Midrange Weekly May 31
Your Weekly Round Up On What’s Got The Midrange Staff’s Attention
Midrange Staff @midrangeyvr
Hello friends, welcome back to Midrange Weekly, your go to space to read about whatever our team googled 6 hours before deadline and frantically scrapped together some words on. A lot of the conversation this week has been around the excitement over BC’s tentative reopening plan. What are you most excited about? No more social distancing? less travel restrictions? Being in a bar past midnight? To any of you who honestly think you could make it past 11:30 you’re clearly delusional and have not yet reconciled with the subtle trauma the pandemic has wrought upon you. That being said, oh hell ya let’s try anyways, bring out those white wine spritzers; we gotta start off easy. Speaking of a beverage that might be socially acceptable to have before noon, grab yourself one and read along.
The Republicans Only Goals Are Nihilism And Entropy
The Jan 6 Insurrection via (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)
On Friday the senate voted on whether or not to approve an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6th insurrection. Unfortunately, but predictably, the measured failed. Despite a majority of senators voting in favour of the motion- all of the democrats and six republicans- the GOP was still able to employ the filibuster and kill the legislation. The rationale on the part of republican leadership and their supplicants in the senate was the typical offerings of bad faith arguments that don’t hold up to even the most elemental logic. Most of their consternation was focused on the idea that the investigation would be no more than a partisan witch hunt, a ludicrous accusation considering the democrats had proposed an investigatory panel composed of one democrat and one republican serving as equal co chairs. The subsequent members of the body would be equally divided. Subpoena power to question anyone involved in the insurrection- say House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy who is clearly terrified to elucidate on what exactly he and Trump discussed on the day of the attack- would be subject to either the majority of the panel signing off on it, or both co chairs being in agreement. Much like the 9/11 panel from a generation ago, the democrats modeled the bureaucratic format around bipartisanship as much as possible. How naïve of them.
Like I said this was predictably inevitable. Even after the democrats bent over backwards with procedural changes to accommodate republican input as much as possible, at the request and insistence of republicans no less, they still said no in the end. There is something surreal in the idea that many of the individuals who had a direct hand in agitating and instigating the treasonous mob that attacked the capital would have the audacity to demand they get a say in how the incident was investigated. That’s like the Taliban insisting it gets a say into how the Al Qaeda attack on 9/11 is investigated. On the part of the republicans, it was obvious that no matter to what extent they were accommodated they would say no. The fear of being seen as anything less than unflinchingly loyal to Trump has short-circuited whatever patriotic duty most of them once paid lip service to. And as the investigation would likely scrutinize the timelines of Trump’s observance of the attack, so far having been documented to range from perverse glee to shrugged apathy, they certainly don’t want any more insight into what exactly happened that day.
With any hope for a joint resolution extinguished, options still remain for the democrats; however they play right into the situation that republicans have largely manufactured and manipulated. That situation is their obnoxiously hypocritical objections to a lack of bipartisanship in the legislative branch. The democrats can still form an internal investigation comprised of solely members of their conference. Indeed such a manoeuvre would be orders of magnitude more efficient and perhaps just as capable of unearthing the perennial questions of the most pernicious American scandals- what did the president know and when did he know it?- among other things. However any illumination on the subject would be subject to ornamental cries of bias and partisan vendetta, which is exactly how the republicans want the situation to play out in the arena of public opinion. Never mind the fact that the republicans held nearly a dozen investigative panels into Benghazi when they were in power. Herein lies the tautological villainy in their tactics. When presented with the opportunity to participate in a joint, bipartisan venture, they say hell no. When the opposing party therefore feels compelled to do the work without them, they complain about a lack of bipartisanship.
It’s this spiralling decent into shamelessness that defines the nihilism at the center of the Republican Party, and extends to nearly all matters of policy or internal culture. The steps take on different forms at a granular level, but the strategy on a macro scale is always the same: Contribute nothing, or even sabotage a policy goal or institution, and then complain how the process doesn’t work. Democrats propose legislation that is proven to be wildly popular among all demographics, like minimum wage hikes or Covid financial relief and the republicans dig in their obstinate heels against it, for the sole purpose of saying democrats can’t get anything done. Recently Biden offered an infrastructure deal to the tune of about 2 trillion dollars and the republicans opening counter bid in the negations was approx. 257 million. That’s roughly 13%. Imagine negotiating with someone on the price of something, and their initial counter offer is to drop down to 13%. You’d walk away from the table. And yet the republicans complain the democrats aren’t playing ball. We see this on an institutional level as well. Last year Trump installed one of his most obsequious and sycophantic of donors- Louis DeJoy as head of the USPS. From there he defunded it, cut employee hours, removed infrastructure and bogged it down in draconian rules, just so Trump could complain the postal service was broken and therefore could not be trusted with mail in ballots in the 2020 election. The tightly coiled cyclical cynicism of it all is galling.
This is how a party operates when they have no actual policy goals. Since the 2017 tax cuts for the rich and corporations, the GOP hasn’t really had any legislative agenda beyond the occasional nominal platitude like ceremonially rote blue lives matter legislation. This is why their nihilism is so effective, because their goals are purposed solely towards large-scale entropy. They don’t want to pass any bills, only prevent things from getting passed. They don’t want to improve America at an institutional level, but rather accelerate its decline in areas they feel the donor class will be inoculated from. Doing so allows them to lambast the democrat’s leadership when they themselves are out of power. Crucially the tactic remains the same even when they are in power, to scare people out of wanting anything to change; to assure- to threaten- that it will only get worse. They want noting and they offer nothing, because that maintains their ineffectual status quo. A person certainly does not have to like every stated policy agenda the democrats proselytize. However, when the republicans admonish such goals, it’s incumbent upon us all to ask what they are offering instead. The answer is always the same. -Tristan
Things From The Internet We Liked
In Meats, Ashley Williams explores the ethical flexibility that exists in the modern day human
For most ride or die vegans and animal rights activists, the argument for ethical butchery is sort of like switching toothpastes brands from Colgate to Toms: it’s a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t really solve the issue of slaughtering sentient beings for consumption. But ethical butchers are a great alternative, if you need to eat meat, to not only the horrific practices of the factory farming industry but the protection of our agricultural and environmental future. In this short, Ashley Williams shows us how people’s moral values can bend given the right circumstances, how fragile and self serving our ethical motivations can be and why, as humans, we hold on to some customs in the name of tradition while leaving others behind. Shout outs to Chris for being so dang patient.
Let’s Look At Some Very Pretty Footage From Horizon: Forbidden West
Earlier on in the Playstation 4’s life cycle one of the first show stopper holy cow would you look at that games was Horizon: Zero Dawn. Well the series is back with a sequel for the PS5 titled Forbidden West, and developer Guerrilla Games just showed off some real gameplay for the first time. While it looks expectedly nice, it gets pretty impressive towards the end as the more destructive moments really show off its impressive physics and geometric calculations.
Joy Squad by Koreless Goes To Some Wild Places
Koreless is the elaborate and high concept electronic music project of Lewis Roberts. He’s just released the track Joy Squad from his upcoming album Agor. As Mickey put it when Tristan sent him the track, “It’s like they took Underworld’s Dark Train, stripped it down, gave it a delousing cop style, and dumped it in a re-starter blender”. Sounds about right.