Midrange Weekly Nov 15

You’re Weekly Round Up On What’s Got The Midrange Staff’s Attention

Hello everyone and welcome back to Midrange Weekly. The rainy season is upon us here in Vancouver and oh boy has it come with a vengeance. Flooding and mudslide warnings have emerged, prompting many to stay in and hibernate. Mickey is pleased with this development. However, as is accordance with our obsession with consumerism, Christmas season has landed (???) even though it’s barely mid November. But, the Golden State Warriors keep on winning, Aaron Rodgers is back and Twitter Blue finally launched in the US, so there’s that. Oh and Steve Bannon was indicted on Contempt Charges Over House’s Capitol Riot Inquiry. Some justice for what happened on January 6th could finally be coming. Here’s hoping the orange man is next.

Finally, big shout out to Shira Blustein of the Acorn here in Vancouver as her new cookbook dropped this past Tuesday. Head on over to your nearest bookstore to grab your own copy. In the meantime, let’s dig into the week and see what got our attention…

 

Judge Schroeder Is The Internet’s Newest Villain For The Week

This week it’s been all eyes on the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, the 17 year old whose actions in Kenosha last year has fomented a confluence of white supremacy, hyper partisan gun rights advocacy, and white privilege all in one case. Throw in a little domestic terrorism in for good measure. Rittenhouse has become the poster child de jour for this alchemy of everything bad. During the Kenosha protests last year, with thousands of people rallying against racial injustice and police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Rittenhouse inserted himself into the mix in lethal ways. With a propagandistic admiration of cops, and the antecedent racist & reckless views that informs much of their code of conduct, Rittenhouse saw this as an opportunity to play cop- or as the second amendment would suggest in a euphemistic spin, a member of a well regulated militia. Before going any further, nothing about his actions or those that would do anything similar are in any way well regulated, and what kind of militia has child soldiers (the kinds that are terroristic). Rittenhouse illegally obtained an AR-15, transported it across state lines (also illegal) from his home in Illinois to Kenosha, looked for any kind of trouble he could find and then pointed his gun at it. He killed two protesters and wounded another. Once it was apparent to him that he had in fact committed murder, he turned himself in to authorities. After pleading not guilty to the charges, he took celebratory photos with members of the Proud Boys, a white supremacist group, hyping his work. His trial is now under way. 

There was no doubt that Rittenhouse case would become an inflection point for hyper partisan conservatives, gun rights activists, and all those who have had it with them over what kind of treatment the criminal justice system would afford the 17 year old white male. Considering the state of things it’s not at all unreasonable to hypothesize about the experience a black defendant would have on trial should they have been the one charged with these crimes. Would they even survive long enough to make it to the courtroom? After all, his trial was the result of actions catalyzed last year by a black man having the life choked out of him by a cop for maybe having a counterfeit bill. This disparity of judicial refrain was highlighted by the subtly absolving headlines of the New York Times on the trial, depicting Rittenhouse as nothing more than a child who admired the police, but things got out of hand. Such neutral deference is not something they afforded even to victims of similar crimes in the past, so long as the victims were black.

Even with the noxious racial and ideological politics at play here, people were likely not prepared for the Rittenhouse trial to be this much of a shit show. We have Judge Schroeder to thank for that. Schroeder’s antics, outbursts, and bizarre diatribes have already become the stuff of morbid virality on line, centering coverage more on what idiotic tantrum he would go off on next as opposed to, say the merits or candour of the opposing legal teams. While Schroeder’s conduct has often been problematic and his competency has indeed proven a real hindrance to a fair trail, his actions being adjudicated through the aperture of social media, often supplanting the role of traditional media has drained much of the context from these controversies. It’s going to sound a bit like I’m defending this judge or approving of his jurisprudence in the trial for a hot minute- this is not the case, exactly. Rather I think it’s instructive to highlight some of the outrages surrounding him that don’t really capture the full insight of what’s going on. 

Things got off to a pretty foreboding start even before the trial had properly begun when news started permeating Twitter that Judge Schroeder had prohibited the term ‘victim’ in reference to the three people Rittenhouse had shot. This on its face sounds pretty abhorrent and a clear demonstration of bias in favour of Rittenhouse’s defense team, but the reality is not so clear-cut. Further digging into Schroeder’s judicial record indicates that he never allows the term ‘victim’ to be used as it could prematurely inform the jury’s view of a defendant beyond the parameters of admissible evidence. One has to remember that Schroeder has seen countless cases, most of them not of such a public spectacle kind of nature; the defendants in his cases are often not middle class white males, sometimes it’s the opposite. This restriction is in place to ensure a fair shot to all defendants in his courtroom; he was attempting to apply it with consistency in this case.

However, Schroder also mandated that in absence of using the term ‘victim’ it was permissible to refer to those shot as ‘rioters’ and ‘arsonists’, which seems down right prodigious in its impact on a juror’s opinions. Whatever logical efficacy there was to be had by the first part of his decision is completely nullified by the other half so what’s the point? What could have been a reasonable establishing of linguist neutrality in accordance with only evidence being considered devolves into partisan framing even more extreme than if he had just left such a consideration unattended.

There are multiple videos of Schroeder lashing out at the prosecution, berating them and threatening repercussions should they not acquiesce to his alleged tantrums, implying an uneven alignment with team Rittenhosue. However the background behind these outbursts is far from arbitrary agitation, but rather relates to a real problem that had vexed Schroeder. On the stand, Rittenhouse opted to plead the 5th amendment, which allows for a defendant to refuse answering questions on the grounds of potential self-incrimination. The prosecutorial lawyer in subsequent questioning tried to imply Rittenhouse’s culpability on the grounds of his pleading the 5th. This is super not allowed! A officer of the court is not allowed to infer guilt, nor translate those sentiments to the jurors based on one’s exercising of the 5th amendment; it’s kind of anathema to the whole point of the constitutional provision. Make no mistake, I fully believe Rittenhouse is guilty of murder and belongs in jail, but one can’t conduct a trial through inferred beliefs; if a conviction is to stick, it has to be obtained through proper legal parameters. The prosecution had repeatedly operated outside of those parameters and Schroeder was right to call them out on it. 

Getting more anecdotal, and admittedly asinine, is the video of Judge Schroeder’s phone going off revealing his ring tone to be that of the song played at Trump rallies. Internet prognosticators viewed this as confirmation that Schroeder is a devout member of the MAGA clan and therefore a walking conflict of interest to oversee a trial so loaded with weaponized political entanglements. This is indeed a legitimate concern, one that may very well be present within Schroeder’s pathology. But the reporting makes it sound like he had been caught using a acutely specific marker of Trump supplicants; the song in question was God Bless The USA. Is it popular among conservatives? Sure. It’s also a pretty old pop rock song that has had fluctuating Americana style connotations for generations as opposed to being distinctly endemic of the Trump brigade. People are reading too much into it.

That’s about as far as even I can go in contextualizing Schroeder’s actions. Beyond that the rest of his theatricality really does seem actively hostile, or at least just confounding in its incompetence. Earlier on the proceedings, Schroeder went off in a rant decrying video evidence of the shooting as inadmissible due to his perceived manipulation via editing of the footage. His rational for this was his grossly ignorant understanding of how cameras or play back works. Schroeder appears under the impression that by zooming in on a video, additional pixels are artificially being added thus obscuring the true nature of the footage. I wish I were making this stuff up. It would be rude to argue this utter lack of even the most basic tech acumen as symptomatic of someone his age, but the fact that the defense lawyer displayed similar ineptitude isn’t helping things. The defense erroneously claimed that Ipads deployed a kind of sophisticated AI that filled in missing gaps in videos to approximate what it thinks may have happened, and thusly cannot be considered a legitimate accounting of the truth. As you can imagine, Schroeder was sympathetic to these astoundingly stupid suggestions. 

Not everyone is great with phones, fine. Less forgivable was Schroeder’s, insistence that- due to it being Veterans Day- everyone in the courtroom, jury included, stand up and clap for a defence witness who was also a veteran. It’s the judge’s responsibility to facilitate a courtroom environment in which the state, for which he is the key analogue of, presents witnesses in the most neutral way possible. Forcing a performative bout of obsequiousness and gratitude to a witness is about as far off the mark from such an ideal as possible. Something like that should never happen in a courtroom. Doing so manipulates the juror’s views of a witness in terms of credibility, believability, and sways their deference to them. It should only be the witness’s testimony or qualifications as they pertain to the trial at hand (that part is crucial) that informs such opinions. 

We also have the strange instance of Schroeder, as the court broke for lunch, insisting he didn’t want, “any of that Asian food that came off the long boat”. Charming! This may seem petty to drag him, but the ambient racism inherent in Rittenhouse’s actions, the media portrayal of him versus others in his position that aren’t white, as well as the background for which this all took place is vital. The angle of institutionalized bigotry is what galvanized Rittenhouse to action in the first place; for such bigotry to be present in the courtroom meant to adjudicate his fate renders the whole process severely compromised. Earlier contexts aside, Schroeder’s casual and flippant racism in conjunction with his bizarrely remedial understanding of basic technological conveniences makes him a sub optimal person to oversee the Rittenhouse case, to put it mildly. Institutional and judicial biases embedded in America’s criminal justice system have already conditioned a great many to steel themselves for a gross miscarriage of justice here; no one needs anymore reasons for this to go sideways. -Tristan

 

Twitter Blue is what?

I singed up to Twitter way back in 2010 when pretty much everyone else did. At the time I thought it was a novel product and service. A great way to communicate with the global collective, not just your friends. But as time passed and my understanding of the platform grew, I stopped tweeting and started using the app solely as a news source. For this, I am a happy and loyal customer. I don’t follow too many individuals or companies, but I do enjoy those that I do, specifically journalists who write about food, tech and basketball. Twitter is the ideal platform to stay up to date on all things current in this fast paced world. However, I don’t know too many who use it as often as I do, outside of a few acquaintances and my fellow Midrange cohort, Tristan. He’s obsessed more than I am, which I think is funny. 

But as the years have passed and Twitter’s social competitors have flourished, namely Meta (ugh…I mean Facebook and Instagram), Snapchat and TikTok, Twitter’s growth hasn’t nearly as much which has prompted many in the tech sphere, specifically Scott Galloway, to challenge Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, to change and update the platform and launch a subscription service.  

Well Scott, you have your wish…sort of. 

From The Verge:

Twitter Blue, the company’s subscription service, is adding new features while expanding to new countries and platforms. The service first launched in June in Canada and Australia on iOS, but starting Tuesday, Twitter Blue will be available in the US and New Zealand and on Android and the web.

Perhaps the most useful Twitter Blue feature is an undo button, which lets you recall tweets before they send. (I can think of a few times that would have saved me from an embarrassing typo.) Other features in the initial launch included a reader mode for tweet threads, bookmarks folders, the ability to theme your Twitter app and app icon, and, as of last month, a Labs program that lets subscribers try out some new Twitter features early.

But as part of Tuesday’s expansion, Twitter Blue is about to get a lot more useful for people who love reading and finding news on Twitter. One feature lets people view ad-free articles on participating websites and gives a portion of revenue from Twitter Blue subscriptions to those sites. If you’re a Twitter Blue subscriber, when you come across a link from a publisher offering ad-free articles, you’ll see an “Ad-free with Twitter Blue” label under the headline.

Now I understand this service has been available in Canada for sometime now, but that really isn’t the point of why I’m writing about it. It’s more that it’s now available in the US but also that it exists at all. The advantages of a subscription model are there with ad-free links to columns and customizable features like being able to delete a tweet, which in the #Metoo era could have invariably saved several hundred people their jobs had this been available years ago. But more importantly, what it signifies is a growing desire for this archetype. The New York Times is the gold standard when it comes to switching from an ad service to a subscription model with more and more following their lead each year. But when it comes to the giants in our lives, ads still rule the day. Twitter has yet to fully commit to an ad-free option, but it could if Blue takes off. The advantages of what that could signify has the potential to send shock waves throughout the market. Imagine an Instagram where those who used it actually wanted to be there. Facebook has billions of users but how many are actually active? This is Twitter’s greatest advantage, they have a strong active user base. Smaller no doubt, but loyal. 

I’m curious to see how this shapes out and if Blue has legs. Plus the fee they’re charging is negligible. Less than a cup of coffee. Worth the risk. About time Jack Dorsey gave his first love some attention. Can’t always go to his second love, Square. What a weird man.

If you want to learn more about Twitter Blue and a little about the man who got it off the ground, this interview by Recode Media host Peter Kafka is excellent. — Jamie

 

Things From The Internet We Liked

 

It’s The 20th Anniversary Of Metal Gear Solid 2, Possibly The Most Important Video Game Ever Made

On Nov 13 2001 Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons Of Liberty released on the Playstation 2. Beyond the at the time astonishingly mind blowing graphics and unprecednated technical fidelity, one of the most anticipated games of all time absolutely confound players with its narrative choices. The deeper into the game we got the more it extoled on the strangest and most esoteric of convoluted theorizing on things like memetics, information, and propaganda. At the time it was absoutluty baffling to the point of considerable alienation. Today it is by far the most prophetic and forward looking piece of art of the last generation at least. No project in any medium more accurately predicted our currently dystopian hell scape of misinformation, disinformation, weaponized social media and sectarian manipulation being implemented thorough online spaces years before such things were even theoretical. It is beyond remarkable how ahead of the curve and ahead of its time this game was. The fake news blitz of Trump’s 2016 campaign, our current clusterfuck of anti vaxxers, holocaust deniers, and white supremacists that somehow continue to find a way to be platformed; all of this predicted in an ontological sense by MGS2. It was a game that suggested that the unrelenting inundation of misinformation online was a far greater existential threat than any nuclear equipped robot that was the alleged and nominal enemy. in 2001 none of this made any sense to anyone. Today it is chillingly accurate, frightening in its specificity. With the anniversary of the game having just passed we want to link to a brilliant and exhaustingly in depth analysis by Kotaku on a game that begs interpretation like no other before or after. This game is the terrifying encapsulation of modernity and deserves to be considered as much. Read the essay.

 

Who Wants To Learn How Vaccines Work?

That seems like something we should all know by now yes? Whether we are the “just give me anything“ crowd or the “did my own research” cult, this seems like fairly pertinent information. Also, this is just an exceptionally cool and well produced explainer video. One that is as informative as it is something that looks like an out take from Ant Man. Check it out and then thank science we no longer try to cure illness with heroin like in the good old days.

 

Vox Drops An Excellent Explainer About The Taliban

We’ve heard who they are for over 20 years now. But do you really understand who they are or how they came to be? Probably not. This should clear things up.

 

Vice Weighs In On Steve Bannon’s Indictment

Is he above the law or not? I guess we’ll find out soon enough. This Vice report delves into the whole issue.

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MIDRANGE WEEKLYdavid mcleod ringuetteKyle Rittenhouse, Covid, coronavirus, Vaccine, Metal Gear Solid 2, Twitter, Jack Dorsey, subscriptionsComment