Thanks for the write up Tom. Your words are pretty close to how I feel about this past year, too. You’re much better at expressing the feelings though. Highlights in 2017 for me are: getting married, eating a sandwich at a place called Duck Fat, Blade Runner 2049, and Zelda Breath of the Wild.
Also, I guess I need to watch Star Trek Discovery now?
Yep. The world in many ways improved after – and because of –
those world wars.
Not sure I’d reduce two world wars to nothing but casualties tallies.
But I’ll bite. Considering the implications of an imploded American democracy, a nuclear exchange with North Korea, the unchecked rise of Russian power, the dissolution of European unity, repealed net neutrality changing how the internet works, and the environmental catastrophe if climate change is ignored, I’d easily put 2017 as potentially worse than 1914 or 1939.
-Tom
Well, not necessarily. I bailed on it because of some seriously stupid writing and a godawful lead actor. But I admire how different they let it be.
-Tom
Is 2017 a one-star year, or did it rate an extra star for the all-clear on cancer? That’s gotta be good for some score increase, right?
And I was hoping for an objective review!
Congrats on your keeping the darn beast at bay, Tom.
Nobody really cares, but my dad was diagnosed with his own a month before you revealed your own condition (Stage IV intestinal cancer in his case), and he is very well, despite crushing odds. I guess this may be, egotiscally, why your own fight resonnated so much with me.
Cheers!
And 2007 was clearly the worst year. Stop looking at the world through tiny American glasses: here, have my Frecnh microscope for a change of perspective ;)
I’d throw out 1854, when the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed, as another year when the future looked hopeless for American democracy.
Also 1941, when it was assumed that Britain and the Soviet Union would fall. There were serious preparations being made for when the Nazis would unite the Old World and inevitably cross from Africa to Brazil.
Or the late 1940s, when Communist infiltrators were found throughout the government and Stalin had the bomb and half of Europe.
The challenges we’re facing now are ones that we’ve overcome in the past. If the American people show half as much courage as we have before, we can overcome them.
I would admire that choice if we didn’t already have a glut of dark, edgy serials on American TV.
I’d argue that those wars didn’t necessarily have to happen for the world to have improved, and the changes from the first one brought on the second one. The Cold War didn’t have to end the way it did - it could have ended in the Fulda and Hof Gaps. Would the resulting world have been worth it? But now we’re into counterfactual history.
But none of those things has actually happened. I think you’re catastrophizing.
I thought Tom was being sarcastic when he called 2017 worse than 1939 but he actually wasn’t, holy shit. Unless I am missing some metasarcasmsarcasm here.
It’s impossible to know if 2017 was actually worse than 1939 or 1914 or any of the other “This didn’t go very well” years. Give it a hundred years, and if we don’t have those hundred years, guess we have our answer.
But it was the year where optimism died for a lot of people. Or maybe optimism remained dead.
(Blahblah, my stuff is not worth it).
Congrats on the all clear, Tom.
Not to make this all about me, but 2017 was my worst year ever. It began with my developing severe arthritis in my hip, which gradually deteriorated to the point that every step is agony. At least there’s a possibility my hip replacement can be moved up, but in the meantime I get to worry about the effect of the opioids that help me make it through the day.
It was they year I had my third surgery for a peptic ulcer since 2013, went through a series of tests, only to find out doctors still have no idea why this keeps happening.
Two days after being released from the hospital for that surgery my mother passed away, but I wasn’t allowed to fly so I missed the funeral.
The year ended with my leaving a job I had for 25 years to take a chance with a new company (same owner I had been with all those years) in a new industry, only to discover that I probably made the wrong move.
2018 has to be better.
This was such a disappointing post from Tom – not because of his political beliefs, but because it shows (similar to Paul Krugman or Stephen Hawking) just how hard it is to transfer excellence and depth of knowledge in one area of writing to another. In this case, games and journalism writing are your thing, and it’s evident that politics is not.
The biggest weakness, evident throughout, is the total inability to acknowledge the other side’s legitimacy in any way. I might recommend you read the book “Republican like me” by the (liberal) former president of NPR, in which he forces himself to live among Republicans for a while. Does he change all his views? No, but he stops lazily referring to them as racists, xenophobic deplorables.
Tom derides Trump for “delegitimizing” the intelligence community, when we have learned over the past few weeks that the head of the Clinton email investigation (and, later, a key member of the Russia probe) was texting with another FBI lawyer about how to work as an “insurance policy” against Trump, who they clearly regarded with a high degree of contempt. These are not supposed to be partisans, but blinded by their political affiliation, they abandoned their sworn duty and privately discussed how to sabotage the incoming president. We learned today from the FBI that months more of their texts have gone “missing.” We learned today from Tom Chick that the intelligence community is always beyond reproach, and it’s very, very bad for a president to ever question them.
Tom makes the same comment about the judiciary. How dare a president verbally challenge the 9th circuit, which has repeatedly extended constitutional protections to non-citizens in unprecedented fashion, only to be repeatedly reversed. It’s clear the 9th circuit knows what it’s doing, and is following the law, and not fitting the law to its own ends! Actually, wait, that’s not clear at all – it’s a topic of high debate among legal scholars. Tom Chick would rather this debate never happen. Questioning the judiciary is not something presidents do. (Circumventing Congress to enact something like DACA, though – that’s the good stuff).
I have no idea what it means for Trump to have “neglected the State Department” – perhaps he should have taken after the Clintons and used it as a way to enrich his personal foundation and draw kickbacks for high-level access. Seriously, is this a reference to Trump’s slow appointments? Is this a big deal that anyone cares about?
The elegy for America’s international political capital would perhaps have more impact if this capital had produced something. Curbed Russia’s aggression or North Korea’s nuclear program, perhaps. It’s hard to say without more than a throwaway one-liner.
Your disdain for the “privileged white men” in the government, and for Trump’s “bloated” face, is juvenile and backwards. It reminds me of the comments about Hillary’s appearance during the campaign. But that’s the kind of thing only deplorable people say.
I am very glad you are feeling better Tom and I wish you all the best. I just hope you stick to game reviews and movie reviews more, because your car crash metaphor applies to your review of 2017.
Yeah Tom, stay in your lane!
“I don’t agree with your political opinion, therefore you are bad at opining.”
Hi JBG. I agree with a lot of Tom’s post, but I do feel like it could be usefully amended to say “mid-to-high level GOP leaders and operatives” rather than just “Republicans”. As it happens, I know several Republicans in real life. I have close family that are Republicans. My best friend is Republican. Well, ok, maybe not that last part. But these people aren’t bad people, or at least they are not reliably worse than other people. They are frequently smart, funny, and skilled. They donate to charity and do volunteer work in their community and will personally help other people and will act to do what they think is best for their family and country. Their only common flaw (in my opinion) is that they have been lied to by their leaders and by people they should be able to trust. And they have not been able to see through those lies. And to a large extent I don’t even blame them for that. If you have a vast, tech-enabled propaganda conglomeration working to trap people inside epistemological bubbles, it is a tough adversary to beat for a random citizen who has a job and a life and maybe doesn’t want to have to spend a lot of time thinking/reading about politics.
OK, and now I will start answering your points/snarking. :)
It is a difficult topic for sure, and really easy to get passionate about on both sides. I tend to do it myself so don’t let myself visit the P&R forum here much, if at all.
I do agree that the average person that is very passionate on either/any side of the hot issues we are faced with today tends to not try to understand the motives of the other view, nor try to find solutions that most people can live with. Social media certainly makes this so much worse for the person that is not willing to research and form their own well thought out views and opinions.
It would have been faster to just type BENGHAZI!
This is clearly a P&R post, but whatever, here we are. Perhaps Tom made it because what we’re witnessing today is simply not normal. Whether things are worse than years leading up to the great wars will depend on whether we can reverse course. I think that’s why Tom says this could be worse, because we don’t know whether things will get better.
Regardless, I’m gonna replay to this like it’s a normal post in P&R, and if folks don’t like it, they don’t need to read it.
I was a Republican for my entire adult life, up until 2016.
They are in fact racists and xenophobes. This isn’t a lazy description. It’s an accurate one. No reasonable person could suggest otherwise at this point, after what we’ve seen. There is no ethical or moral underpinning to the party any longer.
Their supposed evangelical “christian” base have embraced men who are completely bankrupt morally and ethically. Economic “conservatives” have embraced economic isolationism. The party is driven by fear of immigrants and minorities. This stuff absolutely dominates right wing media at this point. You can’t listen to it and not be bombarded by this stuff.
This is a completely empty attack, backed by conspiracy theory and ignorance.
What you have is a case where two (2) employees personally disliked Trump. Guess what? That’s how the majority of the country feels.
And when this became apparent, they were removed from the Investigation. This is exactly how a properly run investigation conducts itself.
The attempt to attack the credibility of the entire US intelligence and federal law enforcement community based on such a tiny individual example is insane, and illustrative of exactly how corrupt the GOP itself has become. Virtually all of Trump’s attacks on them have been utterly without merit or basis in reality. Things like “They wiretapped me!” were straight up lies.
The State Department has been reduced to a skeleton crew.
From that liberal rag (checks notes) The National Review.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449267/state-department-crisis-staffing-cuts-incompetent-leadership-threaten-american
When you say this, do you seriously not grasp the ridiculous level of hypocrisy you are espousing? Do you not realize the tens of millions of dollars that the federal government is paying, directly, to Trump himself? So that he can go golfing at his own resorts? Are you unaware of the multitude of cases of improper management? They literally already admitted to violating laws prohibiting self-dealing. They have literally already been caught funneling money into their business through their charity, multiple times. Do you need me to provide sources for this? Because it’s trivially easy to do so.
Tom’s complaints here are valid. What we are witnessing is the utter corruption of the GOP, and perhaps what makes this so enraging to me is that it was my party. So now I’m left largely without one, because I am not a Democrat, but I will be damned if I sit by complicitly while the GOP attacks the very foundation of our country. And make no mistake, that’s exactly what is happening. Trump’s corruption runs to his core, and the GOP has allowed itself to be infected by it.
This shit is not normal, folks. Remember when shit like “Obama puts fancy mustard on his hot dog!” was a newsworthy scandal?
At this point, stuff like “The President paid a pornstar to keep quiet about him banging her right after his third (!) wife gave birth” barely registers on the news because the President’s administration is so filled with corruption that seemingly everyone involved has committed some crime… like, every fucking day.
Edit: Damnit Timex, you beat me to the post!
Tom makes the same comment about the judiciary. How dare a president verbally challenge the 9th circuit, which has repeatedly extended constitutional protections to non-citizens in unprecedented fashion, only to be repeatedly reversed. It’s clear the 9th circuit knows what it’s doing, and is following the law, and not fitting the law to its own ends! Actually, wait, that’s not clear at all – it’s a topic of high debate among legal scholars. Tom Chick would rather this debate never happen. Questioning the judiciary is not something presidents do. (Circumventing Congress to enact something like DACA, though – that’s the good stuff).
I think Tom could be referring any one of several instances where Trump has attacked judges who have ruled against him. Here’s the one that I immediately thought of when I read Tom’s post, and it is from well before the election.
This isn’t a matter with a lot of high minded legal principles involved; it’s just a case of someone doesn’t agree with Trump, so Trump attacks them as being evil/bad/corrupt whatever. It has all the principles of a M-13 hit on someone who doesn’t acquiece to them.
Tom derides Trump for “delegitimizing” the intelligence community, when we have learned over the past few weeks that the head of the Clinton email investigation (and, later, a key member of the Russia probe) was texting with another FBI lawyer about how to work as an “insurance policy” against Trump, who they clearly regarded with a high degree of contempt. These are not supposed to be partisans, but blinded by their political affiliation, they abandoned their sworn duty and privately discussed how to sabotage the incoming president. We learned today from the FBI that months more of their texts have gone “missing.” We learned today from Tom Chick that the intelligence community is always beyond reproach, and it’s very, very bad for a president to ever question them.
There’s a blogger I like, and he has a phrase I like that: "As a liberal, just about the most transgressive thing you can do is remember the past accurately. (driftglass: As a Liberal, Just About the Most Transgressive Thing You Can Do...)
So, think back to 6 or 12 months ago. What was the opinion of the GOP and Fox News on the FBI at that point? What did they think about Mueller? If you go back a year, the GOP loved them both. Now that Mueller is investigating them, Mueller and everyone around him are Commie Satanists. Again, there aren’t any principles involved. It’s as simple as “You are in my way, therefore you are bad and need to be removed.”
I have no idea what it means for Trump to have “neglected the State Department” – perhaps he should have taken after the Clintons and used it as a way to enrich his personal foundation and draw kickbacks for high-level access. Seriously, is this a reference to Trump’s slow appointments? Is this a big deal that anyone cares about?
The elegy for America’s international political capital would perhaps have more impact if this capital had produced something. Curbed Russia’s aggression or North Korea’s nuclear program, perhaps. It’s hard to say without more than a throwaway one-liner.
I feel like this is a “What have the Roman’s ever done for us?” question. We have decades of peace without any major wars, and without any wars we did not choose. We have an international monetary system that uses our currency and buoys our economy. We have allies that will follow us into even our dumbest wars, and we have many more allies that would defend us if we were ever attacked. Oh, and look at the border between Nato and Russia. State Department efforts pushed the Russians back farther than Barbarossa ever did.
Now compare that to your history books. Absolutely terrible things happen to countries on a regular basis, and they haven’t happened to us. That is a stunning success for our diplomatic corps.
Ok, and now one final point. Here’s a quote from the 2012 election, where he calls for burning the mother fucker down rather than allowing Obama to be president.
“We can’t let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty.”
If you want to be obeyed, you have to obey. If you want loyalty or respect, you need to show it to other people. It’s not an accident that Trump is viewed with contempt. It’s based on his own words and the contempt he shows for other people.
I have a Stylish user CSS addon which hides it from the main view altogether.