. A few months later, O’Brien was planning a party at the church on Oconee Street in celebration of her birthday, to be held on April 5, 1980. She had gotten the popular local band the Side Effects to agree to play, but she now needed an “opening act.” She asked the as-yet-unnamed (in fact, barely formed) R.E.M. to play as well. The band was thrilled at the prospect and said yes, though they had only a couple of half-hearted, beer-soaked rehearsals under their belt by this point.

Buck and Stipe had written a few tentative songs together before they met Berry and Mills. Together the four of them worked out a few more originals, as well as a slew of covers, rehearsing in the back of the church during the Winter of 1979–80. After O’Brien’s invitation to play came in February, the band kicked up the pace, cobbling together a set’s worth of songs in the weeks before the party, deciding at the last minute on the name Twisted Kites (after discarding such other possibilities as Negro Eyes and Cans of Piss—though some band members claim that they played the party without any name at all).

About three hundred people showed up at the church that night, surpassing even O’Brien’s expectations: the birthday gathering was now an Event. After the Side Effects finished their set, Twisted Kites/R.E.M./untitled took the stage, playing about twenty songs, roughly half of them originals, to a wildly enthusiastic (and profoundly drunk) crowd. The band was so well received that night, in fact, that the crowd goaded them into playing their entire set a second time. Among the covers reportedly included in the set were “Honky Tonk Women,” “God Save the Queen,” “Secret Agent Man,” the Troggs’ “I Can’t Control Myself,” and the Monkees’ “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone.” Among the band’s originals that night (also documented on the early bootleg "Bodycount at Tyrone’s," recorded about six months after the party—a fairly representative cross-section of the band’s early material) was a nascent version of “Just a Touch,” which appeared in final form on "Lifes Rich Pageant" in 1986.

Their earliest material was fast, brash, and goofy. Most of the lyrics were first person narratives from Stipe directed, interestingly enough, toward women subjects (or possibly against women subjects, as some R.E.M. historians believe). There’s a liberal use of the rock pronoun baby, and plenty of I don’t wannas a la the first Ramones record. The band settled on the name R.E.M., picked from a dictionary—it didn’t have any trite “punk” connotations, and Stipe really liked the periods. Plus, like "Murmur," it was easy to pronounce.

The band was an almost instant hit on the Athens scene. But as they started to venture out of town, they realized that maybe they weren’t just a local beer-party phenomenon. With encouragement from Jefferson Holt—who had moved to Athens to manage the band—they decided to try and record a demo to send out to clubs and record labels. The band’s first “recording session” was held on June 6, 1980, a couple months after their gig at the church party, in the back of the Decatur branch of Wuxtry Records, where Buck had worked as a student at Emory. It was a stop-off on the afternoon of their first out of town gig at the Warehouse in neighboring Atlanta, essentially a rehearsal for the show, and they bashed through eight songs while Wuxtry owner Mark Methe videotaped them. (While the band never used the tape, which sounded like crap, the murky audio track of the session has shown up on various bootlegs over the years as "first demos.")

Holt suggested they make a proper recording to showcase their newer songs, so they booked a day at engineer Joe Perry’s Bombay Studio, a small eight-track setup in nearby Smyrna, in February of 1981. Within a matter of hours the band laid down eight songs, including skeletal versions of “Radio Free Europe,” “Sitting Still,” and “Shaking Through.” Though the tapes have never been made public, the results were apparently less than stellar—Holt urged the band not to send them around and went looking for another studio and engineer. At the suggestion of Peter Holsapple, Holt called Mitch Easter.

Easter recorded the band’s seven-inch on April 15, 1981, in his garage studio setup. The band wisely decided to focus on just a few songs, rather than banging out a whole mini-set as they did at Bombay, so they recorded “Radio Free Europe” and “Sitting Still,” as well as a third song, “White Tornado”—a quasi-surf instrumental they had just written. The band slapped together a few hundred handmade cassettes of the three songs (plus a “dub mix” of “Radio Free Europe” that Easter had later spliced together, half-jokingly) and sent the tape out to clubs, labels, magazines, and just about anyplace else they could think of. Hib-Tone released the seven-inch of “Radio Free Europe” b/w “Sitting Still” in July 1981; of the initial pressing of 1,000 copies, 600 were sent out as promos, and a total of around 6,000 additional copies were later pressed by popular demand (amazingly, since the first pressing mistakenly omitted any contact info for the label). The band was annoyed with the muddy-sounding mastering job (Buck smashed one of his copies and nailed it to a wall in his house), but the single spurred a critical buzz for the band, garnering wide-spread plaudits and landing on a number of year-end Top 10 lists. R.E.M. started to get letters from labels, most of which made them laugh. They threw them in the fireplace and kept playing.

Should you insure that trip or TV? Here’s what an economist would do

Kamenetskiy Konstantin via Shutterstock

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

You can buy insurance for practically anything these days.

Planning a vacation to France? Your airline, travel agent or even hotel will likely offer trip insurance in case you need to change your dates or cancel. Going to the casino? You can insure your blackjack hand in case it’s not your lucky day.

Recently, I was even asked if I wanted to pay US$20 to insure a pair of $80 ice skates beyond the three-month warranty or $12 to protect a $40 television cable for a “lifetime” of protection — a quarter of each product’s price in exchange for extra “peace of mind.”

But is it really worth paying the extra money? Here’s how an economist like me would answer that question.

Who’s afraid of a little loss?

While the use of insurance to protect against loss can be traced back thousands of years, the modern industry only emerged in the 17th century. Companies in London and later the U.S. developed a sophisticated understanding of risk aimed at protecting people against large losses, disasters and death.

Only in recent years has insurance been used to provide protection against relatively small losses, such as on consumer goods and airline tickets. And while most products come with limited warranties, retailers and manufacturers offer to extend them for small fees — something that used to only be available for large purchases, such as a new car.

Companies seem to be increasingly offering insurance on all manner of things in part because of something known as loss aversion, which is when people feel more psychological impact from a loss than from a similar-sized dollar gain. Another reason is probably because it’s very profitable.

Fundamentally, buying insurance means giving up a small certain payment today — or in regular installments over time — to ensure that a larger, uncertain payment is not required in the future.

The three times to insure

So how do you know when you should plunk down the extra cash and buy insurance? In general, I would argue there are only three types of situations in which you should do so.

First, obviously buy it when you are obliged to. For example, most states require car owners to have insurance. And banks usually demand that home buyers insure their properties in exchange for a mortgage.

Second, buy it when you know you are likely to need it. For example, most of us probably don’t need the phone insurance Apple or Samsung offer with their devices. The plans, which can be expensive, cover some or all of the cost to repair or replace the phone if you break it.

In general, these plans are a terrible deal for a consumer. However, one of my friends is a klutz. He constantly drops and breaks his phone and so has found buying the plan a good deal.

Third, buy insurance when the loss would be devastating financially or emotionally. A good example of this is health insurance. Many of us have some type of medical policy because if a major accident or illness occurs, the financial cost of a large number of doctor visits or surgeries in a hospital quickly overwhelms our savings.

In the case of my $80 skates, on the other hand, extra insurance really doesn’t make much sense. If they break — unlikely given they won’t be subjected to harsh conditions since I don’t skate that often or aggressively — it’ll just mean paying another $80 for a new pair. The extra expense will not affect my lifestyle or cause me to lose sleep.

Calculating emotional loss

To figure out whether that third category applies to you with a particular purchase, you should figure out your cutoff point.

Start by pondering how it would feel to lose $1 instantly. How long would you be in anguish? My guess is probably not long, so add another zero. Ten dollars, $100, $1,000? A good rule of thumb is if the answer is less than 24 hours, keep going higher until the loss would leave you in anguish mentally or financially for more than a day. Stop and write the number down.

Now work your way backwards. Start with a high number, like $1 million. If you’re like me, losing that much money would leave you sweating and shaking. How about half a million? Keep lowering the figure until the financial and mental anguish are under control. Write the number down too.

You now have an upper and lower bound. Never insure anything whose value falls below your lower bound. Always insure anything above your upper bound.

The hard decisions are trying to decide if you should insure things that fall in the middle, which requires more careful analysis. Another option is to get a credit card that offer extended protection on some purchases.

Insuring the little things in life may make you feel better, but odds are it’ll leave you worse off.

Jay L. Zagorsky, Economist and Research Scientist, The Ohio State University

Bill Maher asks Ronan Farrow: Has #MeToo gone too far?

Youtube/Real Time with Bill Maher

On Friday night, Pulitzer Prize–winner Ronan Farrow and author of "War On Peace" stopped by "Real Time with Bill Maher." As soon as Farrow took the hot seat with Maher, he was belittled about his age.

“You have had quite a year, you got the Pulitzer Prize. Are you 30 yet?” Maher said.

“I am 30,” Farrow responded.

“Just 30,” Maher said.

“That’s old in TV years,” Farrow replied.

“Oh, f*ck you,” Maher said back.

“I notice the president spoke to Congress and really echoed a lot of the thoughts in your book,” Maher continued. “Unfortunately, it was the president of France.”

The two continued to discuss America, democracy and diplomacy, during which Farrow cited a Pew Research study that claimed people trust the U.S. less than Germany.

“We’re not still holding the German’s responsible for you-know-what, are we?” Maher said.

“I’m not going to touch the Holocaust stuff tonight,” Farrow responded.

“I’m just saying it was a very long time ago. How long do Germans have to say we’re not those people any more?” Maher said.

Maher went on to ask Farrow about his “other big area.” He was referring to his award-winning reporting for opening the floodgates on the Harvey Weinstein scandal, which may have helped spur the #MeToo movement, placing conversations about sexual assault and harassment in a new light.

“You wrote the article about Harvey Weinstein, it was supposed to go on NBC, right?” Maher asked.

“It was,” Farrow replied.

“But it wound up at the New Yorker because NBC — now they’re dealing with a story about Tom Brokaw and Matt Lauer, and gosh, what’s in the water over there?” Maher asked. “And Bill Cosby, it’s very fitting you’re here, right after he gets sentenced — or not sentenced, but found guilty.”

Maher continued to call these men the “big fish,” but asked if #MeToo was  “causing a backlash that’s hurting it?”

He referred to Al Franken, Aziz Ansari, and Garrison Keillor.

“Everyone had this pent-up desire to show their penis that we just didn’t talk about for years and years,” Farrow joked.

“Not everyone,” Maher said. “But a shocking number of people.”

Maher said he has thought that “maybe” the movement has “gone too far here.”

Farrow said that people have been good at “self-regulating” and used the article about Ansari that was published in Babe as an example.

“It was clearly a single-source narrative about a date gone wrong, and there was a debate about how far gone wrong it was, but I don’t think anyone saw that and said, ‘Oh he’s Harvey Weinstein, this is a multiple rapist,'” Farrow said.

“But he’s not around anymore,” Maher said.

“Is that true of Aziz Ansari?” Farrow asked.

“I think so,” Maher replied.

Farrow responded by explaining that conversations around sexual harassment and assault have been kept silent for decades, thus causing “so much pent-up anger and heartbreak and lack of accountability, that I do think it’s understandable it’s coming out in torrents right now.”

Watch the full discussion here: