Uncategorized – talleyberry

A Picky Nodder and America’s Deep Race Issues

I don’t know the name of the man standing just behind Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe’s left shoulder in the widely-circulated video of McAuliffe’s remarks today at Charlottesville’s Mt. Zion First African Baptist Church, but the man’s conspicuously selective nodding during the speech was the heroism we needed on a day of careless (and sometimes silly) reactions to yesterday’s white supremacist march and terrorist attack on the Virginia city.

In the video, our Nodder shows his approval when McAuliffe sends a simple message to the white nationalist and neo-Nazi marchers: “Go home.” Nod, nod, nod.

But the Nodder immediately freezes when McAuliffe invokes the patriotism of two Founding Fathers. “You wanna talk about patriots?” the Democratic governor asks. “Talk about Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who brought our country together.” Wait a second…

I can’t know for sure—our Nodder’s neck may have tired at just the moment McAuliffe mentioned Jefferson’s name—but I suspect his sudden stillness was a response to the absurdity of McAuliffe’s choice, at a moment of racial division, to hold up as exemplary unifiers two white people who had owned black people as slaves.

I don’t have a problem calling the Founders patriots. They did, of course, “bring the country together,” though not in the same sense it needs to be brought together today. And despite their personal imperfections and hypocrisies, they were inspired by some genius to fill our founding documents with an aspirational vision of equality that continues to drive our nation’s halting progress.

But Mr. Nodder’s reminder of America’s troubled history was useful today, when so many of us struggled to put the events of Charlottesville into their proper context. The president tried to diminish the clash’s importance by painting it as a flare-up of hatred from “many sides.” Likewise, the author of this truly ridiculous blog post, apparently forgetting that 63 million Americans were comfortable enough with Trump’s flirtations with white nationalism to elect him president, suggested the real problem in Charlottesville (and the reason for Heather Heyer’s death) was the left’s overreaction to “a few hundred nutjobs.” While McAuliffe did much better than these two, it was one well-placed listener—and his timely nodding—who reminded us that even the best-intentioned among us sometimes struggle to grasp the depth of our nation’s issues.

It’s Only “Politicizing” When You’re Wrong?

Here’s Frank Bruni on “The Exploitation of Paris” for the New York Times:

Can’t we wait until we’ve resolved the body count? Until the identities of all of the victims have been determined and their families informed? Until the sirens stop wailing? Until the blood is dry?

…

I’d like not to be told, fewer than 18 hours after the shots rang out, how they demonstrate that Americans must crack down on illegal immigration to our own country. I read that and was galled, and not because of my feelings about immigration, but because of my feelings about the automatic, indiscriminate politicization of tragedy.

It’s such a disrespectful impulse.

And it’s such an ugly one.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall in the Times newsroom when the assignments are handed out after such a tragedy. How do they decide who will write the articles denouncing politicization and who will write the politicized articles?

It wasn’t so long ago that I read Nick Kristof’s “A New Way to Tackle Gun Deaths,” which details what Mr. Kristof calls “modest steps to reduce the carnage that leaves America resembling a battlefield” and which was published two days after the Umpqua Community College shooting.

Of course, both Mr. Bruni and Mr. Kristof write for the Opinion section of the Times. They haven’t been assigned viewpoints, and they’re entitled to have different ideas about the appropriate response to shootings. But it’s strange that Mr. Kristof and other perennial gun control advocates (for example, the president, who explicitly defended the practice of “politicization” immediately after Umpqua) escape Mr. Bruni’s criticism here.

Continue reading “It’s Only “Politicizing” When You’re Wrong?”

Talley’s World Cup Watching Guide

I’m an experienced watcher of soccer/football/futebol. If you’re not, I’m going to upgrade you right now. Here’s how I’m watching and what I’m watching for.

The Football

Counterintuitively, an important part of the World Cup is actually the ball. Without the ball, it’s hard to understand what’s going on. If you’re new to the game, you’ll probably just watch the ball the whole time. That’s fine. There will be plenty of on-the-ball skill in this World Cup. Experienced fans: Don’t forget to pay attention to the ball.

The Tactics

Seasoned football fans will probably be looking out for the tactical plans of the involved teams. The best way to learn about strategy in general and these 32 teams in particular is to read Zonal Marking, an excellent website that has just finished a comprehensive, team-by-team tactical rundown. Try following the activity of the two players ZM has picked out as each team’s key actor, and you’ll be surprised how well you begin to see the shape of the rest of the team.

The Commentators

Critiquing commentators is the typical football fan’s favorite extracurricular activity. We glorify in Ray Hudson’s flights of fancy and despair at Taylor Twellman’s grating inanity. Who can forget Adrian Healey’s famous call as Holland destroyed France in 2008: “It’s a Dutch Oven, and the French…are toast”? A good commentating team can make a match much more enjoyable. A bad commentating team can do the same, if they’re comically rather than offensively bad. But beware such commentators as Eric Wynalda and Gus Johnson. Just turn it off.

Here’s a pretty good review of the commentators involved this month. The first game is Ian Darke and Steve McManaman. Enjoy – they’re among the best out there. Here’s the commentary schedule for the rest of the Cup.

What To Drink

Your drink must match your team. Check out this unofficial list of national drinks and get your fandom and fundom on the same page.

What To Wear

See above. Your clothing must also match your national team. If you can’t afford the real thing, just get the colors right.

A Conversation About the Debt Ceiling

Below is a Facebook conversation I recently had with a brilliant politically-minded friend, who has asked not to be named because he is involved with the Lower House of a certain state’s legislature. Comments welcome. Read on:

TMB: Why are you up so early?

A: Haha I’m always up at 5:30, man. Usually in the gym, but my biceps tendon is being a little b*tch this morning.

A: So I did some debt ceiling research instead.

TMB: What’d you find out?

TMB: By the way, talked to a guy who founded a massive telecom company and was huge at AT&T before that. He supported austerity in Europe and here. We talked about his time working for those companies and why he was so successful.

A: A few things.

A: Nice.

TMB: He said he didn’t worry about costs, just about increasing revenue by any means possible and staying ahead of competitors.

TMB: And didn’t understand the irony.

A: Haha…sounds like an interesting conversation.

TMB: What’d you find out today?

A: I found out that the big problem is more the uncertainty regarding the technical processes that govern the treasury’s activity during a default than an actual default in the textbook sense.

A: Which really makes things worse, because even if we avoid a default, we still risk causing serious economic harm to ourselves and other countries, which ultimately threatens the cornerstone of American power, which is our position at the foundation of the global economic system.

A: Instead of celebrating avoiding some sort of theoretically catastrophic event, we should be lamenting the further erosion of that position.

TMB: OF COURSE we should. This year has been an unmitigated disaster. I will suggest one thing, though. Our position at the foundation of the global economic system is pretty unshakable for the same reason that a default would be catastrophic: the entire system, from the most basic assumptions to the most complicated mechanisms, relies on the one central assumption that there is a riskless asset against which all others (including the relatively risky (!) gold) can be measured. That, of course, is US debt. Just as it would wreck the world if that were undone and we had to rebuild the whole system from scratch, any attempt to factor true risk of US debt into global financial theory will also have to rebuild the whole system from scratch. That is the second of the great trilogy of ironies here.

TMB: So 1) US debt is the most powerful bomb in the world if you somehow can light that fuse, 2) if you don’t blow it up, it’s the most stable substance in the world, and 3) the people willing to blow it up are willing to do so, at least in part, because they don’t understand either of the first two. The first point means default destroys the world. The second really means we could go on a ten-year spending spree of Caligulan proportions and we could catapult ourselves back to the forefront of education, science, space, everything, as well as reestablishing our ability to produce at a level that might allow us to reduce the debt, without risking default on pure trust terms, because the system isn’t rigged to judge our debt in pure trust terms — only if we blow it up in one go.

TMB: That’s a pretty liberal suggestion, I think, but I actually believe it. I agree with you. What we are doing now is devastating, because we could triple the g*ddamn debt without making it less attractive. We just can’t do this.

A: Man, I’ve been thinking/arguing part of that for years now. The dollar figure attached to our national debt is almost totally irrelevant, yet conservatives seem to think it’s the only thing that matters. They all think the United States government can and should operate on the same financial principles that apply to most successful households.

A: It’s not the f*cking same.

A: Increasing the effectiveness of our investments is the key to ultimate economic prosperity.

A: Does that mean we can’t cut anything? No. It means we have to move resources from less effective areas into more effective areas, adding additional resources as necessary to increase returns in the most productive ones.

TMB: I’m with you. I think I’m gonna hit the next person who makes the household analogy.

As a follow-up to this conversation, I shared a post on Facebook asking for suggestions as to why the dollar figure of the US debt matters. I got zero responses, but maybe my friends who can answer that question just didn’t see it. What do you think?