On Picking Your Champions In The Internet Age

 The problem I will be speaking to in this post, is outsourcing your thinking. 

But I'm going to start with Tex Winter, Mike D'Antoni and some beloved names Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, Steve Nash, Steve Kerr, Phil Jackson and Steph Curry.

The triangle offense was developed in basketball in the 1940s, but wasn't tested in the NBA really, until Phil Jackson hired Tex Winter as assistant coach and put it in the hands of Michael Jordan. It would then win 6 championships until the dissolution of the Jackson-Jordan-Pippen dynasty. Jackson would then take it to the Shaq-Kobe Lakers where it would win 3 more championships and lose 1 before Shaq-Kobe dissolved and sent Shaq to the Miami Heat, then it would go to 3 more finals and win 2 more championships with the Kobe-Gasol lineup.

The triangle offense proved to be the right answer and in capable hands is probably the winningest offensive strategy since recruiting Bill Russell to your team.

Then there was Mike D'Antoni a multiple coach-of-the-year winner with Pheonix Suns and Houston Rockets whose fast paced 7-seconds-or-less offense oriented play style was championed by 2 time MVP winner Steve Nash and 1 time MVP winner James "Little Game James" Harden. 

D'Antoni had the right idea, it would seem, and certainly Nash and Harden are great at what they do, however (I) feel about James Harden's head-game. The person who would make small ball fast paced offense work though to the tune of 4 championships was Steve Kerr and Steph Curry along with Klay Thompson. 

Nobody else has really been able to get small ball to work, before or since. This is the key point though, having the right idea isn't enough, you need the competence to execute.

So there are many high profile historical case studies in the internet age of bad champions. Where really a market chose the wrong person to champion a cause - Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, Jordan Peterson, Bill Maher are a few that come to mind that I could talk about where people are right about something and hence we could side with a given champion but overall the champions are bad choices.

Think of it if you will, like being arrested for a crime you didn't commit because you happen to know you were at home, lucid, reading a book at the time when the crime was committed. Alas, no alibi, okay but the quality of your lawyer may determine whether you go to trial and whether you serve prison time and how much time you might get. 

So instead of someone really high profile I'm inclined to pick as a case study Peter Boghossian as an example of someone who is a public figure, a public intellectual, who has many positions I'm inclined to agree with and why I wouldn't pick him to be my champion.

I need to be upfront though, basically since Covid, I've watched a number of intelligent people that were providing lucid and coherent social and cultural commentary to varying degrees basically go off the rails. (Naomi Klein author of "Doppleganger" seems to have more to say about that phenomena than I can.)

Peter is not quite off the rails, (*update he appears to have gone off the rails completely in the last few months) he is for me an interesting midpoint in the three principle actors of "The Grievance Studies Affair" where James Lindsay seemed to go totally insane, Helen Pluckrose seems totally sane and Peter I'm not sure about.

For the most part, the reasons I wouldn't pick Peter Boghossian as a champion are at a superficial level - he uses the word "astonishing" so much, it is not reassuring to me that he is a thoughtful person, yet seems to live in a perpetual state of astonishment. 

While I'm sure he intends it to mean "look at the level of depravity and delusion that is being tolerated" his liberal use of "astonishing" starts to imply someone who doesn't know much about anything like "wait you can buy a loaf of bread that comes sliced in the bag now? Wow! That is astonishing." Though a specific example might be "so white people are claiming to be Native American to get highly paid jobs at universities and not-for-profits, that is just astonishing."

And then, there is the extent that Peter Boghossian is a nerd. Behaviourally he seems somewhat self aware of this fact, but he just cannot stop talking about Brazillian Jiu Jitsu to help himself. Yes it's a popular hobby but Peter is a BJJ nerd. As an atheist he may be familiar with the "religion is like a penis" meme where it's nice that you have one, good for you, but don't whip it out in public and don't shove it down my kids throat. Peter is so captivated by BJJ that he likely needs penis rules to curtail his propensity to want to talk about how fabulously marvellous BJJ is. An example, I once watched Peter observe a "hidden claim street epistemology" exercise, and without going too deep into street epistemology, its an exercise where typically someone asks someone on the street "what do you believe" and someone will say "I believe in God" and then you ask them why, and they'll offer some reason and then you sort of explore whether its a good reason or not.

So what claim does Peter choose to road-test hidden claim street epistemology - "I am going to get my black belt in BJJ" Like I love making analogies to basketball and cited NBA greats, so there's some degree to which I should never be a Presidential Candidate if I can't curtail using basketball as a metaphor for everything. Peter doesn't seem aware that the way he talks about BJJ seldom even offers an analogy, or anything that isn't of interest unless you are interested in BJJ.

And then below this in terms of Peter being a nerd is that he really loves Star Trek, and it's kind of the same thing. Like he interviewed "The Critical Drinker" who is far higher profile than him, likely an even worse champion, but The Critical Drinker is a flawed champion of media-as-entertainment. The critical drinker is not in my experience a very good interview subject, in stark contrast to the popularity of his Movie and TV reviews. But Peter is someone who got less out of him than most because I was left with the impression that Peter has watched almost nothing but Star Trek.

And again it was the same thing as BJJ which is in the manner in which I mean Peter is a "nerd", Red Letter Media hosts Mike and Rich talk about Star Trek all the time, they manage though to relate it to what they are talking about such that many people enjoy watching Mike and Rich talk about Star Trek media they have watched with no interest in watching it themselves. Mike will often raise Star Trek in the form of "This movie has the same plot as this Star Trek TNG episode, but in Star Trek they handled it like this it's simple it's clean that's what this movie needed to do instead of..." so relevant and insightful. Peter evokes Star Trek/BJJ like this: "I really like Star Trek/BJJ." Yep, Okay Peter.

All of which is to say, Peter being a bad champion is in my opinion, overdetermined. I think he is onto something with street epistemology, I think he is on to something with the hoax papers and I agree with many of the positions he holds in terms of the excesses of the far left. He seems excitable like nerds, and easily distracted, like nerds such that for everything he gets right he is just prone to these bad judgement calls where I'd never trust him with the ball in clutch time. He's Lebron. Not Kobe, not Steph, not Jordan.

If I was trying to manage an NBA team to the championship though, I would be bringing in my scouts everyday and planning to trade Peter for draft picks.

I just wanted to be honest and upfront that I use superficial cues, yellow flags if you will to make predictions about where a champion is likely to fall short. 

Now, the timing of this post is reactionary. It follows the Harris-Trump Presidential Debate which I didn't watch because I don't vote and the case against re-electing Trump is for me overdetermined. I totally understand Biden being dead and people still voting for the democratic candidate as a cost of polarization. I would expect a Labrador candidate or a literal cactus win almost half of the electoral votes for either party because of polarization.

But I checked in because I remember Peter having an astonished reaction to the last debate between Biden and Trump:

This is not astonishing to me, and it shouldn't be astonishing to anyone who wrote a book titled "A Manual for Creating Atheists" who saw the whole Four Horseman book tour debates of the early 21st century, they should know that there's a bunch of people out there that can watch Dinesh D'Souza ramble about stupid counterfactual nonsense while getting smashed and humiliated by a calm thoughtful person making sound and valid arguments and sound and valid rebuttals and they will say Dinesh D'Souza won by virtue of merely existing because he is defending the position that it is rational to believe that God created the universe.

What I was curious to see, was whether Peter would make the same point about the Harris-Trump debate. The CNN flash poll shows a similar disparity as has almost all commentary I have heard. Again it's not astonishing to me at this point that there are people who will think Trump won a debate if he simply manages to stay alive until the end of it. But Peter should have been astonished that 37% of the CNN polled audience live in a reality where Trump did better than Kamala in the debate.

What Peter posted in the wake of that debate was:

So firstly, its possibly a reaction to the presidential debate. But now its no longer how astonishing that 37% of people in a CNN flash poll think Trump won a debate and in Peter's defence nobody should be astonished at this point that there's people for whom Trump can do no wrong. It's just Peter as a voter thinks national debt is our #1 problem and in doing so provides another determinant as to why Peter is a bad champion in the internet age.

1. Freud's heuristic: "He does not believe who does not live in accordance with his beliefs." Peter dedicates very little time and energy to talking about the national debt. He does a lot of street epistemology and culture stuff predominantly. Campus culture, cancel culture, plagiarism etc. This makes sense in terms of Peter's expertise as a philosophy professor, but I don't watch all of the content Peter produces, I've heard him bring up National Debt 2 or 3 times but I am yet to hear a single argument from Peter as to why its a problem, let alone the number 1 problem.

2. This seems remarkably like proving a negative. Like convince me that protesters aren't paid actors, or that the world isn't flat, or that Santa isn't real. I have heard Peter express his opinion that the national debt is the number one problem nobody is talking about, but I'm yet to hear Peter give any argument as to why it is a problem at all.

3. I haven't looked into it, and I have no idea what Peter thinks the problem is. Like is he worried about the government defaulting on its debt like Greece? Is he worried about Japan, China and Russia cashing in their trillions of foreign reserves and destroying the global economy? Or is he worried that all of US GNP will go to paying interest on bonds? Is he worried that the US will use inflation to eat the national debt by devaluing the dollar? Is he worried interests rates will rise or fall? Is he worried that another currency will become the reserve currency of choice? The main thing for me, is that I can't at this point rule out that Peter is making the common intuitive mistake of confusing a nation for a household. So he could be worried about anything from hyperinflation to austerity budgets to foreclosing on the White House and the President having to move in with his parents. 

4. Probably the easiest argument to dismiss national debt as the #1 problem, is to suggest that it may be a symptom rather than the problem. For example, there's no real evidence that either Republican or Democrat administrations do anything to curb government spending, the government grew in size under Reagan - the politician that campaigned on the government not being the solution but the problem. If the national debt is a result of a two party system that is polarized where people cannot vote for the most appealing suite of issues because they have to prioritize abortion legality (for example) then that would supersede the problem that arises from this causal problem.

And I can't help but notice the general low quality of the points Peter often attempts to make:

Okay. Does this mean anything of interest to anyone? Let me try and explain through a relevant analogy, if someone put up a graph indicating Flat-Earther's trust in mass media vs Globe-ists and it showed that people who believe based on overwhelming evidence and readily observable phenomena and experiments anyone can conduct that the Earth is a sphericalish shape, trusted mass media and Flat Earther's didn't, what would this tell us about the quality of the media?

Much more useful would be graphs of how relatively uninformed and misinformed various media audiences are - because we can measure this objectively. While there are things we don't know that we know, and things we don't know we don't know, there's a huge body of things we actually know we know - like we know that Darth Vader doesn't say "Luke I am your father." in The Empire Strikes Back because we have the fucking movie. 

Gallup are good but this graph isn't exactly easy to read and when Peter shares it it's not clear why. I am serious when I say, its not even interesting. It seems like trust steadily declined, then rapidly, then picked up again for Democrats but not Independents or Republicans. Distrust is more extreme for republicans than independents which is kind of interesting I guess. The massive and most pronounced diversion seems to come in when Trump starts his 2015 Presidential campaign, which is no surprise.

I suspect Peter thinks we should be concerned about how much Democrats or Liberals trust the mass media, but once you match it to dates I think you should be more concerned about the Republican or Conservative outright rejection of mass media. These are a political force that are saying adios to reality.

Worse than this, it was a repost of this astonishment from two weeks ago which is even worse, because the chart is clipped to cut out at 2020, before Democrats trust declined again to 58% from 73% and the poster represents it as "Republicans realize it is propaganda" and "Democrats are still plugged into the Matrix." that Peter is reposting. And they mischaracterize data on "Mass Media" as a synonym for MSN. 

It actually makes me angry to think about how many days off Peter takes relaxing into lazy intuitive thinking while volunteering to be a champion of the Socratic method, reason etc. Think about a graph for "Trust in X/Twitter" whatever political bent you may have, your trust should be extremely low, and somebody is posting on X a suggestion that people who trust mass media, where for all its faults it is not millions of bots and individuals of no particular qualification competing 24-7 for attention by gaming algorithms that reward engagement generated by garbage hot takes, are plugged into the Matrix.

I'm sorry but if your lightning rod for Truth telling is Donald Trump, you are plugged into the fucking Matrix, the man is easily fact checked and I think it makes sense that Republicans abandon mass media when trump starts campaigning in 2015 and Democrats' trust spikes once the Trump presidency begins and news coverage becomes 90% Trump making claims and Trump claims being fact checked.

It would also explain why Peter would have no astonishment that 37% of CNN's audience flash poll actually thought Donald Trump won his debate against Kamala, even though the most talked about moment was him getting fact checked on Haitians eating pets in Springfield.

Since beginning this post, I watched an interview of Peter's with Yasmine Mohammed a former Muslim activist and campaigner for women's rights. You can if you wish check out the video because Yasmine at least is somebody whose opinions are worth hearing even if you disagree. Relevant to this post however, is that in the interview Peter pushes at least twice a moronic idea that "the west" just needs to negotiate a surrender to Islam for a more comfortable slavery. It is hard to be charitable to this idea on any grounds. My best effort would be that Peter is picking up and running with Popper's "Paradox of Intolerance" which would stipulate that if wealthy industrialized educated western democracies permit intolerant forms of religious fundamentalism, then inevitably the intolerant religious dogmatism will take over and dismantle the society that tolerates the religion in the first place.

What it is however, is such an obvious candidate for a "slippery slope" fallacy that Yasmine or anyone can dismiss it immediately as an astonishingly garbage hot-take. Right? Because of Salman Rushdie having a fatwah put on him by the Ayatollah of Iran in the 80s and that he would get stabbed by some random fanatic decades after the fatwah was rescinded and its an example where a tolerant society is tolerating intolerant belief systems doesn't mean that there aren't hundreds more failure points where a w.i.e.r.d society can get much less tolerant of a religion very quickly (as most of "the West" did post Twin Tower attacks) like fuck me Peter should not even be the spokesperson for his "Conversations with Peter Boghossian" podcast.

Then later, and the last thing of his I watched was his interview with Jozef Gherman titled "How AI Will End Academia" which from the title one could be forgiven for thinking it would contain a discussion of the crisis LLMs pose to the value of tertiary degrees. That's certainly what I expected, from both the title of the interview and the subtitle in the thumbnail, and what you get is, in my opinion a conversation between two people who are out of touch.

Jozef Gherman, you can watch for yourself, for the record I quit the interview after 20 minutes, is someone who realized that there was a market for using LLMs to generate academic papers and phds and what not that were undetectable. To Jozef's credit he makes a fairly sound argument that much of tertiary assessment is a waste of time and a distraction, probably best known and most easily recognized in business degrees (for example) as the theory-practice gap. There are for sure, real problems with tertiary institutions.

It's probably easier to shoot holes through by looking at secondary education however. Increasingly, the only point in completing high-school is to go onto tertiary studies. Maybe in the 70s and 80s a student that finished 12 years of grade school had an advantage in the job market over those who left age 16 and only completed 9 or 10 years. It may have been the difference between becoming a trainee mechanic and getting an entry level job in an office somewhere.

Nowadays though, completing years 11 and 12 are a complete waste of time if you have no plans of going to University. If you want to start your own sandwich shop or learn a trade you are likely better off entering the workforce sooner rather than later. 

Bringin us to the content of senior years of highschool - we learn a bunch of arbitrary knowledge for the purpose of sitting tests in order to win scarce places at university where we learn subjects oriented toward a career of some kind. Much of the content of years 11 and 12 is for most people useless and soon forgotten. There's a bunch of Lawyers out there that at one point learned proofs for Euclidean geometry, and delivered a presentation on the Batavia shipwreck, and wrote an essay about the significance of Juliet's lamentations on the balcony over her love for Romeo.

There's like a 99% that a career lawyer will never draw on any of this shit they had to learn to win their place at law school ever again. There's furthermore a good chance that when they get into Law, one of the first subjects they take will go over all the stuff they learned in "legal studies" in high school, as it is not a prerequisite subject for applying to study law.

In short, much of what students learn in highschool is just stuff that is sufficiently difficult that it produces a wide enough distribution of scores that tertiary institutions can use it to discriminate between applicants applying for places. Lump on that all the back doors to ensure wealthy families don't fall in socio-economic standing.

There's a clear argument to be said that high school students can reclaim their lives from the drudgery of having to learn a bunch of irrelevant shit and produce a bunch of essays and reports to be read once or twice by single people before being archived then thrown away by just getting LLMs to generate reports and exams.

Except we have this system to try and identify first and foremost conscientious and industrious people to give educational opportunities to followed by, or peppered with highly intelligent people. And yeah, many people learn far more valuable stuff working a job at McDonalds in high school and socializing in and out of class, than the content of the subjects they study. But breaking a flawed system solves nothing. 

However bad conservatives think affirmative action is, creating undetectable "AI" LLMs has to be worse.

So without further ranting or raving, by the time I quit the interview it was largely because I didn't trust Peter to conduct the interview. 

Because Peter can be right about many many problems in Academia, but I know his position on Academia and that is that it is beyond saving and needs to be burned to the ground. So Peter is just excited about someone coming along that could destroy Academia, and so the title of the interview isn't referring to a problem but a solution. 

Interestingly, when I was in College, the first time campuses would have poster sales for dorm rooms and I bought a poster called "Murphy's Law" with iterations of Murphy's law - one of which was "make a system that an idiot can use and an idiot will use it." I've been thinking a lot lately about this damning aspect of free-market capitalism where demand is efficiently supplied.

One example is just cars - go out to a nearby street and wait for how long it takes for you to observe a piece of driving that you would subjectively assess as "bad" whether it's a 9 point turn, a shithouse park, speeding, running a light, turning without indicating etc. As at writing today's newspaper headlines are all about an 11 year old boy that was killed by a driver who lost control of her vehicle while doing a U-turn and crashed through a school fence into a playground and killed the boy and injured 3 other children. Maybe it was a catastrophic mechanical failure in this case, but the fact remains our society gives cars (and licenses) to people who are not competent to use them safely.

Another example is enerative AI where like Jozef realized there's a demand for students to have undetectable LLMs to generate school work, some coders realized there's demand for an app that allows schoolboys to put underage girl's faces on pornographic pictures so they can share images of their classmates to masturbate over.

No doubt, there's a good chance in many jurisdictions this will result in courts establishing as precedent that the images created are child pornography. But just because there's demand doesn't mean a product should be created.

Bringing me to exactly why you shouldn't outsource your thinking and you should pick your champions carefully - looking at a bush-league candidate like Peter Boghossian - you can go to nice little towns in Mexica particularly in the former Mexica empire territories and find murals depicting the local indigenous people who sided with the conquistadors to help get rid of the Mexica. There are plenty of good reasons to get rid of the Mexica - they were by many accounts of other indigenous people's very bad neighbours and overlords. 

What you want to do though, is not rely on Spanish Conquistadors to destroy your enemy because the real winners were the Conquistadors, who came to conquer. 

Very often, the enemy of your enemy is a much much bigger problem than your enemy. They are not your friends but likely flatterers treating you not as an end but a means. Peter is someone who would welcome Kang and Kodos if they would get rid of wokeness and then be astonished that he is now slave labour building a deathray to blow up a planet he never heard of.

At least he'd no longer have to worry about the National debt. 

Now Peter is just an example though, the real message you should take away is not that Peter isn't up to snuff relative to executing his own ideas of merit, but that you can't outsource your thinking. You have to think for yourself otherwise your letting Hernan Cortes do it, and before you know it your life is burned to the ground, the coffers empty and you have to learn a confusing story about some dude being fully human and fully devine and 1 + 1 + 1 = 1 and God's everywhere but you have to go to Church and give him money.

Overpriced Overton Window Shift

 So first up, I don't see the Overton window as one that can be manipulated or gamed, I think the Overton window is descriptive. Okay in 1997 if you told people you believe the Earth is flat you probably couldn't get a discussion going. The Overton window shifted sufficiently by 2014 that people could get discussions going on flat-earth theories because the internet facilitates user groups forming communities so conversion becomes possible based on a critical mass.

In the early 2000s when I first entered the professional world, the Australian housing market was heating up. One of the best selling books was "From 0 to 130 properties in 3.5 years" and the mood was feverish, within the first month of starting this blog, I wrote my first piece on how property was mishandled by Australian tax codes, from memory only a day or two after my first exposure to the ideas of Henry George who's book "Progress & Poverty" I have never to this day read.

Back in 2006 I would say to question the Australian obsession with property investment was fringe. I mean I literally was going into this dank office of an NGO where there were like all 14 people in a city of 5 million or so who were enthusiastic about discussing land speculation. 

The thing was, Australia would declare from time to time a number of housing affordability crises and for a change of pace rental vacancy crises. However, the Overton window was tight, the situation was always caused because population was growing faster than the supply of housing. There were two clear solutions - cutting back on immigration and removing red tape on new housing construction. 

"It's simple" declared red faced politicians on ABC S&M programming Q&A "Supply and demand. If prices are going up it's because demand exceeds supply, therefore..." and I have no strong association with any side of politics, "...we need more houses/less people."

For a frustrating period of my life, I had a reductive view. Early on I assumed that the end of the situation must be imminent, the overton window didn't matter, I could just conclude from the facts that the Australian property market was going to collapse. It never did, and I was confronted with what I could not understand.

Certainly by 2008~2009 I gave up on trying to predict the catastrophic deflation of the Australian Housing Bubble. I saw the Rudd government pull out all the stops to prevent any loss of enthusiasm for property investment in Australia, such that when the pandemic came in 2019 I was actually interim manager of the organization that introduced me to Henry George and none of us expected the Melbourne or Australian housing market to crash.

I can only speak for myself, but by 2009 I had changed my model to one in which I hold that Australian's simply lack the imagination and enterprising spirit to invest in anything but property. Personally I was convinced, and to a degree still am though for different reasons that all focus and energy should be expended on getting average Australian's to think about property investment at all.

Something I left out of my post on culture shock, coming back from 3 straight years living in Mexico, because I didn't notice it in my early months of return is that the Overton window has dramatically shifted. In Australia people will discuss on forums like Q&A even posing questions to the federal treasurer about curbing property investment as a return to the housing market.

Yesterday morning I watched a bit of a video of some guys just walking through empty houses in the Melbourne suburb of Naarm. I bought an indy game pokemon rip-off called "Cassette Beasts" and was surprised to discover one of the antagonistic groups were property investors, confused by locals as vampires and zombies.

Part of the shift is definitely global, Georgists are popping up everywhere and will even call themselves such. There's been networking by housing advocates in the US, Canada and UK at the least that have got their ideas into the heads of podcast guests who comment on the economy.

Australia does seem fairly isolated however, I base this on the Median house price in San Francisco as of July 2024 being 1.2M USD now roughly 1.77M AUD just an hours drive from the San Jose headquarters of NVidia and Apple, Google etc. The median house price in Sydney Australia is $1.1M AUD just a short drive from...Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Australia's highest cap company whose primary business is lending money for property investment. Then there's BHP at number two cap, a mining company.

House prices in SF are crazy, but they could be seen as a function of the high wages paid by the world's most valuable companies. The desire of young STEM graduates all over the world to go there and get rich by 25. 

Prices in Australia are so bananas they are practically pineapples. Youtube news-explainer channel TLDR did a story on Australia's economy that speaks so candidly about the Australian property market that it likely would come as news to many Australians.

Do I expect anything to change? Not dramatically, but what I'm saying is, that it has already dramatically shifted just for anyone to be saying that the housing market's problems might be caused by housing "investment" which to me indicates not that I am some uncredited profit, but that likely it is symptomatic of greater numbers of people finding the Australian social contract unfeasible. 

Which is to say, I suspect post-Covid inflation shifted the window, more so than 16 years of reporting on housing vacancy by Prosper though I do think the speculative Vacancy report provided important scenery out the Overton Window for discussing, particularly with high profile youtubers like Friendly Jordies.doing good explainers that maybe the common sense story of supply-demand that assumes away market inefficiency helps a lot too.

That said, I don't think humans anywhere are naturally cut out to understand concepts like paper-wealth such that the idea that assets you think you have could be revalued in a way that wealth simply vanishes just isn't going to be intuited. 

I think most people if the only difference between having $10M in the bank as cash and $10M in investment property is that next year $10M cash would be worth $9M because inflation and the houses will be worth $11.4M because magic.

Shove in the "Bezzle" from "embezzlement" which unwilling to go find the relevant explainer video from Patrick Boyle whose channel is excellent, so I'll just make a third-hand hash of it. You think your business has $2000 in the cash register, unbeknownst to you your employee has embezzled $1000 over the weekend since you last balanced the books. As such, that employee has $1000 that they know they can spend, and you believe yourself to have $2000 creating a $1000 bezzle of money people treat as if it exists. At some point, say Monday evening when you count up the money in the register after COB the disparity is discovered, at which point you have to say "oh fuck I can't pay back that short term loan." 

Now I don't know what the bezzle created by Australian banks creating money to loan to people to buy Australian housing is. The Australian property market was valued at $10 trillion dollars, 3~4x times more valuable than the entirety of Australian publicly listed companies, and 3~4x times more valuable than a years worth of finished goods produced by the country.

My position for 14 years has more or less been, if there's no good reason for property to be worth $10 trillion, then there's no good reason it can't be worth $5 trillion or $20 trillion. We are simply observing behaviour. Again, I would rest upon the general observation that despite the shift in the Overton window, Australia's obsession with property could be considered an analogue to religiosity. Most Australians cannot imagine investing in something other than property. They will refer to owning a piece of a business that generates profits as "gambling" (the stock market) and given the rational case against theology has been overdetermined for centuries, I doubt Australian attitudes will significantly budge soon. 

Furthermore, while it is distasteful to live in a society were rentiers are so esteemed and watching them populate the proliferating wine bars to celebrate their unearned wealth, people who own multiple properties aka "property investors" are likely a small minority. The worst thing is that they have meant people who buy homes to live in and raise children and be families are forced to speculate on their own homes through artificially restricted supply and artificially inflated prices. 

A housing crash will devestate good and honest people. Probably for a decade or so, I have come to realize there would be no Schadenfreude for me if the Australian property market were to rationalize or correct. The sooner it does, the least apocalyptic it would be, but we have long passed the point where deleveraging could be described as a bump in the road.

Appropriation v Participation

Some days life serves you up a huge steaming turd. Yes, we have a problem and that problem is bog standard human psychology because when we investigate a huge steaming turd we discover a defiance of the laws of nature - what produced that huge steaming turd was a smaller less offensive turd.

I am talking, of course about the attention given to Rachael "Raygun" Gunn's Olympic breaking performance. A performance for which, without any aid of public discourse I feel almost anyone could watch 10~30 seconds of and broadly understand exactly what happened, what needs to happen and really be done with it. Were we sober. But we are not. This is the shit we get high off, and that is our insurmountable problem.

By the end of the Paris Olympics, I was all like "yay Olympics" they are a great thing though perhaps not worth the price of admission. Dubious sports and all. I was likely my most interested since Sydney 2000 where the games were staged perfectly in my time zone and coincided with school holidays where I could just lay on a couch and watch it all day.

Anyway, Paris introduced "breaking" as a sport. I'm not a fan, or at least sit uneasily with subjective competitions. Like gymnastic floor routines with the ball, hoop or ribbon where a panel of judges have to observe and score on multiple criteria and then eliminate the top and bottom scores and blah blah blah. 

I saw some of the gymnastic floor routines, and even an ignoramus like me can understand that despite the artistic expression, costumes, pageantry there's clearly an athletic competition in the mix. Remove the ribbons, balls and hoops and it becomes more obvious in the case of an athlete like Simone Biles. Furthermore, there's only so much innovation one can reasonably expect out of three props that have been featured at Olympics since Stalin and Hitler were around.

By comparison, let's consider Roller Derby as an Olympic sport. A popular competition exists that has a lot of tacked on culture that I'm tempted in all cases to refer to as bullshit. Like someone can't compete as Sarah Johnson but needs to compete as "Mean Machine" that kind of bullshit. Outside the Olympics I think the culture around roller derby helps to keep the sport a women's space, it has a definite sexualized punk vibe even though from what I've observed the sexualization of Roller Derby does not serve to promote beauty ideals. Barge sized women will be in hot pants and fishnets.

I would expect that to qualify as an Olympic sport Roller Derby may need to permit a men's competition, for which I would expect the hyperfeminisation of the sport to be removed. People would compete in much the same uniforms that they compete in tennis, basketball, cycling or ice skating in. 

Breaking was clearly brought in as a spectacle, preserving much of the cultural bullshit including performance names. Though theoretically the same as sports like gymnastics, synchronized swimming, ice dancing, figure skating, diving etc. Cultural artefacts were preserved for the competition like having competitors "live react" and diss their competitor on stage. One was invited to buy into the fun and pageantry rather than treat breaking soberly like a sport. This is true of the women's gold medal match and the men's gold medal match with presumably expert commentators dropping insight like "one of the hypest songs you can get in a gold medal match..." 

Now the big steaming turd inserted into the debut sport of "breaking" was Australian women's competitor "Raygun" who scored 0 points and sucked up all the oxygen. Whatever there is to say about this flash in the pan, it is almost certain that too much will be said.

It is likely simply a story of incompetence built on incompetence, built on incompetence in a manner many people find hard to believe. The existential fear "mere incompetence" cannot be overstated, it is somewhat the basis of all conspiracy theories and the adamantanes of the conspiracists because people breaking things deliberately is much more comforting than things just breaking because we collectively are not good enough at what we do.

The first incompetence is importing break dance competitions into the Olympics. Now, there are numerous events that are popular and draw crowds and it's not always obvious what those events will be. Surfing is evergreen in terms of popularity but it is a much harder sport to spectate compared to beach volleyball on account of taking place offshore. I think indoor climbing will remain. Will the Olympics try fucking quidditch, bike polo or hacky sack?  

Culturally surfing is Hawaiian but the modern sport was popularized via california hence we may find Australian surfers saying "gnarly" but not so much "totally tubular" and they certainly don't sport Polynesian tattoos and while waiting for a wave they don't sit there doing an upper body Hula dance. Surfing can become an olympic event without participants from countries with distant cultural ties to Polynesia and California participating in the bullshit cultural artefacts some surfing snob might do a PhD thesis on constituting "true" or "authentic" surfing.

Not so with breaking, and this is about the extent that I concur with a concept like "cultural appropriation" where we get Japanese and Korean's acting, pretty much solely in the context of the breaking contest like they are African Americans from the projects. 

In this sense Surfing is like calisthenics, the group of bodyweight exercises originating from Greece that carries with it little-to-no-cultural artefacts, and breaking is like Pose based Yoga which is also a series of bodyweight exercises possibly originating in calisthenics but saddled with a bunch of cultural artefacts like mantras recited in a language most practitioners do not speak.

The second incompetence was that in both the men's and women's competitions 16 people competed and somehow Australia's female representative made the cut. Not simply making the cut on the Australian team, but got one of 16 places and managed to score 0 points. It should stretch credulity that Australia deserved representation in the women's comp. 

For example, Ukraine and the US had two "b-girls" in the competition, Canada had none even though it produced the gold medallist b-boy. South and Central America was completely unrepresented as was Mexico. Morocco was the only African nation that got representation. An Afghan b-girl was disqualified from the competition on account of incorporating some kind of political message into her act. It seems to me that Japan's second best b-girl deserved that 16 spot that Australia obtained for some reason.

The third incompetence was the Australian Olympic Commission qualifying Raygun. Soberly looking at the judging that gave her 0 points, and assuming the judges at least competently discharged their duties, a good argument to be made is that sending Raygun was worse than sending nobody at all. Her performance stimulated all kinds of reactions, and that's largely what I'm referring to when I say that it's easy to say too much about it. 

So there's a large chunk of the population who don't really understand sports at all, and their opinion for the most part, simply doesn't matter. 

Beyond that, most people need only 10 seconds or less of exposure to the phenomena to basically understand the situation completely. Somebody got into the competition that shouldn't have, for some reason, and the point is moot because that's it for breakdancing at the Olympics for the foreseeable future.

I suspect though, for many her qualification are at odds with the experience of walking down a shopping mall in the summer time and seeing kids on the street do a better job of breakdancing than she managed. 

I suspect for those contemporary in age to me or older, that's why Raygun's story did not take, and is unlikely to resemble that of Eric Moussambani's 100m freestyle qualifying swim in the 2000 Olympics. It was understood that Eric simply didn't have the opportunity to be a competitive swimmer, having never even seen a 50m Olympic size swimming pool prior to competing in the Olympics. Given the context, Eric became someone to cheer for in the spirit of participation. Furthermore the Olympic spirit is much more aligned with having Equatorial Guinea send someone to the Olympics to represent them on a world stage than it is a rich country with a bloated public spend on sports sending someone to the Olympics simply because we can.

Raygun as a selection from the AOC is from my limited understanding a direct result of the scarcity of women breakdancers in Australia, though it is possible that the core incompetence of the selection process was that Australia gave Raygun points for effort and creativity, that would not be awarded by the Olympic judges, meaning they ran the wrong contest to select a qualifier, that or Raygun made the rookie mistake of dinner party hosting where instead of cooking a straightforward recipe you are familiar with, you try to pull off something complicated on the big day.

If the AOC had money to burn on sending an athlete just to fill a roster spot, it seems they missed the trick on replicating the success of Alisa Camplin at the Winter Olympics, an ex-gymnast that Australia simply put on skiis to capitalize on complimentary skills. It feels plausible that the AOC could have gone to any of Australia's major ballet companies and found someone with the physical intelligence to be better than the best enthusiastic b-girl in Australia.

The final incompetence being that of Raygun herself. I feel it is fair to compare her somewhat to Eric Moussambani. Where there was a genuine question as to whether Eric the Eel could complete 100m freestyle, Raygun by her own testimony conceded that she simply couldn't do many of the dance moves on account of her physical conditioning.

In this regard she could be compared to the similarly self-aware Stephen Bradbury who famously won Australia's first ever Winter Olympic Gold Medal in the speed skating. Realizing he could not compete he consciously adopted a strategy that relied on the faster skaters crashing, and though out of his control the strategy paid off.

The problem for Raygun is that high speed collisions are just not a common occurrence in break dancing. Though I'm sure there's video of breakdancers doing the worm and falling off a stage, there's just nothing to suggest one could macarena or Nutbush their way to Olympic Gold by having competitors get too ambitious, especially in 1 v 1 "battles."

At which point I arrive at having more or less, nothing against Raygun. Her incompetence is the least of the problem, much like that monsters like Harvey Weinstein exist doesn't concern me anywhere near the extent that people facilitated his crimes because they could profit off of it and to my knowledge have paid no substantial penalty beyond dissolving the Weinstein company.

I have more issue with the AOC and IOC and frankly joe regular that has latched onto the spectacle.

It appears on balance of probability that Raygun was allowed up on that stage to give the world a demonstration of the at-this-point-overdetermined Dunning-Kruger effect. 

There may be some, who likely not consciously are incredulous that the breaking community in Australia isn't so mean that they would simply boo and jeer a b-girl of Raygun's age out of the youth scene. I'm against that, I think if 40 yo, 60 yos or whoever want to step into the arena, they should be able to. I am pro-participation. 

The issue lies at the point that someone determined that Raygun was the best Australia had to offer and sufficient to represent Australia on a world stage. 

What tipped me over the edge into compulsively having to say too much about Raygun, was seeing someone post an opinion about how Raygun's performance was much worse because it was a privileged woman doing a minstrel routine because cultural appropriation.

Now, I don't really have an opinion on Al Jolson though I have watched a video of him performing "My Mammie" in blackface and I simply would say: I don't get it. I don't even know why Al Jolson was in blackface when you take the clip from "The Jazz Singer" as he is singing "My Mammie" to his Lithuanian (?) mother in the crowd. 

Do I think Raygun's performance was a minstrel routine? No. I think if you are taking that much offense you are taking that much offense of your own free will. 

She is almost certainly privileged by virtue of being Australian and having a PhD. In India has a general participation rate in tertiary education of 28.8% Mexico 21%, Australia it's something like 51%. If you are born Australian to non-abusive parents you are de facto privileged, especially when it comes to the Olympics, Australia sent 9 skateboarders to Paris, only Japan and the US sent more.

The most common first names among NBA players are "Michael" "Chris" "Kevin" "James" etc. and largely white-held stereotypes might assume the typical NBA story is a kid from the inner city hood playing hoops on the street to escape the drug game with their father Denzel Washington in Jail and their single mum cooking them spaghetti-o's in a project tower, but actually many NBA stars grow up middle class and are given bog-standard Hebrew (Biblical) first names go to good schools with good basketball programs and could have been a dentist if they weren't so tall with extremely large hands and thus having promising NBA careers especially given all the resources behind them.

Now was there any malice? No. Just dazzling incompetence. Beguiling incompetence. From what little footage I have seen, it is clear she was trying to be creative in an obvious way, suspending the assumption many in the humanities do - that the status quo is non-arbitrary. Basically I think she came up with "original" moves inspired by Australian Fauna, to compensate for her lack of athleticism. What she couldn't produce was something like the Frosby-Flop that instantly revolutionised the High-Jump event. Because she lacks athleticism.

Let's keep in mind, the Venice Beach scene from "Breakin" 1984 contained more creative choreography than the entire 2024 Olympic breaking competition, including a lot of creative stuff that is much worse than what has evolved to be the repertoire of competitive breakdances - namely power moves.

She came up with a passable routine for a children's show. Somebody with high body intelligence like a ballet dancer, with ample time to field-test new moves, could probably innovate breakdancing by taking inspiration from the motor functions of animals like snakes, kangaroos, even wombats and koalas. Kung Fu has a bunch of zoomorphic fighting styles that are at the least both aesthetically pleasing and athletic, if inferior to more straightforward fighting arts like boxing. brazilian jiu-jitsu, and okinawan karate.

A better case could be made for malicious cultural appropriation by a privileged white woman, had she tried to incorporate indigenous dance steps by studying Aboriginal dance companies. Not necessarily a solid case however. Nor produce a winning strategy, as this would be like an Argentinian b-boy or b-girl trying to incorporate the Tango into a break routine. Like there's an avenue for innovation, but it's breakdancing as distinct from other styles of dance. Had she the athleticism and coordination to pull it off, she could have contended for a medal by using more conventional power moves.

This is the point at which cultural appropriation fails to garner my sympathies, because it just comes across as anti-competitive (in the same sense as Gilbert Arenas suggesting the NBA needs to kick out all the European players, an unveiled parochialism) and generally requires some kind of double standard (like Gilbert Arenas feeling his culture is entitled to appropriate basketball just because with very few exceptions black Americans have lifted the profile of the game, or in the teaching materials for the Candyman reboot, "reclaiming" Candyman for black culture when it is adapted from British Author Clive Barker's short story "The Forbidden" set on an English estate), which just cannot arrive at anti-discrimination. I feel I somewhat understand the power dynamic argument that generally founds left-wing discrimination, it's just what can someone like Rachael Gunn do? She is being asked not to participate in case she wins.

There's nothing this argument has to say about Raygun that also cannot be said of winner Ami Yuasa, Dominika Banavic, Liu Qingyi - the medallist b-girls. Without cultural appropriation breaking just isn't a sport at all. If the distinction is that a "privileged" woman made a mockery of the culture by being bad at it, then we must allow that Eminem and Elvis never be cited as cultural appropriators on account of them being good at what they do. (unless in their cases their unprivileged upbringings makes them appropriators because they are good at what they do?)

The institution won out by giving Raygun 0 points. The culture loses because she is the most talked about 2024 Olympian probably, unless incidentally like some NBA star is being more discussed because he signed a trade deal and happened to be an Olympian.

If I were to rank the 2024 Olympic memes on merit they would be as follows:

1. Photo of Gabriel Medina exiting wave on way to Gold in Surfing.

2. Turkish Yusef Dikec casually winning silver in the shooting.

Nth. Raygun's creative new dance moves.

But in terms of google trends, that ranking is reversed.

Now Rachael Gunn herself has to my understanding basically spun the reaction to her dance entry as what I shall call a "Hannah Gadsby" which is to say, she is leaning into the spectacle as apology for the lack of substance. And I know people regard Nanette as quite substantive, but in time I think it is recognized widely that as a comedy special it sucks on account of pre-subversion-jokes not being very funny, as a marketing package for an extended TED talk it rules.

What else has Raygun achieved though beyond a whole bunch of attention? 

Well, Yusef Dikec resonated because he performed while cutting through a lot of his sport's artifice. There's a positive message about backing yourself and not getting intimidated or sucked into the expensive signalling of richer nations and richer competitors. The meme is a watered down version of Abebe Bikala's story winning the 1960 Rome games' marathon barefoot - these are archetypal underdog stories of the Olympics in terms of rich national sports programs losing to poor national sports programs, and not because Abebe couldn't afford shoes nor that Yusef can't afford glasses and hearing protection, they both prefer(red) not to use them.

The photo of Gabriel Medina captures a moment that almost deifies Gabriel. He is suspended triumphant in mid air, his surfboard almost parallel. It speaks of complete dominion over his environment, I wouldn't be surprised if it gets turned into a statue somewhere. Like Michael Jordan's Airwalk or Vince Carter's dunk of death or Usain Bolt's Beijing 100m win, it is capturing a moment that seemingly expands the frontier of human possibility. Little kids will look at that photo and believe that a human being can fly.

I have to be careful how I word this next bit in particular, because I don't want to falsely attribute intent. When we take this combination of memes with a god-like surfer, an ice cold shooter and an incompetent dancer that eclipses not only the other memes, but pretty much all accomplishment - little girls are blameless for inferring from the memes that in the domain of sports men are gods and cool dudes and women are jokes.

I'm not saying it is the case, I am alluding to the packaging of ideas. The best we can say is that it is a triumph of the attention economy, a confluence of incompetence allowing this spectacle to transpire obliterates what inferences can be drawn from Simone Biles' gymnastic golds, Saya Sakakibara's bmx racing gold, Arisha Trew's skateboarding gold, Jessica and Naomi Fox's canoeing golds...even Kathryn Mitchell's ability to compete in javelin at 42 years of age. 

The misogyny is out and in full, because there is probably no easier dog to kick in western society than a middle-aged white woman. Raygun is a Karen even though she made no complaints to a manager and instead tried to have fun with break dancing. Teaching us that Karen's are not even about what Karen's do but what they are. People are reacting as if some human garbage living in some modest comfort of an academic-in-a-humanities department is an affront to the Just World Hypothesis.

Ami Yuasa the gold medalist b-girl is 25 and Japanese. Aside from that she is a university graduate majoring in English and American Literature. So we are definitely saying too much about breaking at the Olympics if I need to discuss Japanese history and Japanese culture to render arguments of "cultural appropriation" unintelligible. Sadly "do I need to explain Japan to you?" is not a rhetorical question when directed to the modern left, given the extent to which in my experience left wingers fetishize Japan despite it basically being an ethno-nationalist state highly gender-polarized and almost completely dissonant with it's history of imperialism. 

All of which is as irrelevant to Ami Yuasa's performance as the history and culture and economy of Australia is irrelevant to Rachael Gunn's. Complaints of the nature of white-privilege, cultural appropriation etc. are likely a good case study to shelve for when we can pick over the corpse of "Anti-racism" as functioning as a literal reverse racism.

If you read the abstract of Rachael Gunn's academic papers, you will see someone who is completely schooled in intersectional feminism and is trying to fight white-male patriarchal neoliberalism. This is the predictable result, because most of these critiques (either by mode or by composition) are horseshit. I'm not going to invest in reading Raygun's doctoral paper, but if she doesn't use an empirical or historical methodology to determine that lack of female representation in break dancing stems as a bi-product from the overall crappiness of the Australian hip-hop (aka skip-hop) scene then that paper is a horseshit PhD.

Hannah Gadsby took something "unserious" being a comedy special and successfully subverted it by making it serious to the point of harrowing for many. Gadsby probably leveraged millions of dollaridoos if not hundreds of thousands and I think in the fullness of time my money is on the major contribution of Nanette being archival evidence of how little was understood about male violence in the early 21st century, again thanks to pinning it on a nebulous skunked/Motte-and-Bailey term like "patriarchy" basically guaranteeing that the content cannot be understood. 

There's no need to analyse, or wait for the fullness of time with Raygun's performance. We already have movies like "The Room" and reality TV competitions like "Idol", "X Factor", "Got Talent", and "So You Think You Can Dance" for which everything is in the title to know exactly what transpired. I think Raygun could leverage this moment into possibly thousands of dollars as a guest speaker at a few events. In the meantime she is likely being psychologically destroyed by the impact of her high-risk strategy, and that middle aged white women are seen as fair game, even more so than straight white men. The inherent risk of asking: "Where the #b-girls at? politics of (in)visibility in breaking culture" assuming the question to be rhetorical.

Rachel Dracht spoofing Raygun on lightning-rod-of-desperate-need-to-be-culturally-relevant Late Night with Jimmy Fallon is just a poor man's version of Tina Fey quoting middle-aged-white-woman Sarah Palin word for word on SNL. Performances that are pure pandering and will likely age less sympathetically than their inspirations (though it is hard to be sympathetic to Palin, very much forerunner to Trump, she is a symptom of the Republican Party base, a point on the evolutionary trajectory of dumb presidents from Raegan to Bush Jr. to Palin to Trump and as NNT pointed out, if you want to scare yourself extrapolate that pattern into the future.)

Furthermore to the specific delusion, someone who mistakes "originality" as an unqualified good is not new. It is a common artistic delusion. It is the reason Melbourne population 5 million, can somewhat viably support 150,000 seats for 9 professional Australian Rules football clubs 705k memberships and about 3ish truly dedicated Jazz venues.  (I wouldn't be surprised if breakdancing is a bigger scene in Melbourne than Jazz is despite having a fraction of the economic support).

Contemporary Jazz is unpopular because it equates being original with being good. It is dwarfed both in number of performers and crowd turnout by solo female singer songwriters with acoustic guitars. On this front, I have long had a gripe that Jazz snobs think they are taking risks, where I feel risk is a measure of variability of outcome. Modern Jazz is not risky, it is almost guaranteed to alienate audiences and bankrupt its practitioners unless they can sit atop a pyramid of tutelage teaching the next generation of unpopular musicians their difficult artform. It does not resemble Coltrane or Miles Davis' highly listenable jazz, because it isn't allowed to, because originality. 

The breaking routine clearly was risky, because it has had this outsize response. The thing that deserves the most outrage would be the degree to which we are all a sucker for spectacle, schadenfreude and outrage itself. 

So at base, what we have is grist for a very problematic mill.

What do we want out of the IOC the AOC out of Raygun and PhD's? Does the public "discourse" bring us any closer? Does it even approach answering the question "how did this happen?" No, the attention economy is terrible at answering questions and solving problems.

I for one, want the IOC to take risks, to try new sports and retire old sports. There are a bunch of difficult questions in sports, not the least of which is the centrality of defining gender to sports. But like, if you contemplate just the question of prize money for winning a gold medal, does a gold medalist water polo team member deserve the same compensation as the 100m sprint winner or marathon winner?

Things are changing constantly and are unpredictable. In permitting the IOC to take risks, they need to have the competence in researching to ensure they are actually taking risks. I believe breaking was introduced to try and draw in a younger crowd, presumably than say, equestrian events do. I believe if they did their research they may have discovered that break dancing is not that popular with young people. 

The AOC needs to reign in its olympic qualifying standards, such that just because somebody is the best regional representative in a sport wouldn't automatically qualify them, as they do with the current Winter Olympic events, otherwise it represents a potential transfer in wealth from Australian Taxpayers to private citizens via the moral hazard of creating spectacle, intentionally or not. The medalling b-girls and b-boys have a common met criteria of competing in world championships or continental championships and medalling. Someone from Sydney (pop. 5.3 million) beating someone from New Zealand (pop 5.12 million) is not good enough. 

Furthermore, for new sports or exhibition sports the IOC should do its utmost to avoid a "pay-to-play" scenario, as would be true of say the IOC putting Gridiron in the Olympics that would not be true of them putting Cricket or Baseball in the Olympics. Cricket obviously has a world cup, the case for it being a truly global game is likely inferior only to Football (Soccer), baseball there are pro-leagues in Japan, the US and Latin America. Gridiron, not only are there almost no compatible international leagues (I think Canadian football is possibly a thing?) but there is also a dearth of non US players in the NFL, with only a few Australians that generally specialize as kickers playing for the big money. 

If the IOC permits NFL to be an Olympic sport we will see G7 nations putting together bullshit teams and granting bullshit citizenship to US pros in a scramble for a silver medal, but we won't see Equatorial Guinea able to send a Grid Iron team to the olympics because it is a ridiculous amount of people and equipment to put up in an olympic village in Los Angeles at taxpayer expense.

Anyway, what about the impacts on Raygun's doctoral thesis? I believe a PhD isn't revokable even when debunked, even when the doctrate of philosophy debunks her own thesis herself. Raygun is by far and away the most famous Australian break dancer of all time. She is likely currently the most famous break dancer in the world, and she did so with no particular noteworthy ability in the sport. She scored zero points and won something like 5 percentage categories in her bouts out of 270. 

She has unintentionally replicated the grievance studies affair's attempted thesis that the social sciences have no sound epistemology, that they can arrive at any a-priori conclusions in this case a lack of representation and achievement by women in breaking is a product of white-patriarchy and neoliberalism, rather than a broader correlation with a lack of interest in the dance style and the low social status in Australia of break dancers. (Raygun aside from being the most famous Australian break dancer, is also the only woman I have ever known to date a male break dancer.)

Thomas Sowell could cut and paste his critiques of critical social theories onto Rachael's thesis - by broadening the scope we can observe that breakdancing is dominated by Asia and Europe. It is popular with affluent Japanese, Chinese and Korean people. Had Rachael not nested her thesis in Sydney and Australia, she may have identified that the (in)visibility of women in the sport had little if nothing to do with patriarchy, whiteness and neoliberalism. 

Much as the IOC needs to get better at its own research, the research conducted in social sciences needs to be less insulated from reality, so that our academics don't initially test their theories only when it gets real on a stage in front of the world.

Is Problem Wit da Orcs?

I want to say from the beginning, I don't know what J.R.R. Tolkien's position was on the races of his middle earth being analogous to races of actual earth. I'm going to allow for arguments sake, with no interest as to the truth of the matter, that Tolkien was the most cartoonish Victorian Era colonial racist Hitler curious stereotype of racism, rather than some old pipe smoking Oxbridge dude more akin to a Bertrand Russell or whatever.

Allowing that, which could be pure fiction, again I cannot state enough how much I don't care, and therein is a spoiler for my thesis and conclusion, lets say that Orcs were created by cartoon racist Tolkien as his veiled opinion of Africa. Definitely not Asians, definitely not Phoenicians, Jews or Arabs, Africans. 

Okay, now we can move on to premises we do not need to allow for the sake of argument, its shit that actually happened. A bunch of nerds unwittingly pick up LOTR and are like "Wooooahhhh woooah woah!" they are blown away by it. They can't get enough, they become fanatics or "fans" for short and start generating their own derivative content. 

Some of them will produce substantial derivative work where they inject their own modicum of originality. Others will produce thinly veiled derivative works where they are forced to be original because they want to go commercial without being sued by Tolkien. 

Somewhere in this process of creative history, "Warhammer Fantasy Battle" falls out and "Dungeons and Dragons" (DnD) and by this stage, nobody can copyright an Orc/Ork/Orruk, they have become too generic to be enforceable.

LOTR itself, unquestionably is a derivative work, drawing on Norse mythology probably Celtic mythology it was a project of myth making. Hence we can get species like Dwarves who live (somehow) underground, much like goblins and from the Hobbit and LOTR a lot of these role-playing-games that formalised many of the fantasy tropes involve going into a dungeon and fighting some shit.

It used to be very fairy-tale black-and-white (and charge that racially as you will) Reagan era good vs evil. So you get like first edition of fantasy role playing games and it's basically each one of you gets an analogue to a fellowship member, or you are general of an analogue to the Battle of Five Armies, and have at it.

Somewhere later in the process, people start deconstructing, in essence, the ethics of killing intelligent life.

Like there was a period in history, maybe the British Raj that was pre-Tolkien (not that people weren't superstitious) but there were adventure clubs and English men with big moustaches did bullshit like hunt tigers. Now, if I was in my supermarket and a Tiger escaped from the zoo and got into the supermarket - it would probably head for the meat section or the Deli and I could probably just leave the supermarket in a calm and orderly fashion.

But say the Tiger was hunting me, I would probably have little compunction about running to the kitchen ware aisle and trying to rip a kitchen knife or two out of their blister pack and enter a kill-or-be-killed mindset.

I think in early additions of DnD, Orcs were just regarded in this sense as the moral equivalent of Tigers - they are dangerous and it is kill or be killed and that is the adventure.

There probably is a game about hunting Tigers in India or Siberia or whatever, but it isn't really part of the fantasy roleplaying genealogy. 

Orcs, Ogres, Trolls, Giants, Vampires, Revenants, Harpies etc. whatever. I'm sure entered these games and genres as the moral equivalent of Sharks, Tigers and Polar Bears but they are a little more exciting because clearly they can hold clubs and axes and swords, but they were kitsch in the sense of stimulating an emotional response of excitement, and about as thoughtful as a shark with a laser gun. 

Like, I did not experience growing up in the fighting fantasy books, board games like Hero Quest and Talisman that Orc society, or Dwarven society had had any more thought as to how their economies functioned and how they come to have swords and shields and chainmail as how a shark might wind up with a laser.

Which is all to say, from the perspective of fans playing DnD or Warhammer they were savage brutes that were going to kill you unless you killed them first.

What happened later, and I cannot stress how little I care about when. Was that people got exhausted of the nerdy tropes without getting exhausted by DnD, and the quite natural process of deconstruction came in. At some point, and likely as a product of convergent evolution, a bunch of people got captivated by the idea of playing DnD or whatever from the Orcs perspective.

So we just have this natural transition from a very one dimensional baddy to a complex character.

From there, someone deconstructs the trope and deconstruction very quickly moves into problematizing.

Now I already allowed that Tolkien for arguments sake could have been a racist and been being racist when he made the orcs the baddies. It doesn't matter and why I don't care is because of the genetic fallacy where I don't think Tolkien ever described Orcs as being green, and now orcs are green and in many of their incarnations they aren't "corrupted elves" or whatever Tolkiens origin story is I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH I DO NOT CARE ENOUGH TO CHECK OR BE RIGHT OR WRONG ABOUT TOLKIEN.

In so far at this point in the 21st century Orcs are problematic because they are "coded" as African and maybe a specific culture of Africa or maybe African American because somewhere Tolkien expressed negative views on jazz music or something, I think the problem can be summarized as Orcs aren't Nazis. 

Bringing me to the differences between Raiders of the Lost Ark, Inglorious Bastaards and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. 

Raiders of the Lost Ark is a Jewish revenge movie for the Holocaust. It leans into the pulp fiction genre, and the Nazis are unambiguously evil trying to get hold of a powerful supernatural artefact and through Hubris the Nazi occultist gets himself and his whole battallion or whatever killed. It's fine because Harrison Ford and love interest know to close their eyes when the Ark is opened. I think Indy even has his hands literally tied. 

Inglorious Bastaards involves a Jewish girl seizing the opportunity to kill Nazi leadership and end WW2. The opening scene establishes that the Nazis killed her family, and the final slaughter is of the Nazi leadership the Nazis most responsible. Ahistorical and counterfactual as the movie may be when compared to something like Downfall, neither Raiders nor Inglorious Bastaards have moral ambiguity.

The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare on the other hand, didn't quite work. In The Great War or "World War 1" I would hope that it is easy to imagine that the German soldiers in the trenches are more or less the moral equivalent of British, French and Anzac soldiers also fighting in the trenches. Which side you fought for was not so much a question of ideology as an accident of birth.

Once you get to WW2, I'll admit it becomes harder, but I think the world is on the cusp of being ready to have killing Nazi rank-and-file soldiers problematized. Because we would have two categories we can never tell being in effect when we watch some allied black-ops group gun down a heap of Nazis.

On the one hand, we have people who are fighting in WW2 because they were simply born Protestant or Catholic German, like probably their parents or grandparents that fought in WW1 you just fought for your country, because there was no EU you couldn't freely move and become a constitutional monarchist in England, a Communist in Spain or a Neutral Swede. You couldn't download duolingo and pick up a foreign language if you were working class German.

Then allowing that there's a large contingent of rank and file soldiers in Germany that were ideological. They stood up and saluted the Furer when some kid sang "tomorrow belongs to me" at the beer garden or beer halls. These are people that much like the Allies didn't have access to good information. They just had local papers, if they read them at all. 

To use an Australian analogy, they were likely the moral equivalents of Australian communities whose beliefs align with the Coal Industry in their town. They think climate change is a hoax, the Great Barrier Reef is thriving and Adani is a wonderful company with an impeccable record. Likely the economic devastation followed by the economic opportunities of the build up to war, mostly informed many German soldiers opinions.

So how much am I supposed to relish them being hosed down by bullets from silenced machine guns. I can certainly see how it was necessary in the context of war, but I can't get any gratification from the fact that most of these people are just born in the wrong place at the wrong time. 

Now, I can't think of a good segue from Nazis to Harleen Quinzel aka Harley Quinn. Batman villain's henchman created based on a dream sequence in a soap opera witnessed by Bruce Tim put into an animated series and then introduced into the comics and exploded in popularity by Margot Robbie's portrayal in piece of shit movie "Suicide Squad."

Harley Quinn became popular. Little girls wanted to dress up as her for Halloween, it captured a lot of women's imaginations. Harley Quinn is an interesting character, because she is fundamentally a train wreck in an unhealthy and abusive relationship with the Joker, and a tragic figure.

So naturally, cannonically because Harley Quinn is popular with women, she must become a good role model, a good guy. So now canonnically I believe it to be the case that Harley has split with the Joker and joined the Bat family to fight against crime and for law and order and justice and whatever. She was replaced by "Punch Line" as Joker's "business partner" rather than useful idiot abused lover, who engages with the Joker on her own terms with her own agency.

Then there's the feature "Harley Quinn: Breaking Glass" where a highschool student Harley joins a Queer theatre troop and befriends a Woke Ivy as she learns that Joker is just a privileged white male or some shit. Condensing Harley Quinn's whole journey into a single narrative arc, while we can learn some cutting edge politics along the way.

However you feel about it, however entertained or not you have been by Harley Quinn's comic book and movie appearances she's a crystal clear example of an over investment in media effects. Put simply "Girls can't have bad things." They have to have nice things.

Now Harley Quinn as a character required no cognitive effort, no mental expenditure, no video essay to problematize. She was a psychologically and emotionally unstable woman in an abusive relationship with the Joker. She required redeeming just as soon as she became a popular Halloween costume with women who do not at large read comics. I'm aware women do read and write and review comics, but I'm guesstimating that 90% of the women that cosplayed as Harley Quinn know her from Margot Robbie's initial portrayal, punching Harley Quinn cosplay into google image search shows me at least that the Margot Robbie costume is overrepresented compared to Harley's traditional harlequin outfit that she wore in most mediums. (Curiously, Harley's outfits from "Birds of Prey" "Breaking Glass" and James Gunn's "Suicide Squad" are unrepresented, which makes sense given that she was desexualised/de-objectified post popularity, because young women cannot be trusted with media.)

Segueing back to Orcs/Orks whatever, when I think DnD what comes to mind? Well it depends when we are talking about. Like "Stranger Things" I feel captures DnD in the 80s and the Satanic Panic and shit. I think of a hobby largely for unathletic pasty white guys and their middle class college bound black friends who do not range but fall either side of gangly and fat wearing Chuck Taylor's and Levi 501s and black t-shirts, before hitting the 90s and then it's fat white guys in college dorms with white-afros and neckbeards in cargo shorts and butthole surfer tees drinking mountain dew and eating doritos and then the Spice Girls end the 90s and begin the 2000s in 1997 and there's boy band and Britney Mania and shit and that lasts into the early-to-mid-2010s and then much as the French preserved rollerblading and breakdancing while the west forgot about it DnD experiences a resurgence in recent years but I basically equate it with the LGBTQIA+ scene now.

We can cut out the middle part and take the strong problematic argument that Orcs are coded as black people.

If we go back to the 70s 80s scene when it appeared to be an activity dominated by white men like almost all "Nerd" "Culture" I feel safe in retrodicting that none of those players picked up that Orcs were coded as African Savages. That none of the people exploring the fantasy of being a knight, a cleric, a mage, a thief, a bard had Colonial fantasies driven by the "Scramble for Africa" nor the trans-Atlantic slave trade. 

I can also confidently retrodict without bothering to check old DnD materials that I won't find such campaigns in there. The historically "problematic" read on Orcs I feel likely to also confirm the scholarly consensus that media effects are weak. It is akin to "the satanic panic" 

Like we just know enough with what 40 years of hindsight that video games, role playing games, movies and books do not produce Nazis and White Supremacists, nor Satanists. 

Flashing forward to present day, where DnD is uses storytelling tech to explore race and gender by a generation for which this shit is their jam. It is more likely that DnD's content is far more likely to change based on who is playing it than the reverse effect.

Bringing me to one of the finest examples of non-journalism I've ever come across. The below video, I am going to say, if you can't guess what the finding of the investigation will be before you've heard the end of the question posed, I'll suspect you of having a debilitating cognitive deficit:

All I learned from that video when I watched it two or three years ago was that "Sensitivity reader" was a job, that based on the thesis of this post, shouldn't exist because media effects are weak.

I think this is the current DnD scene, I don't know what the future holds for DnD maybe it will regress to a hobby seen as mostly for straight white male neckbeards who want to explore the fantasy of living in a heteronormative media culture, but for now DnD appears to an outsider such as myself as far-left egalitarian, all inclusive. Dungeons, dungeons are wheelchair accessible.

What we see more of is a tool - the group conversation based Role Playing Game (RPG) being adopted, appropriated and assimilated by another culture. I'm sure someone who has read continental philosophy and its offsprings, or has atleast absorbed some of it's darwinian memes can explain why there's no doublestandard, but describing DnD as having an indigenous ingroup of white male nerds, that have found themselves on the receiving end of the collonial experience of being discovered, invaded and marginalized is at the very least descriptive.

I don't care, because in this case, while a demographic finds itself maybe losing esteem within the culture (and many adopting or aspiring to the invasive culture) they aren't in anyway dispossessed. Nothing is stopping them from keeping their group all straight white males and playing earlier editions for the sheer simplicity of good vs evil.

I make the point because I find it to generally be the case to explain any and all phenomena as a reiteration of something people have always done. I'm wary of New Era stories.

The real Irony I would point to, is that if there was ever a time to not be concerned that playing DnD would lead to ethnocentric views, in turn leading to ethnonationalism and racial discrimination it is now. 

What could be justified is that more racially enlightened generations are coming into the fantasy genre and finding "racial errors" that they are now correcting, basically being that everyone is qualified to be a sensitivity reader. 

However, they are correcting something that likely, never had an effect. Reshaping fantasy media to be problem free, when the risk that people mistake fantasy for reality is almost historically indeterminate. 

Bringing us to the all important question of intent, which I would specifically word as "Who's doing it to you?" again allowing that Tolkein was a foaming at the mouth racist (which I haven't bothered to substantiate) I don't think the creators of DnD appropriated Orcs for it's 1e bestiary with any conscious knowledge of such, forethought or malicious intent. If they did, by the time you get to Blizzard Entertainment's "Warcraft" I cannot read Orcs as being coded as anything but the fantasy trope of Orcs.

What I overwhelmingly see, from LOTR to DnD to World of Warcraft, is a narrative device to supply enemies to fight so there is action in a roleplaying game. Sure, there could be, and almost certainly must be historical inspiration and likely candidates would be the Mongol Empire, the Persian Empire and the Moors, all the "outsider" cultures that ever seriously threatened or invaded Europe. One can read Dostoevsky's War and Peace (as I just did) and even see a Russian using Napoleonic France as the basis for a foreign invader. 

"Who's doing it to you?" is a crucial question where you create offense where non was intended. Watching Youtube channel "Sit down and Shut up" response to a viewer request on how to get into RPG's host Quinn at one point suggests that characterisation of NPCs should be on the level of pro-wrestling. That is to say, and I'm paraphrasing that your players will enjoy interacting with one-dimensional characters a lot more than interacting with a host of nuanced, dynamic fully realised characters.

I'm sure in many ways, Orcs simply evolved to be best fit to the RPG ecosystem. Again, I'll for the sake of argument grant that they were based in all instances on negative racist stereotypes of tribal cannibalistic savages. I don't think you have a good argument though, even granting this. I suspect those stereotypes existed in the first place to provide the same utility: because people wanted to live in a world where everything was simple and you could embrace the spirit of adventure to cross the Atlantic, invade Mexico, trek to the North Pole, Club Seals, render whale fat etc.

It's really harmful to apply these narratives to reality, where race is a construct. Fantasy is the domain from which these narratives came and to where they belong. 

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga was an excellent film that featured a huge army of motorcycle nomads lead by dementus.

George Miller is on record somewhere, as using them as an analogy for the Huns, steppes people lead by Attila. 

When I watched that movie, I repeatedly got annoyed by the number of motorcycle nomads and the complete lack of supply trains. Like that gang just could not exist without starving to death in a matter of days.

I don't think Miller and his co-writers ever sat down to crunch the numbers on how many calories are needed to sustain the populations of the wasteland. The thing was, even though I couldn't help noticing it, I could just as easily let it go, realizing it was not the point. The point was the story being told.

Maybe the fantasy genre is overrepresented with power fantasies but I do not think fantasy is positively correlated with people attaining power in reality. Unless it correlates to periods of history when tertiary qualifications reliably predicted top quintile household incomes. In which case DnD would correlate to holding power and status in society in the same way that a decrease in Piracy leads to an increase in climate change.

Harley Quinn is in many ways a more interesting problematised fantasy than Orcs. This is because, really there's only been one case of a male identifying with the Joker and then killing a bunch of people as The Joker is want to do (that douchebag dipshit that shot a bunch of people at a premier of "The Dark Knight Rises") but women get involved with abusive men all the time. I think in Australia they are talking about a woman being killed by her domestic partner once every 4 or 8 days at the moment.

I think a statistical analysis would likely show that over the lifetime of the character Harley Quinn, the character has had no discernible effect on violence against women. By which I mean I'd bet that if anything since the early-mid-90s when Harley Quinn debuted in Batman: The Animated Series, to now, it's likely that in countries like the US, Canada, Australia and Western Europe if anything I'd predict the world has become marginally safer.

I would make that prediction because (austerity budgets aside) I think the support infrastructure has likely improved to enable more women to escape dangerous relationships.

I imagine we aren't much closer to solving the riddle of women who mistake danger for safety and safety for danger, who are (like men) susceptible to love bombing, mirroring and being rushed to commit. Just unlike men, women are much much more vulnerable to being beaten to death.

And I would emphasise that I am not saying that a bunch of women are inherently defective when it comes to mate selection. I know too many cases where people have had healthy relationships, then been targeted by abusers. Abusers target and recruit their victims. Abuse is a wicked problem with no clear solution.

Harley Quinn is more likely symptom than cause. Arguably her rehabilitation is likely a symptom of writers who have experienced or studied rehabilitation from abuse writing that into her character. 

But, after rehabilitation, a girl walks into a comic book store and picks up a comic and is presented with a less diverse cast of female characters. Furthermore, I can problematize Punch Line Harley's replacement villain right now, Punch Line's ability to set boundaries with Joker is an implicit victim blaming of Harley suggesting that Harley was simply too stupid or otherwise flawed to handle Joker. A dangerous message all round.

I'll just say I think Punch Line sucks, and thankfully the Lindy effect predicts she will cease to exist before Harley does. Just as Orcs will outlast them both.

When it comes to interpreting media with a critical eye, things are as problematic as you make them. Video games don't kill people, handguns kill people.

Quicksketch: Cheap Cheap Cheap

"The plot cost al Qaeda somewhere in the range of $400,000–500,000, of which

approximately $300,000 passed through the hijackers’ bank accounts in the United

States. The hijackers returned approximately $26,000 to a facilitator in the UAE in the

days prior to the attack. While in the United States, the hijackers spent money primarily

for flight training, travel, and living expenses (such as housing, food, cars, and auto

insurance). Extensive investigation has revealed no substantial source of domestic

financial support.

Neither the hijackers nor their financial facilitators were experts in the use of the

international financial system. They created a paper trail linking them to each other and

their facilitators. Still, they were easily adept enough to blend into the vast international

financial system without doing anything to reveal themselves as criminals, let alone

terrorists bent on mass murder. The money-laundering controls in place at the time were

largely focused on drug trafficking and large-scale financial fraud and could not have

detected the hijackers’ transactions. The controls were never intended to, and could not,

detect or disrupt the routine transactions in which the hijackers engaged." from the 9-11 commission, Exective Summary, Terrorist Financing.

I don't know if it's what I heard or about what I would have guessed but yeah the attacks on the Pentagon, World Trade Center Twin Towers etc. cost half a mil. 

To put it in perspective, the September 11 plot cost less than 0.25% of one of the hijacked planes. (though I cbf'ed adjusting for 23 years of inflation.)

Now in terms of the budgetary costs, the post 9-11 wars "on terror" is estimated around $8 trillion USD. 

So what I see when I look at this, as an incredibly fragile structure, and the cost-benefits is going to get very complex, like military-industrial-complex. I think it is reasonably beyond a civilian like me to comprehend the counterfactuals.

To me in all the years that have passed I've never really heard an argument that justifies the war in Iraq that would not also oblige the US to also prosecute a war against North Korea.

I'm getting side tracked, because in recent weeks something interesting happened in that some kid almost shot the presumptive Republican Presidential candidate with an AR-15.

There was a lot of reflexive talk and news coverage, because it is interesting, but this was more in line of 24 hour News Channel anchors interacting with pundits to speculate on what happened, what could have happened, what will happen etc.

Both more interesting and more disconcerting is that we still live in more or less the same world that managed to kill Frans Ferdinand. An event you can see dramatized in the historical fiction spy movie "The King's Man". 

Except, 20 million people likely wouldn't get dragged into trench warfare over a bunch of anachronistic treaties a  bunch of different nation states have in place to declare war with each other should some figure get popped.

I think many of my well-meaning left-leaning friends maybe don't appreciate how bad the chaos could have been had Trump's head popped like a melon. There's a great temptation on the left to think Trump is causing partisan insanity rather than being a symptom of it, at best a foci. 

And predictably it is a failure of the Secret Service, there job is to protect candidates so that one person gets one vote, not one person gets the only vote.

But let's look at the cost of the assassination attempt. Obviously it cost the shooter his life, so right there like the 9-11 attacks you probably rule out 99% of the worlds population through cost alone. Most people aren't willing to give their lives up. Sure there's a bunch of soldiers and cops and stuff, but the recruiting videos for those professions aren't "You will definitely die!"

Beyond that, like, the plot must have cost between $200~$300 USD. Okay, turns out I was wildly wrong, I blame media stereotypes. We are talking an AR-15 rifle retailing between $800-$1200 USD. Then a ladder which might be a couple of hundred bucks, it sounds like camo gear was just everyday wear for the shooter, and then the gas to drive from home to the rally.

Now Trump has a coffer of campaign funds in the vicinity of half a billion and it is probably reasonable to expect the reaction to his assassination to cost more than the 2020 George Floyd riots.

I'm going to indulge in expressing my ire at something that really annoys me, and that is when Trump boosters refer to his surviving the assassination attempt as "miraculous" because it isn't. Anyone interpreting the outcome as divine intervention needs to just go down to a shooting range and try and recreate the shot on a paper target. I think you would find the probability of missing, quite high.

Which again lends credence to the idea that a disturbed youth of no particular ideological bent executed a dumb plan that went badly (an innocent person was killed) and could have been disastrous.

Even with Andrew Jackson's failed assassination which required not one but two pistols to misfire at close range is not miraculous, given it predates the quality revolution in manufacturing by like 150 years. 

We just live with a basic asymmetry where it takes a second to wreck stuff and time to build. Maybe it's terrifying to contemplate that there's no amount of money that can be spent to guard against the forces of entropy but this thought should be most terrifying to the tyrants of the world. 

I feel, quite strongly, that the main thing that prevents us being victimised by crime, is that most people aren't criminals. I mean most people have probably pirated some IP illegally at some point in this internet age, but the fear of believers that without God anything is permitted is ill-founded.

That fact of reality is that everything is permitted in so far as if you are physically capable, you can do it. Society does the bulk of the negative reinforcement, for example a government agency sniper will shoot you dead if you open fire on a campaign rally.

Before that though, there's just the sheer fact that much as you might fantasize about doing violent things to people causing you anxiety and angst and disappointing you in the human race, almost nobody does it and that's actually a good thing.

The secret service will no doubt have to tighten things up, I'm sure there's some degree of contagion, like the US's tragic history of school shooting where Columbine was but the first high profile school shooting.

To some degree, putting up millions of dollars to fix a thousand dollar problem is the problem. But not necessarily so, the situation might be like the movie "The Martian" where the expense was justified by the significance of the human frontier, or it could be like the movie "se7en" where there's just no amount that you can shoot Kevin Spacey that is going to undo the damage he did.

In the next pandemic, I'd be more pleased to here the Victorian government in Australia paid Quarantine security $2,000 an hour than that they got the army in to do it. 

This is the main takeaway for those who want to live in an ordered and structured society. When half-a-million dollars can force you to spend 8 trillion, it makes sense to just create $200m a year in government jobs to track the terrorists. When a breach in quarantine costs a state billions in lockdown economic losses, it makes sense to pay hotel security 10x their hourly wage. 

It probably would behoove the Trump campaign to stage his rallies in Stadiums and other venues with security, than keep skimping on cheap outdoor venues and passing the cost onto taxpayers to basically have infinite secret service protection.