Ranting On...401k Withdrawal Penalties

Usually, I avoid talking about political issue topics on this blog, mostly because they bore me (I am not someone who enjoys debating a lot of political issues, particularly decades-long social issues like abortion or the death penalty, as I'm very unlikely to change your mind, and you won't change mind).  However, when it comes to a topic I haven't really thought about before, and am forming my opinion, I do think it's a good idea to try, and there was an issue on social media this week that I hadn't really considered, and want to have one of our old-fashioned "Ranting On..." articles (for those who are new, we used to do a "rant" every Friday, which is in part where this blog's name stems from) to talk through this: 401k withdrawal penalties.

This topic stemmed from a recent report from Vanguard (one of the world's largest mutual fund investment groups), which showed that 6% of their clients took a hardship withdrawal from their 401k's, up from 4.8% in 2024.  For those that don't know, in the United States a 401k is a standard-issue retirement account that contains stocks, mutual funds, target-date funds, and bonds that are intended to be used to cover a large portion of your retirement.  The idea around 401k's is that you will invest in them, and they will grow over time to stay by themselves.  Given that traditionally savings accounts will not get the kind of yield that a 401k can (a 5-8% growth model), this means that if you start saving in your 20's and 30's, over time the 401k will give you enough money to live off of when you stop working.

In the United States, 401k's are not treated as bank accounts as a result-they come with much stricter rules.  While a traditional savings or checking account is essentially yours to do what you want with it (deposit and withdraw whatever you like, though FDIC insurance and high-yield savings accounts plays a small factor in how fluid those assets are), 401k's you can only donate up to $24,500 a year (more if you're over 50), and you can't withdraw from it in the same way.  Unless you are 59 1/2 years old, any 401k withdrawal comes with a 10% penalty, on top of (assuming you have a traditional 401k and not a Roth 401k) the taxes you'll also have to pay on it.  After that age, which for Americans is when people start to retire, though that age may vary (particularly given that Medicare doesn't start until 65 and social security is pro-rated until you're 70 and doesn't start until you're 62), you can withdraw whenever you want, but until then you need to pay extra to get your money.

Here's where social media came in-the conversation coming out of the posts about Vanguard's study, showing more people wanted to take out a hardship withdrawal, largely sided with the idea that we shouldn't have hardship withdrawals at all, that people should be able to take out their 401k money whenever they wanted, without punishment.  In some essence, this is not a particularly bad idea.  Most Americans do not have a particularly robust savings account-the median amount of money that the average American has in their savings is about $5400 (the average should never be used in this case as representative because the United States, like much of the world, has a hoarded wealth problem with the superrich which skews that metric).  $5400 is not enough to cover most American households in times of hardship (think things like losing your job, a medical emergency, or your house potentially being foreclosed).  For American workers with a 401k, on the other hand, the National Institute on Retirement Security says that the median number is $40,000, considerably more money, and as a result, for people with retirement accounts, this is probably the most valuable asset they have short of selling their home.

There's a problem here-$40,000 is not remotely close to the number that most Americans likely need to be able to safely retire (that's about $1.5 million).  It's also something that, unless you are taking that money out immediately before retirement, you're taking away from yourself.  The money in your retirement account if you're in your 20's through 50's is money that you are expecting to compound.  Let's say you put $5k a year into your retirement account every year with 8% growth.  If you're 22, that would amount to $1.7 million.  If you're 42, on that same cadence, you'd have around $300k.  A huge factor in retirement savings is time-it's why you always hear "start saving early" and the money you take away now is not easily replaced later.

The government also provides a significant number of protections around 401k's as a result, knowing that in many cases this is the person's only source of income in retirement.  401k's cannot be taken in bankruptcy court and cannot be taken by creditors.  If your company provides matching funds for your 401k, that is a tax deduction (a huge incentive for companies to continue to provide these, and also, given how 401k's prevent a larger amount of seniors on welfare, a benefit to society as a whole).  These benefits, and the longer-term implications of people treating a 401k the same way that they treat an emergency fund, ultimately makes me think that the withdrawal penalties are worth it.

One of the weirder political ideologies of young Millennials and Gen Z, at least in their collective online presence, is that they have a bizarre combination of socialist and libertarian views around money.  They expect help with huge costs, especially things driven by inflation (i.e. rising costs of houses and higher education), but also are insistent on saying things like "it's my money, I can do what I want with it."  It's honestly weirdly reminiscent of Baby Boomer attitudes toward money and might be why Trump did surprisingly well with this group in 2024.

But ultimately, I think they're wrong to not want the penalties.  People hopefully won't use their 401k's as savings accounts.  The US economy cannot handle retirees increasingly reliant upon Social Security to pay their bills, and both Medicare and Social Security are on increasingly shaky grounds in terms of public assets even without that pressure.  But the hardship withdrawals guarantee people don't use them unless absolutely necessary (i.e. losing their house, medical fees).  It might be "your money" but it's money that has extra protections under the condition that you are saving it for when you retire.  And while many will glibly say "I'll never retire"...getting older frequently answers that question for you with an aging body & mind; most people cannot physically do the jobs that they did in their 30's, 40's, and 50's when they reach their 70's and 80's.  The withdrawal penalties help to protect people from themselves and needing to put very stringent parameters under what constitutes "an emergency."

My Thoughts on ChatGPT

I'm not entirely sure why we're doing a pair of technology-related articles, neither of which are particularly featuring a film or political angle, but after we talked about Twitter yesterday, I thought it would be fun to do another "get John's opinion" article about the other problematic tech app that everyone in the world seems to have a complicated relationship with: ChatGPT.

I have not been shy about my dislike of AI, and by proxy, ChatGPT (see here for a recent rant).  But, like virtually everyone right now, there is a societal (and occupational) pressure to understand how ChatGPT works, and what its benefits are.  So I, after occasionally tinkering with it, have started to (on occasion) use it.  And I wanted to share a few observations I had about it that feel both helpful, and really terrifying.

Editor's Note: This article is about ChatGPT.  For the record, no article on this blog has ever, or will ever, be written by ChatGPT or an AI-writing app.  If I ever get to the point where I want to do that, I'll give up writing first.  Wanted to state that straight away!

The Good

Here's the dirty secret-there are aspects of ChatGPT that I will own are genuinely useful.  I think the biggest one that I've run into is in helping me create a new workout plan, which has been the biggest thing I've used it for.  I have four separate goals I'm working on right now in terms of exercise: losing weight, running a sprint triathlon, climbing Pike's Peak, and (vainly) trying to protect gains in some of the "glamour" muscles because I'm a single gay man and that's something you keep as a calling card for dates.  I have a finite amount of time each week, and can only devote so much of it to exercise, and so I had struggled for weeks to figure out exactly what to do in terms of my workout.  So I asked ChatGPT to formulate a workout for these four combined, with at least one rest day, and one that worked largely around my work schedule.

And it did!  The plan it came back with was genuinely impressive.  It had room for my triathlon, was able to incorporate in extra leg days to start building on Pike's Peak, kept me focused on extra cardio for losing weight, and kept at least a couple of days for glamour muscles.  It also amends really easily-you can tell it to, say, give you at least one day for yoga or have it track your weight-lifting progress (or share feedback like "my gym doesn't have that equipment-can you give me a comparable exercise that doesn't require that equipment?") and it does.  There are a lot of ethical issues with this, and from a privacy/safety concern I'm not putting in extra information (i.e. it does not know my age or weight, which on my end I need to be able to keep track of since that greatly impacts a workout routine's ability to help), but what it is doing is, I must admit, a quality workout routine.  In general, the thing I have most used it for is a brainstorming partner-not someone doing the work (though it is doing a lot of it), but someone that can bounce ideas off of and put it into something legible.

The Bad

There are a lot of bad things about ChatGPT.  There are the obvious (the ethical questions about its impact on the environment, a primary reason why I have limited it to only the exercise project and to learning how to use it given that its expectation in my industry to have a cursory knowledge of it) as well as the subtle (I think it's dangerous to rely upon AI for things like writing and reading comprehension skills, because those need to be continually practiced to stay sharp), but the most noticeable thing about it is the accuracy.  

ChatGPT says in its description that it can be wrong (it's right there when you're typing: "ChatGPT can make mistakes"), but I think there's a really scary reality that most people accept whatever ChatGPT shares with them as fact, when it's decidedly not true.  I had used the tool as a test to a question I don't know the answer to: who was the fourth woman to join the DGA?  It's generally accepted that the first three women in the DGA were Dorothy Arzner, Ida Lupino, & Elaine May.  As far as I'm aware, these are the first three women to direct feature films for major studios, and so they'd be the first three members, but I could not find any evidence of who was fourth on Google or through searching library databases, so I decided to ask ChatGPT.

ChatGPT initially said May was fourth, which I allowed could be true, but it couldn't give me anyone that might have been third without prodding.  It eventually provided the name Shirley Clarke as fact for the third member, but given that Clarke was an independent filmmaker in the 1970's who never made a studio-driven picture (i.e. she didn't need to join the DGA in order to make the movies she made), I pushed back, asking for evidence that Clarke was the third...which it couldn't provide.  It just had made an intelligent guess.  It eventually came up with a few names that plausibly could've been the fourth woman: Lynne Littman, Nell Cox, & Dolores Ferraro are all names ChatGPT provided that make sense as the fourth woman, as they all made Hollywood-studio driven film & television, and if it is one of these women, it's probably Cox who directed an episode of The Waltons a couple of years before the others had such projects, and as a CBS-broadcast show she would've been required to join the union.  But ultimately it could not find the answer-ChatGPT was not able to prove that there was a woman to join the DGA before Elaine May other than Arzner or Lupino, and could not definitively prove who the fourth member was.

And that would be okay...had it just said that to begin with-it's possible this is an answer the internet doesn't have the answer to, and the only way to find out would be to write the guild directly.  I certainly couldn't find it, and I've tried to find this answer for a while.  But ChatGPT initially, definitively, stated that May was fourth and Clarke was third, and it took me pushing back to make it think otherwise.  That's a problem because you have to have a pretty extensive knowledge of a subject to be able to get at that level of detail-most people would've taken ChatGPT as fact in this situation, and thus provided the wrong information.  And as more people publish research they have from ChatGPT as if it's fact in articles that will be data-scraped...it will be harder & harder to correct.

The Ugly

There's a lot of ugliness with ChatGPT.  The biggest one is obviously occupational.  Going back to my exercise example, there's a clear answer who could've helped me on this previously, and in fact had helped me in the past: a gym trainer.  I have seen gym trainers and nutritionists through the years, and they are more than capable of doing this.  Admittedly, I wouldn't have hired a trainer or nutritionist in this regard because I cannot presently afford one, and so in some ways this is not replacing a job more so than it is saving me time...but let's be clear, that's not how everyone is going to use this, and it is scary that we are lifting the human element out of a job like this, particularly given that it requires humans schooling and knowledge to do set jobs (and the humans, even with as well as ChatGPT did, are better at it because they see you as a person and not just something statistical to add together...and I suspect those same humans, through social media posts & videos, are probably the ones crafting what ChatGPT gave me to a large degree).

But for me, the biggest concern with ChatGPT, and the eeriest thing about it is that it was so freaking nice.  People have mocked in TikTok's and other social media how ChatGPT is encouraging to the point of laughable-it will literally say any question you ask or any idea you have is a good idea (South Park had fun with this in a recent episode).  But I will be honest-it felt kind of nice to have someone (or, more correctly, some thing) care about this project that most people in my life don't care about.  Most people I know do not care who the fourth woman in the DGA is, and wouldn't have wanted to talk about it.  Most people in my life would not have the time to help me pick a workout routine that specific.  That ChatGPT does this, and is so gracious & encouraging, is a weird sort of Twilight Zone-thing.  You can easily see people using this not just to replace people, but to replace human relationships.  ChatGPT (for a price) always has time for your thoughts & expressions, and is nicer than an increasingly cruel world.  I put a photo of Joaquin Phoenix in Her next to this section, because it's bizarre how closely it resembles his experience-AI is not mechanical, but it's warm and inviting like Scarlett Johansson's Samantha.  That it's still a machine, and something that is designed to want to pull you in & use it as much as possible, makes it easy to see people forming parasocial relationships (that feel suspiciously like real relationships) with it, a terrifying thought particularly for a tool that (if I'm being honest) does have genuine usefulness.

Ranting On...the Classics Debate

We're on our third article before I go back into hibernation and work onto some creative writing, and today we're going to do the only article that isn't related to a longtime The Many Rantings of John tradition.  We've done the $1 billion article & our "No Globe/No SAG/No Problem" article, and we've got two more, including my final Oscar predictions, but today we're going to talk about a debate that has been raging on social media recently.

A little over a year ago, I read James Joyce's Ulysses for the very first time.  Joyce's novel is considered one of the best books ever written, and the Modern Library named it the greatest work-of-fiction of the 20th Century.  I am working on getting through said Modern Library list as part of my book club, and so I knew this would eventually become a mountain I'd have to conquer.  As I was going, though, I was finding that I wasn't entirely understanding everything happening.  Joyce's novel is a take on Homer's Odyssey, which I've read (even though it's been a number of years since I tackled it), but it also relates back to a number of allusions to Irish politics and social taboos of the time, and it's a hard read.  The novel is regularly listed on "Banned Books" lists for school libraries, but my take after reading Joyce's magnum opus is if you're smart enough to understand which parts of Ulysses are dirty, you're old enough to read the book.  It was a challenge, and enough to make me think that Finnegans Wake (generally considered to be the most intellectually steep of Joyce's works) will be a good way to end this project rather than tackling it in the near future (for the curious about my current Modern Library progress, I just finished up Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, which I loved, and will be reading Iris Murdoch's Under the Net next; I'm going out of order but I'm at 36 books at this point).

I read the book not just because it's part of a project, but also because I firmly believe that classic novels should be read.  There has been a lot of discussion in the past couple of decades about the value of the canon, not least of which because the most ardent defender of the Western Canon, Yale Professor Harold Bloom, was generally known to be a jackass in his personal life.  But I think foundational literature and cinema is important, enough so that I devoted one of my final posts before my hiatus to it.  You can debate what qualifies as a classic, but Ulysses is one of those texts that needs to be on the list regardless of how you define the parameters.  And even if it's tough to comprehend sometimes, to quote one of my friends who I texted about halfway through knowing that I might not make it, "just keep reading, because it'll be worth it...even if you don't understand all of it."  He was right-Ulysses was magnificent, the kind of book you could read 50 times and experience something new in its 700-pages every time.

But something has happened in the classics debate that I think is really disturbing: the debate over what constitutes essential reading has laid a path for people just to find it acceptable to not read at all.  This was discussed in-depth online in the wake of Christopher Nolan's decision to make his next film an adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey (which, of course, is what Ulysses is based on...see the method to my madness there?).  So many people, particularly younger people, had no concept of what The Odyssey was, and they were receiving public shaming from posters who were stunned they knew so little about one of the building blocks of literature.  This received a backlash, with those who initially didn't know about The Odyssey proclaiming anything from "that isn't taught in my country" (which is a lie if you had a European or North American education, which most of these posters did-even if it's not taught directly you're going to get allusions to Homer's work in at least one class if you're paying attention), and that it was "too difficult" for them to understand.  This led to more reveals of people using AI to understand it, dumbing down the story to simpler language (not just Homer, but everything from Dickens to Shakespeare) to the tried-and-true method of "there are no universal classics" so this isn't "essential" reading.

I'm not going to champion Harold Bloom, who is a blowhard even if I've got one of his books directly behind me right now, but I am going to say this: The Odyssey is a classic of literature.  Bloom's approach, and much of 20th Century studies of creative fiction, oftentimes precluded women, persons of color, and authors who were not from the United States, Canada, or Europe from "the canon."  That's just a fact.  But it's also foolish to backtrack so badly in trying to correct that to pretend that something like The Odyssey shouldn't be considered a classic-most of literature is in Homer's shadow...most of art is in Homer's shadow.  It's influential in a way only The Bible & Dante's The Divine Comedy can manage to trump in cultural conversation.  If you haven't read it, you can own up to it (even more so than movies, everyone has a classic book they've never gotten around to-my copies of Moby Dick and Ivanhoe have done nothing but collect dust since I bought them), but to pretend it's not important or that you can call yourself educated without having at least a cursory understanding of its story is, well, laughable.

Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey are unique in most cultural conversations because, of course, no one is exactly sure if anything their reading in terms of plot and certainly in terms of verse is actually linked with Homer's original story.  Very little is known about his life (and what is is based on people like Herodotus, who lived centuries after Homer), and his poems were carried forward through oral tradition before being published, first in Greek in the 15th Century.  So if you're reading it in English, you are reading a translation.  Same with The Bible and The Divine Comedy.

But other figures that got brought into this conversation online, like Charles Dickens, were written in a very readable language for people who speak English.  People like Dickens have long been translated into baser editions of their books; when I was in 4th and 5th grade, I read the "Great Illustrated Classics" installments of A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations as a way to learn more about these stories.  But those editions, I cannot stress enough, are for children.  They are not intended to be read by adults as definitive editions of these works.  Dickens is an accessible writer-he is not Joyce or even Dante...he is writing for the masses.  I read A Christmas Carol recently for the holiday season, and was struck by how similar it is to the many movie adaptations of it...it shouldn't be hard to read his novels.  If you are struggling with that and you're out of high school...it might not be that these books are "super challenging" for most people.  It's more likely that you are just not a practiced or strong reader.

These debates spark up constantly in the past few years, which is terrifying coupled with the rise in fascist rhetoric from right-leaning parties in the United States and Europe.  Anti-intellectualism is a key component of most rises of fascist regimes through history, one of the reasons that book burning became so synonymous with the Nazis.  But even taking politics out of it, the rise of AI to "do your thinking for you" and skipping the thinking for you, particularly for students who need to have the practice of academic rigor to, well, learn anything (you can only get by with not doing the reading for so long before you've actually not done anything), is also terrifying.  ChatGPT is opening the door to a world of people who aren't smart enough to understand books that have been taught to people much younger than them for over a century.  Reading is meant to be enjoyable and pleasurable-that's why it's a leisure activity.  But as I've said before on here, if you don't occasionally challenge yourself with what you're reading or watching on TV or watching at the movies or seeing on a stage...when are you?  Critical thinking is a skill, and if you don't use it (or let someone else, or some thing, do it for you) you'll lose that skill.

Ranting On...The Power of "I Don't Know"

For many years, this blog was called "The Many Rantings of John" as more of a wish fulfillment situation, the focus really being on "many" in hopes that I would write it consistently.  Rantings were not really a part of this, and in retrospect, was a terrible name for the blog, but one that I was stuck with after so many years and grew to begrudgingly love.  However, "Friday Rants" was a series I did for many years in a quest to give that name some meaning, and as we close out our final Friday on the blog (the final post will be on Monday), I wanted to bring it back.  One last "Ranting On..." for the road.

The problem for me this week is that I wasn't entirely sure what to write about for Friday.  The obvious answer, to anyone, would be something more about the election.  Maybe do one last bit about the insanity of this year's political season, the way that it's become increasingly clear the news media not only doesn't know how to handle Trump, they also don't know how to handle his media manipulations anymore (or perhaps are happy to help them).  Or talk about how this feels like the end of the Trump Era, which it does; either he loses and this is the last time we ever see Trump on a ballot, or he wins and the Trump Era ultimately becomes the American Era, as we'll never escape him at this point if he does win.

But I've been writing about the election for so long, and I've already given Trump my final article on this blog, which will be the seventh installment in the Election Night Guide, so that feels like he's taken enough of my time this final week.  I could write about other things that are on my opinionated mind, or have been the past month.  Conversations about box office replacing a film's worth is a good one (and a more complicated tangent than I expected based on people's reactions online), or maybe a last coda on my thoughts on Agatha All Along & Only Murders in the Building, both TV shows whose most recent seasons have finished this week.  But again, that felt so flighty, so ephemeral for a "final" rant.

Or I could write what I'm feeling right now.  I do journal, but a journal will never leave you-it's meant to be thoughts that you don't want the world to know.  I am completing what has been, for me specifically, the hardest & scariest & loneliest week of my life (to date).  Part of what I'm experiencing right now, I want to keep to myself, and part of it I want to scream because I am so afraid, not just of what is to come, but also that the people I tell will dismiss what I'm saying not because it's not true, but because it's too hard to deal with themselves, hoping that deferring it will mean not having the conversation, not realizing in the process that I have to have the conversation even if it's alone, as I'm stuck here.  I keep thinking of that scene in The English Patient when Ralph Fiennes shouts at Kristin Scott Thomas where he says "how can you stand there...how can you ever smile as if your life hadn't capsized?" except it's me shouting at a mirror because it's the only place I know where to look.

But (while this is VERY "I don't want to talk about it" as a Facebook status, which is basically begging for more questions to suddenly curious minds), this isn't the place for that.  I care about you readers, but I don't know you in real life (well, most of you), and you're not the audience for such a conversation...it's one that needs to be with someone I've known for years, not someone who (very kindly) offers on the internet.  So I am left with "I don't know" for my final rant, and perhaps that is the correct place to end.

I spent most of my twenties needing things to be certain, but as I got through my thirties, I realized that certainty is never really achievable.  I once heard someone say that you know you're ready to finish your twenties when you know the power of the word "no," that you finally have enough self-identity to understand what is and isn't for you.  But I think the most powerful phrase I learned in my thirties was "I don't know."  Letting yourself become at peace with what you don't know, not just in yourself, but also in the people around you.  Your uncertainty being something you're comfortable with...realizing your confidence in your own knowledge of other people's feelings isn't true-in reality, you are clueless & maybe just need to listen.  Not needing to have an opinion on everything, the impossible nature of not knowing what will happen next.  Dealing with your own doubts, dealing with your loved one's doubts.  Growing up is understanding that you don't know the answer to every question, and in some cases, you'll never get satisfaction as to why.

It's a phrase I've used a lot this week.  About the election, about the source of my stress, about a world where increasingly it feels like angry people are so willing to tear it down just so no one else can feel joy themselves.  Why?  Why is this happening right now?  I don't know.  And the reality is that some of the biggest things in life, the biggest mysteries, you won't know.  Not things like Stonehenge or the JFK assassination, I mean the real mysteries that haunt you.  Why did that friendship stop, and why couldn't I make that romantic relationship work?  Why didn't I ever achieve that dream, and why did that person I loved die so young?  These are the actual mysteries that keep us up at night...these are where doubt & worry reside.  Understanding that you won't get answers to these questions is troubling, but there's also a freedom to it.  Because while we'll never lose that doubt & worry, they'll always come back, the reality is that "I don't know" isn't giving up, it's not an answer to a fight that needs to be won (because some things in life are worth conversing & figuring out)...it's a freedom from the things that you know, in your heart, you''ll never really get to understand the logic behind, because ultimately the only way to understand them is to realize that you can't.

Ranting On...NaNoWriMo & AI

While this blog was named years before I introduced the "Ranting On" series to it, me attempting to adapt to a title I've had a complicated relationship with (I don't really think of this blog as having rants so much as discussions, but it's been 12 years and I'm too attached to the title to care at this point), it is definitely a series that for a while had a long history on this blog.  We're going to briefly bring it back today for a discussion of the NaNoWriMo scandal that dominated social media yesterday, and in general, for a discussion about one of the biggest boogeymen that we've honestly largely ignored on this blog: AI, specifically in terms of writing.

For those who do not set their watches by Twitter, first off-what's that like, and how can I join you?  And second off, let's regroup and discuss the scandal at-large.  To begin with, you have NaNoWriMo, which is a nickname for National Novel Writing Month, a nearly twenty-year-old organization whose premise is simple: write a novel in one month, specifically the month of November.  It's a cool concept, and one that I've attempted before (in 2017, specifically), and one where failure honestly is not the end of the world.  I didn't succeed in it in 2017, but I still made it 10k+ words more in a novel I was writing at the time.  It's basically a social permission to actually start working on a novel, which for many people is a big part of the experience, and they do a good job of creating user tools, even advice/tips from published writers, and you get support from other novelists who are attempting what you do.  It's a lot of work, but really fun, and for some people, it's a life-altering moment.  Novels like Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, and Marissa Meyer's Cinder, all bestsellers, were originally NaNoWriMo novels.

NaNoWriMo, though, less than two months out from their event, issued a statement on Saturday announcing that they support the technology of AI to be used this year as part of its novel-writing experience.  The direct quote was "we believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege."  This erupted in a level of outrage from writers, both professional & novice online, who took offense at the concept of AI not, in fact, being a "cheat" when it came to writing and also the wording, implying that to stand against AI would be somehow ableist of classist.

I'm going to rip the bandaid off right now and own that I, too, think that NaNoWriMo's stance here is not just anti-art, but it's also bullshit, and I think it opens up a lot of conversations about what constitutes writing.  Writing is meant to be a creative connection with material.  That's true if you're doing something like what NaNoWriMo is doing, penning long-form creative fiction, but it's true of everything.  Nonfiction, poetry, writing a daily blog...the whole point of this endeavor is to connect and do your own creative work.  AI is frequently described as a another "tool" but it's not.  This is not something like a rhyming dictionary or a thesaurus or spellcheck, something that is giving you a list of potential prompts to look through to understand the next step-it's doing all of the work for you, and in many ways skipping the human creative point of the writing.  If all you had is an idea, I'm sorry, you're not a writer.  You need to actually write the thing in front of you to write it, and AI doesn't count.  You can say "join the future" or call someone a luddite, but writing involves a very specific set of tools & events.  It involves debating, understanding what comes next, making mistakes & using words you know need to be corrected to push through.  It is an emotional process, something that takes a lot of work...if it doesn't, there's nothing of value from it.  I don't want to read what a machine wrote, and that's true whether it's a 1000-page book in front of me or a two-hour movie or a 500-word article, because without that touch of humanity, the writing part is just worthless...it will have the same emotional connection I have to an instruction manual.  It's why you will never find an article on this blog that was written via AI...I'd rather give up the blog than rely on such a device.

Also, NaNoWriMo needing to justify its actions with "classist" and "ableist" titles is beyond offensive.  Calling it ableist is truly beyond-the-pale, as it implies that people who have some sort of physical handicap are not able to write without the use of AI, which is absurd.  John Milton was completely blind when he wrote Paradise Lost and Stephen Hawking was using a wheelchair to speak when he wrote A Brief History of Time...neither of them needed to have AI do their work in order to finish these esteemed bestsellers (I'm aware Paradise Lost being boiled down to a "bestseller" is a bit pedantic, but bare with me here).  The only thing that AI does is makes it easier to be lazy with your writing, and to equate criticism of laziness as "ableist" is extremely offensive.

And to claim this is "classist" is absurd, and it invites other debates, including one from Twitter a couple of years ago where it was discussed whether or not it was okay to mock writers who "don't read very much" as ableist.  So let's get this straight-every American (and NaNoWriMo, despite being an international competition, is an American non-profit) has access to an endless supply of books for free thanks to a public library system that you can find in every state (albeit one that Republicans are constantly attacking-yet another request to please vote in November).  I have two library books on my dining room table right now, in fact-you don't need anything other than a library card (which anyone can get, for free) to check out books.  So access to books is not classist.  Writing is work-if you don't have time to do this because you're working multiple jobs, that sucks, but it's not classist to assume you need a shortcut.  You just might need longer than a month to write your novel, which isn't the ethos of NaNoWriMo, but it is reality.  Cause let's be honest-if forced to choose, is it more classist to assume that people have the time to finish a novel in a month or is it more classist to assume that people should stick to an arbitrary set of rules & use circumspect, environmentally-damaging technology to suck the soul out of their project?  Real writers write, and write a lot.  Real writers read, and read a lot.  If you can't commit to those two activities, I'm sorry...you're not going to be a writer.

So where does this leave NaNoWriMo?  It's still a good idea, and I hope that someone takes up the mantle of it (and also picks a better month to do it than November...between Thanksgiving & the election, it always feels like such a hassle to try to pull it off then as opposed to January or March, which both come with the added bonus of a 31st day to get your work done).  But I would not trust them with it.  Author Maureen Johnson, who has supported the organization in the past but asked to remove her support in the light of this controversy, pointed out that authors should beware that their work this year might be used to train AI, and indeed ProWritingAid (an AI writing company) is now one of the main sponsors for NaNoWriMo.  It's hard not to wonder if this is less a way to help you achieve your dreams, and more to give mountains of creative material to improve future AI bots who want to strip the written word of its humanity.

Ranting On...the Barbie "Snubs"

My relationship with the Oscars has changed since I first became enamored.  I watched my first Oscar clips for the 1994 (i.e. Forrest Gump Oscars) and watched my first ceremony in 1995.  I was very much a child then, and the Oscars were quite different, much more of a pop culture moment, where everyone you knew stopped everything you were doing and watched them (they were even on a Monday!).  I have, in the years since never missed a ceremony, even driving through a blizzard to watch the 2004 ceremony on my little 13" TV screen, and it has been an omnipresent part of my life.  My friends and family, when describing me, will undoubtedly use the words "movies" or "Oscars" within the first two sentences.

But in that time, I've learned that while movies are always a source of magic, you need to temper your expectations with the Oscars.  I wasn't always this way.  I had an imaginary vendetta against Hilary Swank in 2004 when she beat Annette Bening for the Oscar (for the second time), and I am still actively angry about Crash beating Brokeback Mountain for Best Picture.  But for the most part, when I became a fully-fledged, completely-employed adult, I gave up on putting a lot of stock in what Oscar chose.  There are exceptions (I still think Brendan Fraser beating the beautiful work that was done last year by Colin Farrell & Paul Mescal is insanity, given he was giving a truly bad performance), but for the most part, I am happy when Oscar makes the right call because I know what it means for the person I'm rooting for and just roll my eyes when they pick something foolish.

The internet, particularly Twitter, does not take such a lackadaisical approach to the Oscars, or to anything, let's be real.  Yesterday, in what was surely the most predictable Oscar nominations in eons, the internet lost their collective minds at the nominations, particularly Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie not featuring in Best Director or Actress.  I saw posters blaming Annette Bening, Ryan Gosling, and saying that this fulfilled Gerwig's whole argument in Barbie by having Ken get a nomination but Barbie going home empty-handed.  I initially thought this was just shock-posting for engagement, but eventually saw celebrities (including, somehow, Hillary Clinton) weighing in, so I want to, as someone who has lived through a lot of Oscars, give my two cents.

First off, let's address the obvious-Barbie had a great morning yesterday, the cherry on the sundae of an incredible year for the movie.  2023 was the year of Barbenheimer, and Oscar did not forget to wear some pink.  The film won eight nominations, including for Best Picture, and that is insane when you think about it for longer than two seconds.  The film is about a doll, is a comedy without much hint of drama, and came out in the summer.  These are not things that get you Best Picture nominations-these are things that get you, at best, a citation for Production Design or Original Song.  There is a world, in fact, where Barbie only gets those.  It is a testament to how well-constructed Robbie & Gerwig made this movie (and their flawless press tour the past six months) that it was able to get in at all.  The nominations it got were still a testament to its quality, box office, and ardent fanbase.

If you want to look at the nominations, let's look at them.  First off, Robbie didn't lose to a single man-Barbie didn't lose to Ken, they were in different categories, with different competition. Robbie likely lost it to Annette Bening, a pioneering feminist in her own right, playing a real-life athlete who stood against ageism & sexism to become the first person to swim from Cuba to Florida.  You can get into all kinds of debates over whether or not Bening's performance is better than Robbie's (that's a legit convo to have), but first off, see her movie before you say Robbie was snubbed (which I suspect most people had not seen Nyad, Maestro, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Anatomy of a Fall who were proclaiming Robbie was "robbed" yesterday), and second off, it's not anti-feminist to have Annette freaking Bening instead of Margot Robbie.  It's also worth noting that Barbie did get a nomination yesterday, for Best Picture (Robbie is a producer on the film), which is arguably more in-line with the message of the film than anything else, and for America Ferrera, one of the other women in the movie, so it's hardly like none of the film's actresses didn't get cited for their work.

Gerwig's loss is also not a textbook definition of anti-feminist on its own.  For starters, the people complaining about her miss for sure haven't seen The Zone of Interest (it's barely been released) and likely haven't seen Anatomy of a Fall, which was directed by a woman (a woman who fought to get her film seen even as the President of France was working overtime to make it falter).  The reality is that in a contest where there are five director nominations and 10 Best Picture nominations, there's not a "I guess the film directed itself" joke here so much as it's simply mathematically impossible for all of them to be included.  And no, this isn't a case where we should expand the number of nominees...it's a case where we should be grownups and admit "not everyone is going to make it, and we shouldn't cry foul, particularly when we haven't even seen all of the nominees."

The last thing I want to say is around the people who were convinced that this was a sexist act solely because Ken got in but Barbie didn't, which is much of the plot of the movie.  First, leave Ryan Gosling out of this-he's championed the movie, and been a total cheerleader for Robbie & Gerwig on the red carpet all season.  Second, Robbie & Gerwig both got nominations in other categories-they are headed to the Dolby later this year.  Third, films get nominated for Best Picture without a Best Director nomination all. the. time...including when there were only five Best Picture nominations.  And last, this is kind of pathetic to be this upset over something as silly as an awards show.  It's reminiscent of the Millennial urge to call Trump "Voldemort" or "Thanos."  If you are an adult, you should be able to view the world through shades of grey, understand nuance, and not need a pop culture veneer to make a point.  It's okay to be sad if you wanted Gerwig or Robbie to make it into those categories-if they're your favorites, awesome (I thought they were good too!), but it's not okay to act like this is an anti-feminist act when there's really no indication it was.  It was just a case of a movie that is very out of the Oscar's wheelhouse getting a big awards haul, but not super big because, again, it's not to Oscar's taste.  If you want to create an awards show where Gerwig & Robbie get included...I make my own every year.  I encourage you to do so.  But having a hissy fit online over it is, well, something you should grow up about.

Let's Talk About Sex (at the Movies)

Florence Pugh & Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer

Elon Musk has made Twitter such a chore that I do wonder if, at some point, he'll hit the bridge too far that will get me off of the app (the idea that he's going to stop letting you block people could do it, the idea that he's going to want your driver's license to verify your ID would definitely do it), but until he does, I'm still in my Twitter addiction phase, albeit it's not as fun as it used to be, and so I am still there for most Twitter debates that hit film, politics, & gays (the three prongs of Twitter that I am a part of).  For the last year or two, one of the most omnipresent conversations on Film Twitter has been about sex in film & television, and while I'm working my way through a number of different topics I've wanted to discuss for a while on the blog but haven't had time for, we're going to get to this one today (I'm not calling these recent articles "Ranting On..." in the titles, but I'm using the tag for those of you old enough to remember when I used to lean into my blog title here).

Sex at the movies has always been a conversation that people have debated.  The Hays Code was borne not just out of regulating the behaviors of movie stars, but also out of regulating the movies themselves, as Pre-Code films like Red-Headed Woman, The Sign of the Cross, and Baby Face showed women like Jean Harlow being into BDSM, Claudette Colbert taking a milk bath, and Barbara Stanwyck being pimped out by her father, respectively (seriously-the early 1930's were a crazy time for the movies).  Post the Code, regulations about sexual depictions onscreen were highly-regulated until the 1960's, when it became more common for mainstream movie stars to appear naked in film (Jayne Mansfield was the first, but eventually actresses like Kathleen Turner, Angie Dickinson, & Julie Christie would appear nude as well onscreen, alongside men like Donald Sutherland & Marlon Brando, though nudity was never completely balanced between the two genders post-Code).  Sex was most common in film in the 1970's through the early 1990's, after which two things happened that would make sex far less common in mainstream movies & television.

First was the failure of a number of high-profile salacious pictures (think films like Showgirls and Striptease) in the mid-1990's where, whether because the films weren't good or because audiences could be titillated with pornography at home, they made the "sex sells" moniker feel off.  Second, the success of films like Harry Potter, X-Men, and Spider-Man meant that making movies that appealed specifically to teenagers (but would guarantee people of all ages going to the movies) became more profitable than trying to make an R-Rated film that just adults could see.  Never mind that from 1997-2009, the most successful film of all-time (Titanic) had Kate Winslet undressing and getting steamy with Leonardo DiCaprio in the back of a CB Coupe de Ville...sex became rarer in modern movies in the new millennium.

Which makes the latest bout of converesation so bizarre.  Sex is not common in movies, but there's this complaint, specifically from Gen Z film & television-watchers, that it's everywhere...when it's not.  While there are still shows/movies like Bridgerton or Oppenheimer (the most recent film to attract this controversy) which feature sex scenes, it's far rarer than it's been since the 1960's to watch a Hollywood production and see nudity.

I want to establish a couple of facts here that frequently come up in these conversations.  First, sex scenes in movies and television are highly-regulated.  This has not always been the case (the making of Last Tango in Paris is a good example of this), but with intimacy coaches, agents & stars getting full approval (frequently even employing body doubles), and the script being specifically spelled out over what to do, the risk of unknowing exploitation is not what it would've been decades ago.  Even in scenes where the characters are being exploited, the actors are not (sometimes it feels like modern audiences can't tell the two apart, but more on that in a second).  There are plenty of protections for performers going into a movie over what they will and will not do, and they know going into it what is going to be expected of them.

Jonathan Bailey in Bridgerton

Secondly, not everything that happens in a movie is supposed to be about the plot.  The most frequent complaint in a film or TV show is that "the sex scene didn't advance the plot" but that's not something that should matter.  Films & television shows are not just plot-delivery systems, and having something that gives you some aesthetic look at the lives of the characters (or just something that looks interesting within the movie or show) is a good idea.  Oppenheimer got this criticism, which was weird as the sex scene did, in fact, advance the plot (it gave us a look at the most human side of a mechanical man, which gave us character growth & informed his marriage), but even if it didn't-this is a movie that frequently focuses on motifs, on different cuts in his life.  No one is complaining about random comic side moments within a TV show or a film, even if they don't deliver more to the plot other than a one-liner...why should sex scenes be any different?

Which brings me to what this really is-it's censorship.  People don't like that word because it's ugly...but that's still what this is, and it is ugly, this conversation at its root is reprehensible.  Defending a world where you regulate what is and isn't seen onscreen is no different than Republicans trying to ban queer literature in Texas & Idaho, or conservatives wanting to regulate what teachers are instructing students in Florida.  They're all in the same conversation.  Artistic expression needs to be protected, and that includes sex scenes.  If you're an adult not comfortable with seeing sex scenes in a movie, that's for you & your therapist to discuss, but the world should not be built around what you find comfortable.  If you don't want to see sex onscreen, don't go to PG-13 or R-rated movies.  I'm not a big fan of the MPAA, but they're definitely giving you the solution to your problem on this one if you're actually offended and not just complaining.

Because I've got news for you-the Hays Code, which is what you're supporting, didn't just stop at sex scenes.  They also regulated what type of people you see onscreen.  This is also something that I've seen Gen Z specifically embrace on social media-saying that we should only see depictions of "good people" onscreen.  Arguing that morally ambiguous or antihero figures shouldn't exist onscreen, and villains & heroes should be struck in shades of black-and-white solely  This isn't real life though (in real life, people are messy & make mistakes), and what happens when you espouse for that, what happens when you espouse for the removal of sex scenes in film & television, is that other things that people object to in real life start to become fodder for the same arguments.  The Hays Code didn't allow interracial relationships onscreen and they didn't allow for queer people at all.  When you're talking about removing sex scenes onscreen, keep in mind that for a few of the people cheering on your fight, they also include any depictions of queer life at all (even if it's just existing) as being part of that "objectionable" umbrella.  For Gen Z, a generation that has lived with gay rights being part of the conversation their entire existence (even if it's not where it should be), this might feel alien, but I promise you-it was not long ago that any depictions of gay people in relationships on TV was forbidden or mired in controversy.  Once you start to embrace censorship to get rid of one thing...it'll definitely start coming for the rest.

Shut Up, You're at the Movies

Barbenheimer, the amalgamation of the Barbie and Oppenheimer movies that has swept the back-half of the summer blockbuster season and has resulted in two mammoth hits, is one of the most exciting things to happen at the movies in a while.  I was there opening weekend, my tickets bought weeks in advance, and a change of shirts (I wore pink for Barbie, black for Oppenheimer, very proudly for both) was in tow, and was so excited to watch both films in packed theaters.  During Oppenheimer, though, I could see the man in front of me regularly turning on his cell phone, to the point where I would've moved had it not been a packed theater.  By the final hour he eventually stopped, but this is not something new-in fact, it's something that has become increasingly commonplace in modern social situations, and something I wanted to talk about today.

Rude patrons in movie theaters is not new, and it's something that has been part of the public experience for decades.  I remember thinking a riot would break out during A Star is Born when an audience member not only had their cell phone go off during Bradley Cooper's death scene, but proceeded to talk ON THE PHONE as a weeping Lady Gaga was mourning her husband's loss.  Not getting up, but actually just talking in the middle of the theater.  But since the pandemic broke, I honestly feel like this has become commonplace to the point where it happens virtually every movie.  It has even started to happen in stage plays, where it was much less common before (partially because you might get Patti LuPone to openly yell at you).  I saw a stage production of the western Shane a few weeks ago, and several cell phone screens were visible as the show was going, clearly something that not only the entire audience could see, but also the actors on the stage.

Here's the deal.  I have a relatively high tolerance for certain behaviors in public or in movie theaters, even if they aren't things that I would do.  I think it's tacky to eat food or drink anything other than water in a live theatrical play, but I'm aware that ship has sailed, so hopefully you just time the candy crinkling to scene changes or loud musical numbers (I also have no problem with people eating pizza, nachos, or whatever in a movie & I do it too, but again...try to time your crunches).  I think the trend of people wearing their pajamas and bringing pillows & blankets to the movie theaters is bizarre (like...when did this start?), but if you're being quiet I don't care.  I feel the same about concerts-I think concert videos are stupid (they always look terrible, and you rarely rewatch them, so why not live in the moment?), but I think I lost that battle awhile ago on not having videos because people are obsessed with tracking their every movement on Instagram.  I know that when I see a children's film or an animated movie, I am going to have kids loudly talking during the movie at certain points, asking "is Ariel going to be okay?" and honestly, that's sweet-young people need an entry point into the movies, and this proves that they're at least watching the film.  And I'm also aware that if a movie is three-hours long, you're going to have people out of their seats to go to the bathroom (or to make a phone call in the lobby).  It's not a great look that you can't sit still for three hours, but that's between you and your bladder.

But here's the deal-that's where my patience ends.  You don't need to answer your phone during a movie or a stage play-there is literally NO excuse for doing so, so don't give me one.  If there's something so pressing in your life that you can't take a few hours out of your day to enjoy specifically what is in front of you, then you shouldn't be at a theater.  If your child can't get through the movie at-hand without you putting an iPad in front of them watching a completely different movie (with or without headphones), you shouldn't be at a movie theater.  Your ticket price is for you to sit quietly and enjoy the movie or stage production in front of you-it entitles you to nothing else.  Anyone who says "I paid my ticket, I can do what I want" has spent too much time in front of Fox News, because you sound exactly like Donald Trump...a selfish asshole.

There is this weird gut instinct to defend this behavior online, particularly among Gen Z influencers on Twitter & TikTok, and I gotta say-this is a weird, nasty fight you're picking.  Staying quiet in a movie theater or stage play isn't some elitist stand against anything...it's just being a jerk.  Common decency is increasingly out-of-style in modern culture, perhaps a retaliation to being forced to be inside for a year, with people no longer having any grasp of what proper social etiquette is because they want to lash out in anger over missing a year of doing whatever they wanted...but doing whatever you want still makes you a bad person.  If you want to watch a movie like you're in your living room, you should do that.  But if you're talking during a movie in public, recording the Barbie dance with a flashlight glaring from your phone, or texting your friend a selfie during the new Blue Beetle movie, just know that the entire rest of the audience is hoping the person next to you "accidentally" spills their Blue Raspberry Icee on you.  And we're all willing to chip in get them a new one.

Millennials Deserve Their Social Security (and Need to Say So)

Millennials, which is the generation that I (and most of my friends, including my younger brother) am a member of, have gotten one of the roughest sets of economic cards of any American generation since the Greatest Generation (who were dealt a decade-long depression sandwiched between two world wars that killed many of their brethren).  Our outlook took a different approach, including a gigantic recession in 2008 as we entered the work force combined with a housing crisis coupled with crippling student loan debt that has not remotely kept up with inflation, and a global pandemic that hit us with a second round of layoffs & delayed paychecks as we were entering our peak earning years...Millennials, who are now beginning to turn 40 have gotten the roughest end of the economic bargain (Gen Z hasn't gotten it much better, but they have youth on their side in terms of long-term financial gains & a change in direction).

This has shaped an attitude amongst Millennials that is quite cynical, frequently to the point of defeatism & sometimes hurting their own cause.  Ask any Millennial, and they'll talk about student loans as a lifelong obligation, home ownership as a pipe dream, and retirement saving as pointless.  Part of this is borne of reality (as I said above, they were dealt an impossible set of cards) and part of it (I'm sorry, but it's reality) is a result of being far too cynical, and assuming that the worst will always come.  Why save for tomorrow when climate change/Covid/nuclear war/insert-your-own-catastrophe will kill us all anyway?

Millennials are also, it's worth noting, amongst the most progressive and charitable of generations (yes, Boomers, Millennials give far more to charity than most previous generations, including yourselves, despite being given once-in-a-century economic handicaps).  They are the most highly-educated generation in American history, and are civically-engaged.  They have not yet, however, taken on the most valuable asset that they have at their disposal, and that's going to become crucial in the coming years: that as of 2020, they have overtaken Baby Boomers as the largest generation, and given that even the youngest of Millennials are now of voting age, that means that they are now the largest voting bloc in the United States.

Where am I going with this?  I'll tell you, but we're going to have to pivot for a second so hang on with me and I promise we're getting somewhere.  Over the past few weeks, but especially since the State of the Union, the Republican Party has been dealing with an internal crisis around Social Security & Medicare.  President Biden during the State of the Union accused Republicans of proposing cuts to Social Security & Medicare, which resulted in heckling by members of Congress, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.  This is fascinating because, well, Biden was right.  There are Republicans, to be sure, who have been publicly on record as not wanting to cut Social Security & Medicare, most notably former President Donald Trump (easily the most populist stance he took, and one of the primary reasons he resonated so well with white working class voters who had gone for Obama in 2008 & 2012) and to a lesser degree, Sen. Mitch McConnell.  But Republicans, including major GOP leaders like Mike Pence, Paul Ryan, Nikki Haley, John Thune, Rick Scott, Ron Johnson, & even supposed "moderate" Mitt Romney have talked about curbing Social Security & Medicare benefits, as well as privatizing it in a way that would almost certainly put Social Security benefits at risk in the future.

What's notable as they kick off presidential debates, is the way that Nikki Haley & Mike Pence are going after entitlement benefits, and to some degree are trying to claim what they're proposing is not a "cut."  Their proposal seems to be focused on not impacting current recipients of Social Security & Medicare (those benefits stay), but instead cutting benefits for future generations (without saying it, they mean Millennials & Gen Z), raising the age when you could qualify to as much as 70.

There are ways to make Social Security solvent other than cutting benefits or raising the age.  The biggest and easiest one would be to eliminate the Social Security payroll cap, which currently stands at $147,000 a year; essentially the money you make after that is not taxed for Social Security   This would, in fact, add literal decades of time onto the Social Security solvency issue, some estimate as much as 35 years, during which time public reforms on retirement saving, health insurance, & easier access to public housing could alleviate some of the pressure on Social Security & Medicare as a public good.  But Republicans aren't exploring that-what they're proposing is basically screwing over Millennials & Gen Z to avoid having to raise taxes on the rich.

Millennials I talk to anecdotally assume this is a foregone conclusion, but it really isn't, and here's why: there is increasing unwillingness among Democrats to consider this as an option.  Chuck Schumer is against raising the Social Security age, and Joe Biden has said he'll veto any proposal to raise the Social Security retirement age.  As a result, the Democrats seem to be increasingly aligned that raising the Social Security age is not an option.  This is new-Democrats have been more open in previous years to the idea that with life expectancy going up, entitlement eligibility should go up with it.  What Millennials need to do now is draw a hard line in the sand that this is unacceptable, and that starts with us referring to this as a cut.  For all of the "foregone conclusion" talk, we pay Social Security & Medicare taxes every single paycheck that go into a system that guarantees us access to Social Security at age 62 and Medicare at age 65.  ANY changes that increases the age to that should be called what it is-a cut to our Social Security & Medicare benefits.

So, I am begging my fellow Millennials-we need to stick together on this one.  We already started our economic journeys on the backs of a Boomer-led recession and a Boomer-elected Trump screwing up our futures further by botching the Covid pandemic response.  But if we allow our cynicism & assumption that we can only get dealt a bad hand to not call out Nikki Haley & Mike Pence as totally unacceptable (and show Democrats we mean business that this is not an option for us), that it's an unforgivable act for them to raise the Social Security & Medicare ages, that's on us.  We have earned this right-some Millennials, having worked since high school, have paid into social security for over twenty years.  Excuse my language, but we have fucking earned the right to have our Social Security at the exact same age our parents did.  It's time we made sure we tell Washington that we, too, can vote with our wallets like our parents have for decades.

Ranting On...the Myth of Amy McGrath

Amy McGrath (D-KY)

On Tuesday, voters in Kentucky, Virginia, and New York are headed to the polls, and we'll have more on the results of those races next Wednesday on the blog.  However, I want to discuss some of the movement we're seeing in one of the races today on the blog, as it's a fascinating microcosm of a race, and sort of a weird case study into how nationalizing races can have unintended consequence.

The Democratic Primary in Kentucky has been set for months.  Amy McGrath announced in July of 2019 that she was running for the Democrats, and this felt like a decent solution in taking on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.  McGrath lost in 2018, but she didn't lose by much and has a respectable resume, is a good fundraiser, and honestly, after multiple different Democrats turned down the opportunity, this was at least a non-embarrassing option for the Democrats.

But McGrath has run a pathetic campaign.  Yes she's raised gargantuan piles of money, but otherwise her campaign has been a joke.  She royally botched the initial question of whether she would have voted for Brett Kavanaugh or not (she initially said yes, then changed her answer to no, pleasing no one in the process).  She was nearly sued by Kentuckians for using their image without permission in an ad.  And she has not been able to figure out a a way to run on the same ballot as Donald Trump, not finding a strong balance between criticizing McConnell and not criticizing Trump.  The money has masked the fact that she's running one of the worst Senate campaigns in the country.

And now, she's going to be lucky to win her primary.  Despite having raised $41 million, out-raising McConnell by $9 million, she's in an increasingly tight contest with State Rep. Charles Booker, even though McGrath has 8x as much money.  Booker, a young African-American legislator, is running to McGrath's left, and has done better than either McGrath or McConnell in terms of fundraising from actually citizens in Kentucky.  He's stacked up endorsements from liberal leaders like Bernie Sanders & Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as a more mainstream one from Alison Lundergan Grimes, a former Kentucky Secretary of State who was McConnell's last general election opponent.  Polls show the race closing, as local Democrats seem less enthused about McGrath as a candidate, and are excited for the prospect of Booker.

State Rep. Charles Booker (D-KY)

I'm pretty pragmatic, and so this would upset me in normal circumstances.  McGrath is the candidate that has raised the most money, is more moderate in a red state, and stands (on-paper) the best chance of winning.  But here's where I'm going to depart for a second-I am kind of hoping that Booker wins this, because McGrath has been running not just a shoddy campaign, but also one that has been dishonest about its chances.

One of the things that is fascinating about nationalizing fundraising is that it doesn't often mean smarter fundraising.  Democrats throw hundreds of thousands of dollars at the opponents of national figures like Jim Jordan & Kevin McCarthy, while Republicans are giving pointless amounts of cash to beat AOC or Nancy Pelosi.  This is all money that could actually make a difference in competitive, if less marquee, congressional campaigns.  And nowhere is this more evident than in Kentucky.

McGrath can't entirely be faulted for taking this money, but this is bordering on Jill Green campaigning to audit the election results in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan (playing on people's emotions) rather than feeling practical.  McGrath knows she can't win, and any Democrat who trots out "we might be able to pull it off" is either an fool or charlatan.  McConnell can lose, but by making him stop being majority leader, or perhaps even have him lose so badly that the GOP throws him out of his leadership post, but ruby-red Kentucky is never, ever going to throw out McConnell while Trump is on the ballot.  Ain't gonna happen.  He's as safe as AOC or Jim Jordan.  I'm forgiving of a lot of wishful thinking donations (I wouldn't bat an eye over a Democrat donating to Al Gross or MJ Hegar or Barbara Bollier even though those seats are longshots), but this is basically burning your money.

So McGrath raising this money and not either giving it to more winnable candidates, or at least trying to build up some infrastructure for Kentucky Democrats makes me feel like this is a long con, and one that it'd be better to stop before it gets out-of-hand.  She's even worse than Jaime Harrison (another candidate who is never going to win), as Harrison doing better-than-expected might at least carry Joe Cunningham across-the-finish-line.  But McGrath didn't recruit an up-and-comer in Kentucky's 6th district, the only conceivably winnable pickup in the commonwealth, and so I would prefer us to stop wasting resources on this race.

Booker might just be another option for Democrats frustrated at McConnell.  People might throw their money at him the way they did McGrath.  But hopefully her losing will put some sort of sense into people's minds that all the money in the world can't get you a win if the dynamics of your race don't change.  And from there, prospective donors will instead shift to seats like Iowa or Georgia or North Carolina or Maine...seats that might actually defeat Mitch McConnell.

Ranting On...the Academy Awards Date Switch

There are obviously bigger things going on in the world right now than the Oscars changing their date, and in some ways it feels silly to complain about it or talk about such things, but this is a site devoted to Oscar-watching, and thus major news about the Academy Awards feels like a miss for me not to write about.  We'll return to more serious topics, including some discussions in celebration of Juneteenth, later this week (we'll also have our other 2015 OVP writeup, sometime this week, probably Saturday or Sunday).  But for now, I want to get my two cents in on this date switch.

For those of you who haven't heard, the Academy Awards are moving back both the date of their ceremony (April 25th) and the eligibility window for the upcoming Oscars, extending through the end of February.  This will result in a couple of things.  First, it is only the fourth Oscars ceremony to have been postponed, and the first to be postponed so far in advance (the previous times were the Los Angeles Flood of 1938, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan).  Second, it is the first time since 1933 that an Oscars will honor films for longer than 12 months, here having 14 months worth of eligible films up for the Academy Awards.

There are obvious, pragmatic reasons that the Oscars might have to move back its ceremony date-this shouldn't really be an issue for anyone.  The Academy Awards, as traditionally told, frequently has 3000 people in the Dolby auditorium, not to mention the orchestra pit, the production crew, the red carpet (complete with crowded fans and photographers), and what goes on on stage with dancers & presenters in close contact.  It would be difficult, if not impossible, for the Academy to conduct a traditional ceremony in such a fashion, and absent them wanting to do without the pomp-and-circumstance, the Covid-19 pandemic needs to be more under control than it currently is in order to have something resembling the Oscars.

Where I have my eyebrow raise is around the eligibility window moving, because it feels more like Oscar not wanting to try rather than just extending the window and risk having major "Oscar bait" not get released.  Because there are certainly movies, worthy movies, that have come out this year.  Films like Shirley, Da 5 Bloods, Emma, and The Invisible Man, for example, have gotten raves and while I'm not going to espouse for all of them (I haven't even seen all of them), they have their champions, and would be able to craft a lineup that would do the Academy proud.

However, these aren't "Oscar Bait" films, certainly not in 2020, and so it feels like Oscar isn't willing to get outside of his comfort zone.  Without the assurance that biopics & big-budget productions will be available like they always are, Oscar doesn't seem willing to get outside of his usual tastes and do some homework around what was eligible, and whether there are some hidden gems out there.  The BAFTA Awards have already followed suit, proving that they are more concerned about being a precursor than coming up with a lineup that might not mirror Oscar's exactly, and I am sure the Globes and SAG Awards will follow suit.  This is the principle reason why I stopped watching precursors a couple of years ago and only watch the occasional speech-there's no indication from these awards bodies they want to do anything other than predict the Oscars, and I'm already good at doing that myself.

One thing that won't be moving is my awards.  I publish a version of these every year, and while I will have to debate how I'll handle my "Oscar ballot" question, my Top 10 list of 2020 will only include movies from this calendar year.  I'm kind of excited for the prospect, quite frankly.  While I don't oftentimes agree with Oscar, he's a guide, and a crutch if I'm struggling with filling out a category.  Without that crutch, I'm going to have to seek out more below-the-line films to get my lineup, and I, being a true film fan, love trying to find new, high quality movies wherever they may be.  I just wish Oscar did as well.

Ranting On...Defund the Police

Social media is a terrible place to form opinions, and yet, it's kind of the only place they seem to matter in 2020.  In a world where we now live in our houses, and don't leave them for days or even weeks at a time, where friends are now six inches tall in Zoom calls on our iPads & where the most eye contact you have on a weekend is with the (blessed) cashier washing down the self-checkout at Walgreens, the place where we most oftentimes express ourselves is social media.  Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit-these are the vehicles for our social identity, and frequently they become the place where we show who we are and what we believe.  In 2020, in a presidential election with a man in the White House who becomes somehow more polarizing each day, and in a year where a pandemic and global protests against racism & criminal justice have become the dominant news stories, making sure that you are putting your voice into the chorus is important, and it sometimes means that you either don't have room for questions or doubt for fear that you'll be "cancelled."

This isn't entirely social media's fault, to be fair.  In many ways, "I'm just asking questions" has become the excuse of people who want to stir up controversy, who want to try and trick someone into saying something they don't really mean & then use that against them (I don't watch Fox News, but I have seen enough of it at the gym to know what's going on).  But there does need to be space to learn about a subject before you have an opinion on it, and that's what I have been doing the past few days with the "defund the police" movement.

I'm not going to get into the "why" behind how the "defund the police" movement has become a thing, and really I feel it's insulting to question too hard the motives as to why people are angry at law enforcement, particularly communities of color.  George Floyd is one of hundreds of names of black people who have been victim of a racist judicial system that doesn't see them as worth protecting, doesn't see them as worthy of the same "protection" that white people expect from law enforcement.  And the behavior of police forces, firing rubber bullets at members of the press, pushing down senior citizens walking down the street, spraying tear gas into the faces of protesters from behind the window of an armored car...you can keep your platitudes about "there are some good cops."  In the same way the Catholic Church and Hollywood's male producers needed to put up with criticism of the industry even if they are the "good apples," only the most stubborn of police officers or their supporters would admit that the current system is working and should be above criticism.

I support judicial reforms.  I support the Black Lives Matter movement.  I support Campaign Zero, and their prerogatives, amongst them limiting use of force, body cams for all police officers, ending for-profit policing/prison systems, and the end of broken windows policing.  I support decriminalizing marijuana and prostitution.  I start this conversation very open to the idea of reform, and I don't have much sympathy for the position that law enforcement finds itself in, but I also hear a phrase like "defund the police" and am curious as to how that would work.  And while I have seen the memes attacking people who say "how will that work?" and comparing them to people who are stopping progress in past conversations about equality, I don't see myself that way and I think it's a bit obtuse to lump all of the people questioning the "Defund the Police" movement into such a category.  Because, for real-I am just curious how that would work.

It turns out that while there are some people who support abolishing police departments, many of the goals of the "Defund the Police" movement are not exactly about abolishing police departments, but instead seeing if there are better ways to handle crime in the United States, and literally, in the process, moving the money that has gone to police departments (which almost always dominate city budget conversations) and moving that to other avenues that may be better-prepared to both address crime and perhaps reduce it.

I did a lot of research that I'm going to attempt to synthesize here (I am not an expert in theories on criminal justice, just someone who wanted to be informed), so I suggest if this article doesn't address your concerns you go and find other conversations that do, but essentially the idea here is that in a lot of situations, police officers are an inappropriate response for a host of problems.  Police officers address everything from homicide to your cat going missing-the scope of their job is enormous, and as a result, they are not properly trained to address all of the issues that they might encounter on the job.

For example, many police officers are called in to deal with people who are on chemical substances, or suffering from chemical withdraws.  If these people are not violent or don't pose a danger to the community, why is the police involved at all?  A police officer is not going to have the years of experience dealing with someone who has chemical dependance issues that a drug treatment counselor would have, and it's worth remembering-when someone is using an illegal substance, our goal is not to punish this person, it's to help them (or at least that's what I hope the goal is).  There's no real reason that if this person doesn't pose a danger to the community that the police should be involved at all.  Shifting that funding to someone more qualified to address the problem (like a mobile mental health crisis team) could solve this better, and thus are a better use of public funds to address these citizens' needs.

Mental illness is at the center of many police fatalities.  One in four people who die in police shootings do so while suffering from an acute mental illness.  We have police deal with people who are mentally ill rather than psychologists or mental health professionals-why?  The American Psychiatric Association is very firm on the fact that most people who suffer from mental illness are inherently non-violent, and yet disproportionately we see mentally ill people harmed by the police.  Is it a case where we're sending out the wrong people to address this problem?  Who is more likely to resolve a situation with a mentally ill person in a way that will minimize harm (to the person or others)-a police officer with minimal training in mental health, or a psychologist who has spent a decade of their education preparing to interact with such people?  "Calling the police" is such an engrained part of our lives that we don't think about these very logical answers to problems, and part of that is because the public has not been funding things like drug treatment and mental health response in a way where we assume these occupations (who are trained for this exact situation) can handle the response.  A way to solve that problem is to shift funds from police departments into these other public services, or to "defund."

And this is what is at the core of the "Defund the Police" movement.  You can criticize the name of it all you want, but keep in mind that similar sorts of criticisms were levied at the Black Lives Matter movement or the Gay Marriage movement-choice of words, particularly making them more provocative, has a power to stir conversation.  The "Defund the Police" movement is still malleable-there does not seem to be a consensus around its ultimate goals in the ways that the Gay Marriage and Black Lives Matter movements eventually entailed, but this is a conversation worth having, and I encourage you to not ignore or fear a response on social media, but instead research it.  The "Defund the Police" movement is just one of the many groups espousing criminal justice reform, and I think they are bringing a conversation worth having.