This might describe an Antifa although as noted, I don't think Antifa resistance to voting extends to making it difficult for others to vote, only discouraging people from participating in the process for far-lefty type reasons that I do not fully understand. It might describe a Proud Boy trying to divert attention away from the Proud Boys, and if so that seems a lot more congruent with trying to disrupt elections in Very Liberal Portland and the downtown, bluer part of Vancouver WA where the related arson took place (there's a very close election in that district and the rhetoric in the campaign commercials is Satanically heightened). Or it might describe someone whose political beliefs are not so easy to classify.
Folks who have reason to suspect their ballots were destroyed should seek out provisional ballots and re-vote. Election officials in both Multnomah and Clark Counties are working to determine whose ballots were destroyed (and in many cases they'll be able to if part of the ballot survived the fire).
I think the whole thing is ridiculous and Trump looks small and silly doing it. I suspect I'd say that even if I didn't dislike him so much. The face-bronzer makeup is being applied with less and less skill these days, have you noticed? And the orange high-viz vest looks silly over his suit, and no real garbage truck is ever that clean, and garbage trucks don't just drive around airport tarmacs, and to quote Tim Walz, Trump damn near killed himself trying to get in the thing.
The whole "Joe Biden called you garbage!" thing is also to my ears a clear attempt to recapture the magic of the Hillary Clinton Basket of Deplorables moment and drive Trump voters to the polls in a fit of outrage. Again I question how effective that will be -- it wasn't the candidate saying it this time, it was an old guy who is admittedly associated with the candidate, an old guy already driven out of the race for verbal miscues and perceived mental infirmity, and an old guy who we have thirty-five years of book on committing stupid gaffes that might or might not be attributable to his stutter.
I also think that the Basket of Deplorables Moment was not something that stands out as a singular cause of Hillary Clinton losing in 2016. The Comey Report and a general weakness in the Great Lake States by the Clinton campaign, on top of Clinton's sky-high negatives going into the campaign, all seem much more powerful to me by comparison. (Oh, and she still won the popular vote.)
Harris said the stateswomanlike thing when asked about all this "garbage" business. No one is paying attention to her on this flap, though, which yeah, that's net bad for her.
Whose mind is going to change because of it? "I wasn't going to vote at all, but now I'm gonna vote for Trump because Joe Biden called Trump supporters (who weren't me because I wasn't going to vote at all) garbage after a different Trump supporter called Peurto Ricans garbage?" (Presumably, such a person would simply omit the whole calling Puerto Ricans garbage part of this line of thought.) I submit for your consideration that such a person was probably going to find their way to the polls and vote for Trump anyway, because to paraphrase our own Andrew Donaldson, such a person views a Trump vote as an opportunity to show their middle finger to the Establishment, and that's kind of fun.
The result is a distraction from something else I guess. Good Gods in Asgard Above I am sick unto death of this sort of thing.
But as for the power of the garbage motif now? I personally don't think it's going to matter a damn bit. We're less than a week before election day. Alea iacta est.
To be fair, that has been the tune he's sung since The One He Got Really Right in 2008, and there's no reason to not take the basic message ("don't read much into early voting trends") to heart.
What is the lesson here? I don't understand what "moral allocation" means. So do we learn that liberals have more empathy for people (or entities, if you prefer) further away from their immediate social environment than do conservatives? Both have a center-to-northeast slant, what does that signify?
Congratulations to the editors on the dueling columns today about Donald Trump. Getting those columns scheduled and run opposite each other is skillful management of the site, a powerful catalyst to discussion, and a demonstration of the site's ongoing commitment to providing multiple diverging points of view in long-form essays. The internet was at its intellectual best when that sort of thing was all over the place, and Ordinary Times is keeping that fire lit.
Props to the editors.
As for the immediate issue: my opinion of Trump has always been worn prominently on my sleeve and no one in this community needs to be reminded of it. Have fun today, y'all, and try to keep it civil.
Looks like editorial staff was ready to endorse Harris, and Bezos vetoed them:
"An endorsement of Harris had been drafted by Post editorial page staffers but had yet to be published, according to two sources briefed on the sequence of events who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The decision not to publish was made by The Post's owner -- Amazon founder Jeff Bezos -- according to the same sources."
Point #3 seems particularly encouraging to me. If 3 out of 4 late deciders break Harris, and there are as many as 5% of the voters who are late deciders, that's a net gain of 2.5% nationally.
Yeah, I can 100% see that. There's going to have been plenty of early and absentee votes cast for him anyway, and the CW is he has a ceiling and a floor for his support.
Thing of it is, if he doesn't have the energy to make it through a full day of campaigning, does he have the energy to President come January? I recall we were required to consider similar sorts of concerns for another candidate only a few months ago...
Just saw Lawrence O'Donnell from MSNBC offering his thoughts on the debate and they're remarkable for a couple of reasons. First for playing the actual "enemies from within" remarks compared to the soft shit Baier tried to serve up. Second because it's a weird thing for a generally left-of-center commentator to be tackling the media establishment. Even if it is Fox News.
Baier: Damn, he tried to interrupt her a lot. I liked that he pressed her on several points and make clear to viewers where she was dodging his questions. And she did dodge several questions.
Harris: the election is all vibes to low information voters now, and the vibes to that interview were she stood up to him and held her ground. She looked and sounded Presidential, tough, strong. The low information voter will not discern whether she dodged questions or answered them: such a person will hear assertiveness and probably like it.
Another thought, going back to near the top of the OP, I'm struck by the tribute and high praise paid to Dementia 13. I chat sometimes with a film buff barkeep at one of my local taverns, and she admires Dementia 13 the most of all of Coppola's films too.
The reason why reminds me of active production company Blumhouse Productions. These folks are responsible for mainly low-budget (by modern Hollywood standards) horror movies including Paranormal Activity and progeny, The Purge and progeny, Get Out and Nope of Jordan Peele fame, Glass and Split by M. Night Shyamalan, and and a bunch of others. The recipe is get one or two names attracted to a project, give it a tight budget and then say "no" when the director comes back begging for more money to make an even more awesome movie than was requested.
Blumhouse makes eight to fifteen feature films a year, and they're almost all profitable, with good margins, because production costs stay under control. This forces directors to work within budgets, find creative solutions to storytelling challenges, and rely on good writing and acting rather than special effects to make the movie compelling. The movies don't all have to be big hits, they just need to tell stories that particular audiences will find fun enough that word-of-mouth will produce an ROI.
That's what happened with Dementia 13 and it's what happened with Get Out and it's a reminder that a whole lot of good art happens when the artist is forced to work within constraints. When an artist gains enough resources on their own that they can do things like mortgage billion-dollar wineries to get complete artistic control and unlimited filmmaking resources for themselves, the result can easily look like Megalopolis.
I saw it the week it was released. I knew going into it that it would be a glorious, overblown, and pretentious disaster. This movie commits every Coppola sin that every Coppola movie makes. These include inadequate lighting, casting and making up male actors in secondary roles such that they are indistinguishable from one another, an almost allergic aversion to editing, incomplete mattes (CGI backgrounds here, as noted in OP), and actors mumbling.
100% share in OP's complete frustration with the dangling plotlines and apparent refusal to actually use the analogies to Roman history that the characters' names and the extensive but unused Roman-esque plot points which ... wound up deviating from Roman history. About the only thing that seemed to actually track was Clodio's antics while in female dress, which I thought tracked the story of his infiltration of the Bona Dea ritual nicely -- except for the part where it made him politically radioactive; in Megalopolis, it seems completely disconnected from his subsequent rise to populist thug-in-chief.
After taking some time to process what I'd seen, I wound up concluding that maybe the movie was not meant to have a plot at all. We should instead view it as a kind of cinematic impressionism -- a series of scenes and images and vignettes that, when considered in retrospect, are supposed to give us the feeling of taking an emotional journey, and tell us a story of an artist who struggles to make his difficult but powerful vision reality and makes the world a better place for it, both for the world at large and for the family he forged along the way. Certainly Francis Ford Coppola would like that to be how he is remembered, and it's probably pretty close to the overall story he was trying to tell.
The end product, though, really isn't that impressionistic auto-epitaph. I'd now say that Megalopolis is The Fountainhead meets The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimenson. Would not have greenlit.
Got mine Thursday. Thursday night I was pretty run down, had a few chills and used more blankets to sleep than usual. Friday I was dehydrated (probably from sweating a lot in the night from all those blankets) but otherwise right as rain.
This is a far sight from 2020, when people were dying everywhere. Operation Warp Speed was really a good thing. I think Trump doesn't get a lot of credit for it for the reasons the OP says, but also because those of us who think about "credit" for governmental actions realize that President Clinton would have done nearly the exact same thing, or if she had been impeached out of office by then, President Kaine would have also.
The interesting counter-factual to me is not what a Democratic President would have done in that circumstance, but rather if President Trump had succumbed to COVID when he got it, and President Pence had launched Operation Warp Speed (or called it something like Operation Swift Angel; Pence is famously a very religious man) and done it in memoriam for the fallen President. That would have been the only -- but a big -- achievement of his short Presidency as he stood for election; my imagination suggests that in this counterfactual, President Pence would have been elected to a term in his own right and a forever WHACK against the liberal trope that religious conservatives are anti-science. You may imagine further political, legal, international, and cultural implications from there (SCOTUS, Ukraine, Israel, pandemic recovery, etc.).
Here's where things are today if the polls are accurate.
https://www.270towin.com/map-images/lrQB4
What would change over the next 28 days? Hurricane relief, for one. If it goes well, affected states will presumably have good feelings about the government helping them out and sway blue. Not enough in Florida, I'd think, even if Florida is hit really hard tomorrow and even if FEMA does a great job responding. And while there's no real disaster abrewing in Arizona other than Kari Lake, that may well be enough to drag things down. Arizona has voted D, by narrow margins, for President and Senate recently. So I think it could look like this...
...which is 2020 again, except NC flips D.
NARRATOR: FEMA is not going to do a great job responding, and even if it does, it'll be portrayed as doing a bad job responding because SOMETHING is going to go wrong. So, there's going to be no post-disaster blue shift in the southeast, and that leaves us with my actual prediction:
On “What If Kamala Wins?”
Yeah I've heard that before somewhere...
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/28/2024”
Don't drive your own car to do crimes where you should anticipate getting your picture took.
"
Echoing Steve, the local skinny here in Portland is that the bomber was a Millenial (age 30-40), white, and male, with experience in metalworking, driving an early 2000's model Volvo S60. We aren't being told the license plates in the news, so far as I can tell, but there's pretty clear video of the incendiary device being deposited so it's a good bet that investigators do know the plate.
This might describe an Antifa although as noted, I don't think Antifa resistance to voting extends to making it difficult for others to vote, only discouraging people from participating in the process for far-lefty type reasons that I do not fully understand. It might describe a Proud Boy trying to divert attention away from the Proud Boys, and if so that seems a lot more congruent with trying to disrupt elections in Very Liberal Portland and the downtown, bluer part of Vancouver WA where the related arson took place (there's a very close election in that district and the rhetoric in the campaign commercials is Satanically heightened). Or it might describe someone whose political beliefs are not so easy to classify.
Folks who have reason to suspect their ballots were destroyed should seek out provisional ballots and re-vote. Election officials in both Multnomah and Clark Counties are working to determine whose ballots were destroyed (and in many cases they'll be able to if part of the ballot survived the fire).
"
I think the whole thing is ridiculous and Trump looks small and silly doing it. I suspect I'd say that even if I didn't dislike him so much. The face-bronzer makeup is being applied with less and less skill these days, have you noticed? And the orange high-viz vest looks silly over his suit, and no real garbage truck is ever that clean, and garbage trucks don't just drive around airport tarmacs, and to quote Tim Walz, Trump damn near killed himself trying to get in the thing.
The whole "Joe Biden called you garbage!" thing is also to my ears a clear attempt to recapture the magic of the Hillary Clinton Basket of Deplorables moment and drive Trump voters to the polls in a fit of outrage. Again I question how effective that will be -- it wasn't the candidate saying it this time, it was an old guy who is admittedly associated with the candidate, an old guy already driven out of the race for verbal miscues and perceived mental infirmity, and an old guy who we have thirty-five years of book on committing stupid gaffes that might or might not be attributable to his stutter.
I also think that the Basket of Deplorables Moment was not something that stands out as a singular cause of Hillary Clinton losing in 2016. The Comey Report and a general weakness in the Great Lake States by the Clinton campaign, on top of Clinton's sky-high negatives going into the campaign, all seem much more powerful to me by comparison. (Oh, and she still won the popular vote.)
Harris said the stateswomanlike thing when asked about all this "garbage" business. No one is paying attention to her on this flap, though, which yeah, that's net bad for her.
Whose mind is going to change because of it? "I wasn't going to vote at all, but now I'm gonna vote for Trump because Joe Biden called Trump supporters (who weren't me because I wasn't going to vote at all) garbage after a different Trump supporter called Peurto Ricans garbage?" (Presumably, such a person would simply omit the whole calling Puerto Ricans garbage part of this line of thought.) I submit for your consideration that such a person was probably going to find their way to the polls and vote for Trump anyway, because to paraphrase our own Andrew Donaldson, such a person views a Trump vote as an opportunity to show their middle finger to the Establishment, and that's kind of fun.
The result is a distraction from something else I guess. Good Gods in Asgard Above I am sick unto death of this sort of thing.
But as for the power of the garbage motif now? I personally don't think it's going to matter a damn bit. We're less than a week before election day. Alea iacta est.
"
To be fair, that has been the tune he's sung since The One He Got Really Right in 2008, and there's no reason to not take the basic message ("don't read much into early voting trends") to heart.
Absent some black swan event... alea iacta est.
On “What If Kamala Wins?”
What is the lesson here? I don't understand what "moral allocation" means. So do we learn that liberals have more empathy for people (or entities, if you prefer) further away from their immediate social environment than do conservatives? Both have a center-to-northeast slant, what does that signify?
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/28/2024”
Congratulations to the editors on the dueling columns today about Donald Trump. Getting those columns scheduled and run opposite each other is skillful management of the site, a powerful catalyst to discussion, and a demonstration of the site's ongoing commitment to providing multiple diverging points of view in long-form essays. The internet was at its intellectual best when that sort of thing was all over the place, and Ordinary Times is keeping that fire lit.
Props to the editors.
As for the immediate issue: my opinion of Trump has always been worn prominently on my sleeve and no one in this community needs to be reminded of it. Have fun today, y'all, and try to keep it civil.
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/21/2024”
Yeah as far as I know she's always been out. Like -- this is not news to anyone, in Wisconsin or in Hovde's home state of California, either.
On “From The Washington Post: On Political Endorsement”
I don't know about that.
"
Apparently WaPo editor-at-large Robert Kagan has resigned from the newspaper over this.
"
Looks like editorial staff was ready to endorse Harris, and Bezos vetoed them:
"An endorsement of Harris had been drafted by Post editorial page staffers but had yet to be published, according to two sources briefed on the sequence of events who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The decision not to publish was made by The Post's owner -- Amazon founder Jeff Bezos -- according to the same sources."
On “The Election’s Home Stretch”
Point #3 seems particularly encouraging to me. If 3 out of 4 late deciders break Harris, and there are as many as 5% of the voters who are late deciders, that's a net gain of 2.5% nationally.
"
Yeah, I can 100% see that. There's going to have been plenty of early and absentee votes cast for him anyway, and the CW is he has a ceiling and a floor for his support.
Thing of it is, if he doesn't have the energy to make it through a full day of campaigning, does he have the energy to President come January? I recall we were required to consider similar sorts of concerns for another candidate only a few months ago...
On “Campaign Scratchpad: Known Unknowns”
He could have made that point on the Hawk Tuah gal's podcast, too.
On “The Election’s Home Stretch”
If, as the OP hopes, Trumpism is a spent force and recedes from the GOP, what replaces it won't be a return to 1980's style Reaganesque conservatism. It'll be something different from what conservatism has been before. Of all places, Jon Stewart's "The Weekly Show Podcast" had a very interesting discussion about what role taxes and tariffs might play in the future with Oren Cass and Zachary Carter; I commend it to you.
On “Group Activity: VP Kamala Harris Fox News Interview”
LOL: Fox News interviewed Bret Baier to ask him what HE thought of the interview. Guess what his opinion is.
https://youtu.be/QPO9Ua1ZPFU?si=nTWr0sFhvhokdr3w
On “Open Mic for the week of 10/14/2024”
Let us all hope and pray so. This has been going on for quite long enough.
On “Group Activity: VP Kamala Harris Fox News Interview”
Just saw Lawrence O'Donnell from MSNBC offering his thoughts on the debate and they're remarkable for a couple of reasons. First for playing the actual "enemies from within" remarks compared to the soft shit Baier tried to serve up. Second because it's a weird thing for a generally left-of-center commentator to be tackling the media establishment. Even if it is Fox News.
https://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/lawrence-bret-baier-lied-and-kamala-harris-forcefully-responds-221955141607
"
Baier: Damn, he tried to interrupt her a lot. I liked that he pressed her on several points and make clear to viewers where she was dodging his questions. And she did dodge several questions.
Harris: the election is all vibes to low information voters now, and the vibes to that interview were she stood up to him and held her ground. She looked and sounded Presidential, tough, strong. The low information voter will not discern whether she dodged questions or answered them: such a person will hear assertiveness and probably like it.
On “Megalopolis Is Terrible And Everyone Should See It”
Another thought, going back to near the top of the OP, I'm struck by the tribute and high praise paid to Dementia 13. I chat sometimes with a film buff barkeep at one of my local taverns, and she admires Dementia 13 the most of all of Coppola's films too.
The reason why reminds me of active production company Blumhouse Productions. These folks are responsible for mainly low-budget (by modern Hollywood standards) horror movies including Paranormal Activity and progeny, The Purge and progeny, Get Out and Nope of Jordan Peele fame, Glass and Split by M. Night Shyamalan, and and a bunch of others. The recipe is get one or two names attracted to a project, give it a tight budget and then say "no" when the director comes back begging for more money to make an even more awesome movie than was requested.
Blumhouse makes eight to fifteen feature films a year, and they're almost all profitable, with good margins, because production costs stay under control. This forces directors to work within budgets, find creative solutions to storytelling challenges, and rely on good writing and acting rather than special effects to make the movie compelling. The movies don't all have to be big hits, they just need to tell stories that particular audiences will find fun enough that word-of-mouth will produce an ROI.
That's what happened with Dementia 13 and it's what happened with Get Out and it's a reminder that a whole lot of good art happens when the artist is forced to work within constraints. When an artist gains enough resources on their own that they can do things like mortgage billion-dollar wineries to get complete artistic control and unlimited filmmaking resources for themselves, the result can easily look like Megalopolis.
"
I saw it the week it was released. I knew going into it that it would be a glorious, overblown, and pretentious disaster. This movie commits every Coppola sin that every Coppola movie makes. These include inadequate lighting, casting and making up male actors in secondary roles such that they are indistinguishable from one another, an almost allergic aversion to editing, incomplete mattes (CGI backgrounds here, as noted in OP), and actors mumbling.
100% share in OP's complete frustration with the dangling plotlines and apparent refusal to actually use the analogies to Roman history that the characters' names and the extensive but unused Roman-esque plot points which ... wound up deviating from Roman history. About the only thing that seemed to actually track was Clodio's antics while in female dress, which I thought tracked the story of his infiltration of the Bona Dea ritual nicely -- except for the part where it made him politically radioactive; in Megalopolis, it seems completely disconnected from his subsequent rise to populist thug-in-chief.
After taking some time to process what I'd seen, I wound up concluding that maybe the movie was not meant to have a plot at all. We should instead view it as a kind of cinematic impressionism -- a series of scenes and images and vignettes that, when considered in retrospect, are supposed to give us the feeling of taking an emotional journey, and tell us a story of an artist who struggles to make his difficult but powerful vision reality and makes the world a better place for it, both for the world at large and for the family he forged along the way. Certainly Francis Ford Coppola would like that to be how he is remembered, and it's probably pretty close to the overall story he was trying to tell.
The end product, though, really isn't that impressionistic auto-epitaph. I'd now say that Megalopolis is The Fountainhead meets The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimenson. Would not have greenlit.
On “Lone Star Rising”
Six years is also only a short time in the future. 2032 will be here before we know it.
Both my statement and yours are true.
On “The COVID-Flu Cocktail: A New Fall Tradition”
Got mine Thursday. Thursday night I was pretty run down, had a few chills and used more blankets to sleep than usual. Friday I was dehydrated (probably from sweating a lot in the night from all those blankets) but otherwise right as rain.
This is a far sight from 2020, when people were dying everywhere. Operation Warp Speed was really a good thing. I think Trump doesn't get a lot of credit for it for the reasons the OP says, but also because those of us who think about "credit" for governmental actions realize that President Clinton would have done nearly the exact same thing, or if she had been impeached out of office by then, President Kaine would have also.
The interesting counter-factual to me is not what a Democratic President would have done in that circumstance, but rather if President Trump had succumbed to COVID when he got it, and President Pence had launched Operation Warp Speed (or called it something like Operation Swift Angel; Pence is famously a very religious man) and done it in memoriam for the fallen President. That would have been the only -- but a big -- achievement of his short Presidency as he stood for election; my imagination suggests that in this counterfactual, President Pence would have been elected to a term in his own right and a forever WHACK against the liberal trope that religious conservatives are anti-science. You may imagine further political, legal, international, and cultural implications from there (SCOTUS, Ukraine, Israel, pandemic recovery, etc.).
On “The Joy Of Opening Time Capsules: The 2024 Presidential Election”
Here's where things are today if the polls are accurate.
https://www.270towin.com/map-images/lrQB4
What would change over the next 28 days? Hurricane relief, for one. If it goes well, affected states will presumably have good feelings about the government helping them out and sway blue. Not enough in Florida, I'd think, even if Florida is hit really hard tomorrow and even if FEMA does a great job responding. And while there's no real disaster abrewing in Arizona other than Kari Lake, that may well be enough to drag things down. Arizona has voted D, by narrow margins, for President and Senate recently. So I think it could look like this...
...which is 2020 again, except NC flips D.
NARRATOR: FEMA is not going to do a great job responding, and even if it does, it'll be portrayed as doing a bad job responding because SOMETHING is going to go wrong. So, there's going to be no post-disaster blue shift in the southeast, and that leaves us with my actual prediction:
And there, there is my marker.
On “Let’s face it: We knew that Harris would win back in August”
That last link, to the Lichtman post on Twitter/X. Man, the replies. Oh man. So glad I'm not on there anymore.