A Gambler Looks at the GameStop Adventure

During the last 72 hours, I've received some requests for my opinion regarding the whole GameStop situation. Is it just pure gambling, I've been asked, or is there something broader in progress? An army of investors, mostly residents of Reddit WallStreetBets, has used the Robinhood app to make and lose fortunes. The whipsawing of GameStop stock is the latest and evidently one of the greatest consequences of this army's newfound logistical power.

Initial Thoughts

Well, now that I've taken a quick look at the storylines, I have a few opinions. First, however, let me be clear. I know nothing about stock trading, less about subreddits, and my only familiarity with Robinhood is that I once lived on Robin Hood Drive in Clarksville, Tennessee. This will be one of those rare occasions when I attempt to opine regarding something I know nothing about. But bear with me.

An article that provided some contextual footing was Jon Sarlin's CNN piece on January 29 titled "Inside the reddit army that's crushing Wall Street." I recommend it as a starting point. Anywhere you look in mainstream media, you'll find interviews with people who have made sudden fortunes from very little starting money, and a few interviews with those who have then lost those fortunes. For example, today CNN ran a piece about a 10 year-old investor who made more than $3,000 on an initial $60 investment. A similar story features CNN interviewing a Missouri man with a 35K salary who quickly made a million dollars. So what people are asking me is, "Is all of this just pure gambling?"

I know a gambling subculture when I see one, and WallStreetBets appears to be its own two-fisted degenerative subculture. If you substituted "sports gambling" for "options trading" and read the subreddit forums, you'd come to the conclusion that you're dealing with out-of-control, hardcore gamblers who have no idea of the likelihood of making a profit. Somehow, because this is stock market investing, the media tone is more forgiving. 

Before criticizing this stock gambling subculture, however, I have some caveats. Having some background in journalism, I'll point out possible pitfalls in taking all reportage at face value.

Journalism Caveats

Since the landscape of sports gambling is generally sampled and reported in certain flawed, misrepresentative ways, I think it's helpful for me as a member of the not-savvy-about-options-trading club to understand that the same kind of misrepresentation may be occurring for GameStop reporting.

For example, the Jon Sarlin CNN column I referenced earlier was very, very helpful to me in providing an understandable framework, so kudos to him. However, and it is a big however, it's important to understand that for someone familiar with the material, it was easy to impose tone and spin to the piece. The big responsibilities of the author include his choice of interview subjects, what he chooses to ask those subjects, and the decisions he makes as to whom to include. Plus the author gets to edit the responses to his questions. So basically what I'm saying is that the entire tone and spin of the piece, and what the public takes away from it, is dictated by the cherry-picking of interview subjects and the cherry-picking of what they said. 

The fundamental challenge of writing this kind of story is to responsibly blend the objective, historical background and seating material for the piece with interview segments that are chosen because they are representative of the whole, not because they make for compelling reading or sexy clips that grab attention. At least that's the way I see it.

When sports gamblers are interviewed, usually they're chosen for some mega-freakish win or because of some degenerate storyline. There's rarely any sense that people being interviewed are representative of any whole. That's the problem I have with many of the initial media interviews with GameStop investors. I don't walk away with a sense of whether they've been chosen for freakish wins, disastrous storylines, or because understanding them helps you understand the entire milieu.

Are They Just Gambling?

Okay, enough with the caveats. Based on what I've read to this point, WallStreetBets traders come across as arrogant, self-absorbed, degenerate gamblers. Now I'm going to defend them in a bit, because I'm going to frame things in a bigger context, but for now, in the context of the resources they have on hand and what they are doing, they seem stark raving mad to me. Many of the quotes from the Sarlin piece reveal out-of-control people who lack long-term financial discipline. Many of the quotes make the investors sound like gambling addicts on a bad tilt, and descriptions of the groups' chats suggest most of them are committed to this lack-of-control addiction.

I want to directly quote a line from Sarlin's column, "But unlike many other online communities, there is also a clear financial goal for the people in it." Now that is an interesting comment on which I almost gagged. A "clear financial goal" is also the wished-for-outcome for the vast majority of those picking up dice, playing poker, or betting sports. Having a "clear financial goal" is like wanting to have eternal life. It's a great idea, but unless you have a sense of how many people actually pull it off, having that goal doesn't, in and of itself, do you any practical good.

Defending the Army

Now I'm going to step back from my immediate impression of this particular subculture and defend these investors, who are generally not one-percenters. I have no real beef with anarchist investors, as long as they are clear-headed about what they are doing and about their chances of financial success.

Way back in 1984, I gave a paper at the National Conference on Gambling and Risk-Taking. The paper appeared to be well received, but a few of my concluding comments garnered some pushback during the socials after the sessions.

I have always argued against addicted out-of-control gambling behavior. However, I also fully defend the use of negative expectation gambling as a tool in a broader context. For example, playing at being James Bond in a casino environment may enhance one's non-material resume, so to speak. Cultivating the perception that one is urbane, worldly, and willing to take substantial risks has value. Whether gambling enhances you in the eyes of business colleagues and potential lovers, or provides a respite from a day-to-day grind, those non-material aspects may have more overall value than the material resources sacrificed while gambling. So I'm always aware of that. I'll lecture recreational gamblers when the mechanics of what they are doing is wrong, but I won't tell them that the actual gambling is wrong. Not my job, and I'm not in their shoes, so I don't really know what they get out of their gambling. I try to correct dumb betting from a math perspective, not an overall context perspective.

The pushback I got during the conference social events was that some people couldn't believe I didn't automatically define losing a big chunk of annual income, say 25%, as a gambling problem or addiction. I refused to automatically do that, as I don't know what the person is getting out of his gambling participation. I'm not God. Maybe it's what gets that person up every morning. Maybe it's the primary context that facilitates he or she having sex. I just do not know.

Conclusion

I circle back to the anarchist investors. The Sarlin piece revealed a burgeoning social network for these people, a political purpose of sorts, a devil-may-care, financial disaster precipice kind of cachet. I don't know to what degree they draw their identity and their purpose from anarchist (and likely idiotic) investing. Not my call. Does it make sense for them to do it? I have no idea. Maybe it's what gets them a date on Saturday night. 

Sarlin's descriptions of the online social interactions of the WallStreetBets investors reminded me of American sociologist Erving Goffman's comments about gambling. Quoting anthropologist Natasha Dow Schull, "Goffman regarded gambling as the occasion for 'character contests' in which players could demonstrate their courage, integrity, and composure in the face of contingency."

This is where I mention some key facts regarding "contingency" facing non-one-percenter investors in 2021. The framing statistics for the anarchist investors' behaviors are that (1) almost 75% of Americans die in debt, (2) the average debt for those in debt is roughly 62K, and (3) things are not getting better.

Once these numbers frame the context for these traders, what appears to be an insane go-for-broke mentality seems a bit more rational. Their attitudes and perspectives make much more sense.

Bob Dietz

January 30, 2021

Learning New Lingo

I was eight or nine years old, reading an X-Men comic book, when I saw the word balloon where Magneto first called his henchman sidekick, the Toad, a "sycophantic simpleton." I had no idea what "sycophantic" meant, so I looked it up in a big, fine dictionary and decided to use the word as often as possible. I still wasn't quite sure how to pronounce it, but I used it nonetheless.

Now, 55 years later, I'm appalled that "sycophantism" has become ubiquitous across the media landscape, all because Republicans have worshipped at the feet of Trump and his bad behavior for the last four years. My favorite word has become overused and banal, and my use of it is now perceived as cliched.

The years 2020-21 have been tough on my go-to vocabulary. "Sycophant," "cognitive dissonance," and "delusion" have all become American media staples. My job in this brief installment is therefore to give readers a heads up on words and phrases that will soon flood mainstream conversation. Use them now with relative impunity; three months from now they'll be so fashionable as to be memes.

First of all, get comfortable with the phrase "Christian-American Nationalism." As laid out at the wonderful holykoolaid.com site, our sudden surge in state religions features prophets, over the top evangelizing, and a stunning inability to handle (my old favorite and yours) cognitive dissonance. Mainly, though, what is striking is the assignation of biblical heft to actual current political figures. State-worship and religious worship thus blend in a way that would horrify the founding fathers.

A word that ties into "Christian-American Nationalism" is "Revelator." In case you're wondering, "Revelator" seems to be a self-promoting title that sidesteps the "uh oh; I'm nuts," connotations of calling oneself a "Prophet." "Revelator" sounds much more scientific than "Prophet," and at the same time it hints at somewhat less stringent consequences for being wrong.

See, the problem with being a "Prophet" is that the Bible lays out the consequences of wrongness in the prophecy game. Basically, thanks to the Council of Laodicea and others that canonized the Bible, if a prophet is wrong about something, then they were a Satan-filled false prophet. Only people who were correct all the time were vetted into the Bible as prophets. That's the way good editors, councils, and deities prefer things, and that's the way it is. Calling yourself "Revelator Robert" as opposed to  "Bob the Prophet" softens the consequences of wrong predictions. Since false prophets have often been stoned, it's an important public relations detail.

So keep on the alert for references to "Christian-American Nationalism" and "Revelators" going forward. I suspect we'll soon be fielding various new words to describe people with varying degrees of compartmentalized delusions. I'll endeavor to keep you abreast. In the meantime, let's all do our best to use fashionable, but not cliched, lingo.

Bob Dietz

January 28, 2021 

Masking White Privilege

Sometimes the reality of white privilege pops up and slaps you in the face. There's no masking it, one might say.

As reported January 22 by Abby Haglage for yahoo!life, a study by USC's Center for Economic and Social Research discovered significant ethnic disparities regarding mask wearing. Overall, 51% of those surveyed reported wearing masks consistently when interacting outside of their households. Blacks wore masks 67% of the time under those conditions. Latinos reported 63%, and other races reported 65%. Whites brought up the rear with 46%.

No one should be surprised by the racial disparities in mask wearing because we've all seen the anti-mask protests, and they are overwhelmingly Caucasian. But really, when you ponder this a bit more, the correlation turns a bit ugly. Why should a demographic that went to war to defend its right to own human beings decide to wear masks to protect other human beings? Individual (white) rights would, one should expect, rule the day.

All of the arguments du jour begin to blend together. The U.S. made the decision to not shut down because the priority was to fortify the 401Ks of the 15% of Americans who own 85% of stocks. That's white privilege. Placing an underclass of disproportionally non-white "essential workers" at much greater virus load risk is a version of white privilege. The hell-with-you mask aversion is white privilege.

My thought experiment goes something like this -- if whites were disproportionately vulnerable to Covid-19, would we have mask-wearing laws? What would the national conversation sound like? Would Christian recitations of The Golden Rule be recycled every half hour on Fox News?

At one point during the early summer, my home state of Tennessee was 50th in mask-wearing percentage. Dead last. We're the poster child for wayward white privilege, and we're in awful shape right now. My county has reported a 30% positivity rate, and the more infectious and deadly variants haven't yet arrived in Tennessee.

This is one time in history when white privilege is biting white lives in the ass. We are truly dumb as a box of Saltines.

Bob Dietz

January 25, 2021

Sauron Joins the GOP

"There are no solutions for popular delusions."

What must the world think of "The Asylum," previously known as the United States of America?

On January 23, the UK Guardian reported that attorney Paul Davis, who lost his job after posting selfies of himself at the Capitol riots, filed a lawsuit in Texas to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The lawsuit analogizes the United States to Tolkien's Kingdom of Gondor, whose king (like Trump, presumably) has been exiled. Rumor has it that if the lawsuit fails, Davis will refile using the Count of Monte Cristo argument.

Meanwhile, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, she of QAnon-loving fame, decided to file articles of impeachment against Joe Biden. Yes, we have gotten to that cultural point when the mention of something nuts in the political sphere no longer requires putting an "R" designation after the person's name. Hard to believe, but true.

And then there's Rep. Andy Harris of Maryland, who on January 21, the day after Biden's inauguration, tried to bring a concealed weapon onto the House floor. Personally, I don't blame him. That Sauron is a tough sonufabitch, but the jury is out on whether he can handle hot lead. To my recollection, handguns were banned in Mordor.

Bob Dietz

January 24, 2021

Asylum Polling

I've delayed writing this particular column for days. My reasons for delaying are ironic. I'd prefer to not believe what the polling shows, and what the polling shows is that Americans believe what they prefer to believe, regardless of evidence. Writing this column is psychically painful, and the column is about people avoiding dealing with anything psychically painful.

I've been hoping some later versions of the polls would contradict the earlier polling, but that hasn't happened, and I think it's unlikely to happen anytime soon. So, to borrow a phrase from CNN's Chris Cuomo, let's get to it.

The problems framed by the polling are fairly simple and straightforward. How should a modern democracy deal with the fact that a large chunk of its electorate is clinically delusional? And does it make any sense to placate, negotiate, and attempt to reach common ground with those citizens who are unable to rationally evaluate evidence and who often fail to even recognize evidence? Is there any real democratic value in failing to disqualify paranoid and irrational individuals from having a voice? In other words, why cater to people who are nuts, bonkers, off the deep end? What is the advantage in allowing inmates to help run the asylum?

The January 11 Quinnipiac University poll reveals that Republicans, by a 73-21 margin, say there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election. Democrats say there was not by 93-5, and Independents say there was not by 60-36.

Back in the spring, a plurality of polled Republicans said that coronavirus threats were overblown, and I debated in several columns if that was due to people just taking political stands in their poll responses as opposed to reporting what they actually believed. I think that debate can be shelved. A big chunk of the GOP has anchored themselves in the Sea of Delusions. They're not lost due to a political stance. They're failing to process reality because they'd prefer to play dress up.

An Older Poll with a Surprise

Now I'll back up to an older poll, one taken December 1st through December 6th by NPR/PBS. I'm pleased to announce that due to President Trump's absence, my propensity for political incorrectness will once again merit some notice.

The question that interests me is on Page 43 of the NPR poll, "Do you trust that the results of the 2020 election are accurate, or not?" The answer, as has been widely reported in the media, is that just 24% of Republicans say yes. A massive 72% say no, and 4% are unsure. As was the case for "coronavirus is overblown" questions in the spring and summer, less education correlates with non-evidence based answers. Thus, 26% of college grads of all parties say the 2020 election was not accurate, while 39% of non-college grads say the same. 

What I found fascinating about the NPR poll, however, was the gender disparity among Republicans. I was very surprised, and part of my surprise results from nobody in mainstream media highlighting it. Here we go.

For Republican men, 33% said the election was accurate, and 64% said it was not. For Republican women, just 15% said the election was accurate and a whopping 81% said it was not. That is a monstrous irrationality gender divide. Huge. I have not heard a mention of it on CNN or MSNBC or in polite company. The fact that Republican women are significantly more nuts than Republican men appears to have been buried on Page 43.

No need to thank me for mentioning it. I aim to do as much politically incorrect wet work as the law allows.

New CNN Poll

Next I'd like to mention a CNN poll from January 9-14 that highlights the continued election denialism of most Republicans. Just 19% of GOP voters in the poll said Biden had actually won the election. Seventy-five percent said that there had been widespread voter fraud. In addition, 50% of Republicans said that there was solid evidence of such fraud. 

These polls raise a large number of serious questions. What I'd like to know is if these views are crystallized as a kind of permanent Trump base mythos or if they're amenable to degradation over time. Whatever the answer, the problem-in-the-now is that a majority of the Republican electorate believes what they prefer to believe. The Covid-19 irrationality has lessened a bit over time, but half of Republicans polled December 1-6 still thought the virus was overblown. 

The mental acuity criteria for deciding whether action must be taken is whether an individual poses a threat to himself or others. The Covid-19 deniers clearly fall into that category. Election deniers may pose less of a threat overall, but in many ways are just as delusional. The question, and it bears repeating, is whether attempts to include irrational people in political processes serve any useful purpose. In the case of Covid-19, the United States has paid the price for allowing the promulgation of irrational anti-science nonsense. How high a percent of irrationality and paranoia can a population sustain without completely falling prey to self-defeating madness? And how can a country compete economically and scientifically against other nations, and other economic systems, when its back is bowed by the weight of its own delusions?

Bob Dietz

January 23, 2021

Keeping Tabs on Lingo

Those who have read my entries for the last year know that my favorite 2020 word was "delusional," and my favorite phrase has been "cognitive dissonance." I have admittedly worn them out.

The rest of the world, however, is now catching up. Most media conversations for the last two weeks have centered on who is responsible for the degree of Republican electorate delusions in this country and what can be done about it. Commentators have avoided the term "insanity" as that is inflammatory at a time when we are supposed to pivot towards Kumbaya. Thus, media lays the blame on a handful of manipulative GOP leaders and the hypnotic promulgations of social media. "Delusion" therefore becomes a common term.

Pinning down the provenance of people being irrational, however, isn't likely to be helpful regarding existing mass delusions. Delicately ignoring the intractability and ubiquity of Americans being nuts does not solve the issue of their being nuts. It likely makes things worse. My personal suspicion is that attempts to heal a deluded chunk of the electorate without labeling them as deluded is a snipe hunt. I liken it to labeling Norman Bates as a taxidermist in hopes that he won't notice that he's psychotic. We shall see.

I've circled back to cognitive dissonance many times in the last hundred posts, and it's good to see that the phrase has entered mainstream nomenclature. I leave you with a quote from Daniel Hodges, a D.C. cop who was seen crushed in a doorway by Trump rioters in a famous video. 

"The cognitive dissonance and the zealotry of these people is unreal. They were waving the Thin Blue Line flag and telling us 'we're not your enemies' while they were attacking us, and you know, killed one of us."

There are no solutions for popular delusions.

Bob Dietz

January 20, 2021

American Insanity -- A Russian's View

How did the United States get here, with literally half of a major political party clinically deluded? And what comes next? My next column recommendation is a January 12, 2021 piece by Garry Kasparov, the famed Russian chess champion.

I'm not usually a huge fan of Kasparov's columns, as I feel that he's often guilty of a kind of Margaret-Mead-in-Samoa naivete and self-presumed expertise when it comes to U.S. culture. What I find refreshing about Kasparov's writing, however, is that he doesn't treat the U.S. as if it has some Kryptonian invulnerability to fascism and idiocy. He sees America as any other country-in-a-mess.

Kasparov's blunt warnings certainly carry more heft after the January 6 insurrection. I'm going to quote a paragraph here that I think hits everything on the head. "Garry Kasparov: What Happens Next" was published by CNN on January 12.

"Hemingway wrote in 'For Whom the Bell Tolls': 'There are many who do not know they are fascists, but will find it out when the time comes.' The time has come, and we are finding them out. Fortuitously, they are inclined to boast of their transgressions on Instagram and from the Senate floor, which makes them easy to find."

In his column, Kasparov mentions a couple of recent surveys that I'll address in a future "Popular Delusions and Madness of Crowds" entry. Based on these new surveys, Americans are more deluded than I give them credit for. As I like to chant before nodding off to sleep:

There are no solutions for popular delusions.

Bob Dietz

January 15, 2021

Framing the American Insanity

How did we get here, to the point where a full quarter of the American electorate is clinically delusional? In the months ahead, I'll make the case (as I have in the past) that American culture predisposes its citizenry to bouts of clinical insanity. In the next few columns, I'll reference others' columns rather than my own predictable blather as a way to frame some of the issues.

I spent many of the previous hundred columns describing how Trumpism and Trump support is primarily a religion. I was initially hesitant to define Trumpism as such, mainly because labeling it as religious is such an easy, blase, and cliched thing to do. Sometimes, though, the easy observation is also the correct or most useful observation. I think that's the case with Trump's infamous base. Trumpism checks all the religious boxes, and Trump's base supporters certainly qualify as zealots.

I've argued these points for more than a year. Today I'd like to present another voice, the author of a brief CNN opinion piece. Peniel E. Joseph's "What the Church of Trump is costing America" was published October 7, 2020. Joseph is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs. I'm going to quote the opening two paragraphs for their timeliness in the wake of the January 6 Capitol riot. I recommend reading the piece in its entirety. Bear in mind that this was published in October.

"How did the President of the United States become one of the nation's largest threats to public health and safety? When one man became head of "church" and state: the Church of Trump, that is.

For many of his most ardent supporters, Donald Trump has indeed become a church -- defined as a gathering place or grouping point for like-minded individuals to learn, express and amplify a set of beliefs that they collectively define and refine over time. While unable to articulate any meaningful religious experience, biblical knowledge or deep belief system, the President has become, for many, the embodiment of a peculiar definition of American exceptionalism."

As I've said many, many times, it didn't take Mensa-level reasoning to anticipate where 2020 Trumpism would lead. And here we are.

Bob Dietz

January 15, 2021

American Delusions

As the American media shifts its focus to Trump's second impeachment, they leave behind the question that was a focal point for the last week -- how did we get here? The answers are obvious if complex. When you literally have a quarter of an electorate clinically delusional, bad things figure to be on the menu. I'm not being hyperbolic here. I've given my take on the situation in many past columns, most explicitly in the two listed below. I recommend readers interested in balancing themselves in our present-day American context revisit those columns.

1) Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (May 25, 2020)

2) The Sanity Test of 2020 (December 27, 2020)

There exists no easy out, no quick fix, when half or more of one political party is so mentally damaged as to be unable to process evidence in a rational manner. I'm sure there are many subtle threads that contributed to our current spider-on-LSD cultural tapestry, but there are also threads that have been flashing neon orange as well. Internet echo chambers have largely replaced small newspapers as trusted sources of both information and psychological equilibrium. The fact that Americans now move every five years means that personal internet gestalts feature more continuity than physical interpersonal gestalts in the real world. Getting unanchored in reality has never been easier, the Middle Ages excepted. As in the Middle Ages, many Americans now tend to be cloistered, and the conspiracists bury their heads in the minutia of folios rather than actually observing the world. Science is anathema to them.

So while the media is mesmerized by the politics of impeachment and the logistics of Trumpian insurrection, I'll turn my attention in 2021 to the delusional nature of large swaths of the American public. 

I'm not a political writer; never have been. I was able to see pandemic reality and GOP irrationality, and call them out, because I have a knack for evaluating public evidence quickly and understanding when other people cannot. That's the province of the professional sports gambler. It'll be a useful ability in the months ahead.

My next column will be a shout out to a couple of CNN pieces that set the stage for what rational Americans are going to face in the months ahead. 

Buckle up. There's no quick solutions for popular delusions. 

Bob Dietz

January 13, 2021

Tales from The Asylum -- Insurrection Edition

For the last year, I've done "Tales from The Asylum" stories as a way to highlight how truly irrational U.S. leadership decisions have been and how unhinged large chunks of the Republican electorate have become. If you like, check out:

August 3 -- Last Week in The Asylum

August 10 -- Tales from The Asylum

August 19 -- Tales from The Asylum

August 29 -- Tales from The Asylum

October 24 -- Tales from The Asylum

The August 19 column received some good reviews.

Now, after a Trump-fueled mob attacked the Capitol yesterday, people suddenly realize that irrationality runs rampant in Trumpworld. After four years of inoculation from reality, snowballing these last 12 months with pandemic lie after pandemic lie, how could the cult of Trump have been conditioned for anything but irrationality?

Suddenly GOP asses were on the line yesterday and guns were drawn and people died, and the GOP is shocked, shocked they say, that it came to this. LOL. Sounds like a bunch of lawyers. Voluntary blindness when convenient; backbones like Gumby.

So Trump is nuts, and the GOP couldn't figure it out until yesterday. If that's true, Republicans are the dumbest, most imperceptive political party on the planet. 

I had my popcorn ready yesterday, as I anticipated the events. Two things surprised me. First, I was shocked at the non-response of law enforcement and how easily rioters flooded the Capitol. Second, I was surprised that Congress reconvened in the same location last night. Because many of the rioters were wearing large backpacks, I thought sweeping the entire Capitol for bombs would take until morning. Evidently, bomb sweeping tech is well beyond my expectations.

The unfortunate aspect of all this -- the Capitol goes sane in two weeks and rampant insanity, for the most part, will be outside the walls of Congress or the White House. It will be in the streets and homes of American towns and cities. And it will be more dangerous than what we saw January 6.

Bob Dietz

January 7, 2021

In the Footsteps of Captain Renault

Now that injuries have accrued and at least one life has been lost amid 30,000 Trumpian zombies attacking the Capitol, I roll my eyes cynically at the idea that today was a tipping point that magically enabled some in the GOP to focus their eyeballs on reality. Yeah, they had a real epiphany today. What, were they complete morons up to this point, unable to anticipate the most obvious of causes and effects?

I can just hear Ted Cruz, whose slimeball minister act is such a caricature as to be B-movie worthy, saying:

"I am shocked, shocked I tell you, to find that 30,000 delusional anarchists with a history of white nationalism, conspiracy paranoia, threat-making, and ownership of automatic weapons would violently break into the Capitol."

Bob Dietz

January 6, 2021

January 6 -- MAGA Terrorism

"You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on." 

George W. Bush

I find it amusing (horrific but amusing) that President Donald Trump has always sought to live by this famous Bush quote. The fact that it's a George W. quote makes me feel as if The Donald was paying attention to how the Bush family did things and decided to dial that style to 11 for his Trumpian base.

Well, today many of those people who have been fooled all of the time for the last four years assembled in the nation's capital city. Once assembled, they attacked the Capitol building. Who didn't see this coming?

I certainly did. I scheduled nothing so I could watch the potential firestorm.

If there hadn't been bloodshed and injuries, today would have been comical. I give Putin credit for however heavy his thumb has been on the U.S. political scale. Trump has done as much damage to the United States as humanly possible. The Giuliani, Don Junior, and Prez speeches today lit the fire for the Capitol assault.

This fooling some of the people all of the time started with the Trumpian predictions regarding COVID-19. When scientists said one thing and Trump continually proclaimed something else, the Trumpians bought into the Trump narrative. We went from "It's 15, soon to be zero" to hydroxy touting to continual estimates of covid deaths that were off by factors of 10 or more.  

The Trumpsters bought it all. As 2020 unfolded, we were treated to Q-Anon conspiracies, Fauci conspiracies, Bill Gates conspiracies. Wild stuff, with any believer qualifying for a psych ward. The Trumpsters bought it. Eventually, we got to an election that Trump, despite losing by more than seven million votes, sold to his troops as rigged. After losing quickly in 60 courtrooms, the election conspiracists retreated to the word "allegation" as a motivation and psychological fixation.

Now, as has been mentioned by the national media, had 30,000 blacks or Muslims descended on D.C. today and behaved like the Trumpsters, the responses and language used today would have been very, very different. 

Once people commit to nonsense over objective reality, once they buy into what they prefer to believe rather than factual evidence, they can be steered anywhere. We're looking at 50 million Americans on mental and emotional leashes. Today in D.C. was not the culmination, but the beginning. I strongly suspect this gets worse before it gets better. Maybe tomorrow.

What do I recommend? Well, the only way to rid a nation of 50 million lemmings with automatic weapons is to find a really big cliff.

Bob Dietz

January 6, 2021

Defending Dabo Swinney's Buckeye Ranking

I figured I'd get this posted prior to the Clemson/Ohio State game kicking off, otherwise I'd risk being overtly self-serving.

Swinney, Clemson's head coach, took all kinds of heat for ranking Ohio State eleventh in the final Coaches Poll. Swinney defended his decision logically and concisely in an interview with Sam Cooper for Yahoo Sports. Basically, Swinney said that he couldn't put Ohio State in the top 10 because they simply hadn't played enough games.

Rather than criticizing Swinney, I'm going to argue here that Swinney probably OVER-rated Ohio State. Unless you consider the 2020 Ohio State team as a clone of the 2019 team, which evidently the "committee" does, there is absolutely zero reason to place the 2020 Ohio State squad in the top 10, much less the college football playoff. This Ohio State team has demonstrated nothing against a pitiful schedule. The 2020 Buckeye defense is very ordinary. Without their quarterback, they are a .500 team in the SEC or Big 12. With their quarterback, well, I'm not sure.

In 2011, Ohio State president Gordon Gee claimed Ohio State deserved title game consideration because the Buckeyes, unlike TCU and Boise State, didn't play "the Little Sisters of the Poor." Well, looking at Ohio State's 2020 schedule, the Buckeyes have faced the blind orphaned children of the Little Sisters of the Poor. 

I love the way Northwestern plays, and I actually had them at 200-1 to win the Big 10. But realistically, Northwestern may have been the best team Ohio State played, and that isn't saying a whole lot. The Buckeyes didn't face Iowa or Wisconsin. They played a really lousy slate of opponents. No computer using 2020 numbers could put Ohio State in the top six or seven teams.

Ohio State going to the playoff is all brand name and television ratings. It's just another example of monopolization and venality, of networks putting heavy thumbs on the decision-making scales because they pay the bills. It's crony monopoly capitalism at its most venal. But Howard Cosell isn't on the broadcast teams, so that probably won't get a mention.

Swinney was, I think, overly generous in his evaluation of Ohio State. The Buckeyes' schedule merited a spot in the Liberty Bowl  or thereabouts. Three of the four playoff teams, Clemson included, have jury-rigged silo-scheduling resumes. That, however, is a tale for another day. For now, I'll just say that Swinney got the Ohio State ranking correct, and he should be saluted.

Bob Dietz

January 1, 2021