I'm a Liberal Who Voted For Trump. Here's why.

Last week, I got into my Prius, pulled it silently out of my driveway (after tooting the horn twice, to warn any cats in the vicinity to watch out), and glided off to my local poll.  There, I grabbed the ballot, voted to legalize marijuana, keep bans on corporate finance of campaigns in place, and ban the distribution of disposable plastic grocery bags.  Also, for Donald J Trump as president.  How can this paradox be explained?!

Some who know me probably suspect it's because I believe in cultural libertarianism rather than cultural leftism; that is to say, I reject the politically-correct, "don't punch down" principle that has taken hold in too much of the Left and overridden its commitment to liberal ideals like free speech and secularism whenever there's the slightest chance that someone of some marginalized group might be offended by it.  Pushing everybody into a national drum circle where they all hold their tongues for fear of disrupting harmony is not the right way to call upon American values to build a society that is "Stronger Together"; America is the land of "Freedom to" and not "Freedom from", and every politician and pundit who wants to be taken seriously must understand this.  However, no; unlike some people, I didn't vote Trump to smack down political correctness, because in practice, Trump's opposition to it so far has consisted of little more than trolling its mendacity with his own, to the effect that each feels more and more vindicated and their angsty spews have both gotten more and more inescapable.  It's an insult arms race, with no Insult Arms Limitation Treaty in sight.

Some may suspect it's because I feel a great need to combat Islamic radicalism.  Trump has pledged to do this, but his only real idea for how is to restrict immigration from states it infests; what the world really needs is an idea of how to save the victims in those states from the radicalism that has scared them into immigrating to the west and might sneak in with them, and I'm not convinced Trump has any, so no; that's not it, either.

Yet buried amidst the insults and inexperience that proliferate in Trump's plans for America, there is one point that resonates loud and clear with me, and that is the desire to combat the global free trade lobby that has wrecked America and the world for decades.

Trump's marketing to "Joe Sixpack" has focused to a great extent on keeping jobs here, and I support this, too, but American blue-collar workers losing jobs as their employers flee abroad to foreign states represent only one part of this massive disaster, and plenty others, people on the Left have been calling out faster than the Right did.  Think of the tragedies of freely-traded beef: American farmers work in the American countryside, which is an opportune place to farm sustainably, but they also take American wages, which means that food bought from them needs to cost more to pay those wages.  So the food businesses stop relying on them and instead go to countries where they can pay lower wages to farmers, in a region where they can't do it sustainably, so they have to keep cutting down the rainforest to do it.  Think of the tragedies of landfill upon landfill of discarded American goods.  Why do we, as a nation not overwhelmingly represented in the global population census, produce the overwhelming majority of the world's garbage?  As the cliche goes, "because we can"...economically speaking.

Stay environmentalist, California!

Once again, the wage disparity between America and the other nations its manufacturing companies flee to has created a destructive scenario wherein it is economically advantageous for Americans to discard and replace their broken, glitchy or simply outdated goods rather than repairing them.  Physical capital such as plastic, silicon and copper cost money, buying more than you already have will set you back, but as overseas costs to manufacture new goods are so much lower than American technicians would charge to repair these things, that cost isn't relevant enough.  So it's in with the new, out to the dump with the old, and that's even before we get into the damage caused to the natural environment from mining the materials and running the machines to keep building the new.  People here take replacing goods for granted, and the snowball effect it has had on our consumer culture has gotten ever more nauseating.  California is getting more and more Left, you say?  Then why are we so constantly downwind of propaganda from technology companies that tell us how cool we'll be if we buy yet another smartphone made in China, as if we didn't already own three?! 

The unfortunate answer is that the Left, as they exist in politics, have lost their way for decades.  Even as leftists on the ground pleaded to "Save the Rainforest" and "Stop the Dump", the Clintons' brand of Neoliberalism has continued to be the guiding principle among both elected Democrats and left-coast plutocrats.  Decades ago, as communism fell, trade picked up, the media got louder and more globalized and "New Labour" (allegedly) supplanted Thatcherism in Britain, a big focus of "liberals" has been painting a happy, utopian face on the profit-motivated, trade-bound world order that Nixon, Thatcher and Reagan engineered.  The world was coming together, gushed the bold neoliberals, people were communicating with one another, economies were improving on paper, people of all races and creeds were jetting around and shaking hands.  If we could learn to get along with and respect all the people within our borders, the neoliberals argued, surely the same could be true of those outside them, right?  Well let's put it this way, passing the Emancipation Proclamation and banning Jim Crow laws didn't cause businesses to flee, jungles to be destroyed, ice to be melted, or landfills to be clogged.

Things were going to break eventually.  It didn't take long for the notion of a more peaceful, friendly world than we had in the Cold War to be dealt many humiliating blows by a resurgence of terrorists (Many of them from nations that had gotten rich from global free trade), but for a while, the elites on both the Left and the Right were able to maintain the trust of their constituents by pointing the finger at each other and demonizing. (Then they hopped on a plane to go chum with foreign dictators, negotiating more dollar diplomacy.)  People could be made to think one party or the other was on their side for a while, but after over two decades of changing the guard, without a key answer about reigning in the problematic system of political and business elites making deals with themselves in mind; not their people or the planet, at some point there would have to come candidates who said "Stop it".

Unfortunately, this turned out to be Trump--because the Democrats in charge didn't want Sanders.  They had figured that, in the face of Trump's obnoxious trolling of political correctness, they could fall back on identity politics, their trusty weapon for romanticizing globalization, to bring enough anti-Trump forces out of the woodwork.  After all, we had twice proven that we were willing to elect our first black president, because, as his posters proclaimed, "Yes We Can".  We had shown we were willing to symbolize we respected black people; surely we would do the same for women, right? 

Sure...but what type of women?  If the disenfranchised, change-happy segments of society placed a lot of value on political insiders with experience navigating the system, then logically in 2008 our first black President would have been Colin Powell--but they didn't, so he wasn't.  They wanted a new, relatively untested man with new, relatively untested ideas, ideas that felt like they came from the people voting him in, and weren't scarred by the legacy of his associates' failings, and they got him.  There was a certain irony to President Obama's choice of words during Hillary's election night rally, reminding the people that Hillary had gained the admiration of others within the system, including Republicans, at a time when many in the Left (and the Right, now) have never felt more assured and angry that the system is broken.  Globalist plutocracy broke it, is what we both cried.  To be sure, Trump was a part of the plutocratic system, too, but in his campaign he was condemning NAFTA, and running against a woman whose family's greatest legacy was NAFTA.  The choice seemed easy to me: Free-trade and outsourcing have to go; I have been saying this for years, and so I drove my Prius to the poll and helped elect the most anti-free-trade choice (at least who actually won primaries) in decades.

Which believe me, is not to be taken as soapboxing.  I don't blame anybody for voting for Trump, but I don't blame anybody for not voting for him, either.  There are plenty of Republicans I would far less like to elect than Trump, but that doesn't mean I think he's ideal.  He's run his campaign like a jackass, he's unfamiliar with the nuts and bolts of politics, he's thus-far done nothing to political correctness other than reassure itself of its veracity, and perhaps most importantly, it could be naive to expect a billionaire to fulfill his promises to save America from so many other billionaires.  Even if sincere in this matter, Trump will likely face opposition from the more standard big-business Republicans who now control the Legislature.  Much of what I say about the environmental need to stop free-trade could be undermined if Trump's proposals for laxer environmental laws pass, but his proposals for defeating outsourcing do not.  Other negative effects of Trump's presidency could be so bad that none of it will be worth it.  Trump could be a failure.

However, I am here to advise fellow liberals that things aren't all gloom and doom these days.  Maybe, Trump will surprise you, and end up doing a lot of what you wish your own party could have done, but even if he doesn't, the way things have gone still allows for rebound.  Even if Trump doesn't end up saving America from outsourcing, the fact is that he campaigned on the promise of doing so, and he succeeded with the core of a party that we'd long-since written off as gung-ho supporters of the free market in all its forms; opposed to the ideas of helping the underdogs.  This isn't trivial.  However much the ideologues want to write off these people as a "Basket of Deplorables" describable by various insults ending in "ist", they won an election, and if those who underestimated them want to roll with this punch, they will need to be reckoned with.  The good news for the Democrats is that I think they can.  The blue-collar theme of Trump's populist conservatism can actually resonate very well with the sort of protectionist economics the Left used to stand for, and many of its on-the-street proponents still do. 

Much of the media is now coming around to the idea that Trump is a protest candidate for the sorts of Americans who felt powerless voting for anyone else, but contrary to what the media said, it's not just because the social views of the left couldn't be reconciled with more "redneck" attitudes; it's because the economic existence of the American lower class has become one of scraping by on not-enough money, some of it just from welfare, and managing to do it only by caving in to buy cheap Chinese goods at Walmart and cheap South American beef at McDonald's; no time to care about what deals with devils created them.  That's no way for people to live and feel good about themselves; what these people need is the sense of empowerment that Rosie the Riveter gave women once, and likewise, it must come from the availability of industrial jobs that make them upwardly mobile.  Meanwhile, the middle class has gotten numb to the hidden costs of free trade because they're its beneficiaries; doing skilled labor to buy many more goods, and because in the coastal cities they inhabit, they can now take a deep breath and not smell smoke, it's easier for them to patch the delusion of a more environmentally friendly world order into their "Not in My Backyard" sensibilities, when in fact, things are more at risk than ever.  It couldn't last, and it hasn't.

So next time there's an election, try this: Repackage protectionism in less obnoxious terms than Trump did.  Instead of ethno-nationalism, talk about the economic empowerment of the poor.  Talk about curtailing our waste.  Talk about the uplifting feeling of being a creator of things, instead of just a consumer of things.  Talk about the restoration of ideals; not profit, to the core of our foreign policy.  Jettison moral preaching about racism entirely, because the first step to stopping citizens from hating each other is to create a country where they don't feel threatened for jobs by each other.  I bet you a surprising amount of the basket of deplorables will get on board. 

Because we all need this, and it's been an issue for years.  We cannot keep selling out those citizens most economically at risk.  We cannot keep losing the productive potential that really did make America great in ways it hasn't been for a while.  We cannot keep littering at the rate that outsourcing has enabled.  We cannot keep sending money to empower countries with terrible standards in environmental protection and human rights.  Curtailing all of this will give Americans, at least the sort who were used to the lazy lifestyle it enabled, a sizable kick in the balls, but it was needed, and I challenge many liberals of the bent I have to deny these points.  Time will tell if I elected the wrong President, but I feel confident in saying now that I did it for all of the right reasons.

The Ten Funniest Candidate Statements from the The California 2016 Senate Race

I may have shared this before, but back in 2008, when I first entered a university, I declared Politics as my intended major.  Alas, people kept telling me the only things I could really do with politics were become a lawyer or run for office.  Becoming a lawyer violated my personal code of ethics, and as to running for office, back in those days, I felt I didn't have the proper charisma to get support.

You're probably thinking a joke about Donald Trump is coming next, and I've certainly remarked on that, but it turns out the Troll-in-Chief is just the tip of a new oncoming iceberg of...unique personalities entering candidates.  The Official Voter Information Guide yielded such ample gems that I am now quite certain I could at least get my own into it next election!  Meanwhile, join in the fun as I spotlight the comedy gold in this booklet I'm not throwing out anytime soon!

Click on the link to read more!  Just as soon as you can figure out how to click on a link printed on paper, that is! (Also, I'm wondering if this is just Danny Devito in a wig.)

It's always a little tragic when someone with such an incredibly awesome name puts out such a vacuous, generic statement.  Also note that subject-verb-number disagreement in the paragraph's third line.  Microsoft Word's ongoing inability to recognize prepositional phrases has caused glaring damage to people's own abilities to recognize them.  You are ruining us, big software industry!  Vote Thomas Fairfield, and together, we can make grammar great again!

I guess when your last name is "Laws", you needn't bother with any effort at all in your publicity statement.  For all we know, we could be voting for a computer programmed to suggest political buzzwords.

A certain segment of voters will be wondering when God's Heart became an electable position.  As to myself, I'm just wondering about those 10 giant chaos in economy.  When I first read that I kept almost picturing Ling Ling Shi charging upon bloated, villainous, business-suit-wearing versions of those things in Sonic Adventure, but it's a bit difficult when I don't even know if Ling Ling is a man or woman.  I'd better check, or else somehow my first mental image is somehow a panda in a chef's uniform.

Oh Massie, you're crazy!  Everyone knows it's the water that they use for mind-control!

Fight the power!  In other words, fight anyone whom some wild yahoo screams loud enough about being dangerous!  If you actually visit that link, you'll see Massie Munroe has some real competition for the Cloud Cuckooland Voter District.  Also, you'll probably be rolling your eyes.

Are you running for Senator or cheerleader?!

Um, what?!  Did you think a computer was going to be reading this?!  Well, maybe they gave computers the right to vote when I wasn't looking.  Carry on Jason.

I want to applaud Mike Beitiks for his courageous struggle to reclaim double-negatives from trendy ungrammatical use and reintegrate them into their correct context to mean something positive, but I can't help mentioning that "not nothing" still doesn't imply a lot.  It's a little bit like me running with the pledge: "I could care less about fighting terrorism and creating jobs.  For example, I could care about them not at all, but lucky for you I care about them more!  For more information, visit www.thomasfairfieldcouldcareless.net."

Speaking of grammar, I think you could use a comma there between "tax" and "which", Mr. Kraus.  See, right now it sounds a bit like if you can figure out any tax policies that create jobs, you're going to attack those policies in particular.  I'm not all that big on state employment programs, but come on, think of the people!

That just about wraps up our tour of the hysterical world of California politics, so head out to the poll and vote today!  But as you enter the booth, always remember the old saying: "00101000111101111!"

Of Sanders, Socialism, Scandinavia, and Standards

I was originally considering making this a tweet storm, but ultimately, I think Blogger is better for longer statements, and it makes me money, so here we go.  That said, don't expect this to be a deep piece of professional journalism; merely an observation, and those who have been paying even a little bit of attention to the way American political rhetoric works should understand what I've been observing.

Ever since Democratic Presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders has begun running as a self-proclaimed socialist, people have challenged him to justify that position.  Their challenges are undoubtedly motivated by the snowballing nightmares happening right now in the proudly socialist Venezuela.  Sanders tends to answer those critiques by explaining that what he would really rather emulate are "democratic socialist" states in Scandinavia.  The political Right's rebuttal to this tends to be that Scandinavian nations aren't socialist; they're "welfare states".

Here's the hypocrisy of that sort of argument: For decades, agitators on the same political Right have been denigrating even the tiniest Left-wing calls for European-style welfare programs as "socialist".  During the Cold War, "socialism" became a dirty word used to stigmatize anyone who argued the state should help people out, because that had also been the rallying cry of the Communist Bloc.  No less respected figures on the Right than Winston Churchill warned that the election of a new Labour government would lead to inevitably to authoritarian socialism (which looked rather silly when that new Labour government was voted out and Churchill regained the position of Prime Minister).  For quite some time in America, it was the challenge of numerous Democrats to explain to their haters how they weren't socialist.  Yet it was only a matter of time until the Syndrome Principle took effect; once everything became socialist, nothing was.  Now, thanks to constant abuse as an insult having worn the term's impact out, Bernie Sanders has grabbed it up and run with it. 

You may note that this is happening at the same time that Donald Trump is gleefully going out of his way to make statements he has to know people will consider bigoted; the likes of which have long been considered among the worst parts of the conservative voter bloc.  Between these two populist candidates, it would appear that signaling that you have balls is now the tantamount "virtue"; to be hated and feared for your attitudes is to signal that you're doing something right, but I digress. 

The point at hand is that only now, when we finally have a Democrat who accepts the label of socialist, and defines it as support of welfare programs within the framework of liberal democracy, is the Right suddenly changing its tune and proclaiming that they're not the same thing.  What we have now is a Democrat who believes socialism is precisely the sort of thing that Republican firebrands have accused it of being for years; the only difference being that he likes it, and detractors are backpedaling on their old message.  This is a hypocrisy that deserves to be laughed at.

Does that mean Sanders necessarily has any idea how to run a successful economy.  I'd say no.  I am quite open in my opposition to his plans for a drastically-risen minimum wage, and I think his refusal to give clear answers about his thoughts on Venezuela are a pile of shame of his own.  Granted, it wasn't long before public shame shifted back over to Trump for offering to debate Sanders and then refusing when he accepted.  I don't want readers to take this blog as a necessary endorsement of a candidates actual views.  However, I certainly will not necessarily endorse the views of their haters, either, and as always, it is clear now that stupidity is a bipartisan flaw.

Don't Panic Too Much; US Presidents Making Nice With Communists is Nothing New

Grinning for the Fourth Estate, the US commander in chief stepped out of his jet onto foreign soil, inevitably to be scrutinized by foreign soldiers as well as his own, and began making awkward but good-natured overtures to a Communist dictator whose ideals were at odds with America's.

Who was this president?  Well, recently it was Obama, meeting Raul Castro in Cuba.  In the past, however, it was Richard Nixon meeting Mao Zedong in China, and creating lasting trade relations.  Then, it was Ronald Reagan; not only meeting with Soviet Premiere Mikhael Gorbachev to introduce American franchises, but even striking up a friendship.  Neither of these two Republican presidents has been seen as soft on communism as a result, and in fact, they're hailed as helping to bring communism down by introducing the world to the benefits of consumer capitalsim.  Yet when Obama, a black Democrat whom many still refuse to believe is an American citizen, has made similar overtures into Cuba, the usual gang of alarmists have lost their mind and are abuzz with conspiracy accusations.

Still, let's not point the finger too hard in one direction.  The Obama presidency, perhaps more than any in history, has become a battleground for identity zealots of all stripes, often at a remove from the man's own nature.  For Leftists in 2008, not only was his election a quick way to signal that America had moved on from centuries of racism, but the fact that he had a very Middle Eastern-sounding name felt like an apology for the more recent PR blunders George W Bush had in that region; to them, he was progressivism in the non-white flesh.  The Right, in turn, seized upon this Left-wing appetite for new and non-Eurocentric things as evidence of their running accusation of the Left, present at least since Vietnam, as the perpetual betrayers of America.  Both plugged their political knee-jerks into the symbol they made of Obama, and as The Political Compass correctly points out, both were absurd.

The reality is that while Obama may be many things, many of whose merits can be debated, a proletariat-worshiping socialist is not one of them.  Policies such as bank and automotive bail-outs, as well as mandating that citizens purchase health plans from insurance companies, may have been in some sense Keynesian, but they still were most immediately beneficial to the preexisting economic elites, and positive effects on the lower classes were effectively as trickle-down as those that occurred when Reagan bolstered businesses by cutting taxes instead.  Stocks shot up under Obama, employment rates lagged behind.  He will leave the White House with capitalism very much intact.

Indeed, since the era of Reagan and Thatcher, not just America, but almost the whole world has gotten steadily more capitalist, as what has become known as neoliberalism (with no objection from the Clintons, who embraced it in the form of NAFTA) has superseded old loyalties in establishing relationships between countries.  With plenty of unsavory tyrannical states left in the world, one of the few things that really distinguishes Cuba is its retention of disproved command-economics--but then, Mao was still running that sort of economy when he opened trade with Nixon, too.  Given that both China and the USSR were gigantic nuclear powers, it's certain that they were far more terrifying sorts of Communist states than Cuba was, so during the Cold War, when they got diplomacy and Cuba didn't, it seems logical to assume that had more to do with the absolute losses to be had in a conflict than the possible profits a relationship might bring.  Even so, now that the Cold War has ended and trade concerns have surpassed staving off Mutually Assured Destruction as a priority of foreign policy, it's actually remarkable that the US resuming relations with Cuba took this long.

Politicians, Right-wing as well as Left-wing, love to drum their supporters into ideological fervor because that makes it easier for them to think in the crass, either-or terms on which American elections rest, and for the Right, part of that ideological fervor entails a hatred for socialism. (As if there was much socialism left to hate anymore.)  However, when it comes to foreign policy and the trade deals that underscore it, the inconvenient truth for ideologues about free markets is that they're differentiated from communist approaches to economics not by having a different ideology, but by having no ideology, which also means no condemnation of ideology--if there's money to made, businesses don't turn down the opportunity.  As anti-communist Cuban expatriate Paquito D'Rivera described the long-parodied irony of Che Guevara's post-portem career, "Sometimes it makes me feel happy when I see somebody with those T-shirts.  His success has been in the area of human activity that he hated most; marketing."

Now granted, not every ideologically-agnostic business deal is as humorous and harmless as making a buck off of self-assumed rebels who don't look too deeply into motives, and if you think it stinks that American businesses are channeling money into propping up authoritarian communist regimes who offer them cheap labor, and authoritarian Islamic regimes that offer cheap oil, well, I agree.  Free trade that causes America to make-nice (often with no strings attached) with extremely un-American regimes carries all sorts of risks and moral quandaries; especially given the dangerous rogues that money could find its way to, and these days, even Republicans are starting to have second thoughts, as witness Middle American die-hards backing Donald Trump as he breaks with decades of conservative policies favoring unregulated foreign trade, and advocates such drastic measures as a "trade-war" with China.  There are cases to be made against business deals with authoritarians.

Be all that as it may, though, there is absolutely no good reason to believe that Obama's new diplomacy with Cuba is going to let communism into the US (and if you do believe that, it's likely because your perception of Obama is shaped by the most ignorant blowhards on the Right, the most ignorant blowhards on the Left, or quite possibly both); quite the contrary, if China, Russia and Vietnam are any indication, it is far more likely capitalism will come to Cuba.  Again, that does not mean everything is hunky-dory.  Cuba will likely make market reforms, but that does not mean it will become a democracy.  Cuba will likely open up to investment from Cuban expatriates, but that does not mean its government will offer them any reparations.  These sorts of deals don't work like that.
So no; Obama's dealing with communist Cuba is not ideal.  However, it is not a new low.  In the decades-old tradition established by Republicans and maintained by Democrats, this is business as usual--literally.

#GGInSF: It's Not Always Easy Being Autistic--Even in a Nerd's World

Disclaimer: Before I launch into this angsty rant, I want to make clear I am in no way intending to imply that I, as a neurodiverse individual who finds it harder to enjoy many forms of socializing, am therefor somehow superior to the normies who are easier to please.  Such pretense belongs on Tumblr, at least in the sense that feces belong in a sewer, so other places don't have to deal with it.  I have talents some people don't, and can tell you a lot about certain niche topics, and I think those, too, are likely tied to my having Asperger's Syndrome, but I came here to blog about the problems, today--and that is what I'll limit this to; I'm not going to act like I necessarily know the solution and others should conform.

Shortly after joining GamerGate in November, 2014, I made a video proclaiming that it could be the best thing that ever happened it to autistic people.  Not only did the backlash against people like Leigh Alexander and Sam Biddle represent one of the first times socially awkward people struck back at those who shamed them for their unique mannerisms and interests, but GamerGate went on to establish a series of friendships based upon mutual interests rather than aimless mingling; a must for autistic people who despise small-talk and the like.  However, although I stand by those points, it's become obvious that even falling in with GamerGate hasn't solved all of the problems related to autism.

Since making that video, I've been to three meet-ups.  The first was in San Jose, the second was at Huntington Beach, and the third, a week ago today (that means it was on January 9, 2016), was in San Francisco.  At all times, I reaffirmed that GamerGate is a lovely bunch who have been intolerably smeared to the point I think we need to update libel and slander laws to prevent guilting individuals by association, but I have also reaffirmed something about myself--I simply don't do well in crowded, noisy places.  The San Jose meetup took place primarily at a crowded, noisy bar, where I struggled to follow dialogue.  The Huntington Beach meetup took place primarily (surprise) at the beach, which I liked much better because it was easy to follow dialogue.  Sadly, the San Francisco meetup once again took place primarily at a crowded, noisy bar, where once again, that prevented me from following dialogue.

Which is actually quite tragic in these sorts of situations.  A lot of the sorts of conversations that go on while people sit around a table drinking, I couldn't care less about not hearing, because standard socialization and small-talk bore me; the way they bore many autistic people. (Or in some extreme cases, even unnerve them.)  The sort of things GamerGate members talk about, even in bars and under the influence, is frequently very interesting to me, but unfortunately, presumably because I'm autistic, oftentimes I simply can't perceive nearly enough of what they're saying over the racket of the other patrons chattering and the music blasting--and I presume this to be an autistic thing because if non-autistic people had the same problems understanding nearby speakers in noisy venues, they probably wouldn't be choosing such venues to have their important discussions.

The saddest moment for me during the San Francisco meetup was the end of it; for me a downer ending.  While the bar talk was hard to follow, and far from ideal, I still got some useful conversation from it; unfortunately, it ran literally to midnight.  At that point, the group decided they wanted to go over to someone's apartment and actually play video games, or at least talk in a place where it wouldn't be hard to understand.  Most of the people went.  Sadly, I felt I just couldn't.  I was already exhausted, I don't have the strongest stomach, and that night I had already had three beers; my maximum.  To stay up several hours longer, I would probably need to down some coffee on top of that; a risk to my gut I wasn't willing to take.  Therefor I made the difficult decision that midnight to walk back to my hotel and go to bed and especially upon reading the tweets of all the amusing things that happened after the group went off to spend more time at the apartment, I've been regretting it ever since.

I'm not just sad things turned out like that; even against my better judgment, I've gotten mad.  I don't know if I'm madder at myself or at other people, and I don't know which is worse; much as it isn't clear where the line is between self-esteem and arrogance--if that line even objectively exists at all.  An unpleasant part of growing up as an autistic boy in America is that the "Majority Rules" axiom; which I and everyone else was taught to venerate, has been an almost constant detriment to my social life.  That has remained true even throughout many events, even as I intellectually supported the principle, and it remains true now in GamerGate; even as it becomes increasingly clear that we're part of a much-needed greater American cultural renaissance that gets the world reacquainted with the wisdom of classical liberal principles that have come under attack since the New Left that formed in the 1960s has come to dominate discourse. (Look for a more extended blog on that one, coming soon.)

Hence I don't begrudge the masses for enjoying noisy bars or other standard social venues, and enthusiastically salute GamerGate for insisting that cultural scenarios and artifacts ought to focus on pleasing their legions of aficionados rather than condescending to noisy negativists invading the space with their nitpickty alien values; I guess it's just that I also supposed GamerGate, rallying as it does around a niche (but increasingly less-niche) hobby would also center its meetups more around that hobby.  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't disappointed this hasn't been the case for the ones I've been to, and I would have strongly preferred the San Francisco meetup spent more time in the apartment playing games and did that part earlier, but again, I'm only here to get my opinion off my chest; not argue for its relative merit.

Even so, while I'd never presume myself in a position to demand a change to such events, I'm not sure I can go to them anymore.  I continue to support GamerGate and the broader Cultural Libertarian movement, but I don't think my best course for doing so consists of standardized nights on the town.  These trips are not cheap, although some in the future may be depending on where the events are held, and I simply feel I get a lot more out of the group when I'm playing games online with them and communicating via the microphone, which I can do from home.  I'd love to do more, to meet people and do things alongside them that could not be done from home, and maybe some day, I may even meet Mrs. Right in GamerGate--a long shot for most people, but in my case I think it isn't much less likely I'd meet a woman anywhere else--but from here on, I think I will have to weigh the pros and cons more carefully.

Understanding the Rise of Milo Yiannopoulis—and What his Political Opponents Could Learn From Him

Like a younger, gayer Winston Churchill, Milo Yiannopoulis (known as “Nero” on Twitter) has made a (long, hard-to-spell) name for himself charging his way ever further into the many present-day crises regarding the frailty and endurance of liberal culture; a culture by whose standards his politics are already far backwards, and nevertheless become a celebrated figure, his witticisms, perkiness and near impenetrable refinement charming even opponents.

However, there is more to the cult of Milo than simply charisma.  These days, your rank-and-file political pundits—right or left—do their best to be amusing, but usually cater only to those whose views they share.  Why, after all, should people pay attention to a political opponent who can turn a phrase when there are political allies to care about who can do it too?  The answer, in the simplest terms, is that Milo is happy to return the favor, and in the process, he has become more than your rank-and-file political pundit.

Despite having become one of the most infamous public faces of the GamerGate movement, the irony is that Yiannopoulis is,

by his own admission, an outsider to it.  As a conservative journalist, he’s not obligated to take a side in what he sees as a civil war among liberals, as a man without a history of playing video games, he wouldn’t seem to have a stake in arguing how they ought to be made, as a Catholic, he’s hardly mandated to stand against the constant charge that the pursuit of pleasure is making modern people sinful, and as a rather flamboyant, immaculate and cushy-living gay Englishman, he’s an odd candidate to defend hot-blooded hyper-masculinity.  Yet in a world of political activism whose big consistency is becoming disgusted at any perceived slights or opponents, characterized by people who are all too willing to assume the worst of those that offend their personal sensibilities and throw up walls against them, Milo has opted instead to build bridges, to jet all over the political landscape in search of conversation, and this breath of fresh air has paid off.

These days, demonization of political opponents has gone so far that it’s even led to scaremongering character-attacks on people like Bill Maher for having slightly different opinions than their technical political allies, and “disinvitation” is halting discourse, but Milo has no such crippling fear and flight. 

As reported by the Los Angeles Times’ David Ng, he was so eager to debate GamerGate with opponent Anita Sarkeesian that he even offered to pay her or donate to a charity of her choice. (Although according to Milo, he actually offered twice the amount Ng declared; maybe there’s an error in conversion rates somewhere?)  Sarkeesian didn’t accept the offer, but some others one would expect to be bitter foes to Milo haven’t just talked to him, but become friends.  

One of these is Carl Benjamin,

better known by his screenname, Sargon of Akkad.  Sargon’s webseries features “This week in stupid” videos, Jon Stewart-esque comedic jabs at absurdities on both the Left and the Right (along with more serious philosophical videos), but also like Stewart, there’s little doubt that he’s a liberal leftist, having taken a survey declaring himself such, railed against the Conservative Party’s misdeeds and proclaimed a desire for cottage industry to return and seize the economy back from large corporations.  One would expect the worst if someone with such views ever chatted with an outspoken conservative, but he and Milo have gotten on fine.  

More recently, Milo reached out to feminist filmmaker Cassie Jaye, whose views on gay marriage and undoubtedly other things are against his.  Jaye had been working on The Red Pill, a documentary investigating the Men’s Rights Movement, her former benefactors had abandoned her once the subject matter was getting too controversial and potentially offensive, and the film was at risk for cancellation.  It is said that lightning doesn’t strike twice, but Milo had learned the ropes from his experiences with GamerGate, and

signal-boosted Cassie Jaye’s fall out of the good-graces of fellow feminists, as well as the last resort crowdfunding she’d begun for the movie.  Within a few days, the film’s minimum was funded, reaching stretch goals soon after, mainstream feminism lost a battle, and Milo and his allies admitted another member to their textbook case of the axiom that politics make for strange bedfellows.

The specific political bed that unites these uncommon allies is their common opposition to censorship and no-platforming.  For certain blowhards, of questionable number but undeniable volume, ensuring the success of their contemporary political goals trumps reverence to the broader liberal democratic traditions of free speech and impartial debate, but Milo’s rise to prominence has led many back to that exciting political climate of the early enlightenment, where political ideas were not yet social axioms, not yet laws, often not even discussed by actual politicians yet, but the source of many interesting philosophical discussions by hobbyists in salons, coffee shops, and fraternal lodges, and as Breitbart Tech launched,

he took to YouTube and hosted a conversational stream lasting over seven hours, to which people from all over the political spectrum were invited.  There were disagreements to be had, and Milo even argued with fellow conservatives over the merits of Donald Trump, but throughout it all, the participants maintained an atmosphere of civility, the likes of which some on college campuses these days might think impossible.

Meanwhile, even as Milo has gone out of his way to find common ground with people who would once be assumed his enemies, he has also upheld his anti-censorship principles by calling to task his nominal allies.  When GamerGate fell into Milo’s lap and gave him a rare opportunity to be a conservative inductee into the ultra-modernist world of electronic entertainment, he could have used the fervor of the moment just to slam left-wing activists who’d run afoul of many people; after all, a huge part of political campaigning is playing up the misdeeds of one’s opponents, while sweeping one’s own side’s dirt under the rug.  Instead, though, he’s acknowledged the Right has a history of anti-pleasure moral crusaders, such as in an

article where he pointed out the similarities in rhetoric and tactics between feminist Anita Sarkeesian and Christian-Rightist Jack Thompson.  Later, as he reflected on more time with the movement, he explained, “The Right hates gamers because it blames games for real-world violence. The Left now hates them because progressives have come to accuse video games, bizarrely, of somehow being able to make people sexist.”  

What this bipartisan criticism represents is, once again, a commitment to freedom of expression—which protects both speech, and the creation of media, like video games--and standing up to all who oppose it, whatever their justification.  This is a value many liberals share, even while some prominent members of the left have gone the other way.  While the press has been willing to characterize GamerGate’s attitudes as right-wing because the people GamerGate harshly criticizes are

left-wing, it should be remembered that they’re left-wing journalists, and it’s questionable how much they represent the overall soul of the left when no less a figure than President Barrack Obama himself has also come out against the alarming trend of no-platforming one’s political opponents.  Does that mean he’ll agree with Milo Yiannopoulis and even the more liberal wings of GamerGate on everything?  Of course not, but agreeing on everything isn’t the point.  The point is to preserve a western culture built on diverse ideas, fight back against presumptuous claims that some of those ideas are not just distressing, but dangerous to some people, and assert that the best policies arise out of dialectic between ideas.  E pluribus unum is a canonized statement in America for a reason.

With all of this overwhelming promotion of Milo Yiannopoulis and his adventures in culture warfare, one may be tempted to believe I am a gung-ho supporter who hangs on and repeats his every word.  This is not the case; in fact, I am a social liberal, economically left-of-center and I share none of his religious ideals.  I cannot co-sign on his regressive tax proposals, and I found it embarrassing to watch him on

The Rubin Report trying to rationalize his Catholic opposition to gay marriage as being in the best interests of the gay community.  Yes; I will share Milo’s articles and retweet his tweets when I think he has a point, but the experience is, rather like a rollercoaster, a twisted mix of empowering and scary.  I’d be lying if I said that at times, I didn’t resent having a man with a fair amount of openly reactionary attitudes fighting on my behalf for what I and many other see as a liberal value, and there are no-doubt people on the Left (or even on the Right) who suspect that Milo is simply trying to carpetbag nerds into becoming more right-wing.  

However, those who allege Milo’s carrying out some diabolical, terrifyingly effective conspiracy hatched in secret are, in fact, giving him far too much credit.  Milo’s “recruit the ronin” policy really depends on the existence of ronin, and in many cases, that existence is due to their being disowned by former left-wing allies on the basis of far lesser disagreements than Milo has with them.  The most disturbing thing about the runaway success of Milo Yiannopoulis is that there’s nothing about his successful modus operandi that liberals couldn’t do themselves, and given their far greater alignment with modern culture, it’s very arguable they could be even more effective at gaining support—and yet, many have opted not to do it.  Speaking as a liberal leftist (though admittedly becoming more uncomfortable with the latter designation), who does, in fact, have a vested interest in promoting my politics, I openly declare that the Left could use a lot more people like Milo Yiannopoulis.  By this, I do not mean people opposed to gay marriage, abortion, feminism, and progressive taxes, but simply people who don’t treat their own political bias as so high and mighty that it warrants a dehumanizing and silencing embargo against anyone who disagrees, even when they disagree only a little bit.  To be sure, there are plenty on the Left who agree with that, but not enough of them in high places.  A few have stepped up, such as David Pakman and Jonathan Chait, but we need more; including, preferably, people who up until now have engaged in counter-productive othering.

The following is a challenge to all the high and mighty on the liberal left alarmed by the rise of Milo Yiannopoulis: Open the gates.  If your positions are so obviously correct, intelligent and broadly-supported as you maintain, then surely you wouldn’t have anything to lose from meeting with those people you’re currently ostracizing and starting to discuss things.  Your zero-tolerance tactics have backfired and more and more people are sick of them.  If you keep your ideals on this self-destructive course, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Is "Meritocracy" An Irreparable Talking-Point? Only if You Let it Be One.

This was inspired by a series of Twitter posts, although one was also inspired by a rather long Facebook post made by famous Dirty Jobs host, Mike Rowe.  Then, as with other times, Mike has come off as potentially controversial for taking a stand to suggest that an individual's success in life is equivalent to the burden he or she is willing to bear--a view many have come to suspect is ignorant and essentially right-wing.  To that, I have a few things to say.

First, I get it; okay?  I get it not just as somebody who considers himself somewhere left-of-center economically, but as someone who, like many other autistic men, has known tremendous discrimination in the job world, and who knows that my group is not unique; in some states, it's still legal to discriminate against homosexuals in the workforce.  Unfair bosses are a reality.  It's understandable that people are skeptical when someone of a political bent talks of meritocracy; political people, after all, have their beliefs, their vision of what beliefs and characteristics makes a better or worse person, and it's hard to buy such people put aside such biases to base their definition of a hard worker strictly on objective qualities like efficiency, precision and tenacity.  Furthermore, there's no doubt that some prominent people on the right, among them Margaret Thatcher, have become well-known, and variously-regarded (depending on one's own political bias) for promoting a meritocracy as the solution to all society's woes; nor is there much doubt as to why.  The existence of that outstanding worker who can grab the bull by the horns, and go from rags to riches of his or her own device, is a talking-point for those who allege that no compassionate help from above is necessary, and no major hindrances to worker advancement are built into companies.  Are such workers and their inspiring success stories typical?  Expect that question to be argued for decades to come, with very little hope of a satisfying answer arising, as that would hinge on the absurd presumption that all workers and all employers are equally as ethical or corrupt as their peers.

The second thing that must be said, however, is that following this healthy skepticism through to preemptively belittling anyone who dares to stress the value of hard, meaningful work, is, as Rowe suggested, doing people no favors.  Leftists may be correct in identifying why more Right-leaning thinkers place a high value on hard work--because it puts the burden of proof on workers, rather than their wealthy constituents--but to presume this is the case with every person who says such things is not in actuality reigning in unfair considerations; it is merely allowing the political Right, with its comparatively low respect to the underdogs, to be the exclusive venue wherein such things are discussed, with all the bias that entails.  Today, vocal people on the Left are making the same mistake with "meritocracy" as vocal people on the Right have been making for decades with "liberalism"; that is, surrendering the term to the opposition, to be fed back to people in skewed form, when both ideas as they were originally conceived contributed to tremendous citizen growth on a sub-political level.

It is important to note that while politicians are frequently obnoxious for the things they spout over and over again, sometimes the issue isn't that those things aren't true, so much as that they're almost never the whole truth.  The unfortunate factor underlying this trend is that their career depends on appealing to certain sorts of people and convincing those people to look down on other sorts, and that means playing up some people's faults while sweeping others under the rug.  Most people outside of politics, though, should have the ability to think about things more deeply.  Most of us by now have come across (among many other types of people) both obnoxious finaglers in high places who place unreasonable demands on people in lower places, and irritating slackers who don't even put demands on themselves that most others see as no-brainers.  We should be able to make multi-factored analyses based on such experiences, but too often people who are passionate about things fall prey to what could be called "political cooties"; that is, knee-jerk reactions against the sort of ideas they deem hostile to their interests, and in this case, the real victims will be workers, unable to form a whole picture of the world important to them when led by people who only focus on select parts of it.

What the work world (including that part of it concerned with why certain types of people are lagging behind others) actually needs are dialogue and analysis by people who aren't so full of themselves that they let mere words get to them and shut them down.  Before the reductive binary bore of Right Vs Left got involved, our culture's politics had already embraced the more meaningful idea that there is wisdom in crowds, and none of us is as smart as all of us.  Let's try to bring that back and face these problems together.