I didn’t follow the Derek Chauvin trial for the murder of George Floyd. And I managed to never watch the video of the murder. The truth is that I find these things very upsetting and I don’t think they do me any good. I already know that American policing is irredeemably broken. But I think Derek Chauvin shows us a lot about the problems in our society.

Villain

I am glad that Derek Chauvin was found guilty. And second-degree murder sounds about right. I think it is a mistake to vilify him too much. I do not believe that he wanted to kill George Floyd. But I think he is a terrible person because he doesn’t seem to have cared whether Floyd lived or died.

An analogy has occurred to me recently. It’s like holding a beetle down on the ground so it can’t crawl away. Doing so presses on its back. You don’t mean to kill it. But you realize that it might. It’s just a beetle. If you do kill it, who cares? Certainly not you.

Yes, I’m saying that Chauvin thought of Floyd like an insect. He should never have been allowed in a position of power. And he deserves harsh punishment.

Police Hide Villainy

But let’s be clear. The initial report told a very different story — one that Chauvin assumed would be the final word. The press release from the Minneapolis Police Department was titled, “Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction.” It stated:

Two officers arrived and located the suspect, a male believed to be in his 40s, in his car. He was ordered to step from his car. After he got out, he physically resisted officers. Officers were able to get the suspect into handcuffs and noted he appeared to be suffering medical distress. Officers called for an ambulance. He was transported to Hennepin County Medical Center by ambulance where he died a short time later.

If there had not been video of the incident, Derek Chauvin would not have been held accountable in any way for this. And that’s even true if there had been a dozen eyewitnesses. He is in jail now entirely because of the video.

Men like him should never be put in any situation where they have power over other people. They lack fundamental empathy for other people.

Victim

Derek Chauvin is also a victim. But in saying that, I do not mean that we should show him sympathy. I just mean that the environment in which he existed made him a worse man than he could have been.

Chauvin’s actions indicate a long history of him thinking that this kind of behavior is acceptable. We know there had been many complaints against him. And they were never acted upon in a substantial way. It was completely rational for Chauvin to think that he would not be held accountable for this killing.

But the fact that this crime was particularly egregious speaks to a larger problem with police culture. I don’t think that Chauvin would have kept his knee on George Floyd’s neck for so long had there not been a crowd there. The fact that there was a crowd pointing out his misbehavior made Chauvin act like a spoiled child, “You can’t tell me what to do!”

And, of course, that’s what he did! We see this again and again. Police officers are far more concerned about getting the respect that they think they deserve than they are about doing their jobs. If you are rude to a barista, they might spit in your coffee. If you are rude to a cop, they might kill you. And if no one is around to record it, they will face no consequences.

Symbol

And it’s that way that Derek Chauvin is a symbol for modern American policing. I don’t care what kind of a cop it is — good, bad, or indifferent — they all act this way. I know a few cops who are friends of the family. They all have this same personality.

I think they are deeply insecure people. Certainly I don’t need other people constantly kissing my ass to know that I have value. Anywhere someone does need that is the source of untold problems — whether it is from cops or grammar school bullies.

The irony is that our society does kiss the asses of cops. Except for rare cases like this, society goes out of its way to claim that these under-educated, over-paid mediocrities are heroes right out of Homer. (And even in this case, most conservative outlets are treating Chauvin like a wronged hero.) Yet it’s never enough. How could it be? Self-worth is something that comes from the inside. Flattery is just a band-aid.

I’m not hopeful. I do hope that we can make systemic changes to policing. But even with them, we will have major problems until we stop allowing cops to think that they are anything but paid workers who do not deserve our respect.

I’m open to respecting individual police officers — just as soon as one of them earns it.

Derek Chauvin Murdering George Floyd image used under Fair Use.

There’s a big reason why the Democrats can’t do anything bipartisan at this point. And that’s because Republicans don’t have any ideas. We saw this most clearly with the rescue package. The big compromise offered by the 10 Republicans headed by Susan Collins was just: “What the Democrats want — but less.”

It’s what we’ve heard from them for years about wanting a smaller government. They don’t want smaller government for any reason. They want smaller government as an end in itself. And that makes no sense!

What is the right size of government? The size that allows it to do what we want it to do. Smaller government is just a talking point for Republicans. So if Republicans get together and come up with a compromise on infrastructure it will be the same thing. It will be about a quarter of the size that the Democrats want. And there will be no rhyme or reason for it.

If the Democrats want a hundred billion dollars for roads and bridges, the Republicans will want $50 billion. Why? Will there be a reason why we need less infrastructure spending? Of course not!

Branding!

It’s really more a branding exercise than anything else. Jonathan Chait cleverly pointed out how this worked with “moderate” Republican Olympia Snowe (who, you may recall, was even more “moderate” than Susan Collins) on her retirement:

When George W Bush proposed a huge, regressive tax cut in 2001, Snowe, sitting at the heart of a decisive block of centrists, used her leverage to support the passage of a modestly smaller and less regressive version. When Barack Obama proposed a large fiscal stimulus in 2009, Snowe (citing fears of deficits that she had helped create) decided to shave a nice round $100 billion off his figure and call it a day.

If a Gingrich administration proposed spending a trillion dollars to erect a 100-foot-tall solid-gold Winston Churchill statue on Mars, Snowe would no doubt decide, after careful deliberation, that the wise course was to trim the height down to 90 feet and perhaps use a cheaper bronze alloy in the base.

Let’s all stop believing that the Democrats have anyone to negotiate with. The most “reasonable” Republicans only have this to offer: “What the Democrats want — but less.”

Image of Susan Collins is in the public domain.

On my walks, there’s a house that has American, Army, Navy, and Marine flags displayed over its garage. They are out 24-hours per day in all weather. It’s a classic case of easy patriotism. Or to put it in a way that my conservative friends might understand: virtue signaling.

But what really struck me was the bumper sticker on their very big and very clean truck. (Read: it is not used for anything a truck is normally needed for.) The bumper sticker is shown above. It says, “United States Marine Corps: When It Absolutely Positively Has to Be Destroyed.”

The most obvious thing about this is that the bumper sticker is a mistake. The original read, “When It Absolutely Positively Has to Be Destroyed Overnight.” You know, like the old FedEx slogan, “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.”

Bullshit Branding

But the more important thing about the bumper sticker is how it shows the lie of Marine branding. Clearly, this bumper sticker does not come from the USMC. In fact, I’m sure that as an institution, they hate it.

All the branches of the military push a brand that they are just out in the world trying to help people. And they only kill and destroy when there is absolutely, positively no other option.

But the people who admire the Marine Corps (and this very much includes a lot if not most if not the vast majority of Marines themselves) love this stuff. And regardless what conservatives will tell you, it is also what they love about the Marines and all the other military outfits.

The idea is that they are badasses. They don’t go along with Clausewitz, “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” They like war in the same way that a gorilla likes beating its chest.

I obviously have my own opinions about what our military should be used for. But everyone should be in favor of being honest about what they think the military is for. Secretly liking the military because it allows us to bully the rest of the world while claiming to only care about preserving peace? That is bullshit. Even Trump was more honest than that.

People of my age well remember the freak out over crack babies. Crack users were having babies and they were supposedly destroyed for life. It turns out that it wasn’t true. Cocaine-using mothers gave birth to babies with low weights. That’s it. But I think we should always remember crack babies because the truth is we repeat this same error over and over again.

And it’s not a coincidence the things like this so often are associated with black people. Society at large loves things like crack because they provide a quick-fix for inequality. Dealing with America’s past and ongoing systemic racism is hard. Even worse, it’s something that all of us white folks will be required to change to facilitate.

It is super easy to assume that the problem is really black women doing cocaine. Then it’s a simple matter of passing some laws and paying more cops to lock them up. Then we’ll have equality! Or rather, we’ll have an excuse for doing nothing for a decade or two before we find out that we destroyed a bunch of lives for no reason and we’re faced with the same problems as ever.

Assume the Newest Outrage Is False

Whenever I hear of an outrage in the news I always remember the crack babies. I remember that at worst whatever people are hysterical about is a much smaller problem than is claimed. And it’s most likely not to be a problem at all. Admittedly, it does kind of suck being the person always throwing cold water on everyone’s dopamine highs.

As mythical as these outrages may be, they result in very real consequences. Today there are laws on the books all over the nation that allow the government to prosecute women if they don’t treat their pregnancies well enough. These were laws that came onto the books, at least in part, to fight the mythical problem of crack babies. Today, people mostly know there were no crack babies, but the laws remain.

Note how absurd this is. Although I think it is often overstated, fetal alcohol syndrome is an actual problem. But it was never associated specifically with blacks and so it didn’t result in mass hysteria. And it didn’t result in new laws penalizing women.

Scratch an outbreak of hysteria and you are more likely than not to uncover yet more systemic racism.

Image cropped from Sleeping Baby by Realt0n12 licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

I find it curious that there are still people who think that burning the American flag is some terrible thing. A lot of people want to make it illegal. But could there be any form of speech that the First Amendment most clearly applies to?

If you think that the United States has betrayed its own ideals, what better way is there to say so than to burn the American flag?

When I was a kid, it was widely believed that if a flag fell on the ground, it had to be destroyed — by fire. Or maybe burying it. Certainly, you wouldn’t want to throw it in the trash. Regardless, this was the kind of thing that you supposedly did out of respect for the flag.

It turns out that most people say you do not have to destroy a flag that touches the ground. But it doesn’t matter. It shows that how one treats the flag is open to opinion. And it changes over time.

I know it’s shocking to many, but we all show our patriotism in our own ways. What I don’t like is people who get angry at others while they show a facile kind of patriotism themselves.

Flags in My Neighborhood

The neighborhood I walk each day features dozens of American flags flying outside houses. Almost all of these houses feature multiple trucks and badly managed lawns, so I know they are owned by conservatives. And not one of these flags is taken down at night or in bad weather. I know because I take walks in the early morning and at night.

I also know because many of these flags are badly worn. One is obviously fraying when viewed from across the street. And I’m sure that these people think themselves very patriotic. “Remember last year when I bought a flag and hung it up?!”

Facile Patriotism

This is very much like the yellow ribbons that I saw on cars during the George W Bush administration. It showed that you supported the troops! It’s set-it and forget-it patriotism.

This fetishization of the American flag is thus literal “virtue signaling.” It the kind of patriotism that signals that you are a Good Person as opposed to people like me who have a more nuanced but active patriotism.

And by and large, these flag-wavers are the people who are most offended by the burning of the American flag. In Shoe0nHead’s video, these free-speech champions were mostly all for laws against flag burning. The people who didn’t think it should be illegal were mostly military, who I would hope would also treat their flags well.[1]

I have little doubt that many of the insurgents on 6 January 2021 had well-worn flags outside their own houses. They don’t love America so much as “America.” Easily won patriotism is just as easily lost.

But I totally defend their right to treat their flags badly. I’m just not as accepting of the way they treat our country.

[1] It’s amazing how many people bring up the burning of the BLM flag without understanding the issue at all. It was stolen from a church and then burned. The issue was never that you can’t burn a BLM flag. Yet in their minds, there was some special law that protected BLM. It’s amazing! It’s like the old NRA bumper stickers, “I’m ignorant as fuck, and I vote!“

Image via PxHear — it is in the public domain.

A lot of things people say are both true and wrong. A good example of this is the claim that the First Amendment only applies to government censorship. This is true. But are we also going to say that this is good? I don’t think so.

In a world where the commons is now owned by private companies, we need to expand upon the First Amendment. And we need to be broader when we talk about free speech.

None of this should be seen as a defense of Donald Trump or conservatives more generally. The major social media platforms have been doing nothing but helping the conservative movement. Just look at the top shared articles on Facebook in any given week. It’s always overwhelmingly conservative articles with a couple of mainstream news items and nothing leftist at all.

Just as with the War on Christmas, what conservatives think is fair is for there to be great limits on everyone else while they get special rights. But there are major (Real!) free speech issues with the private ownership of the public square that greatly harm leftists.

Who Controls Speech?

The biggest political story since Republicans stormed the Capitol is that Amazon kicked Parler off their servers. The power of Amazon in the web hosting business has been a huge problem for years. If you pulled the plug on AWS, the internet as we know it would be gone. They host everyone! This is the biggest problem with Amazon, not its retail sales.

Parler seems to be a toxic entity on the internet. I have no problem with them being shut down. In fact, I’m happy about it. However, I don’t think Amazon should be the one to make that decision.

Similarly, I don’t have a problem with Trump being kicked off Twitter. But this example is illustrative.

Had Trump been an ordinary person, he would have been banned from Twitter years ago. In fact, I think that had Trump been a Democratic politician with leftist ideas, he would have been banned from Twitter.

So the question is not, “Why was Trump banned?” It was, “Why did it take so long”? And I think we know the answer to that. It’s because Trump is good for the bottom line. Fuck any concerns about the public good.

The Obvious Solution

Some people think that the big social media companies should become utilities. But to my mind, utilities are just a bullshit way of allowing the private sector to make a profit on things that are effectively collectivized. I’ve certainly not seen it working well here in California with PG&E.

So I say we just collectivize all of these things. We democratize the process of algorithms instead of allowing our country to be destroyed just so Mark Zuckerberg can add a few dollars to his store of wealth.

Now some may wonder why I had to write an article about this. What I’m proposing is really simple after all. And that’s the thing. Nationalizing general social media companies is distinctly outside the Overton Window. And that’s bizarre because the status quo is to allow the public square to be completely controlled by a few very rich individuals who have very different incentives from what is best for the public.

The Public Square Must Be Public!

So it’s obvious that the public square should be public. Yet we don’t generally talk about this because we are so caught up in a paradigm of socialism vs capitalism. But the progression of capitalism over the years has been to make more and more public space private.

When people like Adam Smith and Thomas Paine were writing, the world was far more public than it is today. It was still possible to go and find farmable land that didn’t belong to anyone. Not so today. Try farming an unused piece of land somewhere near you and see how long it takes for the police to come and arrest you.[1]

This isn’t rocket science. It isn’t brain surgery. It’s something that a toddler could understand. The public square should be public.

[1] Note that so-called libertarians are in favor of everything being private property. It shows that libertarians don’t really care about liberty. They care about private property. This is why a world run by libertarians would be a dystopia.

Image cropped by Stump Speaking by George Caleb Bingham in the public domain.

Wednesday morning, I woke up to the news that there would be no charges filed against the officers responsible for paralyzing Jacob Blake, including one officer who shot at his back seven times (four shots him him). It was sad but not surprising. The truth is, as a society, we’ve decided that blue lives matter more than anyone else’s. But I didn’t have a lot of time to think about the problems we face with policing and racism because reactionaries stormed the Capitol.

Contrast in Black and White

It was quite a contrast. On one hand you have an unarmed black man facing away from an officer shot in the back. And on the other, the Capitol Police were shockingly nice and accommodating to people who were literally staging a revolution.

Many people have noted that had the insurgents been black or brown, the police would have sprayed them with bullets. Clearly, this is racial. But it is more than that. It is about affinity.

If there had been a bunch of white people there storming the capital in the name of social justice or other liberal causes, I believe there would have been more shooting. Certainly not as many had they been black. But still a lot.

Police and Military Affinity

This is a major problem in the United States. Just as in the Jim Crow South, the police are on the wrong side of history. Police tend to be more conservative — especially when it comes to how society ought to police itself. (I’m sure that a large number of officers did go into policing because they wanted to help people. The problem is what they mean by “help people.”)

Traditionally, authoritarians gain power because the military backs them. Right now we don’t have to worry about that because Trump is not that popular in the army — and distinctly unpopular among the officer corps. But what about next time? What about when someone like Trump comes around who’s much better at talking to and about the military?

Another issue is the 147 Congressional Republicans who objected to the presidential election results even after the attack on the Capitol. I have no doubt that almost all the Republicans would have been for throwing out electoral votes if they had control of both chambers of Congress. It’s just that some were smart enough to know they couldn’t actually steal the election so it wasn’t worth putting out their necks.

Whose Votes Matter?

I don’t pretend to have much affinity with conservatives. They’re mostly people who lack empathy and don’t care about facts or knowledge. But I do share enough affinity with them to realize that they are human beings with different beliefs who vote differently than I do. And I understand that in a democracy their voices must be heard.

The issue with racism is that it allows people to see others as less human. As less valid. I don’t think that his supporters actually believe that Trump got more votes in the election. I think they believe that Trump got the most votes from the kind of people who matter.

So the responses to the attack on the Capitol and to Jacob Blake are the perfect contrast of what’s wrong in this country today and, well, let’s face it, forever.

Jacob Blake Protestor by Becker1999 under CC BY 2.0.

The storming of the Capitol building on Wednesday was, as so much during the Trump era, shocking but not surprising. Also, like so much of the last four years, it has been analyzed well by others. What I think I might have to say that I haven’t heard is about what these would-be revolutionaries did once they got inside.

Cosplay Revolutionaries

If I could look past the despair I feel of seeing our imperfect but existing democracy crumble, Wednesday was pretty funny. Once the mob got inside the Capitol, they acted like the proverbial dog that catches the car. They had no plan. So they did some vandalism.

But mostly they just took selfies of themselves and explored the area. It reminded me of what my friend Will and I did when we managed to break inside the college recording studio. (Note: we didn’t break anything. It just wasn’t that hard to get past the locks. And we had a bit of experience with that…)

I’ve made fun before of cosplay socialists. I still think they are ridiculous; they make leftists look silly; and they hurt the cause by making social progress sound easy. But I wasn’t prepared for the pretend revolutionaries on the right. They don’t even have real complaints!

Offended Conservatives

Conservatives have been very good at appropriating the aesthetics of social justice without having the cause. Aesthetics without content.

We see this a lot with conservative dust-ups over liberals not using the right word. And admittedly there are some really pathetic liberals who do the same thing. But they aren’t co-opting it. They are pointing out real problems even if the specifics are nonsense.

Conservatives, on the other hand, really think that it’s just a game. None of them were really outraged when Hillary Clinton said, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession…” Conservatives love opportunities to pretend to be offended when they aren’t.

And the nation as a whole does too. For example, a politician who uses the n-word will probably have their career ended. But no one is surprised when the n-word is unleashed. It is always following a long time in which the speaker has shown themselves to be a racist.

This kind of dedicated never-read-the-subtext game is beloved by the vast majority of Americans.

The Oppressed Elites

The one thing Trump has been very good at is allowing all of these people who are not oppressed to think that they are. To think that the results of one election that they don’t like are tantamount to tyranny. Of course, even if Trump had won these people would claim to be oppressed.

Nothing new here. Just think of John Wilkes Booth killing Abraham Lincoln. He was convinced he was Brutus striking a blow against the tyrant Julius Caesar! You have to ask why Booth felt he lived under tyranny. After all, his life was good. But he, like the “revolutionaries” on Wednesday, had convinced himself that minor complaints justified a violent response.

Brought to You By the Media

The media is a huge part of the problem here. They allow conservatives to pretend to be oppressed simply because they cloak themselves in the language of the oppressed. Conservatives are always given the benefit of the doubt. We’ve seen this most clearly with Donald Trump.

When Trump says something that is demonstrably wrong, the media claim they can’t call it a lie. After all, how can they know what’s going on inside his head? He might really think it’s true! Then they tell us that Trump thinks he really won the election! Suddenly, when knowing what goes on inside Trump’s head helps him, they are psychics!

The rules are simple. If it makes Trump look better then they can get inside his head. If it makes him look worse, though, they can’t. They don’t want to be unfair!

And this opens the door for media outlets that will go far further — who will make a buck telling people that their basest inclinations are Right and True.

More Than the Insurgents

But the insurgents who attacked the Capitol this week have been condemned! They had to be given how much coverage violence that happens adjacent to liberal protests get. But even this criticism is limited to the mainstream. In conservative media, it was really leftists who stormed the Capitol!

But all the others who support these would-be revolutionaries are given a free ride. The 45 percent of Republicans who say that the attack was justified are given a pass. We are told again and again that they really believe that the election was stolen.[1]

Well, that may be. But they are the ones who have chosen to get their news from OANN and The Epoch Times. They are the ones who continue to vote for politicians who lie to them.

[1] Check out this wonderful bit of false equivalence from The Washington Post. Yeah, a lot of Democrats were unhappy about 2004. First, what do you expect after 2000? Second, things were bad in Ohio in 2004. And people always grumble after an election loss. In 2020, we have a candidate who lost the popular vote by over 7 million votes and still they are certain that the election was stolen. A lot of political science research is remarkably facile.

Trump at “Stop the Steal” Rally 6 Jan 2020 by Voice of America. It is in the public domain.

The Resolute Desk. It’s the main desk in the Oval Office. Duplicated a zillion times on film and TV sets, it is immediately recognizable to everyone. (Well, that and the windows.) Let’s learn where it came from!

Search for the Northwest Passage

In the 19th century, every empire worth its salt was trying to find the Northwest Passage. What’s that? It’s an easier way of getting from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.

The route south of Argentina has notoriously awful sailing conditions. Even today, it’s a rough ride for scientists headed for Antarctica.

Lewis and Clark were trying to find a river route for it. They failed badly, of course. Eventually, we found the solution of having lots of workers die from malaria digging through Panama. But this was before then.

England Loses Two Ships

England sent two ships to explore the waters north of Canada: the HMS Erebus (named for a mythical figure in Hell) and HMS Terror (named after the English word for “terror”). Sailors are superstitious sorts, as a rule, so those aren’t great ship names.

Both ships got frozen in sea ice. Some Inuit oral history suggests that the desperate sailors went all Donner Party. Whatever happened, they didn’t come back.

There’s a brilliant fictionalized TV show about this, called The Terror, in which everyone dies horribly. The star, Jared Harris, is also in the brilliant TV show Chernobyl, which has equally gruesome deaths. It’s Mr Harris’s thing, so it seems. (His dad was in Unforgiven, where most everyone dies — but via standard means and after Harris’ character escapes. There’s no radiation sickness or Death Murder Polar Bears.)

England Almost Loses a Third Ship

The captain of the Terror had a proper English wife, so she pushed for a search-and-rescue operation. It was launched on the HMS Resolute (better name). It also got stuck in Arctic sea ice, but the crew was saved.

America, which was just then building up its own navy, and had unsuccessfully tried to invade Canada a few times, decided to be gracious and permitted the Resolute to be returned to England. Because the thing could still float, barely.

It gets back to England, and it’s basically only worth salvaging for parts at this juncture. But Queen Victoria grasps the point of America’s gesture and responds in kind. They make a very beautifully wood-worked desk out of the Resolute. And they offer it to America as a gift, which we accept

Today, it sits in the Oval Office. (LBJ had it tour the country for a awhile after Kennedy was killed; Carter put it back in.)

So, that’s the Resolute Desk. Betcha thought the name was because Presidents made serious decisions at it. (I did!) Nope, it’s from scraps of a doomed boat looking for two other doomed boats, gifted to us in a geopolitical strategy move. But, hey, geopolitical strategy move is also where the Statue Of Liberty comes from. I’ll take it!

Afterword

The wreckage of the Erebus was discovered in 2014. Two years later, the Terror was discovered in better shape. Their exact locations have not been disclosed, but from what we know I calculate that they were roughly 40 miles apart. The sites have not been fully examined and there is hope that they will find written records.

Image cropped from Barack Obama at Resolute Desk by White House (Pete Souza) — derivative work — under CC BY 2.0.

Like a good little numbers-oriented liberal, I was all over the polls in the lead-up to November’s election. And election night came and I was crushed. I concluded that there really was something wrong with the polls and I wasn’t going to listen to them. Then I started hearing about how close the two Georgia Senate race polls were.

Unskew the Polls!

I thought, “Aha! I’m going to show how wrong the polls were in Georgia and how no one should listen to them for the run-off!” My idea was that I could do an estimate of these conservative freaks who aren’t showing up in the polls but who are showing up to vote. I was planning to do something like Dean Chambers’ Unskewed Polls.

Back in the 2012 election, conservatives claimed that the polls were all wrong because they didn’t have a high enough percentage of white people. It was a telling claim: the more white people vote the better Republicans do!

So Chambers “unskewed” the polls by adjusting them to have the “right” number of white people. And could you believe it?! Obama was only going to win 179 electoral votes!

But this was wrong. The country is becoming less white. So there were simply less whites as a percentage of the vote in 2012 than there had been in 2008. And when the votes were cast, that was exactly what they showed. Obama won 330 electoral votes — 151 more than Mr Chambers had predicted.

A Better Plan

But I had a better idea. I was going to look at how much better Trump did than the polls suggested he would. The Senate elections are only two months after the presidential election, so that ought to be valid. Off the top of my head, I figured the polls were off by about 4 percentage points.

But I was wrong. At least about Georgia.

The Georgia Polls

The FiveThirtyEight average of national polls gave Biden an 8.4 percentage point lead over Trump. The final results were that Biden won by 4.5 points. So they were off by 3.9 points. (Note that this isn’t actually that bad — especially in an unusual election like this one with huge turnout because of the pandemic.)

But in Georiga, FiveThirtyEight had Biden winning by 1.2 percentage points. And Biden won by 0.24 points. And Real Clear Politics had Trump winning by 1.0 points!

When it comes to the Senate polls, things are more complicated. I’ll start with the easy one: Perdue vs Ossoff. Real Clear Politics showed Ossoff winning by 0.7 percentage points. But he ended up losing by 1.8 points. That is mostly due to “undecided” voters all going for Perdue. (I really do think that a lot of Republicans don’t even like to admit to themselves that they support the people they do.) That’s off by 2.5 points but it isn’t unreasonable.

The Warnock race had a ridiculous number of people running. Obviously, we know about the two major Republicans: Loeffler and Collins. But the 6 candidates only garnered 90.3 percent of the vote. A full 9.7 percent of the vote went to 14 people who got less than 2 percent (7 got less than 0.6 percent).

RCP had Warnock winning by 15.7 percentage points and he won by only 7.0 points. But remember that the people supporting the minor candidates were not generally included in the polls. So that’s probably what most of the difference is.

The Run-Off Polls

The run-off polls show the two races even. Can we trust them? Kinda.

Generally what they show is the Republican candidate slightly ahead. But this is not always the case. And it is rare for any candidate to get to 50 percent.

What does this mean? I’d say it means that the most likely outcome will be two Republican victories. But it will all come down to turn-out.

The good news is that these appear to be competitive. And I didn’t think that was the case when I started writing this.

Help Out

You can help out the campaigns. Here are their websites:

• Raphael Warnock
• Jon Ossoff

If you are going to give money, you might consider Stacey Abrams’ group Fair Fight Action. They are doing the kind of work that is most critical to turning Georgia blue.

I recommend doing what you can but not getting your hopes up. These are real possibilities for the Democrats but that’s all. But that’s better than it could be. And all the more reason to fight!

Georgia by Nick Youngson under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Alpha Stock Images.

Over at Psychotronic Review, I just published The Films of Slumberjack Entertainment. It includes embeds of most of their short films, so you should check it out.

It’s almost all horror. But it isn’t the kind of stuff that’s going to give you nightmares. They are heavy on the comedy. There is, however, a fair amount of gore. I mention that only because I’ve recently found that most people don’t find blood spraying out of zombies funny the way I do!

Why I Care?

I’ve been giving a lot of thought to why I love independent films like these. Some others include:

• Michael Kallio
• JR Bookwalter
• Tjardus Greidanus
• Diani & Devine

There are many more, of course. But why do I care? I think it is because it is ridiculously hard to be an artist today.

Decades ago, I came up with my “Sunday Morning Blues Jam” theory of creativity. It’s this: you can go to any Sunday morning blues jam session anywhere in the world and find people who are better than you could have hoped to have seen a century earlier.

When it comes to film, it’s even worse. With digital cameras and computer software that is a hundred times better than anything anyone had a couple of decades ago, there are a lot of really creative people making a lot of really creative movies.

It’s hard for me because I want to see everything. But it has to be far worse for the filmmakers. The people I talk about are making really great stuff. And few people notice. Yet they keep producing things. They are quite literally the best of who we are.

Caveats

Okay, some caveats. Bookwalter is something of a legend. Also: he hasn’t directed anything in almost two decades and generally isn’t even producing. But he’s still working behind the scenes and getting things restored and released.

And Tjardus Greidanus has gone on to be quite a successful documentary filmmaker. And I also don’t want to forget people like George Barry whose artistic vision is so wonderfully idiosyncratic that he left the business.

Finally, I don’t wish to minimize what any of these people are trying to do. I know they all are clearly hoping that they will take off. I hope they do too! (Admittedly, my liking all of them is normally a bad sign for their careers.) And I have little doubt that their work will at least lead somewhere fulfilling.

Creative Dedication

But even producing a fully developed 4-minute short like The Dog Walker takes a lot of work. So this is about something more than dreams. This is about the creative force that many people feel.

Regardless of what is in the hearts of any of these people, they honor us by honoring their art. And I guess that’s why I care.

Detail of The Lacemaker by Johannes Vermeer — Musée du Louvre, Public Domain.