Scott Paeth

Grand Theft Auto IV

I like playing video games, but I'm by no means hard core, and I've never had a desire to play one of the Grand Theft Auto games. However, I was interested in this observation from Salon.com:

As much as it is a driving and shooting game, then, "GTA" is also a puzzle game. The puzzle concerns social relationships: You're working with and for several characters at once, and what you do for some of them affects how you get along with others. In a game known mainly for carjacking, it's surprising how much time you're asked to spend building and maintaining friendships and romantic liaisons -- going on dates to bowling alleys and comedy clubs, hanging out with your pals at bars and pool halls, keeping up with a surfeit of text messages and e-mail (even deleting Nigerian spam).

It may be too much to say that "GTA" has a message, but it certainly has a vision: It's the dystopian near-future, something like the world of "The Children of Men" (there are no kids here, either).

The vision is pushed by the media your character encounters -- the radio stations, the TV networks, the astonishingly deep in-game Web (with parodies of Craigslist, Fox News, Match.com and other sites, which you access at Internet cafes called TW@).

As you pass through the city, you learn about the end of reading as a pastime, or the new market in selling babies over the Internet, or the extremely elevated terrorist threat -- "Liberty City is now officially on Charcoal 8 Alert, more serious than the Red High 7 Risk Alert, but not as serious as the recently created Black Severe 9 Alert," the game's Fox News analogue, Weasel News, warns.

I can't imagine enjoying a game like GTAIV, but I might enjoy reading a book or seeing a movie set in its world? The difference? I suppose it's one of moral agency. I can watch characters on a movie screen do dispicable things without identifying with their depravity. I can read about them in books without becoming responsible for their actions. But you take agency over video game characters, and their actions are, vicariously, your actions, and the limits (or lack of limits) of your moral universe define the characters' morality as well. Thus, by playing this story in a video game, I would come to see myself as complicit in that which my character did, in ways that I would not want to be complicit.

By analogy, I've played several Star Wars themed video games, and one consistent theme is the ability of your character to choose the light side or the dark side of the Force through the choices you make in-game. I've never been comfortable playing dark side characters. When I played Neverwinter Nights 2, which allows alignment shift based on your behavior, by the end of the game my character was strongly "Lawful Good" (and here I had always thought of myself in real life as Neutral Good, oh well).

So, GTA, though I'm sure a very intriguing game for any number of reasons, would leave me morally troubled in a way that watching "No Country for Old Men" did not. So, I'll be happy to read the reviews, and consider the distopian vision of the game, but I can't imagine I'd ever be intrigued enough to actually play it.

I've really gotta get on my bike more

Here's a Hungarian commercial advocating the benefits of cycling. Makes ya want to break out the old two wheeler, doesn't it?

And, John, when you read this, ask Kinga if she can supply the translation!

Did McCain Vote for Gore?

Here's an interesting political sideshow, to distract everyone from the boring political sideshow that has become the Democratic nomination race (Ok, ok, it's really not boring, but it has been frustrating at times!).

Nevertheless, I find the implications of this intriguing:

At a dinner party in Los Angeles not long after the 2000 election, I was talking to a man and his wife, both prominent Republicans. The conversation soon turned to the new president. "I didn't vote for George Bush" the man confessed. "I didn't either," his wife added. Their names: John and Cindy McCain (Cindy told me she had cast a write-in vote for her husband).

McCain now denies this, of course, but Matt Yglesias wonders if it's really possible that McCain voted for Gore in 2000:

In 2000, after all, Bush's signature initiative was a tax cut proposal that, at at the time, McCain opposed -- just like Gore. Similarly, McCain's signature initiative was a campaign finance reform proposal that Bush opposed but Gore favored. On foreign policy, I don't think a clear differentiation emerged between Bush and Gore, but many construed Bush's rhetoric as calling for a retrenchment of American commitments abroad at a time when McCain was calling to expand them and adopt "rogue state rollback" as a signature issue. Gore's running mate was Joe Lieberman, who's clearly someone McCain adores. As a career Republicans, you could imagine McCain deciding he couldn't possible vote for Gore and just not voting, but considering the issue positions and personal bitterness why would McCain have voted for Bush?

Actually, I find it more likely that, like Cindy, he wrote himself in for President. But Matt's argument is compelling. McCain has always been conservative, more conservative than his media fan club are willing to admit, but he was also always willing to work with Democrats on policies he considered valuable. And, as Matt notes, he apparently did consider running as John Kerry's VP in 2004. So, McCain for Gore? It's possible. But even if so, I'm not sure it means very much. After all, I'm not sure that Joe Lieberman would vote for Gore today, so what does it matter if McCain did?

Iron Man Shrugged

An Iron Man movie? Really? Well, I have to admit myself that it looks pretty cool, and Robert Downey, Jr. is an inspired casting choice. So, yeah, I'll probably see it, if for no other reason than I'm a sucker for comic book movies.

But ... Iron Man? Billionaire industrialist Tony Stark? Arms Dealer Tony Stark? Tony Stark who is responsible for the Super Hero registration act, and the forcible interning of rebellious super heroes in an interdimensional version of Guantanamo Bay? Let's face it, Iron Man is a putz! And yet, we are after all the children of Ronald Reagan and George Bush, and all but 12 years of my life have been lived under Stark's Republican minions, so perhaps it shouldn't be suprising that Iron Man's go-go capitalism is viewed as an unquestioned virtue. Exhibit A is Slate Magazine's article on the movie:

Even now, Iron Man represents Stan Lee's adolescent dog-eat-dog version of capitalism, the version that appeals to our "might makes right" monkey brains: Innovation is good; monopolies rock when we run them, suck when we don't; big corporations need CEOs rich enough to own space jets; and regulations should be a result of the CEOs' benevolence and wisdom, not imposed by outsiders. Tony Stark is a self-made man who believes that we can build ourselves out of trouble. He's one of America's romanticized lone inventors who, like Steve Jobs, solve problems by locking themselves away in secret workshops to emerge later with their paradigm-shifting inventions.

These days, the Iron Man comic book sells worse than not only the Hulk, Daredevil, Captain America, and Thor but the six different titles featuring Wolverine. So why an Iron Man movie? In a maneuver worthy of Tony Stark himself, Marvel Comics is producing Iron Man on its own after getting burned on licensing deals for the lucrative Spider-Man and X-Men franchises. Who's left in the stable? Captain America and Daredevil have already bombed on film, and the Hulk and Thor are in movies coming later this year, and so Iron Man it is. The Iron Man movie is a decision born of greed and pragmatism, a decision based on Marvel's best corporate interests. It's a purely capitalist decision, and according to Iron Man ethics, that makes it practically heroic.

On the other hand, it's worth noting an important tweaking of Iron Man's story in the new movie: Although he starts as an arms merchant, he eventually sees the wrong in making a fortune on instruments of death, and uses his super suit to right his past wrongs. So, while the movie is no more questioning of the virtues of capitalism than the comic book, it seems to come around to recognizing that what companies create is an important moral consideration. It is not a matter of whether business or capitalism is good or evil, but whether capitalism, as a means of providing goods in the market, can make distinction between goods that are, well, good, and those that are not. In that regard at least, Iron Man has grown up, at least a little.

Jeremiah's Jeremiads

Barack Obama yesterday decided that, after a four-day humiliation fest at the hands of Jeremiah Wright, that it was finally time to throw him under the bus. Usually, when that phrase is used, it means that a politician is unfairly jettisoning an inconvenient supporter. In this case, however, there's nothing unfair about it. Jeremiah Wright was the least supportive supporter a candidate could have!

For the most part, I've avoided the Wright story, except occasionally, because on the one hand I just didn't know enough about him or his thinking to have an informed opinion, and on the other hand, I couldn't really see what all the fuss was about. The whole episode stank of a manufactured controversy (as, indeed, it was). When Obama gave his speech in Philly last month calling for an understanding an honest conversation about race in the United States, I thought he had fairly effectively put the whole matter to rest.

And then, for some reason, Jeremiah Wright decided to insert himself back into the campaign by making a number of increasingly embarrassing appearances over the weekend. I caught a bit of his appearance on Bill Moyers on Friday, and thought he performed quite well. "Maybe he'll rehabilitate himself," I thought, "and definitively cease to be an albatros around Obama's neck." Then again, maybe not. It was really his performance at the National Press Club that was his final undoing, and Obama did the right thing distancing himself from Wright in the way he did. At this point, if Hillary Clinton secures the Democratic nomination for President, she ought to send a huge bouquet of roses to Jeremiah Wright, because it will be largely his doing.

On the other hand, many would say that it is the role of a preacher, particularly one who sees his role as a prophetic "speaking truth to power," to say controversial and inconvenient things in the presence of the powerful, and I would certainly agree. In the end, my problem with Wright was the unthoughtful and poorly informed substance of what he had to say, rather than the idea of a prophetic preacher offering, well, Jeremiads in the public square.

It's one thing to condemn a history of racism and bigotry in this country, and even to acknowledge the many and grievous sins of the United States government throughout the centuries. It's quite another, however, to make patently stupid statements such as that the U.S. government is responsible for the AIDS virus (and yes, I know that the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments ought to give anybody pause about just what can be done in this country). With all that could have been rightly said in critique of the United States, the fact that Wright (as well as, let's face it, his many detractors) chose to focus on such a transparently silly allegation boggles the mind.

In the end, Barack Obama has demonstrated far greater moral judgment and prudence than Jeremiah Wright has. And for all the good that Wright did here in Chicago throughout his long tenure at Trinity UCC, it is now time for him to step out of the limelight, and allow both his successor at Trinity and his former parishoner to do their jobs without him making it harder on them.

CODA

One last thing: On the subject of why Wright and Trinity UCC were so attractive to Obama, this passage from the New Republic sheds some light on what it was that distinguished Trinity and Wright from other Chicago Churches:

Wright earned bachelor's and master's degrees in sacred music from Howard University and initially pursued a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago Divinity School before interrupting his studies to minister full-time. His intellectualism and black militancy put him at odds with some Baptist ministers around Chicago, with whom he often sparred publicly, and he finally accepted a position at Trinity. ...

Wright remains a maverick among Chicago's vast assortment of black preachers. He will question Scripture when he feels it forsakes common sense; he is an ardent foe of mandatory school prayer; and he is a staunch advocate for homosexual rights, which is almost unheard-of among African-American ministers. Gay and lesbian couples, with hands clasped, can be spotted in Trinity's pews each Sunday. Even if some blacks consider Wright's church serving only the bourgeois set, his ministry attracts a broad cross section of Chicago's black community. Obama first noticed the church because Wright had placed a "Free Africa" sign out front to protest continuing apartheid. The liberal, Columbia-educated Obama was attracted to Wright's cerebral and inclusive nature, as opposed to the more socially conservative and less educated ministers around Chicago. Wright developed into a counselor and mentor to Obama as Obama sought to understand the power of Christianity in the lives of black Americans, and as he grappled with the complex vagaries of Chicago's black political scene. "Trying to hold a conversation with a guy like Barack, and him trying to hold a conversation with some ministers, it's like you are dating someone and she wants to talk to you about Rosie and what she saw on Oprah, and that's it," Wright explained. "But here I was, able to stay with him lockstep as we moved from topic to topic. . . . He felt comfortable asking me questions that were postmodern, post-Enlightenment and that college-educated and graduate school-trained people wrestle with when it comes to the faith. We talked about race and politics. I was not threatened by those questions." ...

But more than that, Trinity's less doctrinal approach to the Bible intrigued and attracted Obama. "Faith to him is how he sees the human condition," Wright said. "Faith to him is not . . . litmus test, mouth-spouting, quoting Scripture. It's what you do with your life, how you live your life. That's far more important than beating someone over the head with Scripture that says women shouldn't wear pants or if you drink, you're going to hell. That's just not who Barack is."

Capital Gains

Let's help spread the facts, shall we? Via Atrios:

With talk of raising the capital gains tax in the air, you're going to hear a lot of conservatives and mainstream media folks blather on about how much this kind of thing is going to be so bad for the "middle class" or "even working folk" because everyone is invested in the stock market through 401K plans, etc. But the capital gains tax rate will never apply to that money. More than that, any capital gains from those plans will be, upon withdrawal, taxed at the income tax rate which for most people will be higher than the current 15% capital gains rate. So wealthier people who have direct investments in stocks and whatnot get to pay 15% on their capital gains, while the rest of us in lowly 401K land will likely be paying a higher rate.

With a coda from Matt Yglesias:

But it's absolutely crippling to any effort to outline policy with any level of ambition to concede the idea that any tax that places any burden whatsoever on the non-rich is therefore unacceptable. It's fairly easy to design revenue measures that fall mostly on the rich, but extraordinarily difficult to design measures that exclusively snag people who fit a conventional definition of rich. It's true that a married couple composed of an NYPD detective who pulls lots of overtime and a NYC public high school teacher with a lot of seniority can have a joint income of over $200,000 a year but a tax hike on the $200,000k+ crowd is still, all things considered, an extremely progressive measure.

It was Oliver Wendell Holmes, after all, who said that taxes are the price we pay for getting to live in a free and prosperous society. And after all, the marginal tax rate of the average American is far below that of most others advanced industrial countries, so why do we whine about it so much?

The D&D Website: Soooooo Bad!

Michael Sigler at Dragon Avenue has a vlog about all that is wrong with WOTC's D&D website:

Why the D&D website sucks from Michael Sigler on Vimeo.

I'll admit, I gave up checking out Wizards' website a few years ago when they stopped offering really good "Web Enhancements" for D&D products (which were, by the way, excellent through the entire run of D&D 3.0). My declining interest seemed to correspond almost exactly to the decision to revise the game to D&D 3.5. Now that 4.0 is almost upon us, the site holds no interest for me whatsoever.

It's a shame though. I loved Dungeon and Dragon magazines, which no exist only in spectral form on the WOTC website. But I'll be damned if I'm going to navigate their ugly ass website just to find one or two interesting articles. And I'll be doubly damned if I'm going to pay for it.

Fortunately, no matter how far Wizards of the Coast falls, they can't take away my D&D books, so I can keep playing to my heart's content as long as I can find other players.

In Touch

Insight from Matt Yglesias:

Ultimately, one suspects that it would be really, really, really hard for anyone involved in politics professionally for as long as a John McCain or a Hillary Clinton or even a Barack Obama to be really and truly "in touch" with peoples' lives. Which is what brings us back to policy priorities. McCains are reducing the level of government services in order to pay for an indefinite prolongation of the war in Iraq, the extension of Bush's tax cuts for the highest-income Americans, a large hike in non-war defense spending, and a series of new tax breaks. Clinton and Obama are both, in somewhat different ways, offering more services paid for by returning to something more like the levels of taxation that so devastated the national economy in the 1990s.

Objective analysis isn't what it used to be

In today's New York Times, an article entitled, "Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon's Hidden Hand." An Excerpt:

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized. (Emphasis added).

There are mornings when I wake up with hope and optimisim about the future of our polity. There are mornings when I believe that the new media have our best interests at heart and want to provide the best information possible to the American public, so that we can make an informed choice about the issues of the day. But, far more often, there are mornings when I wake up, read a story like this, and find myself totally unsurprised.

The Unbearable Dullness of Superman

"Why Superman Will Always Suck." A few excerpts:

It almost goes without saying, but if your hero cannot possibly be killed in any instance which does not somehow involve an incredibly rare space-rock, then you've got one boring-ass hero. It's sort of like watching Neo fight all the agent Smiths in The Matrix Reloaded: we know our hero can't possibly die, and he doesn't act like he's in any danger whatsoever, so the entire fight is a foregone conclusion and the audience becomes bored out of their skulls.

I mean, yeah – we obviously go into most superhero stories more or less positive that the hero won't die, but they still entertain us because the hero doesn't know that. Spidey is always scared, even if only a little, that one of the Green Goblin's pumpkin bombs will be the end of him; Daredevil is fully aware that a well-placed projectile from Bullseye could kill him. As a result, these characters act with restraint and forethought; since Superman knows nothing bad can happen to him no matter what, he acts with no such subtlety. He flies headlong into every conflict, fists thrust forward, because he knows he's in no immediate danger. Thus, we know he's in no immediate danger, and we get bored out of our fucking skulls.

<SNIP>

Superman has no values of his own, so he's content to just uphold the values of the ruling class; this prevents him from becoming a dangerous vigilante a la Frank Castle, but it also means he has no legitimate opinions of his own where crime is concerned. In Paul Dini's storybook series on DC superheroes, Batman had to deal with gangland violence, Wonder Woman fights terrorism, and Superman tries to end world hunger. This is no accident – Superman is way too morally simplistic to deal with complex things like the "wars" on drugs or terror. In Batman: War on Crime, Bats comes up against a young boy holding a gun on him. Batman, understanding the complexity of crime and the reasons for its existence, talks the kid into dropping the gun and giving up a life of violence.

Superman would probably just use his heat-vision to melt the gun, then put the kid in prison where he'd become a hard-bitten thug who'd murder somebody a few months after getting out.

<SNIP>

Superman represents hope and indefatigable strength, and any attempt to complicate these issues would no longer make him Superman. By definition, Superman has to be boring and morally absolute because if he isn't, he ain't Superman. I mean, in Kingdom Come he's momentarily called to task for getting angry at the UN and threatening to kill the world leaders for killing Captain Marvel, but he's talked down from doing anything irrational within, like, two pages of initially getting the idea to fuck up the United Nations. Heck, Superman's arc in Kingdom Come isn't even anything deeper than "America has forgotten me and I them, and we need to restore faith in one another." Wow – real interesting. While you're doing that, Batman will be over in the corner, contemplating suicide.