Month: November 2014

We all know by now the old saw about what happens when someone introduces a statement with "I'm not a racist, but…
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" and over the last few years I have come to understand that a man self-identifying as "a nice guy" is equally ominous. It makes sense that it would portend something awful. How often is "nice" used in a way that isn't passive aggressive or pejorative?

Think about what you mean when you describe another person as nice. You mean they are boring, so boring that you can't think of an actual quality they possess. When you had a "nice time" at something, did you have lots of fun? And in what world would you want to lead by describing yourself to another person as nice? I'm not nice. I'm polite, but in common usage "nice" means saying a lot of flattering things to someone in the hopes that they will do what you want them to do.

The clearest warning sign is that the men who are always telling everyone what Nice Guys they are inevitably fall into one of a small number of categories. Some are young and awkward, too immature to really understand how romantic and sexual relationships work and of the belief that they are owed something by the women of the world for being friendly. Hopefully they grow out of it. Most are the ex-fratboy "Learn How to Pick Up Any Woman!" types who think that they are so much smarter than women, despite all evidence to the contrary, that women will fawn over them in response to 20 minutes of pleasantries and a cocktail. These people are so transparently awful that the phrase Nice Guy, as their chosen descriptor, is indelibly tainted by association.

There's nothing I get a bigger kick out of than the hundreds of posts seen weekly around the internet about men trying to pick up women on dating sites and apps (Tinder, OK Cupid, etc), introducing themselves as Nice Guys, and then immediately going psychotic when their advances do not receive a prompt and positive response. To wit, from Tinder's Finest Bachelors, we have one of the internet's most entrepreneurial and self promoting wizards of pickup artistry going from "I am such a nice guy! You should meet me!" to "You should be happy I am acknowledging your existence you whore" in like, ten minutes. This is curious, as it is not the kind of thing I would classify as Nice nor is it something a legitimately Nice Person would say.

When I lived in Madison, WI I grew wary of the downtown homeless population. Having lived in Chicago I was not shocked to see homelessness, nor am I prone to spiteful reactions toward them. But I learned that some of the homeless people, either due to mental instability or strategic planning, would flip the hell out if you said no when they asked for change. "Have any change?" "No, sorry, not today." "YOU MOTHERFUCKER I AM GONNA RIP YOUR FUCKING THROAT OUT IF I DON'T GET…
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" etc etc. This made me, unfortunately, apprehensive about interacting with them.

Usually I try to treat homeless people like People, looking them in the eye and exchanging words with them rather than trying to avoid them out of shame or whatever.

After a couple of them lost their shit on me, though, I became a little more actively evasive.

Being a woman on an internet dating site can't be too different. It's a minor miracle that they talk to any of us, ever.

It is common knowledge that the newspaper industry is going down the toilet, which is unfortunate for all of us because newspapers provide 90-something percent of the original reporting relied upon by other media.

Most of what we read online or see on TV isn't "reporting" per se but re-reporting from major newspapers. We want them to continue to do the hard work but we don't want to pay for it.

This will have more consequences that we realize since smaller papers are usually the first to go, either going under or being purchased by larger media companies and filled with homogeneous wire service content. That means there is essentially no one paying any attention to what local governments are up to, and boy oh boy do local governments get up to some stupid crap. The Chicago Tribune just uncovered a fun little game the Chicago Public Schools played with its bond issues. Due to the district's financial problems, "plain old municipal bonds weren't good enough anymore, and banks were standing by with attractive new options.
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So…the chief administrative officer at CPS and other officials pushed forward with an extraordinary gamble. From 2003 through 2007, the district issued $1 billion worth of auction-rate securities, nearly all of it paired with complex derivative contracts called interest-rate swaps, in a bid to lower borrowing costs." Shockingly that didn't work, and instead of lowering costs it ended up costing over $100 million dollars more than traditional bonds would have.

In a vacuum this example is not that big of a deal outside of Chicago.
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What should be keeping us awake at night is the prospect of thousands of Bright Ideas of this variety lurking out there and waiting to blow up in our faces. There is nothing more terrifying than going to a city council meeting or becoming familiar with your local government on some level. You may find some shining examples of public servants here and there; overall, however, the people who have decision-making power at the local level in this country are not terribly bright. And for the most part we have absolutely no idea what they are doing.

If they make decisions that affect us directly – putting up red light cameras, for example – we freak out. Not much of what they do is that visible, though.

Given the budget nightmares that city/county governments and school boards have confronted since 2008, we might reasonably shudder to think of how many shortsighted, risky, delusional, or otherwise harebrained schemes they signed off on in the last few years. With most of us (myself included) paying next to no attention to what is going on at the local level, it is highly likely that we'll be seeing plenty more of these little surprises. These are the governmental equivalent of taking payday loans – cash in hand today with the exorbitant costs punted into the future.

I can't wait to see all the disasters on which the clock is currently ticking without our knowledge.

Another election, another autopsy of the American electorate.

Here's what we know. Americans generally believe that the minimum wage should be increased, that the War on Drugs is stupid, that draconian prison policies should be scaled back (if for the wrong reasons), and they elected by sizable margins what may be the least likely human beings on the planet to enact policies along those lines.

On the surface it makes no sense, but this pattern is becoming familiar. Democrats do well or something approximating well during presidential elections when a larger share of peripheral voters – younger, poorer, generally disenfranchised, and more cynical voters who can be enticed into voting only with great effort – show up at the polls.

Then the midterms roll around and turnout is embarrassingly low, limited mostly to old white people. This certainly contributes to the schizophrenic nature of our elections in comparison to public opinion on major issues, which is generally pretty stable over time. Our preferences don't change dramatically yet the balance of power swings back and forth regularly. Why?

Differences in who turns out across elections are part of the answer.
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The other is that American voters have extremely limited choices. Third parties, leaving aside the occasional billionaire independent candidates as anomalies, have no realistic hope of winning elections beyond the local level. When people are highly dissatisfied (which they are) and feel that the country is a clustercuss (which it is), what option is there when the Democratic Party appears to be in control than to vote for Republicans?
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When the GOP has been in charge for a while, what else is there to do but vote for Democrats (see 2006, 2008)?

Unwilling to devote the kind of time and energy it would take to be well informed about the issues and demand decent candidates – not that we could compete with the influence of unlimited and unaccountable money – we have little choice but to mix and match different combinations of institutions of government and the jackwagons that are offered to us on the ballot. The only inherent advantage Republicans have is their superiority at playing the "They're comin' for your guns!" game. With the demographic tide firmly against them, that trick won't work forever.

In the meantime we all have to live with the consequences of constantly electing people who are hellbent on doing things large majorities of us find either reprehensible or merely stupid.

Over the past year or two I've used this forum for a terrible confession a few times: that following the minutiae of elections and domestic politics no longer holds much appeal for me.

In the past I've devoted considerable time and space to covering Senate races, for example, but this year it felt even more pointless than usual. What is at stake in this $4 billion election in which neither party has advanced any kind of agenda? The Republicans are running purely on fear and lies and the Democratic game plan is…there isn't one. Obama has completely given up and has disengaged from Congress.
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Who can blame him, and what reason is there not to follow his example and say "Alright, fuck it"?

There has always been an aspect of voyeurism to politics and elections.

Now it feels like the participatory aspect has gone out the window and we are now simply spectators in a battle (or "battle", if you recognize how slender the differences between some pairs of candidates are) fought between complicated legal fictions turning billions of dollars into terrible TV commercials on behalf of corporate interests. It feels like there is nothing at stake and everyone is just going through the motions. Turnout will be abysmal as usual and 2014-16 will rival 1998-2000 in terms of gridlock, pettiness, and absolute futility regardless of what happens on Tuesday.

A handful of gubernatorial races should, in theory, be interesting but we're all so used to punitive austerity and legislative ineptitude at this point that no one even bothers to pretend that our situation will improve depending on which candidate wins. The Republicans are promising to keep destroying everything and the Democrats are doing their usual "We'll do, uh, something different from that, or probably nothing. And isn't nothing better than something bad?" Hard to imagine why nobody cares about participating in this process with incentives like that.
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More pointless "showdowns," more pointless Repeal Obamacare votes, more pointless Benghazi investigations, and more nothing happening for months on end while we wait for the odd Supreme Court decision for the rare spectacle of something actually happening. That is what we have to look forward to whether there are 45 or 50 or 55 Republicans in the Senate or whether they add more to their historically awful House majority.

This is the new normal and it stretches endlessly before us. And another election in which most of the people who vote are over 55 offers nothing more interesting than the possibility that things will get even worse.

But I'm being a little ambitious. Getting even worse would mean that the election managed to change something. Let's be serious.