Modern Warfare 2: Can video games teach us about the horrors of war? The answer, of course, is no.

Modern Warfare 2 (nee Call of Duty 6) is the sequel to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 1: A New Hope, which was a massive hit and also an awesome game. This was partly because COD4 was actually able to transcend the narrative and thematic limitations inherent in the FPS genre in several key sequences in the single player campaign. The two that stick out for me are the one in which your playable character dies slowly and painfully in a nuclear blast and another in which your controllable perspective shifts from a squad under heavy and hectic fire by some or other Russian separatist battalion to a gunner comfortably ensconced in a AC130 gunship miles in the air who comes in to save the day by raining destruction on the attackers from an untouchable height. This sequence in particular, without being too heavy-handed about things, effectively used the gaming medium to contrast the vulnerability of traditional ground soldiering with the eerie detachment of computer-aided remote warfare.

Modern Warfare 2 tries really, really hard to replicate that, but doesn't quite hit the mark. The single player story, which in quick order blends Generation Kill, James Bond, 24, Red Dawn, The Rock, and the climax of Face/Off (which the last level essentially steals wholesale), has a lot of 'wow' moments and high points, but would really have benefited from focusing less on trying to top the original and more on explaining exactly what the hell is going on at any given moment. There is that 'controversial' optional level in which you control a participant in a terrorist attack, which is actually quite chilling and effective until you play further in and realize that the developers have utilized it as little more than a gateway to go completely over the top rather than as the emotional centerpiece of a coherent narrative.

This is disappointing, largely because you can tell that the developers (Infinity Ward, who also created COD4) put in some effort to make Modern Warfare 2 resonate on a level deeper than the average military shooter game. The Call of Duty series' trademark deathscreen historical quotes seem to be skewed more antiwar this go-round (and include at least one choice selection from Don Rumsfeld about the location of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction), the game explicitly sets one level in Afghanistan (rather than COD4's vague 'The Middle East'). and there are several moments that attempt to highlight the perils of war. I think that the decision to directly continue the storyline from of the first Modern Warfare is a big limiting factor in constructing a serious narrative; as ludicrous as the levels depicting a land invasion of Washington D.C. by the Russian Army were, I still thought the game's story might have been able to right itself, until it nuked the fridge completely by bringing back one of the presumed-dead main characters from the first game. The entire final third of Modern Warfare 2 stays in an uninterrupted soap-opera mode, although the gameplay admittedly doesn't much suffer for it.

The single-player campaign is all well and good, but the real reason that Modern Warfare 2 is so hotly anticipated is the online competitive multiplayer. I never really played COD4 multiplayer more than a few times, but I made the mistake of popping online for a couple matches the first day I had the game and was almost immediately addicted. MW2's multiplayer weds the campaign's gameplay mechanics to a relatively standard selection of deathmatch modes, and grafts on a truly remarkable upgrade system whereby the player unlocks a range of weapons and other bonuses through earning experiences points in-game. Mostly, these points are earned by killing enemy players (natch), but there's all sorts of available bonuses and side-challenges to boost your totals. The net effect is a constant stream of positive reinforcement: one of the things that first endeared me to the game is the fact that if you get a kill after a dry streak, your point value for that kill is doubled as a 'comeback' bonus. Also, although the rules are somewhat more complex than similar games like Halo 3, the gameplay wasn't as hard for me to pick up because it tends to emphasize caution and situational awareness over fancy maneuvering and memorizing weapon locations.

As brilliant as the multiplayer is, I think it's also the biggest thing keeping Modern Warfare 2 from saying anything serious about modern warfare. It's simply not possible to postulate within two halves of the same product that shooting the shit out of people (feel free to insert mental quotation marks around that last word) is at the same time (a) a morally charged action with serious political and personal ramifications and (b) an endlessly rewarding competitive sport. In the end, this is the main problem of all video games with aspersions to seriousness: they're bound by the need to be fun as well as interactive. Even if it were possible to create an Xbox 360 equivalent of Casualties of War, who the hell would play it?

Important Breakthrough Alert!

That up there is the newly-FDA approved NeuroStar TMS system for treating depression. It works by sending electromagnetic waves to the prefrontal cortex to stimulate dopamine release, and has been shown to be as effective as antidepressant medication in clinical trials. Best of all, it only requires daily 40 minute treatments for a month, for the low price of $6,000. That's great! I just wish that somebody would come up with some other way to treat depression that would require even fewer sessions and less money, but would still be about as effective as antidepressant medication. Cough, cough.

Why men do need to reconsider masculinity, and why feminism can't help

Since gender politics is something of a tertiary intellectual interest of mine, I was excited to come across "What's the Alternative to Tucker Max?," Courtney Martin's web article in The American Prospect about the trials and tribulations of pro-feminist college men's struggles with the concept of masculinity. The reason I was particularly jazzed about this piece is that it both raises a question that I've been pondering (how men should assimilate the cultural shifts since the inception of the feminist movement into masculinity as a social construct) and admirably but unintentionally illustrates the shortcomings in the intellectual zeitgeist that make this project more difficult than it need be.

Martin is covering the happenings at a national conference for pro-feminist men. In the grand tradition of semantically-obsessed campus politics, the meeting is dubbed the National Conference for Campus-Based Men's Gender Equality and Anti-Violence Groups. In summarizing the proceedings, she cannily notes:

In attendance were about 200 individuals, representing 40 colleges and two dozen organizations, many of them sporting titles like Center Against Sexual and Domestic Abuse, Men Can Stop Rape, and Men Stopping Violence. Notice a trend here? This contemporary movement of gender-conscious young men is largely identifying themselves in terms of what they are against. They're not rapists. They're not misogynists. They're also not particularly effective in imagining what they do want to be.

To give credit where it's due, Martin pretty much nails the summary of the problem here: it's exceedingly difficult to form a coherent identity based on NOT doing things. So why is it so hard for progressive men to identify positive male role behaviors? Martin essentially fails to answer this question in the remainder of her essay, which is fine; it's not her question to answer, after all. What I find fascinating, and revealing, is the manner in which she attempts to engage it. This paragraph dropped my jaw:

This became painfully clear over the course of the weekend as speakers and students grappled to find what one presenter referred to as a "feminist masculinity." Is there such a thing? Does it look like President Barack Obama -- or does his insistence on talking about sports and drinking beers reveal that he's just one of the guys? Does it look like KRS-1, the veteran rapper who recently said that hip-hop needs more women -- or is his statement too little, too late? Stephen Colbert, in some ways, is the closest thing we've got. He consistently lampoons misogynist punditry and policy, yet his "feminist masculinity" is only visible vis-à-vis its blowhard foil.

Consider how remarkable it is that by whatever standards of acceptability that Martin/this men's group (it's unclear whether these examples are her own thoughts or if they were discussed at the conference), the President of the United States, who signed into law a bill designed to help women gain legal remuneration for pay discrimination and by most accounts has a fruitful and egalitarian partnership with his own wife, is crossed off of the list of potential role models for enjoying sports and beer. The other potential role model who also fails to make the grade, is an aging rapper with extremely little contemporary relevance in his chosen art form. And while Stephen Colbert is a brilliant comedian, to hold him up as the sole existing exemplar of "feminist masculinity" is beyond ridiculous: his public persona is based entirely on sly irony and he's notoriously protective of his private life and beliefs. How does this represent a workable model of gender identity in any sense?

Although she reaches a different conclusion by the end of her piece, with these examples, Martin essentially answers her own rhetorical question about the feasibility of a "feminist masculinity" with a resounding no. Which leads us to the next question: why can't these college men and Courtney Martin come up with a single alternative to Tucker Max? I believe that the answer is that both parties are thinking of "feminist masculinity" as equivalent to "a code of behavior for men that practitioners of contemporary feminist thought will have absolutely no quarrel with any aspect of."

I don't think that this is even achievable, and the reason why is ably demonstrated by Jezebel blogger, Anna North, who comments on Martin's article:

But do men need, in addition, "a positive, masculine gender identity?" It's something of a strange concept — few feminists would ever say that women needed "a positive, feminine gender identity." While plenty of women take pride in being female, "femininity" is so loaded with patriarchal expectation that, for feminists, it's kind of a dirty word. This may not be a bad thing — in fact, I'd argue that "masculine" should go the same way.

I have to admit to some surprise at the statement about feminists not arguing for the positivity of female gender identity - I didn't realize Carol Gilligan had gone quite so out of vogue - but the latter half of her statement illustrates a prevalent explicit and implicit theme in feminist thought that renders the concept of "feminist masculinity" a contradiction in terms. To sum, the idea is that gender roles and gendered behavior are mostly or entirely socially constructed for the express purpose of creating or maintaining a societal power dynamic that is unfavorable to women, and the only way to rectify gender inequities is to remove the very idea of normative differences based in gender or sex. From this point of view, the ideas of "masculinity" or "femininity" imply pernicious social constructions regardless of the behaviors or values to which they refer.

I don't mean to imply that every feminist holds this exact belief, but it and its corollaries are a major cornerstone of both academic and activist feminism. Indeed, Martin's article on the erstwhile male gender warriors employs some familiar rhetorical tropes to this end, referring to the desire of progressive males to "separate themselves from all the gendered behaviors and beliefs that they now see as oppressive" and stating that "(i)t's not until privileged folks, men in this case, can own the ways in which they have a self-interest in resisting systems of oppression that their work becomes sustainable. " In my view, neither of these statements are inaccurate with regard to the challenges of contemporary masculinity, but they do hit upon the main reason why feminist thought is ill-equipped to help these young men with the task.

Simply put, the social constructionist view that is the warp and woof of the bulk of feminist gender critique is unable to lend any examples of gendered behavior that are not oppressive for these young men to latch on to. This isn't necessarily a problem: again, it shouldn't be the responsibility of feminists to tell men how to behave. What's problematic is that practitioners of the constructionist strains of feminist thought are increasingly unable to recognize within their own worldview that gendered behaviors might even vary by degree of oppressiveness. An example: one of the more widely deployed constructionist feminist concepts is 'rape culture,' a definition of which is offered here by a fairly prominent feminist blogger. I recommend that you click through to read it in full or part, but the post largely bypasses a traditional definition of the term in favor of offering multiple and extensive examples of 'rape culture' which range from "treating straight sexuality as the norm" and "encouraging men to use the language of rape to establish dominance over one another ("I'll make you my bitch")" to "1 in 6 women being sexually assaulted in their lifetimes" and "rape being used as a weapon, a tool of war and genocide and oppression."

I believe that this post very nicely encapsulates the weakness of the social constructivist worldview. It's has absolutely nothing to do with the author's identification of the horrors of rape and the numerous other instances of violence and exploitation perpetrated upon women. Indeed, I think that more people, men particularly, need to be made aware of these issues and to condemn them in no uncertain terms. The issue is the way in which the concept of 'rape culture' takes a variety of problems and identifies them as the same problem.

The feminist critique of masculinity operates along many of the same lines, as evidenced by the insinuition that Barack Obama's enjoyment of beer and sports disqualifies him as an alternative to the 'toxic' misogynistic buffoonery of Tucker Max. I can't help but think that there's something deeply misguided in the notion that fighting rape, sexual violence, and bigotry against women involves rejecting masculine-identified behavior in every form. If there is to be a project of reclaiming or redefining masculinity for today's world (and I think there desperately needs to be, if for no other reason than to offer a counterweight to the various idiots and bigots who have taken up the mantle in), it needs to start with taking a fresh accounting of the positive aspects of the old masculinity along with the negative. I think that, good intentions aside, the men puzzling over the issue at the conference described by Martin, have gotten too caught up in the social constructionist idea that masculinity is by definition oppressive, and would benefit from pushing back against it to take a more nuanced view at the risk of alarming their feminist allies.

What might this look like? I have some thoughts, which I'll (maybe) offer up at a later time.

The Box review and a meditation on modern genre thillers

I liked The Box, the newly released film from Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly, quite a bit. For those who haven't heard of the movie, it's about a married couple (James Marsden and Cameron Diaz) who are given a box with a button by a mysterious man (Frank Langella) who offers them a million dollars in cash if they press it, but tells them that someone they do not know will die if they do. The Box has a number of commendable qualities: it's attractively shot and layers on the period details (the film is set in 1976) rather than hitting the viewer over the head with them, it has a very good score by Arcade Fire's Win Butler and Regine Chassagne, and features strong performances by Marsden and Langella. The movie's biggest weakness, predictably enough, is Cameron Diaz, who still can't act to save her life and appears to be concentrating really hard on maintaining her Southern accent every time she's onscreen.

Nothing about The Box is particularly innovative or unique in the pantheon of sci-fi thrillers, but that's not really important. What the movie excels at is tone, putting itself in the tradition of middlebrow science fiction such as The Twilight Zone (The Box is based on a short story that was adapted for an episode of one of the Twilight Zone revivals), which take plausible and believable characters and place them into dramatic situations that become increasingly strange and unsettling as the plot progresses. I like stories of this type: the best ones grab your attention by uniting the audience and the main characters in the task of trying to figure out exactly what the hell is going on. I wrote about this aspect a couple days ago by way of explaining what I like about Lost, and The Box hits many of the same points, doubling down on cryptic elements regularly and managing to be dramatically stylized without going completely over the top or rejecting its own internal logic.

Unfortunately, movies with this sort of tone don't seem to get made very often these days, and when they do, they don't tend to be very well received. The recent movie that I found myself comparing the feel of The Box to is this year's Knowing, which I also enjoyed for its employment of many of the aforementioned elements, and which was at one point slated to be directed by Kelly until that fell through and Alex Proyas took it over. Knowing was mostly brutalized by critics (with the exception of noted Proyas fanboy Roger Ebert, who gave it four stars) and The Box isn't doing much better. What is it about these type of films that fails to catch on? I have a few ideas.

First, I think that modern viewers have a tough time accepting the sort of pulp genre tone that blends dramatic realism with fantastical elements when it's not presented in the context of an action movie. Unlike the 50s and 60s, sci-fi and horror movies these days tend to be built around action sequences, not character interaction or suspenseful developments, which are now associated more or less exclusively with 'realistic' dramas. I think that this makes it harder for audiences to stomach the exaggerated tone of character-based genre films when it's presented non-ironically, although movies set in the past tend to get more of a pass on this than those set in the present day, probably because audiences can rationalize to themselves that people probably just acted that way back then. Interestingly enough, this summer's Moon, which shares some of the character-based mystery elements of The Box's narrative but has a gritter, less pulpy tone, was (deservedly) well-received critically.

There's a second factor that I think negatively impacts the modern audience's tolerance for character-based pulp drama: M. Night Shyamalan. Shyamalan's films employ a lot of the same qualities I've been discussing; a dramatic but exaggerated tone, a focus on how characters interact with implausible and inexplicable events, and an emphasis on the fantastical or supernatural that deepens throughout the plot. Many of his films have been successful, which would seem to bode well for the type of movie that I've been discussing. However, I believe that Shyamalan's emphasis on the twist ending has had a detrimental effect on how people evaluate the quality of movies like Knowing and The Box. Since The Sixth Sense, people walk into movies pitched as mysteries and sit through the whole thing trying to guess what the ending will be. The problem with this is that although the twist ending is a storied device of pulp drama, the power of these movies comes from how they suck you into the experience as it goes along. When you treat 90% of the movie as a mere set-up to be dispensed with before you can evaluate the worthiness of the ending, a lot of the enjoyment is lost. The Box has quite a few narrative turns beyond the initial premise, but it doesn't build up to some grand coda that subverts all your previous expectations, although I found the ending to be quite satisfying.

Cameron Diaz aside, The Box is the type of well-made pulp drama entertainment that I could use more of in this day and age. It also feature the type of bullshit generic name that I could use less of in this day and age, but never mind that. I'd put it far above the likes of yet another Christmas Carol remake and I think it's a return to form for Richard Kelly after Southland Tales (a mess of a movie that I actually find quite compelling in some respects) even if it doesn't wind up being a commercial success. I'll gladly sign on to see whatever his next movie is.

Quick Ft. Hood update w/ links

General Casey strikes the right notes of caution. Megan McArdle pushes back against any political interpretation of the tragedy. Jeffrey Goldberg urges that Hasan's Muslim background not be dismissed or downplayed. All good reads with smart points.

Thoughts on the massacre at Ft. Hood

Yesterday's shooting spree by Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan at Ft. Hood affected me greatly. Usually I take tragic news more or less in stride, but this incident is so disturbing on so many levels that I've found myself looking at every bit of news I can get my hands on and turning the implications over in my head. The deepest and most immediate part of this tragedy, of course, is the fact that 13 American servicemembers are dead, killed on their own nation's soil as they prepared to deploy to war. At a time when our military is fighting two foreign wars characterized by unpredictable violence and insurgent tactics, to have this type of attack occur on the supposedly safe and friendly ground of an Army base is doubly horrifying. I can't even fathom the anger and pain that active-duty servicemembers, veterans, and their families are feeling in response to these murders, particularly given all the misinformation and speculation swirling around in the first hours of the attack.

Adding to that, we've got to deal with the fact that the shooter was, by all appearances, a religiously devout Muslim. Pretty much as soon as Hasan's name leaked out, when the inital reports were that he had been killed, political fault lines were forming over this issue. Broadly speaking, (and it should be noted that plenty of commentators across the ideological spectrum either refrained from weighing in due to lack of evidence or took a measured and appropriate tone in their analysis) the tack from liberal commentators was that Hasan's religion shouldn't be assumed as the motive for the attacks and the tack from conservatives was that Hasan is clearly a terrorist and that politically correct cowardice is making America vulnerable to Islamic extremism.

To put it bluntly, both of these general arguments make me extremely uncomfortable. As far as the first goes, it seems extremely likely that Hasan's religious beliefs played a substantial role in his actions. Even excluding the very real recent and historical phenomenon of acts of violence being committed as an affirmation of Islamic faith, what are the odds that a man as religiously devout as Hasan appears to have been would commit such an extreme act if he believed it to be at odds with his spiritual beliefs? His religion is absolutely fair game in this discussion, and I think it's disingenuous and false to pretend otherwise.

However, to address the other line of thought, just because Hasan's Islamic beliefs played a major role in this shooting doesn't mean that he committed the shooting because he was a Muslim. This in an important distinction to make for several reasons. First, there's a substantial strain of post 9/11 conservative thought that holds that Islam as an entity is the cultural enemy of the United States and that this idea should be an explicit cornerstone of the "war on terrorism." Note, for instance, the opening of this blog on the Fort Hood shootings: "The moment I first heard about the mass murders at Fort Hood I knew in my bones that the shooter or shooters were Muslims." One of the more extreme exemplars of this line of 'thinking' is Michelle Malkin's 2004 book In Defense of Internment, which offers up a retroactive justification for the WWII policy of detaining Japanese citizens on the basis of their ethnic background by way of advocating for racial profiling to be actively deployed to combat terrorism on American soil.

Unlike some on the left, I think that the U.S. government and American culture on the whole have on balance done a commendable job of clearly identifying the violent and totalitarian strains of Islam, rather than the religion as a whole, as the target of anti-terrorism efforts, the Afghanistan invasion, and the fight against the Iraqi insurgency. I believe that this is a reflection on the long tradition of religious freedom in America and is a major reason why our country hasn't had nearly the problems with organized radicalism and backlash from the Islamic population that areas of Europe have experienced in the time since 9/11. It's also the right decision on a tactical level: overt or covert declarations that America is the enemy of Islam only serve to reinforce the similar claims made by al-Qaeda types in their vile recruitment pitches, and there remains beside the small matter of the impracticality of declaring open hostility on an ideology with well over a billion adherents. But it's a nuanced position that can be difficult to maintain, particularly since there's a vocal segment of the American population who openly defines patriotism as being synonymous with evangelical Christian faith, and violent attacks perpetuated by Muslims on domestic soil can test it mightily in the eyes of the public. Conservative writer Reihan Salam has a great piece about this that's well worth reading.

The investigation into Hasan will hopefully clear some of this up, particularly on the question of whether he had any verifiable links to terrorist groups. My sense, based on the limited facts available, is that he was essentially an isolated and embittered man who became disenchanted with his job and his life, and in response immersed himself in the idea that the U.S. military was persecuting him personally and Islam generally. The shootings themselves feel sort of like a hybrid of a terrorist act and a suicide-by-cop; I have no idea which was foremost in Hasan's mind, but I suppose eventually we'll know more.

The final thing that disturbs me about the Ft. Hood shootings is the speculation about Hasan's role as a mental health provider who worked with soldiers suffering from PTSD. I've already seen at least two articles (here and here) claiming that Hasan may have been suffering from 'vicarious traumatization' from dealing with PTSD sufferers, that he may have had PTSD himself as a result, and that this may have been a factor in his rampage. This is an idea that needs to get smacked down as quickly and decisively as humanly possible.

First of all, treating PTSD or having interactions with PTSD sufferers is NOT in itself traumatic. Trauma is specifically defined as exposure to an event involving actual or threatened death or serious injury to a person or witnessing another person being exposed to same, and reacting with intense fear, helplessness, or horror. Listening to a person talk about trauma is NOT dangerous, and therefore cannot be traumatic. It can be very stressful, but stress is not the same thing as trauma. I have no doubt that Hasan was deeply affected by the stories he heard from the soldiers under his care (and the way, he was almost certainly not conducting psychotherapy with the soldiers under his care, because modern psychiatrists almost exclusively concern themselves with medication prescription and management) but he did not develop PTSD as a result of his work.

This is an unfathomably important point to make because the PTSD syndrome is based partially on how the sufferer reacts to his or her memories of the trauma as being potentially as harmful as the traumatic event itself. The gold-standard psychotherapies for PTSD derive much of their effectiveness from helping PTSD sufferers understand that their memories cannot hurt them and desensitizing them to their emotional power. If because of this incident the military and the public come to the utterly mistaken conclusion that talking about traumatic events can traumatize listeners or "give them" PTSD, that belief will absolutely impair our ability as a society to help those suffering from PTSD seek help and recover from the disorder. The very last thing that PTSD sufferers need is more reinforcement for the idea that their memories are dangerous to themselves and others, or another repetition of the overblown and inaccurate stereotype that PTSD 'causes' people to go on murder sprees.

I hope that many of these concerns don't come to pass, just as I hope that this tragic event gets the attention that it deserves. I'll definitely be following this story closely.

whoa...

I just stumbled across this blog post, in which Matt Yglesias pushes back against a David Brooks column complaining about how technology has ruined romance by presenting a passage from Brett Easton Ellis's pre-Internet and texting book The Rules of Attraction. It's a pretty good pushback, if you leave aside the fact that Yglesias kind of bricks the layup by picking a segment that depicts a rape rather than a seduction, which I chalk up to him being too lazy to look further into the book (if I recall correctly, the excerpt in question comes within the first couple chapters) to pick one of the countless other exchanges that would have been more suitable to the point. But what really caught my attention was this lead-in statement:

Here’s his depiction of the the “sanctified . . . choice of an erotic partner” in 1985, when Brooks was 24 and there was no SMS or World Wide Web:

Hold the phone. David Brooks is only 48 years old? According to the infallible Wikipedia, yep. I would have pegged him at least a decade over that. I guess his apostasy vis a vis the conservative CW on same-sex marriage and Barack Obama makes a little more sense to me now.

Let's parse last night's elections!

A disclaimer: I think that off-year elections, particularly those coming a scant 10 months into the first term of a presidency, aren't incredibly meaningful, and discussing them as such is really more akin to masturbation that serious analysis. Then again, you could say that about nine-tenths or more of contemporary political discussion and you wouldn't likely be wrong. I like masturbation, though. I also like politics, so let's do this.

The dominant spin from last night's elections is probably going to be that the Republicans taking the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey represents a Republican resurgence and a rebuke of sorts to the Obama Administration. Exhibit A of this line is Karl Rove's op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today in which he essentially chalks up the Democratic losses to voter unease over the potential costs of Obama's health care reform proposals. I'm not sure that this argument holds water particularly, since it isn't like Obama decided to reform the health care system sometime in March of this year. It was a major part of his presidential campaign, and it didn't seem to dissuade a lot of people from voting Democratic then. It seems more plausible to me that the fact that there's been so little forward momentum on health care depressed Democratic turnout and created a lane for the energized Republican opposition, but I don't think that's what happened either.

Rather, I think people voted for the gubernatorial elections based on their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the governance of their state, rather than based on their antipathy or affection for Barack Obama. Chris Christie, newly elected Republican governor of New Jersey says that he's looking forward to "working with President Obama," not exactly words that will get him a headliner slot at any upcoming Tea Party rallies. It also bears mentioning that Jon Corzine is a Wall Street billionaire who bought his way into office, and "Wall Street billionaire" is a shade below "Roman Polanski" in the hierarchy of things people, let alone the Democratic base, are positively disposed to at present. If I lived in New Jersey, I sure as shit wouldn't take twenty hard-earned minutes out of my day to throw a vote Corzine's way.

As for the whole three-way ordeal in New York's 23rd district, I think more than anything it demonstrates that winning Congressional elections is basically a matter of convincing people that you're going to be fully dedicated to kicking loose those sweet, sweet federal pork dollars than your overarching allegiance to a philosophical theory of governance. From what I've read, Hoffman was running far more on the latter category and was notably weak in the former. It's not by accident that pretty much everybody in Congress gets re-elected for decades despite the fact that the voting public pretty much unanimously hates the House of Representatives as a collective entity. As such, I don't think it's really valid to draw a larger inference about the electoral future of the conservative movement from this one instance. However, I did come across a quote today from noted conservative intellectual Glenn Beck that gave me pause:

And here's what the ‑‑ forget about the Democrats. Here's what the Republicans should learn. The tea party movement, if you think you're going to run people that are going to be, you know, ACORN wannabes and they're just part of the corruption, part of the system, if you're going to run those people, you can expect a tea party guy to come out, and the tea parties, they'll help you lose every single election. Every single election. Because I for one am not ‑‑ if I believe in the Republican, I'll vote for the Republican. But if you're running somebody who's like part of the system, I'm not interested. I'm not interested. And I think that a lot of Americans are like that. So the Republicans have a choice to make. You can either spend a million dollars trying to destroy a third party accountant, or you could say, wow, this accountant probably would come in within three points of beating the Democrat if we combined our efforts, Republicans and Democrats, spent a fortune, had our candidate then drop out and campaign for the Democrats, we might be able to come in with about a 3‑point margin. You might want to just say, "Maybe we should go with the accountants. Maybe we should go with the regular people."

Remember two months ago when I suggested that the right was succumbing to fallacies that had long plagued the left by mounting strident and inane protest marches? What noted conservative intellectual Glenn Beck is suggesting here is literally a replica of the modern American left's worst idea, running ideological protest candidates to "send a message" to the mainstream party. Let's review the two most prominent examples. The first is successfully defeating Joe Lieberman in the Democratic Senate primary in Connecticut. Rather than ushering in a new wave of unabashed legislative progressivism, Lieberman just won re-election as an Independent, proceeded to campaign wholeheartedly for John McCain in 2008, and was most recently seen vowing to help the Republican minority fuck over any meaningful healthcare reform bill from being brought to a vote in the Senate. The second is Ralph Nader's presidential bid in 2000, which was aimed squarely at siphoning votes from Democratic nominee Al Gore. Despite a rather pathetic nationwide showing, Nader still managed to accrue more than enough votes to cover the small margin separating Bush from Gore in Florida, clearing the way for Bush to win both the state and the election ('win' of course, being shorthand for 'U.S. Supreme Court decision barring the completion of vote recounting', although I think Bush would have wound up winning anyway). Suffice it to say that the Bush presidency isn't exactly what the average Nader voter had in mind on his or her way to the ballot box in 2000. I should know, I was a freshman in college at the time and I was acquainted with quite a few of them. If there's a similar situation that forms on the right in 2010/2012 (or the Republicans nominate Sarah Palin for president), I don't imagine that it'll turn out much better. I'm somewhat skeptical that this will actually happen, but the idea's obviously percolating out there.

From my point of view, the only thing about last night that should inspire anger or fear among liberals is the narrow passage of yet another gay marriage ban, this time in Maine. Specifically, I'm extremely disappointed that Obama and/or the DNC didn't lift one finger to suggest that Democrats should turn out to prevent rights being stripped from gay citizens. I know that that Obama's against gay marriage and the Democrats as a national political entity have absolutely no spine when it comes to taking a stand for social liberties, but this is really fucking shameful. Legal discrimination against gays is the defining civil rights issue of our time. These state constitutional bans are not going to last forever. They're going to fall, either by being repealed by less-bigoted future electorates (which I'd prefer) or by federal action (which I'll accept, despite the fact that it'll kick off yet another generations-long political battle a 'la Roe v. Wade). And eventually, Americans will look back at these laws with the same revulsion that we (or: most of us) look back at Jim Crow laws today. I expect better of Obama than the half-assed thumb-twiddling we're getting from him on these kinds of issues, and I hope that I'm far from alone in that view.

How to watch Lost: a primer

I've been watching quite a bit of Lost as of late, thanks to the fact that all of the early seasons are on Xbox 360 Netflix Watch Instantly in pseudo-HD. I've gotten almost to the end of the second season now, and I've got the third and fourth queued up. I'd pretty much avoided watching or even really learning that much about the show, despite its considerable popularity, mostly because of my general policy of eschewing TV dramas for more intellectual pursuits, such as playing Horde mode in Gears of War 2 for the nth + 1 hour. However, I've really come to like Lost, partly because it's a quality show and partly because it fits particularly well with my domestic lifestyle.

What I mean by that is that I sort of prefer to be doing multiple things at once given the option. The idea of spending an hour just watching a TV show doesn't appeal to me nearly as much as spending an hour watching a TV show while cooking dinner and surfing the Internet. The problem with this is that most sitcom/drama style TV shows require a fair amount of attention to make the experience worthwhile, either to catch the jokes or keep the progressing plot points straight within the episode. By contrast, I can watch Lost while doing pretty much anything else and still get about as much out of it as I would watching it in rapt attention.

The canny thing about Lost is that it's a show that understands that people like mystery more than they like resolution. Once you figure out that basically every Lost episode is going to end with a cliff-hanger, you can pretty much ignore everything between the first two minutes (which helpfully recap everything of relevance for the brain-damaged or slow-witted viewer) and the final seven minutes to 30 seconds or so, depending on the episode, and still follow the overarching plot. You'll miss some specific developments, mostly congregated around the planned commercial breaks, but the bulk of each episode's content is mainly the various survivors talking about their feelings or some such.

There's also a B-story for each episode, which are always flashbacks that flesh out the characters. These are pretty easy to pay minimal attention to because they (a) only focus on one character per episode and (b) really only develop one character trait per entire set of flashbacks (for instance: Charlie's the world's whiniest heroin addict! Jack's a surgeon with a God complex! Sawyer's an emotionally conflicted criminal! Kate's an emotionally conflicted criminal and is also female!). Given that Lost devotes flashback episodes to uninteresting or annoying characters such as Hurley and Charlie about as often as it does to interesting ones like John Locke, Ana Lucia, or Mr. Eko, you're looking at being able to ignore up to 80% of some episodes with no real sacrifice to your overall enjoyment of the show, as you'll probably be able to discern the major point of the backstory in the first ten minutes.

Finally, actually watching the action unfold onscreen is surprisingly inessential to the Lost experience. It's an extremely talky show with very little onscreen action unaccompanied by dialogue, so as long as you're listening to what's going on, you really don't need to be watching it. I'd estimate that I'm actually only looking at the screen for probably about half of the total time that I'm watching Lost. From that angle, the experience is more like a radio drama than a television show, and I actually think it makes the more melodramatic and ridiculous aspects of the show far more palatable. This is particularly true having it on instant-watcher streaming, because I can put on an episode every day and follow the cliffhangers and plot twists like it's a soap opera rather than having to wait week-to-week or longer to find out what's coming next. It helps keep my expectations more modest, so I don't really mind when the series piles on cliffhangers rather than giving straightforward explanations for anything. I understand that the show goes downhill somewhat in the third season, but it'd have to fall off pretty hard indeed to disappoint me in any substantive way.