Stories, logic, systems

Alan Kay of Apple Computer, when prompted to talk about science education in computers in 1995, wrote a statement: Powerful Ideas Need Love Too! in which he talked about three kinds of thinking:

it is the way most of the college students that NSF and I talked to had “learned science” — as isolated cases, stories that would be retrieved to deal with a similar situation, not as a system of inter related arguments about what we think we know and how well we think we know it. Story thinking won out. Claude Levi-Strauss and Seymour Papert have called this incremental isolated “natural” learning “bricolage” -— which means making something by “tinkering around.” This is one of the reasons that engineering predates science by thousands of years; some constructions can be accomplished gradually by trial and error without needing any grand explanations for why things work.

Yet if we look back over the last 400 years to ponder what ideas have caused the greatest changes in human society and have ushered in our modern era of democracy, science, technology and health care, it should be a bit of a shock to realize that none of these is in story form!

[...]
In order to be completely enfranchised in the 21st century, it will be very important for children to get fluent in the three central forms of thinking that are now in use: “stories,” “logical arguments,” and “systems dynamics.” The question is “how?”

To address how to teach these things — and how to teach an understanding of computers — he offers an analogy.

Suppose it were music that the nation is concerned about. Our parents are worried that their children won't succeed in life unless they are musicians. Our musical test scores are the lowest in the world. After much hue and cry, Congress comes up with a technological solution: "by the year 2000 we will put a piano in every classroom! But there are no funds to hire musicians, so we will retrain the existing teachers for two weeks every summer. That should solve the problem!" But we know that nothing much will happen here, because as any musician will tell you, the music is not in the piano--if it were we would have to let it vote! What music there is, is inside each and every one of us.

Now some things will happen with a piano in every classroom. The children will love to play around with it, and a "chopstick culture" is likely to develop. This is "piano by bricolage". Some will be encouraged by parents to take lessons, and a few rare children will decide to take matters into their own hands and find ways to learn the real thing without any official support. Other kinds of technologies, such as recordings, support the notion of "music appreciation." It seems to turn most away from listening, but a few exceptions may be drawn closer. The problem is that "music appreciation" is like the "appreciation" of "science" or "math" or "computers," it isn't the same as actually learning music, science, math, or computing!

He offers an alternative approach, which is a vigorous challenge to the way we develop computer systems even now, decades later. Check it out.

Trans athletes

The question of trans people participating in athletic competition is the one area where opponents of trans liberation make arguments which are not simply bullshit. It is reasonable for a person who sincerely favors trans liberation to pause over the possibility that trans athletes have an unfair advantage.

Except that the experiment has been done. And the short version of what we have found is that trans women just do not have the advantage which one may reasonably imagine they might. Opponents of trans liberation reliably lie as a deliberate strategy.

(The long version is that we face a long overdue general question about athletics and fairness in a time when body modification technologies have progressed so much and will only progress further. Any good solution to that challenge needs to give every kind of athlete — trans and disabled and willing to ruin their health and unwilling to risk their health and so forth. Real inclusion.)

No one has proposed forcing sports leagues to adopt any policy. But public school sports face a public policy question, and the answer is simple. “Fairness” proposals offered by opponents of trans liberation always turn out to be backdoor attempts to keep trans kids out of sports, and we should just let the kids play.

I have assembled this index of resources in doing my homework to understand the question.

Four Myths About Trans Athletes, Debunked

1. FACT: Including trans athletes will benefit everyone
   MYTH: The participation of trans athletes hurts cis women
2. FACT: Trans athletes do not have an unfair advantage in sports
   MYTH: Trans athletes’ physiological characteristics provide an unfair advantage over cis athletes
3. FACT: Trans girls are girls
   MYTH: Sex is binary, apparent at birth, and identifiable through singular biological characteristics
4. FACT: Trans people belong on the same teams as other students
   MYTH: Trans students need separate teams.

Shades of Gray: Sex, Gender, and Fairness in Sport

This long article covers a lot of ground; even folks with no interest in sports may have an interest in the medical and biological details:

A scientific consensus does not yet exist regarding the differences between genders, let alone how to define those genders. Because of this uncertainty, rules and policies that encourage inclusion of transgender athletes represent the best balance among the imperfect choices available. Specifically, allowing male-to-female transgender athletes to compete in the division of their choice within sport should not be considered prima facie disadvantageous to other women competitors, though this will need to be considered on a sport-by-sport basis.

Stop Using Phony Science

A succint overview of the biology of sex and gender from Scientific American demonstrating that no, there are not simply two distinct biological sexes.

While this is a small overview, the science is clear and conclusive: sex is not binary, transgender people are real. It is time that we acknowledge this. Defining a person’s sex identity using decontextualized “facts” is unscientific and dehumanizing. The trans experience provides essential insights into the science of sex and scientifically demonstrates that uncommon and atypical phenomena are vital for a successful living system.

Trans exclusion in sports: a discriminatory and erroneous tradition

An instructive look at both history and science.

Outrage and suspicion based on the idea that men are pretending to be women in order to dominate women’s sports is over 100 years old. When women’s participation in athletics increased in the early 1900s, this created significant anxiety that the position of (white) men in society was being threatened and the (white) ideal of women as delicate, feminine, and passive was in jeopardy.

GOP seizes on women’s sports as unlikely wedge issue

A strong argument from 2021 that opponents of trans liberation cynically chose to focus on “fairness” in athletic competition not out of genuine concern but because it seems like a plausible issue to uninformed people who are not bigots. Identifying, hyping, and exploiting wedge issues is a pattern by the right — the template is abortion used as an instrument by segregationists.

Wave Of Bills To Block Trans Athletes Has No Basis In Science, Researcher Says

But the question is whether there is in real life, during actual competitions, an advantage of performance linked to this male hormone and whether trans athletes are systematically winning all competitions. The answer to this latter question, are trans athletes winning everything, is simple — that’s not the case.

We Finally Understand That Gender Isn’t Binary. Sex Isn’t, Either.

For generations, the false perception that there are two distinct biological sexes has [...] caused humiliation for athletes around the globe who are closely scrutinized. In the mid-1940s, female Olympic athletes went through a degrading process of having their genitals inspected to receive “femininity certificates.” This was replaced by chromosome testing in the late 1960s, and subsequently hormone testing. But instead of rooting out imposters, these tests illustrated the complexity of human sex.

In real life, transgender girls in sports are a non-controversy

Competitive equity is a beautiful and elusive objective for those of us who coach or oversee high school athletics. It is why we have junior varsity teams and freshmen and sophomore teams and why we try to match up teams that won’t slaughter one another. It often does not work out that way and we have all seen and heard about lopsided scores in high school football and basketball and pretty much every other sport.

[⋯]

The possibility that a trans female athlete might enjoy any degree of physical advantage, then, will in no meaningful way alter the competitive equation.

In fact, it rarely has. In the more than eight years since the California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) began allowing high school athletes to compete as the gender with which they identify — regardless of what they were assigned at birth — there has not been a single case in which a trans female athlete has been dominant enough to stir protest.

Including Trans Women Athletes in Competitive Sport: Analyzing the Science, Law, and Principles and Policies of Fairness in Competition

This fascinating paper tries to find a logically rigorous standard for “fair” competition, closely examines both longstanding sport regulations and some some very interesting medical evidence … and concludes that assumptions that trans atheletes using hormone therapies having an unfair advantage simply do not hold water.

Biological restrictions, such as endogenous testosterone limits, are not consistent with IOC [International Olympic Committee] and CAS [Court of Arbitration for Sport] principles [⋯] in place of a limit on endogenous testosterone for women (whether cisgender, transgender, or intersex), we argue that ‘legally recognized gender’ is most fully in line with IOC and CAS principles.
[⋯]
Thus, the divide policed by the HRs [Hyperandrogenism Regulations] is a divide between one set of female athletes with a particular physical characteristic and those that lack it, namely, a particular level of androgens and androgen sensitivity. Enforcing the HRs would thus create a group of females who were unable to compete at all. However, both the Charter and the HRs themselves either imply or outright state a right to compete.
[⋯]
In short, all available scientific evidence suggests that there is no overall relationship between endogenous testosterone and sport performance. It will take the rest of this section to substantiate this. There is also no available scientific evidence that post-transition trans women have an unfair competitive advantage. Instead, what little research we have indicates that post-transition trans women have no competitive advantage over cis women.
[⋯]
One-eighth of cisgender men are naturally already below the upper ‘normal’ range for cisgender women. There’s no relationship between endogenous testosterone and performance in men. There is a highly dubious relationship, at best, in women. Testosterone is a hopeless unreliable predictor of performance in post- puberty athletes. It cannot serve the function the IOC, IAAF [International Association of Athletics Federation], and other sports organizations want it to.

Fact Check: Lists Claiming Hundreds Of Trans Women Are Dominating Sports Are Dangerous and Incorrect

Opponents of trans liberation lie.

Together, HeCheated and SheWon may falsely make it seem as if there are thousands upon thousands of trans women and girls dominating their presumed-cis competitors across the globe. But many of their claims are uncorroborated or just plain wrong.

Trans boy wrestler forced to compete with girls, qualified for state tournament

People who assert that trans athletes should compete in the same class with the gender they were assigned at birth need to contend with the example of Mack Beggs, the high school wrestler who was forced by Texas law to compete against girls, though he was a trans boy taking testosterone as treatment to enable his transition.

Baudhuin now blames the state’s governing body for public school athletics and a vote a year ago by school superintendents and athletic directors that required athletes to compete under the gender on their birth certificates.

Baudhuin said his outlook changed because he said he read reports that Beggs had asked the governing body, the University Interscholastic League, to compete as a boy and was turned down.

Sauce for the trans goose is sauce for the trans gander. Of course many opponents of trans women athletes competing with cis women turned around to assert that it was also unfair for this trans boy to compete with cis girls. The rules they had insisted on did not satisfy them.

It should be evident that a separate competitive class just for trans athletes is a ghetto. So what do we want?

That connects to this clarifying observation from Aaron Bady.

The GOP's war on trans athletes is about transphobia, yes, but I think it also very nicely demonstrates what so many people think youth sports are for: COMPETITION. Not a communal activity that brings people together; sports is a WAR for victory that trans kids are STEALING.

For so many people, the idea that we have physical recreation for youth some reason other than a Nike-branded “SECOND PLACE IS FIRST LOSER” deathmatch is completely foreign to them

If a kid’s experience of youth sports was RUINED because they didn’t win--which is the subtext of every “Trans athletes are DESTROYING sports” story--then maybe youth sports aren't serving all the kids who don't win (which is most of them) very well at all?

But hey, what do I know, I’m just someone who played a little baseball and ran track in school and sucked at all of it and never won anything

In other contexts, people will say that “learning to lose” is the most important character-building aspect of youth sports, along with working as a team.

Combines nicely with their contempt for “participation trophies”

This is a good point! The open hostility to recognizing the value of mere competition without victory, or the idea that “it’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game” as they say

Christine Mboma & Beatrice Masilingi

Dread of trans athletes has disqualified two African cis women from the Olympics, Christine Mboma and Beatrice Masilingi. One does not need to know a whole lot of history to see the deep racist resonances in authorities declaring that African women are not really women.

This development only furthers the belief held by many that Mboma as well as her compatriot Beatrice Masilingi (49.53 pb), who also is listed as withdrawn from the 400, did not meet the World Athletics eligibility regulations for female classification that apply to running events from 400 meters up to the mile. Those same rules are preventing Caster Semenya, Francine Niyonsaba and Margaret Wambui from competing in the women’s 800 this year as they have all refused to lower their testosterone with birth control pills.

Twitter thread by Dr Sheree Bekker

I have been hearing more frequently the narrative that women’s sport apparently exists as a ‘protected category’ so that women can win (because on this account without it no woman will ever win again) This is:

1. not the reason why women’s sport exists as a category
2. it is not true that women will never win again.

This narrative is profoundly paternalistic and keeps women small. Let’s unpack this a little:

A. Women’s sport exists as a category because the dominance of men athletes was threatened by women competing.

We see this over and over again in the history of sport...

Exhibit A1: Figure Skating

• 1902: Madge Syers enters the World Champs and comes 2^nd (no rule preventing her, though no woman has ever entered before)
• 1903: Women banned from World Champs
• 1905: Segregated women’s category

Exhibit A2: Skeet Shooting

• 1992 Barcelona: Zhang Shang wins the Gold Medal. The event had always been an open event (no gendered categories)
• 1996 Atlanta: women banned from shooting
• 2000 Sydney: Segregated women’s category, fewer targets for women

Exhibit A3: Football

• 1920: Women’s football thriving in the UK with 53000 strong crowds (men had been off fighting in WW1)
• 1921: FA bans women’s football (men had returned from WW1)
• 1971: Fifty (50!) years later ban is lifted, women’s football is still recovering

More examples exist but the pattern is clear:

Where women were included (or simply included themselves) it was only when they started threatening men’s dominance/entitlement that we were segregated into a separate category. It is why we still see Sport & Women’s Sport 👀

Women’s inclusion was on the terms of those in power. They didn’t want women ‘taking opportunities’ away from men so they segregated women. It was never about a benevolent (still sexist) aim of supposedly ‘giving women a chance to win’. It was about control.

And the narrative …

B. About women being inherently physically inferior to men?

Concocted as a reason to segregate us without threatening masculinity. There are once again actually greater fears here that women may start to challenge men’s dominance more broadly. Indeed we are already starting to see this...

Exhibit B1: ultra-endurance racing

The longer the race, the stronger we get

At the outer edges of endurance sports, something interesting is happening: women are beating men

Exhibit B2: surfing

(this article is excellent!)

This Woman Surfed the Biggest Wave of the Year

Here’s why you probably haven’t heard about it.

Exhibit B3: The ban on men pacemaking for women

Women Who Run Marathons Alongside Men No Longer Allowed to Set World Records

Exhibit B4: shooting again

(fascinating article here for how it tries to explain why women are winning)

10m air rifle: The Olympic sport where women outgun men

The air rifle event is one of only two Olympic sports where female athletes post consistently better numbers than males.

There are some really lovely real-life examples and research studies that show that the more men participate against women, the more they come to accept that women can be good athletes, e.g.

1. Challenging the gender binary? Male basketball practice players’ views of female athletes and women’s sports

   Kane’s ‘sport as a continuum’ theory posits many women can outperform many men in a variety of athletic endeavors. However, because sports are typically sex-segregated, this athletic continuum is rarely seen but provides a potentially powerful mechanism of transformation relative to views of female athletes and women’s sport. In women’s intercollegiate basketball, it is common for teams to practice against a male scout team. We used Kane’s continuum theory to examine the effects of integrated playing experiences on male practice players’ attitudes towards female athletes and women’s sports. Data from interviews revealed divergent first-order themes (‘Acknowledgement of the Sport Continuum’ and ‘Maintenance of Traditional Gender Stereotypes’) and several related second-order themes. The divergent themes reflect the complexity of gender relations in sport as the men simultaneously experienced and articulated a gender continuum while reinforcing a gender binary, which kept their own power and privilege in sport intact.

2. Towards the “Undoing” of Gender in Mixed-Sex Martial Arts and Combat Sports

   Based on the accounts of my interviewees, those who stand to benefit most from increasingly sex-integrated practice in MACS are women who wish to achieve ever-higher levels of martial capability. This may involve serious, lifelong commitment to developing combat skills purely for their own sake; wanting to feel more secure or powerful through their self-defense preparedness; or aspiring towards a successful competitive career. But such women following these paths typically find themselves lacking sufficiently talented female training partners and competitive opportunities, given the general over-representation of men at such levels in most clubs and disciplines. Therefore, integrated training (and even competition) often becomes necessary, and so practitioners and instructors invested in this type of training would likely do well to seek ways to encourage integrated practices, perhaps in the ways in which I have suggested [56].

   However, the positive outcomes of integrated training, I believe, go beyond simply the development of particular practitioners’ performance levels. As argued above, activities which promote the “undoing” of gender—that is, those which encourage men and women to identify and behave in ways which challenge sexist understandings of difference—are considered by feminist scholars to be highly useful in undermining gender injustice more broadly. Although such a process is rarely accomplished without difficulty, and in practice may be fraught with contradictory impulses that operate to reassert gender at the same moment as challenge it , I nevertheless contend that MACS represent one such site at which this potential may be at least partially realized. Following their experiences of integrated training, many men and women in my study claimed to reject typical gender ideals, and the sexual hierarchy arising from them:

   Being a real man? That means nothing to me, absolutely nothing… (A real woman?), it’s the same again, nothing. I couldn’t separate them out because they’re the same as much as they are different. You don’t need to be either to be good at kickboxing, to be a martial artist. (Amir, 43, kickboxing)

   I see myself doing something for women, instead of just obeying a stereotype… I think it’s feminism, you know, pursuing something for ourselves and showing that normal everyday women are capable of doing something which a lot of people say we’re not. I think it’s a good thing what we’re doing. (Rachel, 22, BJJ/MMA)

Inclusion is not only the right thing to do, but it also makes us all better. This is why I will always fight for the inclusion of trans women in women's sport.

Just as cis women are kept small, so too are trans women kept small. “The idea that women and girls have an advantage because they are trans ignores the actual conditions of their lives.” Our liberation (and excellence!) is bound up together.

Sport isn’t inherently gendered. We manufacture strict binary gendered differences, and then we naturalise them. Understanding and interrogating this helps us to understand the panic and fearmongering around women’s sport right now, and where we might go next.

I’ll end with this paragraph on women’s sport as a radically inclusive space

Women’s sports is not a defensive structure from which men are excluded so that women might flourish. It is, in fact, the opposite of this: it is, potentially, a radically inclusive space which has the capacity to destroy the public’s ideas about gender and gender difference precisely because gender is always in play in women’s sports in ways that it is not in men’s sports (with a few exceptions — e.g. figure skating). Because men have been so committed to the “end of women’s sports” for so long, women’s sports thrives in the zone of destruction. It has its own character thanks to the gender trouble at its origin. If women’s sports has one job that really is different from men’s sports, it is the destruction of sex/gender difference. Men’s sports (with a few exceptions which prove the rule) reinforce ideologies of gender difference. Women’s sports destroy them.

It is possible to have a different conversation here. Gender expansiveness gives us all permission to break free from - and take up space beyond - societal norms, and I'm very much here for that. Onward.

A Twitter thread from Brynn Tannehill

Not substantively different from the resources above, but crisp and convenient for sharing on Twitter:

The transgender athlete won’t seem to die. This is so frustrating, because from a logical standpoint, the answer is so freaking obvious: the current system is not broken. It does not need fixing.

Quick test: name a transgender Olympian off the top of your head. You can’t, because since the IOC started allowing transgender people to compete in 2004 there hasn’t been one.

The NCAA has allowed transgender people to compete without surgery since 2011, and there has not been a single dominant transgender athlete anywhere in college sports.

These constitute large scale, longitudinal tests of the system with millions of athletes as a sample, and the IOC and NCAA rules for transgender athletes are clearly sufficient to preserve the integrity of sports at this time. 15+ years and millions of test subjects is bigger, and longer, than any clinical trial of a drug that I can think of. The development and deployment of the F-22A, the world’s most advanced stealth fighter, lasted roughly as long.

The clinical evidence and subject matter opinion aligns with the observed results: removal of testosterone for a year is sufficient to remove competitive advantage. In terms of testing this hypothesis, there is literally no disagreement between various results.

The arguments from the other side are either anecdotes (What about so-and-so who won some mid-level event?), or are a form of fearmongering (Transgender women will start dominating women’s sports in the future!) that ignores the large scale, real world testing of the policies.

The implied “solutions” of “Well, they can compete against men or get their own league” replaces a speculative harm with an actual one, because no harm to sport is happening now, but either of the proposed “solutions” represents a de facto ban on transgender athletes. Testosterone, which the NCAA and IOC regulate, is a key factor in performance. Because trans women lack it, they cannot hope to compete against men. And there simply aren’t enough transgender people for them to “get their own league”, nor would there be enough public interest to fund such events even if you could find 32 world class transgender fencers. Or 16 crew teams, etc...

On top of that, segregating transgender people from society, and driving them from public life, is what the right wing wants. When asked about transgender people in 2016, Ted Cruz replied “Can’t they just do that in their homes?” Separate but equal never works out that way.

If, at some point we start to see a disproportionate number of transgender women winning high level athletic events, then it would be appropriate to reevaluate the rules for participation. But for now, there is no data-based evidence that the system is broken.

Athletic leagues do this all the time: if something is giving people a competitive advantage, they ban it (but not the players, unless they cheat on the new rules). Steroids, weird golf clubs, aluminum bats, corked bats, intake manifolds with laser holes in them....

I’m frustrated as hell that we’re still fighting this battle. The empirical evidence all points one way. We have years of data and huge sample set. The alternative is hurting a minority group for no measurable gain (you can’t have less than 0 trans Olympic athletes)

So, when I point these things undeniable facts out, and people still want to argue, I have no issue with calling them bigots and transphobes. They are immune to facts, logic, data, and expertise. But they are willing to hurt trans people based on their own “gut” feelings.

Oh, and Renee Richards was 40+ years ago, never ranked higher than 20th, never won a major event, and Martina Navritilova beat her all three times they met. Fallon Fox never made it to the big leagues, lost once, and is retired. The woman who complained about Rachel Evans winning, had beat Evans in 8 of the 11 events they had met in previously. And with that, I just summed up every major female trans athlete in the past 40 years. This isn’t a big enough sample to decide ANYTHING.

We have thoroughly field tested the hypothesis that transgender athletes will dominate if they are allowed to compete, and statistically we can reject this hypothesis with high degree of certainty. (I’ll do the math and display it for you if you really want).

Let Them Play

We believe that children deserve the right to experience the wide-reaching benefits of organized sports in a fun, safe, and nurturing environment, without having to compromise who they are. We believe that is what is right and fair, from both a scientific and a moral perspective—and in this package we explore exactly why and how. We hope this collection of stories will help people who are new to this issue see that trans kids are simply kids, and will equip you to advocate for them in your own community.

Richard Dawkins used his new podcast to promote more transphobic lies

None of this is new for Dawkins. He’s been pushing right-wing anti-trans talking points for years now.

Ballet

A very instructive example which raises questions about how we respond to trans kids.

When I said I wanted to be a dancer at six years old, adults took that to mean I’d want certain permanent alterations to my body. Unlike with young trans kids, no one was looking to make sure I fully understood what I was getting into. And unlike with young trans kids, these changes were not reversible when I changed my mind. There wasn’t even a way to delay things to buy time (like puberty blockers), it was all or nothing. If I wanted to be a professional dancer, my normal ass joints were a ticking timebomb.

Leave Trans People Alone: A Rant

Jonathan V. Last writing for the anti-Trump-conservative The Bulwark says a lot of little things which as an advocate for trans liberation I would quibble with … but he still gets the point.

Let me say this very clearly: Trans people playing sports isn’t an “issue.” It’s a small universe of edge cases that can mostly be sorted out by the direct stakeholders.

The “issue” that’s broad, and systemic, and happening right in front of us is that we have a society that’s decided it wants to bully a class of vulnerable people who are already having a hard enough time. We have an unhealthy percentage of citizens cheering “LFG!” as the current administration revels in the freedom to target anyone on the margins. The trans “issue” is, at root, simple. Be a good person. Try to help others make their way in the world. Don’t be a bully.

Annotated Bibliography of Point-by-Point Rebuttals of Anti-Transgender Disinformation

An extensive general resource.

Manifesto

A New American Manifesto, from one of my favorite Twitter commentators, is a plain English rendition of my favorite political manifesto. Perhaps you will recognize it.

From the People of the United States of America: From time to time in human societies, things get so bad with the governments that we set up that we have to take a step back, stop being citizens of that government and just be basic humans again, loyal only to the primary needs of humanity. This is one of those times and it’s only fair if we are going to take such a drastic step, that we first explain why. We owe everybody that.

Very much worth reading the whole thing. Especially if you recognize the original version.

Infoviz & Justice

The good folks at PolicyViz have some comments on challenges and approaches in bringing a racial equity sensibility to information visualization and presentation.

Although more people are thinking and writing about these issues, there hasn’t been much agreement around best practices for taking an equity lens to data visualization, especially as it applies to setting standards for entire organizations. As best we can, we have been reading a variety of posts and papers (a short list can be found below) and discussing ways we can develop a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive approach to presenting and visualizing data. We view this effort as just the beginning of our process and anticipate growing and expanding our work as we learn more and receive feedback from colleagues, partners, and readers.

To that end, we have identified eight areas in which researchers, analysts, and anyone working with data can be more inclusive in how they present their data.

• Using language with a racial equity awareness
• Ordering data labels in a purposeful way
• Considering the missing groups
• Using colors with a racial equity awareness
• Using icons and shapes with a racial equity awareness
• Demonstrating empathy
• Questioning default visualization approaches

I found the examples of ordering of data labels particularly striking; I can all too easily imagine making thoughtless choices with ugly unintended implications.

There is also a presentation with links to related resources.

Command-line interface design

I need to spend some more time with these deeply-considered Command Line Interface Guidelines

Yet with its creaky, decades-old constraints and inexplicable quirks, the command line is still the most versatile corner of the computer. It lets you pull back the curtain, see what’s really going on, and creatively interact with the machine at a level of sophistication and depth that GUIs cannot afford. It’s available on almost any laptop, for anyone who wants to learn it. It can be used interactively, or it can be automated. And, it doesn’t change as fast as other parts of the system. There is creative value in its stability.

So, while we still have it, we should try to maximize its utility and accessibility.

A lot has changed about how we program computers since those early days. The command line of the past was machine-first: little more than a REPL on top of a scripting platform. But as general-purpose interpreted languages have flourished, the role of the shell script has shrunk. Today’s command line is human-first: a text-based UI that affords access to all kinds of tools, systems and platforms. In the past, the editor was inside the terminal—today, the terminal is just as often a feature of the editor. And there’s been a proliferation of git-like multi-tool commands. Commands within commands, and high-level commands that perform entire workflows rather than atomic functions.

Inspired by traditional UNIX philosophy, driven by an interest in encouraging a more delightful and accessible CLI environment, and guided by our experiences as programmers, we decided it was time to revisit the best practices and design principles for building command-line programs.

Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey

Netflix's new Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey is pretty much exactly the movie it wants to be.

It is enthusiastically and directly a movie for children; its charms for adults are almost entirely incidental, but prodigious.

I am the kind of nerd who will watch a movie just to admire the production design. The sets, props, and costuming are magnificent, bursting with color, joy, and little grace notes. The vibrant palette turns the blend of Christmas Schmaltz Victoriana and Steampunk Victoriana into a distinctive world.

The actors all vibrate with delight at being unleashed by For Kids, playing for the cheap seats. Keegan-Michael Key in particular looks like he always wanted to play Evil Willy Wonka, and the kid actors are all magnetic screen presences.

There are a lot of tepid songs (with one notably killer exception near the end) but this is not wearying because almost all of them are accompanied by lively dance numbers like they don’t make any more.

Will stubborn Jeronicus Jangle learn to believe in himself again? Will earnest young Journey become a brilliant inventor in her own right? Will thieving Gustafson get his comeuppance? You know the answers.

I predict that today’s kids will make it tomorrow’s classic.

Authoritarian psychology and the liberal democratic ethos

A clarifying observation from my secret cousin ^@Politigoth:

By their nature, authoritarians respect authoritarian action. Their worldview is shaped by fear of punishment. Therefore if no one will be punished for a thing, there is no reason not to do that thing. Without punishment, all actions are valid. This is true in both religious and secular contexts. In short, if there’s nothing to make you afraid of doing X, then you can do X.

People who are not authoritarians don’t work this way, don’t think this way and don’t operate on these principles. But because of this, they make the crucial error of thinking that letting actions perpetrated in bad faith slide in the name of “someone has to make the first move” will engender a good faith response. They are continually disappointed, because this is (here’s the punchline, folks) not the lesson authoritarians learn from this gesture. They learn that rules don’t apply to them, and that there is no authority that will call them to account.

This is important to understand, especially in this moment when we are experiencing breakdowns in liberalism as in liberal democracy.

Liberalism builds institutions like legislatures as a forum where constituencies with divergent interests hash out their differences in a human process of compromise and reciprocity. It mythologizes the virtues of giving up some things you want and accepting some things you do not want so that we can all get along. This is a good myth.

But one thing that the last decade plus has taught me is that authoritarians were always just playing along with this ethos, only pretending to believe in this ideal. This breakdown in authoritarian pretense makes libdem governance hard to maintain.

Defenders of the libdem order yearn to continue to act as if we have a healthy libdem order. We do not want to act harshly, because we want a society which is not harsh. We offer our open hand, to show what we want, because we would respond to that in kind. “When they go low, we go high.” But this reflects, in part, our difficulties understanding the thinking of reflexively-authoritarian people.

Authoritarians presume that the world is cruel, that authority & power are inherently cruel, and that obedience to right authority defines the good. This is why they accept political authority which harms them, so long as it harms others more; such is the nature of power. This is why religious authoritarians look to a God of harsh judgments; such is the nature of power. This is why religious authoritarians are baffled that people who do not dread divine retribution can live moral lives; how do we recognize the good?

As ^@Politigoth says, offering the open hand sends them a confusing signal. (If you want to understand authoritarian psychology and its consequences, I strongly recommend psychology prof Dr. Bob Altemeyer’s study The Authoritarians.)

This clarifies the importance of something that has been much on my mind. Defenders of the libdem order err in leaving out elements of our own ethos for how to act. As I summarize in a recurring refrain, the libdem ethos calls for:

1. Honesty — always speak in good faith, telling the truth as well as one knows it, especially about oneʼs own ideas and intentions
2. Generosity — start from a presumption that everyone speaks & acts in good faith
3. Vigilance — always watch carefully for bad actors
4. Skepticism — demand strong evidence before accepting that someone is a bad actor
5. Transparency — publicly document evidence of bad actors
6. Safety — ruthlessly exclude demonstrated bad actors

I often lament how liberals-as-in-Democrats have failed at the necessary ruthlessness, and how the press have failed at the vigilence and stringent documentation. (I also occasionally lament when social justice advocates have elided the stringent documentation, or the starting presumption of good faith.)

I tend to think of this in terms of creating good incentives for building and maintaining a libdem order, but ^@Politigoth reminded me of something at least as important. Libdem ruthlessness when necessary bridges the gap in psychology between egalitarians and authoritarians.

Update on moral debt

After watching ^@Politigoth in a lively discussion of this point, I realized something else about authoritarian psychology. She argues, correctly, that Biden’s plan to govern with gestures toward reconciliation with conservatives will backfire, and the lack of consequences for their bad faith actions in support of DJT will read to them as a demonstration that Democrats are chumps who deserve contempt … and also that their actions were not really wrong, because there were no consequences for them.

This make me register how, to the libdem sensibility, when someone offers clemency to bad faith actors, this incurs on them a debt. They have harmed the social and political order and need to make amends. They have been granted undeserved grace on a provisional basis, will be watched more carefully, and need to invest in demonstrating that they are commited to acting in good faith and to the health of the system.

This does not register at all with authoritarians. When they break faith — which they will — they will feel baffled by how we are even angrier the next time. It will feel disproportionate to them, because they will not see the history and larger failure.

Update on Not Moving On

A comment by pacerme on a post at Emptywheel:

I truly fear the codependent belief that Dems have acted out for years, that taking the moral high ground is the moral equivalent of letting bygones be bygones. This would be what happens in domestic violence when he / she or they forget about the beating last night and move on hoping it will never happen again.

Ignoring the broken laws of the Republican Party. From Iran contra, to Plame, to Iraq war, to Russian interference in our elections, to literally torturing children on the border in a way that will alter their brains for life. Dems behave with this moral superiority that is really just codependency. Instead of living in the truth and allowing the natural consequences, as provided by our laws, the Dems intervene like the father who calls in legal favors for their drug addicted child to save the family name. Never realizing that by interfering with the natural consequences, the perception of truth is altered for the addict and that this interference may well only bolster the disease and hasten the fatal illness of addiction. (If left untreated). This doesn’t require chastisement or anger, but love and the discipline to refuse to protect that addicted child from the consequences of the disease, or the violent partner from the consequence of violent behavior.

If you love your country, you let the truth and its consequences reign. And if you are behaving outside of dysfunction you allow the consequences to speak truth to the nation. No matter how unpopular or risky that is. To refuse to do so under some self righteous belief of superiority, some hope that if we ignore it it will go away will continue to chip at our democracy. Dysfunction is contagious. Taking the moral high ground means applying the legal process for truth’s sake despite the consequences.

Pew political typology

Pew Research have an interesting typology for breaking Americans into political tendencies which attempts to be more sophisticated than the classic linear political spectrum (or libertarians' two-dimensional political compass), offering nine types.

Persuasive Litigator offers a useful summary:

Solid Liberals

• Largely white
• Well-educated (most are college graduates and nearly a third have a postgraduate degree)
• Express liberal attitudes on virtually every issue
• Highly likely to have acted in or contributed to protests against President Trump in the past year

Opportunity Democrats

• Agree with Solid Liberals on major issues
• But less affluent and less politically engaged
• Somewhat less liberal, both in their attitudes on issues and in their self-descriptions
• More likely than solid liberals to support corporations and large companies
• Believe that most people can get ahead if they are willing to work hard

Disaffected Democrats

• Disproportionately racial minority
• While holding positive feelings toward the Democratic Party and its leading figures, they are cynical about politics, government and the course of the country
• Financially stressed
• Supports activist government and the social safety net, but most say government is “wasteful and inefficient”
• Most believe their side has been losing in politics
• Fewer than half believe that voting gives them a say in how the government runs things

Devout and Diverse

• Faces higher financial hardships than Disaffected Democrats
• Most religiously-observant of all Democrat-leaning group
• Least politically engaged of all Democrat-leaning groups
• About a quarter lean Republican
• Critical of government regulation of business

Core Conservatives

• Only 13 percent of the public, but 43 percent of politically engaged Republicans
• Financially comfortable and male-dominated
• Overwhelmingly supports smaller government, lower corporate tax rates
• Believes in the fairness of the nation’s economic system
• Expresses a positive view of U.S. involvement in the global economy

Country-First Conservatives

• Older than other Republican-leaning groups
• Less educated than other Republican-leaning groups
• Unhappy with country’s  course
• Focused on immigration and globalism (both being negative)

Market Skeptic Republicans

• Like other Republican-leaning groups but sharply diverging from others on financial issues
• Only about a third of Market Skeptic Republicans say banks and other financial institutions have a positive effect on the way things are going in the country
• Supports raising taxes on corporations and large businesses
• Believes that the economic system favors powerful interests

New Era Enterprisers

• Fundamentally optimistic about the state of the nation and its future
• More likely than any other typology group to say the next generation of Americans will have it better than people today.
• Younger and somewhat less overwhelmingly white than the other GOP-leaning groups
• Strongly pro-business
• Generally thinks that immigrants strengthen, rather than burden, the country

Bystanders

• Non-voters
• Non-affiliated with any party
• Not engaged by the political process
• Not interested or informed in political issues

I have some reservations about this typology, in part egocentrically I cannot find myself on it, and I suspect that the types are quickly shifting in this moment of political reälignment — but digging into the detailed Pew description is worth your time if you care about this stuff.

A parable about service design

So I wrote this message and attached it to the support tickets for a product which broke.

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I write this in sympathy for the person who is trying to fix WD support & service and needs ammunition for making the argument that changes are necessary. I hope this serves you well. I invite you to contact me at miniver@gmail.com if you would like further help.

WD failed me at every turn, in the simplest imaginable customer service situation. The service reps did not fail me; every one of the many I have worked with in this misadventure has been professional, friendly, and eager to help. Your systems failed them, and thus failed me, in numerous ways.

Over two months ago, I bought a double hard drive from WD; one of the two drives failed in its first day of operation. I contacted Support, did as they directed. After numerous chats, emails, and phone calls I still do not have a working product.

You sold me a product which did not work. When a service rep hears this, they should say, “Golly, we are so sorry. I will have a replacement in your hands tomorrow. We will throw a shipping sticker in the box so you can put the broken thing in the box and ship it back to us.”

This was a choice WD made. You not empower the service reps to just do the right thing.

For the benefit of whatever numbskull will tell you that this reflects an extravagant level of service for a little ^$250 product, allow me to spell out the foolishness of penny pinching. When one goes to a restaurant, one cannot see into the kitchen; if one finds dirty silverware on the table, one suspects an unsanitary kitchen. Less responsive customer service and tech support suggests a lack of pride and diligence. I have no real ability to judge the quality of the hard drive itself, but I can see whether you strive to make the device which holds my precious data reliable enough that a bad one constitutes an emergency which you correct as swiftly and easily as possible. If you cannot afford to do this, it means that your drives break all the time. If you do treat it as an emergency and treat me well, it reflects a commitment to the product which would lead me to recommend your product.

Instead, I was told that first I must ship the broken drive back to you, then on receipt you would replace it.

This was a choice WD made. You did not empower the service reps to just do the right thing.

I asked whether to return the entire unit, or to pull the failed drive and only return that. The rep told me to return only the failed part. That would turn out to be the wrong advice. Following this incorrect advice would later present a significant problem.

This was a set of choices WD made. You did not empower the service reps to just do the right thing.

The rep gave me a URL linking to a widget for printing a shipping sticker … which asked whether I wanted to send it the fast expensive way or the slow inexpensive way. You expected me to pay for the cost of correcting your failure. Insulting.

This was a choice WD made. You did not empower the service rep to just do the right thing.

So I wasted my time and your money on a second conversation with a rep, explaining that I refused to pay for the shipping, for the obvious reasons. The rep apologized and said they could not give me a paid shipping label.

This was a choice WD made. You did not empower the service rep to just do the right thing.

The rep passed me along to another person. I had to wait to have that conversation, with no visibility into when it would happen.

This was a choice WD made. You did not empower the service rep to do the right thing.

So then I sent the drive back. And waited. And waited.

This was a choice WD made. You did not empower receiving to give me immediate confirmation.

Eventually the next phase in my adventure began. I was contacted and told that I would not simply receive a replacement drive because I should have sent the entire unit.

This was a choice WD made. You gave me the wrong instructions. And you did not empower your people to just correct for the failure on their end.

I then had a series of exchanges with various people on your service team: phone calls, chats, email messages. I encountered people who thought I had not returned the drive, people who thought I asked you to send the broken drive back to me, people who informed me again that I should have sent the entire unit. There are now four separate “service incidents” on your clumsy service website, making it to retrace my steps. (Reference numbers 200824-000594, 201024-000608, 201027-001294, and 201105-001104 if you care to dig.)

This was a choice WD made. You did not create systems which clarified my communication with service reps.

I repeatedly asked to have a replacement drive sent to me. Reps kept telling me that they could not do this.

This was a choice WD made. You did not empower the service reps to just do the right thing.

Eventually, I started yelling angrily at reps on phone calls. I confess that this was strategic, a ploy to get my problem addressed. But it was also easy, because I was angry.

This was a choice WD made. You did not empower the service reps to just do the right thing.

Finally, I had a call in which I managed to get myself passed to someone actually empowered to send me a working drive. The conversation required wrangling and stubbornness and yelling, because it started with the rep telling me that they could not correct my problem.

This was a choice WD made. You did not empower the service reps to just do the right thing.

At the time of this writing, I have been assured that both my broken drive and a working one are winging their way toward me. I have received a mailing label so that I can return the broken one to you, because you think you need it, so this belated completion of customer service comes with an additional chore which I must perform.

These are choices WD made. You did not empower the service reps to just do the right thing.

I am the kind of person who buys a little baby RAID array, is stubborn enough to get this sorted out, and is stubborn enough to write you this letter. How many people do you imagine that I will tell to never buy a product from WD?

I write this because service design is part of my profession, and I have sympathy for the person in your organization who I imagine must have lost countless fights trying enable your service organization to live up to their sacred duty to your customers, and who needs customer stories to tell. I wish them luck, because you have obviously made their job impossible so far.

These are choices WD made. You did not empower the service manager to just do the right thing.

The Craft: Legacy

The TLDR: It is a charming trifle made for teenagers, with a bit of interesting cultural politics. If you love the exuberantly hokey original, you will like this revisitation.

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The film is not the cunning indie masterpiece one might hope for. The plot does not really make sense; one gets the sense that it suffered some trimming in service of a brisk runtime. The characterizations are thin. The magic doesn’t even make sense on its own terms. Someone on the production has clearly had a look at proper modern witches because there is some real-deal witchcraft flavor thrown into the cauldron; tastes will vary among Pagan friends whether you find it charming or frustrating to see this sprinkled over the very imaginary version of witchcraft portrayed in the movie. The scares are not very scary. The transgressions are not very transgressive.

And none of that matters. It is not that kind of movie.

The young actors playing our little coven do not quite have the latent star power of the crew from the original — how could they? — but they deliver the goods. All four are charming and magnetic and completely sell how delighted they are to be friends doing magic. Cailee Spaeny as Lily, our central character, does some real acting, which pays off in how the movie plays her close relationship with her mother; I look forward to seeing her in more roles. And it was wise of the production to spend a few extra bucks to get David Duchovny to show up and have fun as the new stepdad our heroine is wary of.

There was some nice stuff for me as a production design nerd. The Spooky Book Of The Craft (inherited from the original film?) has a spot-on Early 1970s Small Press look. The girls’ wardrobes feel real; there’s a nice moment in which a hidden witchcraft theme in the costuming is demonstrated to have been hiding in plain sight. The Somewhat Spooky big old house Lily and her mom move into both has the right atmosphere and feels like a real place. And the coven’s makeup case full of magic supplies was my favorite character of the movie.

The movie’s cultural politics are deliberately and very explicitly woke in a breezy way that gives me hope for the Youngs. Attention to cultural politics stuff that was a fight for geezers like me not so long ago is just assumed to be part of the world of these characters. Toxic masculinity is a key theme that surfaces in a few ways without devolving into Boys Are Bad. There is a Representation Matters moment which is deliberately and refreshingly fleeting; the movie registers something important, registers that it is important, then swiftly moves on because our characters are not wrought about it. Magic is used as a device for talking about consent practices, even. The movie is not perfectly thoughtful on this stuff — I had reservations, and I presume that people with more skin in the game than I have will have more — but it bothered to be good enough to be worth criticizing.

And it is just fun. The girls are bursting with life, full of big feelings and adolescently irresponsible with their magic powers. It gets a lot of mileage out of some cheap, simple special effects. They get a bushel of Hero Walks and Hero Moments. The callbacks to the original film are cheap shots that work.

And thanks to either re-shoots or cunning, the trailer is full of misdirection, so there are a couple of nice surprises.

If you are reading this, you are almost certainly too old to be the target audience. It is a movie made for teenagers. But that is a nice place to visit.

Authoritarian? Fascist? Totalitarian?

We must use must use these terms precisely. They are not simply the same.

• Authoritarianism
• Totalitiarianism
• Fascism
• Misunderstandings
• Clarity
• In the US
• Resources

Authoritarianism

“Authoritarian” is the broadest category.

In politics, the term “authoritarian” registers what widely differing regimes like the USSR, Gaddafi’s Libya, and contemporary Singapore have in common.

Authoritarianism names a way that power is applied: individuals or groups exercising power unchecked by rules, process, accountability for how it is exercised, or other institutional limits.

Misunderstandings

• Authoritarianism does not reflect institutions which are “too strong”; more commonly, it reflects institutions being too weak to act as a check on the exercise of power.
• Authoritarianism does not only describe governments, it also describes systems of power which we may not think of as “political”: religious cults, corporations, families, and other forms of social order.
• Authoritarianism does not mean power in the wrong hands, or applied to the inappropriate domains. Legitimate leaders acting in legitimate domains may still act as authoritarians; illegitimate leaders and action in illegitimate domains may not necessarily qualify as authoritarian.

Totalitarianism

The term “totalitarian” refers to a type of authoritarianism; neither all authoritarianisms nor all fascisms are totalitarian.

A totalitarian order pursues limitless exercise of power over every aspect of life. For example, East Germany was totalitarian in trying to put every individual under active surveillance by the secret police, in torturing people for deviance from government wishes in the minutiae of their private lives.

The term “totalitarian” points to the similarities between regimes with vastly different ideologies and projects — Stalin’s USSR, late Nazi Germany, ISIL, and the fictional society in Orwell’s 1984, for example.

Fascism

Scholars famously have a hard time tidily defining “fascism” because of how it adapts to particular conditions. Each fascist movement has idiosyncratic national and historical characteristics. To understand what stands behind those variations, I recommend spending time with Wikipedia’s suprisingly good index of definitions of fascism, or at least David Neiwert’s post framing the highlights, plus Neiwert’s other writing about its history and distinctive character.

Misunderstandings

To sneak up on a good understanding, it helps to first dismiss some misunderstandings.

Overlapping with authoritarianism and totalitarianism

Not all authoritarianisms are fascist, but fascism is inherently authoritarian, seeking unrestrained power justified by supposed necessity. Because fascist movements frame themselves as offering a kind of anti-politicsa which rejects “misuse” of state power “in the wrong hands”, fascists often cannot see their own obvious authoritarianism.

Likewise, fascists’ claims to reject totalitarian ambition can reflect a genuine misunderstanding of the implications of their own ideology. But after seizing control of a state, fascist logics tend to drive them toward totalitarianism.

Part of the far right

Fascism is a far right ideology. It stands on the right because it opposes equality. It qualifies as far right because it demands revolutionary change. But fascism is more than just a name for far right authoritarianism; it has other distinctive qualities.

Most military juntas are are far right authoritarians but not fascists, for instance, and neoreaction is a contemporary far right authoritarian movement in the US distinct from fascism.

Not a policy ideology

“Political ideology” refers to a few distinct things.

Some political ideologies have a vision of society & governance, like liberal democracy, monarchism, or theocracy. Others have a policy program compatible with multiple modes of governance, like neoliberalism, socialism, or Islamism. Some ideologies address both, like Leninism’s far left combination of revolution, authoritarian governance, and socialist policy.

Fascism does not just focus on society & governance, it has a radical distinterest in policy specfics. Though fascist movements sometimes address policy, they offer shifting, even incoherent positions in service of their pursuit of power. The fascist method often produces loud advocacy for absurd policies as a tactic which diverts attention away from policy questions.

Not an instrument of capitalism or “liberalism”

Leftists rightly dread how anti-left liberals and the capitalist class too often accept — or even court alliances with — fascists. But they are confused when they describe or even define fascism as an instrument created to defend the capitalist order against the left, or even as capitalism’s true face revealed.

Capitalist elites try to harness fascist movements for their own purposes but they neither author nor inspire them. Fascism is a mass popular movement.

Nor do fascists care about quotidian economic policy. Mussolini did not define fascism as “corporatism”. Fascists do feel deep ideological disgust at the left, but their resemblance to ardent capitalists ends there; to fascists, alliances with capitalist elites are tactical politicing in pursuit of power, lacking any true allegiance.

Clarity

I think scholar David Griffin provides the most useful single thesis, summarizing fascism as “palingenetic ultranationalism”: a dream of violent, transformative national rebirth. He and other scholars find a host of characteristics common among fascist movements, but his description of that dream as the “core” of fascism helps see through confusion created by the ways in which fascist movements vary dramatically.

I have my own distillation of Griffin’s and others’ theories, describing fascism as a myth combined with a method:

Fascism’s myth

• our nation and its true people are great — unique, strong, noble, and rightfully among the first rank of nations
• thus in the inexorable violent contest between peoples our nation is destined to prevail
• but people alien to the nation corrupt it, sowing weakness & division out of hatred for the nation and its true people
• we must therefore purge the corruption, under a strong leader of profound insight, using violence and every other means possible
• that purge will eliminate national strife & petty politics, restoring meaning & unity to society, producing a rebirth into national greatness

In this we can see fascism’s disinterest in policy; it imagines a good society magically emerging once the nation’s greatness is unleashed, without having to fuss over nerdy details of regulations or government spending. It is an anti-politics politics.

This fantasy embraces simpleminded irrationalism:

The Conspiracy Theory offers a paradoxically comforting nightmare. Someone is in control of All This. The world can be made right simply by eliminating Them.

[⋯]

Since Nazis put The Jews at the top of the list of Those Who Corrupt, drawing on the Protocols and its decendants, it is tempting to imagine that antisemitism is part of the definition of fascism. But neither fascism nor The Conspiracy Theory are always or simply antisemitic.

Fascism’s method

Fascists twist the liberal-democratic institutions & sensibilities they hate in order to discredit & break them; they consider it a virtue to speak and act in bad faith, doing things like:

• lying brazenly and claiming that the press are motivated solely by politics, to make citizens stop trying to figure out what the truth is
• sowing violence in society, so that limits on the use of force by the state seem pointless
• yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, to make free speech seem naïve and dangerous

In the United States

We have a hard time seeing it, but the fascist sensibility has deep taproots in American political culture. We can see precursors to it in the logic of the Confederacy, and in the Klan in the Reconstruction era. We see echoes and rhymes with the fascist sensibility in the John Birch society and the “Patriot” movement.

And we have long had fascism itself. The 20^th century revival of the Klan was a fascist movement, arguably the first in the world. Few remember Timothy McVeigh as a fascist, but we should.

Our hesitation to name American movements as “fascist” partly reflects how our deep rhetorical commitment to liberal democracy complicates our distinctive national fascist voice. (Again, in this context “liberal” means neither “not conservative” nor “not leftist”; rather, it means universal rights and rule of law.) Since our politics constantly references “freedom” and “rights” and so forth, American fascism cannot directly reject libdem principle as most other fascisms do, instead our fascisms generally twist what those ideas mean.

Trump & MAGA

For a long time, I referred to Donald Trump and Team Trump as “para-fascist”. The resemblances to historical fascisms were too strong to ignore, but the differences gave me pause. Partly this reflected how Trump himself is barely interested in politics qua politics, driven instead by his personal narcissism. He is fascist in his fundamental urges rather than out of any considered ideology. The fascist qualities of his movement reflect the team he attracts, and how he adapts himself to appeal to his supporters.

As more and more pieces have fallen into place, it has become unmistakable that one cannot understand Trump-ism without reading it as a form of fascism. The slogan “Make America Great Again” perfectly distills Roger Griffin’s “palingenetic ultranationalism” thesis. A superb 2016 examination of Trump describes his characteristic lack of a policy program, accidentally making the case that he is fascist in the course of mistakenly suggesting that he is not:

Trump’s campaign is defined by the absence of a consistent ideological agenda, in favor of

1. raw venom at his (and therefore America’s) enemies
2. sweeping though incoherent criticism of the status quo and the establishment
3. a commitment to Making America Great Again so vague and apocalyptic that it borders on millenarianism

It adds up to a gigantic middle finger that many dispossessed are happy to get behind in the mistaken belief that it’s pointing at the objects of their resentments.

Not everyone who finds MAGA rhetoric appealing can be understood simply as a fascist, nor does all of American fascism identify or align itself with MAGA, but “MAGA” is the right way to name the fascist movement which we have to face.

Returning to The Conspiracy Theory, we should recognize how American fascism has adapted to the pseudo-philo-semitism of Christian nationalism.

Many contemporary fascists cast trans people as Them, a frightening and frighteningly effective innovation, since in amplifying fascism’s anxieties about masculinity, in being a small-yet-pervasive population, in and many other ways trans people fulfill the function of Them in fascism and The Conspiracy Theory even better than Jews do.

Though MAGA fascism now dominates US conservatism and the Republican Party, we should recognize this as unstable in a time of transition. Movement conservatism, the style of conservatism which consumed the Republican Party and US politics in the wake of Reagan and Fox News, sold itself to many voters with oblique dogwhistles which nourished fascist sensibilities, but was not itself fascist. MAGA is voters moving away from movement conservatism which failed to deliver what they wanted, putting the US into a major political reälignment. It is impossible to predict who will have a chair when the music stops.

Key resources

Linz, Julian J. (2000) Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes

A highly respected broad analysis.

Adorno, Theodor. (1950) The Authoritarian Personality

An immensely influential study of the psychology & sociology of authoritarian political orders.

Altemeyer, Bob. (2006) The Authoritarians

A refinement of Adorno’s themes which addresses, among other things, authoritarian patterns outside of fully authoritarian societies.

Arendt, Hannah. (1951) The Origins of Totalitarianism

The work which secured the significance of totalitarianism as a useful category.

Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works (2020)

A succinct and lively overview.

Griffin, Roger (ed). (1995) Fascism

A hefty anthology collecting key sources on understanding fascism.

Griffin, Roger. (1993) The Nature of Fascism

My favorite single analysis.

Paxton, Robert O. (2004) The Anatomy of Fascism

The other seminal English-language analysis.

Neiwert, David. (2003) Rush, Newspeak, and Fascism

An examination of fascist elements in contemporary American conservatism pre-dating MAGA but anticipating it frightieningly well.

Kevin J. Elliott, Yes It’s Fascism (2025)

A good short read about the Trump regime at the increasingly indispensible Liberal Currents.

Refining this post

After originally writing this post I came to rely on it heavily, and have thus made numerous edits since.

In particular, the initial version made the misleading implication that the Confederacy and original Klan were simply fascist; they differ from fascism in a number of ways, including a fraught relationship with the Westphalian nation-state. In refining the phrasing on that point and many other things, I have tried to bring greater clarity without destroying my original sense.

Nonviolence

Proper non-violence understands that violence is justified but believes that it is unwise. Non-violence means facing violence without returning it; retreating from confrontation is not non-violent action, it is passivity.

Too many people think that nonviolence means a white liberal quietism which drapes itself in a vague and false moral claim to reflect the logic of the Civil Rights Movement. Claiming nonviolence as an absolute value rather than as a considered tactic reflects a combination of ignorance and moral laziness.

Non-violence is vitally important because violence is not a way of getting where you want to go, only more quickly; its existence changes your destination.

There are a lot of ways that things could go in which we will need a lot of white bodies on the street facing guns. We need bourgeois white people like me standing at the front, braving the bullets.

2017 doesn’t make me confident that enough of us will step up, but it does give me hope.

Case #1 for nonviolence: it is working for BLM

The re-acceleration of street protest and reporting on it which emerged after the street execution of George Floyd has produced dynamics similar to protests of the Civil Rights Movement.

That the movement has been primarily and overwhelmingly nonviolent only underlines how the few outbreaks of vandalism (most notably the capture and burning of the Minneapolis Third Precinct police station) demonstrates that there is a huge capacity for popular violence which has been held in check.

That police in cities across the country have demonstrated repeatedly that they will engage in increasingly frantic brutality in response to nonviolent street protest has conclusively proved what anti-police advocates have been saying all along.

And the result has been that now clear majorities now favor vigorous reform in a way which was politically inconceivable just a year ago, and even more incredibly police abolition is on the table as something which popularly credible people are advocating and which opponents need to actively argue against. This is a huge victory, and the contrast of nonviolence was integral in demonstrating the reality of police culture and conduct.

White liberals’ clarity here is not what it should be, but it is improving every day; a turn toward broader violence in response to police violence would reverse that trend.

Case #2 for nonviolence: it is working against far right street demonstrators

In 2017, far right street actions tried to provoke street violence in order to feed their story about their strength and the ordinary conservatives to support them against the violent leftist hordes. Instead, overwhelmingly nonviolent counterprotest got bigger and bigger while those far right gangs fell apart over their inability to deliver sufficient thrills and glory to their members. The mess at the “Unite The Right” rally did not unite the right; massive popular turnout in nonviolent counterprotest against them which followed at San Francisco, then even moreso in Boston, embarrassed them and made them look silly and weak, breaking the far right street movements’ momentum until their resurgence this year.

These kinds of confrontations are happening again this year, but again the mass of nonviolent counterprotest has made far right would-be brownshirts look silly and weak. Instead of looking like brave badasses facing down the scary antifa thugs of their authoritarian fantasies, their exemplar is scrawny, panicked Kyle Rittenhouse flailing around wildly.

We have too many fascist true believers who accept their story but they have not been able to swell their numbers or persuade the inattentive white middle as they had imagined.

There are always going to be liberals who are King’s White Moderates who will find that any shadow of evidence of “violence” (which is usually only vandalism) allows them to rationalize their rejection of any action at all. One object of non-violence is to limit their ranks by keeping the facts off their side.

Case #3 for non-violence: what if things get very bad?

The hard test is the moment to come in the wake of the election. There are a lot of people on the right who are hungry for a shooting civil war against a “violent takeover by the radical left”.

Anti-left liberals will be tempted to side with the right against the left if they can be persuaded that we are violent. And yeah, some of them are going to be suckered no matter what we do.

But the longer the interval in which it is clear that the far right are bringing guns and blood while the left are not, the more it will erode the credibility of the far right. We don’t just need it to be true that they are the ones who shoot first; we need it to last long enough that it is clear even to people who are not paying attention that they shot first. If we can hold that line, the far right will lack popular support … which translates into an unwillingness for the US military to fire on US civilians.

It is our best chance for avoiding an authoritarian death spiral.

And if that fails — either through a failure to step up, or us getting stepped on — the calculus changes.

Up to that point, the ideal response would be a massive and entirely nonviolent movement. There is no getting that ideal, but it is useful to aspire to it. An overwhelmingly nonviolent movement is more plausible and still very good.

But after that point, if we move from the fascist ascendancy we have now to the fascist control we fear, then the only way to dislodge fascist power is through violent action.

That said, even in that eventuality, while we would need violence to win that war, the more active nonviolence there is in the resistance the better the peace we can hope for when we win. Nonviolence will always need recruits.

More

A commentary on the kind of people who we are talking about:

I’m getting really tired of the wise serene pacifist trope in fiction. Every committed pacifist, prison abolitionist, antiwar activist, etc I’ve ever met in real life has been vibrating with compressed rage at all times. Do you know what it’s like to believe deeply in your heart that doing harm to others is wrong and the goal of society should be to alleviate suffering for all people and live in the United States of America? IT’S NOT FUN. Show Us The Pissed-Off Pacifists.

Dude there might be a word for the emotion that is forged when someone’s deep abiding love and compassion for all people and living things welds itself into decades of built-up foaming fury at how those people been treated their whole life by those in power to create a sort of alloyed super-commitment to a set of ethical principles but i promise you “tranquility” is not that fucking word

• International Center On Nonviolent Conflict
• Choose Democracy
• Research by Erica Chenoweth
• Non-coöperation library
• The Compass of Mourning — Judith Butler — “I defend a politics of non-violence, in the knowledge that it cannot possibly operate as an absolute principle to be applied on all occasions. I maintain that liberation struggles that practise non-violence help to create the non-violent world in which we all want to live.”

An invitation to the Marvel movies (and streaming series)

A friend who is an astute watcher of popculture recently confessed to me that they have been intrigued by the phenomenon of the Marvel Studios films, but had not yet sat down to see them. This is a viewing order for the films of the Marvel Cinematic Universe fun for fans but designed for someone coming in cold like my friend — only glancingly familiar with either the movies or the comics they are based on — who is ready to commit to watching most or all of the films. Inspired by the “Machete Order” for watching the two Lucas trilogies of Star Wars — which treats Episode II & III as an extended flashback between V and VI, omitting Episode I entirely — this viewing order is different both from the order in which the films were released and from the chronological order of the events in the world of the films.

Marvel Studios and the fictive “Marvel Cinematic Universe” are interesting and unique for a number of reasons. There have been movie series with multiple sequels before, and superhero movies before, but the MCU is the first to capture the distinctly entangled series quality of superhero comics which fans love. Alan Moore, in his introduction to a collection of comics published in 1987, describes it better than I could:

There are great economic advantages in being able to prop up an ailing, poor-selling comic book with an appearance by a successful guest star. Consequently, all the comic book stories produced by any given publisher are likely to take place in the same imaginary universe. This includes the brightly colored costumed adventurers populating their super-hero titles the shambling monstrosities that dominate thier horror titles, and the odd girzzled cowpoke who’s wandered in from a western title through a convenient time warp. For those more familiar with conventional literature, try to imagine Dr. Frankenstein kidnapping one of the protagonists of Little Women for his medical experiments, only to find himself to the scrutiny of a team-up between Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. I’m sure that the both the charms and the overwhelming absurdities of this approach will become immediately apparent, and so it is in comic books
[⋯]
The continuity-expert’s nightmare of a thousand different super-powered characters co-existing in the same continuum can, with the application of a sensitive and sympathetic eye, become a rich and fertile mythic background with fascinating archetypal characters hanging around, waiting to be picked like grapes on the vine. Yes, of course, the whole idea is utterly inane, but to let its predictable inanities blind you to its truly fabulous and breathtaking aspects is to do both oneself and the genre a disservice.

This viewing guide is intended to highlight this quality of superhero stories, the sense that different adventures of different characters made by different creators fit into a sprawling world of wonders and adventure, delivering a story of its developing world across the whole series.

How to use this list

Marvel Studios’ movies famously include one or two post-credits bonus scenes. Many of them are in-jokes for comics nerds or teasers for later movies which may be screwed up by this watch order, so I encourage skipping most of them. I have marked movies with an asterisk when you do want to check out the post-credits bit.

For convenience, this post starts with just the list of movies, then repeats itself with notes on each of the movies & series.

In order to highlight the building narrative, the list is sequenced such that it leaves a lot of the best stuff for late in the series. If your patience runs short, skip ahead to Section B to taste the very best before dropping out. There are also ways to abbreviate the viewing binge less radically …

• Within each section, things are numbered only if the viewing order is important. In other cases, I just provide a list, starting with the ones I recommend most highly.
• Sections with Roman numerals deliver the initial long-sweep story across multiple films in a deliberate order. If you want to focus on that experience, run just through these and skip the lettered sections.
• Sections marked A, B, and S deliver bonus Marvel Studios movies which are not integral to the long-sweep story.
• Sections marked Σ & Χ deliver movies about Marvel characters which were not made by Marvel Studios. They make an interesting contrast which informs what the Marvel Studios movies are doing.

Overview

I — Introducing the Marvel Universe

1. Iron Man
2. Captain Marvel
3. Thor
4. The Avengers

II — The Ballad Of Steve Rogers

1. Captain America: The First Avenger
2. Captain America: The Winter Soldier

III — The Ballad Of Tony Stark

1. Iron Man 2
2. Iron Man 3

IV — The Problem Child

• Avengers: Age Of Ultron

A — Bonus stories

• Guardians of the Galaxy vol 1
• Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
• Ant-Man
• Doctor Strange
• Thor: The Dark World
• The Incredible Hulk

V — Civil War

1. Captain America: Civil War
2. Black Widow

B — Marvel’s best

• Thor: Ragnarok
• Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2
• Black Panther

VI — Infinity

1. Avengers: Infinity War
2. Ant-Man & The Wasp
3. Avengers: Endgame

S — Spider-Man

1. Spider-Man: Homecoming
2. Spider-Man: Away From Home
3. Spider-Man: No Way Home

Σ — Alternate Spiders

• Spider-Man &
  Spider-Man 2
• Into The Spider-Verse &
  Across The Spider-Verse

X — X-Men

1. X-Men: First Class
2. X-Men
3. X-2: X-Men United
4. X-Men: Days Of Future Past
5. Logan
6. Deadpool &
   Deadpool 2
7. Deadpool & Wolverine

VII — After the endgame

• WandaVision
• The Marvels
• Jessica Jones
• Guardians of the Galaxy vol 3
• Agatha All Along
• Ms. Marvel
• Loki
• Luke Cage
• The Falcoln & The Winter Soldier
• Wakanda Forever
• She-Hulk
• Hawkeye
• Captain America: Brave New World
• Thor: Love and Thunder
• Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness
• The Eternals
• Ant-Man: Quantumania &
  Secret Invasion &
  Iron Fist

More details

I — Introducing the Marvel Universe

A taste of the basic charms of these movies.

1. Iron Man ★★★★☆ *
   The movie which initially put Marvel Studios on the map. When it was released, Marvel Studios’ first experiment with the Blade movies with Wesley Snipes had done well enough but had not really opened up Marvel’s comics sensibility … Robert Downey, Jr. was considered a has-been … not even comics fans were enthusiastic about Iron Man … and director Jon Favreau was a small-time cult actor / writer / director. But Favreau was a nerd who respected the material, so the movie just worked and was a hit. And the post-credits bonus — then a surprise from out of the blue — teased the series of films which Marvel Studios hoped to build. In this viewing order, we go from that little extra scene into a flashback …
2. Captain Marvel ★★★☆☆
   Though this was released late in the series, it is a perfect demonstration of the basic charms of Marvel movies — action & spectacle, character melodrama, actors having fun hamming it up — plus it sets up a few things for an ordinary viewer which one had to be a comics fan to appreciate when encountering the films in release order.
3. Thor ★★★☆☆ *
   Most film industry folks were puzzled when Marvel got Kenneth “Henry V” Branagh to direct a superhero movie. It was the right move, bringing the right note of shameless Shakespearean melodrama. The story is simple but then-unknowns Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston turn out to be awfully charming, and the supporting cast all have too much fun.
4. The Avengers ★★★★☆ *
   With this film, the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink pleasures of the Marvel Universe unfold. Uber-nerd director Joss Whedon (not yet disgraced when this was made) made it work with his knack for character ensemble and deep love & understanding of genre tropes. Aliens! Mad science! Super-spies! Hammy pseudo-Shakespearean dialogue! Plus Mark Ruffalo delivers an acting miracle that powers a perfect narrative climax.

If you feel that these were fun but also have had enough, you could tap out here and count yourself as having given Marvel a try. But the best is still ahead, so consider sticking with it, or just leaping ahead to B — Marvel’s Best.

II — The Ballad Of Steve Rogers

One could binge the Marvel movies or chip away at this list at a leisurely pace, but these two are a matched set, playing off of each other in a way that demonstrates how superhero stories can exercise the same characters for very different kinds of stories. I recommend watching them in this order as a double feature, or at least within a week or two of each other.

1. Captain America: The First Avenger ★★★★☆ *
   This origin story set in the Second World War was released before The Avengers, but I think it works better — especially for non-fans — as a flashback after the ensemble movie, which introduces Captain America well enough even if you don’t know anything about him. Marvel once again reached for a cult director with unique qualifications: Joe Johnston had directed the underappreciated, deliberately earnest, dieselpunk retro-pulpy The Rocketeer, and he reprises that voice for this WWII story about a character created in 1941. Chris Evans as our hero makes it look easy to play a character who is an unequivocal good guy, in contrast to most of the interestingly flawed Marvel heroes.
2. Captain America: The Winter Soldier ★★★★★
   The first Marvel movie to really stretch what the setting and characters can do, this entry contrasts with its predecessor’s earnest tone by delivering as much a crackling 1970s paranoid political thriller as superhero spectacle. (One thing to notice, which this watch order undercuts, is how when it was originally released, we had experienced our heroes as a handful of exceptional individuals in a world otherwise much like our own; Winter Soldier made the Marvel world feel expansive, with weirdness hiding behind every door.)

III — The Ballad Of Tony Stark

• Iron Man 2 ★★☆☆☆
  Frankly a mediocre entry in the series. It’s not bad, but it is disappointing, so I recommend skipping it unless you find yourself loving RDJ as Tony Stark … or you are someone who cannot get enough of Sam Rockwell goofing around.
• Iron Man 3 ★★★★☆ *
  Writer / director Shane Black directed RDJ in the weird comedy-noir masterpiece Kiss Kiss Bang Bang back in 2005. Tapped by Marvel, he delivered a mix of big spectacle, twisty storytelling, and a character turn for Tony Stark which made RDJ work for a living, setting Tony up as interesting enough to serve as the backbone of the whole film series. It’s also worth noting that when Marvel announced that the villain would be The Mandarin — a character who is basically Comics Supervillain Fu Manchu — folks like me were Concerned about how badly racist that could go, but the movie subverted that problem more cleverly than they (or just about anyone) have managed again since.

IV — The Problem Child

This movie swings for the fences … and doesn’t really work. But it includes elements signficantly referenced in later films in the series, so while one can skip it, this is the one film in the series where I encourage you to ride out a weak film in service of enjoying the series as a whole. I recommend nibbling on it a few scenes at a time, which plays to its strengths and mitigates many of its weaknesses: watch a chunk of it when you have some idle time, or as an appetizer before watching a movie from Section A, to get to a point where you have have finished Ultron before digging in to Civil War.

• Avengers: Age Of Ultron ★★☆☆☆
  Yeah, it’s a bad movie, but there are a lot of good bits rattling around in it: smarter engagement with the themes of Frankenstein in the age of artificial intelligence than most movies entirely about that, some delightful scenes of our heroes just hanging out together, a direct rebuke to the inhuman callousness of the nearly-fascist Superman film Man Of Steel which was released while this was in production, and a couple of crackerjack action sequences. But the worst bits are bad. The effects for the face of killer robot Ultron are a queasy Uncanny Valley failure, undercutting a superb voice performance by James Spader. And one scene is a horrendous misfire which has Natasha “Black Widow” Romanov saying something gobsmackingly stupid and sexist.

A — Bonus stories

You don’t need any of these to make sense out of the story arc explored in the sections with the Roman numerals, but most of them are pretty good, they show more of the range of things that superhero stories can do, and the more of them you catch the better the callbacks and character stuff from later movies will land.

• Guardians of the Galaxy vol 1 ★★★★☆
  A showcase for Marvel movies’ capacity for exuberant fun speaking to our inner ten-year-old, threaded with surprisingly poignant notes. If Star Wars has broken your heart with disappointment, this picture may rekindle your enthusiasm for Wacky Adventures In Space. One can really watch this one at any point, since it takes place In Space, away from our other heroes; the characters don’t get folded in to the rest of the story until Infinity War.
• Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings ★★★★☆
  A demonstration of superhero sensibilities marrying well with other kinds of stories. If one has any love at all for xianxia or wuxia or kung fu movies, it reflects what Daniel Pinkwater said about Laurel & Hardy — one knows exactly what is coming but the delivery is so perfect that one cackles with delight when it arrives. (Oh, there’s a bunch of bamboo scaffolding on this building? I wonder what will happen!) It stands almost completely on its own, though there is an allusion to Doctor Strange which benefits a bit from having seen that first.
• Ant-Man ★★★★☆
  Loose goofy fun, with Paul Rudd characteristically charming and funny, bursting with setpieces more about cleverly playing off of our hero’s superpowers than the special effects. I must note that this was my young neice’s favorite. It does not draw much on other Marvel movies, but one should catch it before seeing Civil War.
• Doctor Strange ★★★☆☆
  The story is a little tepid and it does not get as much leverage as it should out of some of its actors, but it has a bunch of unique strengths. Our hero comes up with a very clever resolution at the ending, there are some dazzling unique visual setpieces which folks who found that Inception left a lot of opportunity for extravagant effects on the table will find refreshing. And not only does Strange play a big role in the Infinity movies, this movie sets up my single favorite callback in Endgame.
• Thor: The Dark World ★★☆☆☆
  This movie isn’t quite bad but it is weak entry is worth watching if you find that you love Thor & Loki … and it does set up a couple of really terrific callbacks in later, better movies.
• The Incredible Hulk ★★☆☆☆ *
  The first MCU film, though release timing had it come right after the original Iron Man; it turns out rough enough around the edges that they re-cast the Hulk’s alter ego Bruce Banner in the later films. But if you love the Hulk, Frankenstein, Ed Norton, or mad science you may find it interesting. (Don’t confuse this with the strange, gutsy, flawed Ang Lee film Hulk, which predates Marvel Studios!)

V — Civil War

1. Captain America: Civil War ★★★☆☆
   This picture exercises how superhero comics have a lot in common with long-running melodramatic soap operas, portraying larger-than-life characters who live in a messy, complicated world. Plus it finally delivers the truly extravagent superhero action setpieces fans are accustomed to seeing on the comic page with a lot of superheroes onstage together. The story works a significantly better if you have seen Age Of Ultron, and there’s a fun payoff if you have seen Ant-Man movie is also a plus, but neither is strictly necessary.
2. Black Widow ★★★☆☆
   This pretty-good spy thriller + family comedy-drama fits right after Civil War in the story sequence despite production problems which wound up deferring its release until much later. If you want to catch it, it benefits a little from watching it shortly after Civil War.

B — Marvel’s best

These three are generally understood to be the best Marvel Studios movies as movies. They benefit significantly from playing off of earlier movies in the sequence but are not necessary to feed the long story of the series.

• Thor: Ragnarok ★★★★★
  Somehow this candy-colored delight is both the most fun and funny Marvel movie while also managing to deliver another meditation on colonialism and a resonant story about family, community, and responsibility.
• Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2 ★★★★★
  A refinement of all the zany, vulgar charm of the previous entry, building to an ending with much more emotional resonance than one would expect. You don’t need to see vol 1 first to make sense of it, but it’s almost as good a movie so you probably want to.
• Black Panther ★★★★★
  An allegory of colonialism and global racial injustice through the lens of US Black cultural dreams and sensibilities, which sounds like eating your spinach … but enlivened by superheroes and the exuberance of the Marvel sensibility, it is instead a fun and inspiring modern myth which became a pop culture phenomenon for good reason. If you only see one Marvel movie, this is the one. And it makes a good segue to the end of the story cycle ….

VI — Infinity

This wraps up the initial big ten-year story arc Marvel Studios built with their movies. Though fans’ and Marvel marketing’s use of the word “saga” is overly grandiose, there really is a payoff here from working on such a big canvas. In comics, every few years comics publishers do a “crossover” story which ties together almost everything they publish, touching the stories in each character's individual books and then climaxing in a story which contrives to include as many characters as possible to play a role. This is both a sleazy marketing gimmick and, when it works, the ultimate expression of a unique thing that the superhero storytelling can do with its vast cosmology, numerous genres, and hundreds of characters with interlocking stories. It is a miracle that this works at all, much less as well as it does.

1. Avengers: Infinity War ★★★★☆ *
   Thanos, the space villain who has been knocking around the edges of the stories told so far, takes center stage in his quest for the Infinity Stone MacGuffins which have played a part in several of the movies. It is worth noting that structurally, Thanos is the protagonist of this movie.
2. Ant-Man & The Wasp ★★★☆☆ *
   A sequel almost as much fun as the original, with even more clever play with the implicitions of our heroes’ weird superpowers, if you like that sort of thing. Not an important movie in the Big Story, so you could skip it if you didn’t take a shine to the first Ant-Man film, but it’s nice to get a smaller story as a break between the massive spectacles of the two big Avengers movies … and the post-credits scene establishes it as bridging Infinity War to Endgame in an interesting way.
3. Avengers: Endgame ★★★★☆
   Most superhero stories begin and end with a stable status quo. This movie shows how the world and our characters were transformed by the events of Infinity War, reflects on where our characters came from, plays out what they do next, completes both The Ballad Of Tony Stark and The Ballad Of Steve Rogers, and makes a callback to Age Of Ultron so good that it makes watching that weak entry worthwhile.

S — Spider-Man

The three Marvel Studios Spider-Man movies are not strictly necessary to make sense of the big initial story arc, but are all good.

1. Spider-Man: Homecoming ★★★☆☆
   Another example of bringing life to stale genres by stirring in superheroics, in this case the teen high school comedy-drama. Not great but solid, with good performances by the cast and a superb twist at a key moment. Properly speaking this takes place shortly after the events of Civil War, but it doesn’t really hurt anything to watch at a different point.
2. Spider-Man: Away From Home ★★★☆☆ *
   More teen high school comedy-drama, not quite as strong as the first entry (and a few elements which disintegrate if one thinks too hard), but the lead characters are charming and the villain is interesting. Contains major spoilers for Infinity War, so best if you wait to watch this one after that.
3. Spider-Man: No Way Home ★★★★☆
   The best Marvel Studios Spider-Man feature. Since it plays with ideas from Spider-Man movies which Marvel Studios did not make, so I encourage catching at least one of the two Sam Raimi / Tobey Macguire movies first ….

Σ — Alternate Spiders

For rights reasons, Sony Pictures has made three distinct series of Spider-Man movies unconnected by style or story from the Marvel Studios version of the character. (Four if you count the so-bad-they’re-good Venom movies.) Alas, the two Amazing Spider-Man movies with Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker feature a few technical virtues (Spider-Man moves beautifully in them) but are clumsy enough that I cannot recommend them. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3 with Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker is better than its reputation, but it too is disappointing enough to skip unless you fall in love with Peter Parker.

But these two pairs of movies are terrific:

• Spider-Man ★★★★☆ &
  Spider-Man 2 ★★★★★
  Raimi’s first entry is super and the second one is even better, in the running for best superhero movies ever in the eyes of many comics fans. In contrast to the Marvel Studios movies, these commit deeply to the melodramatic storytelling style of the comics of the 1960s.
• Into The Spider-Verse ★★★★★ &
  Across The Spider-Verse ★★★★☆
  The first is both one of the best superhero movies ever made and also one of the best animated features ever made: visually dazzling, bursting with love for superhero stories, and genuinely moving. The sequel is a hair short of that, but for honest reasons — it suffers the challenges of a second act in a three-act story, and sometimes groans under the weight of its ambitions — but that is praising it with faint damnation.

X — The X-Men

Before Marvel Studios began their MCU sequence, 20^th Century Fox started a series of films about this team of Marvel superheroes and their antagonists. Half of the dozen-plus entries in the series are only suited to superhero nerds, which is frustrating because the X-Men are among of the best and most beloved things in Marvel comics. But there are a few that are good, one very good, and one true classic. Disney’s acquisiton of Fox means that these characters will get rebooted in Marvel Studios films to come, so if you want a taste of a different style of Marvel movie than Marvel Studios has made, these are worth a look.

1. X-Men: First Class ★★★★☆
   The second-best X-Men film. It was made late in the series, but since it flashes back to the origins of the team in the 1960s, it is actually the ideal place to start, making its allegory of the Black, gay, and other liberatory social movements very direct. (I wrote a little review of it when it was new.)
2. X-Men ★★★☆☆
   The first film made in the series. Seeing it now, in contrast to the matured Marvel Studios approach, it suffers painful failure to trust the material, but at the time it was new fans like me were excited that it was one of the best superhero movies yet made, with gravitas delivered by Ian McKellen & Patrick Stewart, a star-making turn by Hugh Jackman, clever superheroic setpieces, and effective queer allegory.
3. X-2: X-Men United ★★★☆☆
   A follow-up that improves a bit on its predecessor, with more room for the performances to breathe.
4. X-Men: Days Of Future Past ★★☆☆☆
   A flawed, fun mess which ties together the casts of the flashback and later versions of the team. If you’re losing patience with the X-Men, skip this one, but it has some virtues, including a couple of terrific superhero action setpieces if you like those. After you see it, search YouTube for “quicksilver sweet dreams” to enjoy a sequel to its most memorable bit, snipped out from the gawdawful movie in which it appears.
5. Logan ★★★★★
   The last, and by far the best, film in this series. Not just a terrific superhero movie but a classic movie, period, re-framing the characters and world as a John Ford western. It benefits if one has seen the previous movies (especially X-2) but you don’t strictly need any of them.
6. Deadpool &
   Deadpool 2 ★★★☆☆
   A pair of gonzo, vulgar, refuge-in-audacity action-comedies which somehow work much better than they have any right to. They technically belong to this series but have a completely different tone. Worth seeing as a taste of superhero comics sensibilities in their silly Brechtian self-parody mode.
7. Deadpool & Wolverine ★★★★☆
   Going back to the well a third time really should not have worked, much less turned out the best of the series. Watch it after seeing Logan … ideally quite some time after, for reasons which will become apparent.

VII — After the endgame

With the conclusion of the big “Infinity Saga” arc, there are a growing set of feature films — plus an array of streaming TV series — informed by it. Covid, bad luck, and trying a few too many projects broke Marvel’s stride, undermining the consistency and the sense of an overarching story, but there is some good stuff worth catching. One can dig into most of these in any order after getting to the two Infinity films; I note the few cases where watch order makes a difference.

• WandaVision ★★★★☆
  Possibly Marvel Studios’ most gutsy experiment with what one can do with superheroes on screen, and it works, playing with sitcom conventions to deliver both wit and pathos to deliver a cleverly accessible version of David Lynch’s surrealist voice.
• The Marvels ★★★★☆
  Maybe I am a sucker, but I adore this trifle. It hits all of the formula elements deliciously, so shameless in its pursuit of fun that it lets Samuel L. Jackson bring his comedic side and has teen superhero Ms. Marvel get a phone call from her mom literally telling her, “you cannot have any more space adventures”. This comes after the events of WandaVision & Ms. Marvel, but you don’t need to see either of those first.
• Jessica Jones ★★★★☆ / ★★★☆☆
  The first season is somehow both entertaining and a sophisticated meditation on narcissistic abuse. The later seasons don’t have quite the same depth but do deliver the crime-drama goods.
• Werewolf By Night ★★★☆☆
  A shaggy love letter to old horror movies.
• Guardians of the Galaxy vol 3 ★★★☆☆
  This third installment isn’t quite as strong as the previous ones, but it still delivers the mix-of-tones goods. CW: There’s a bit of animal cruelty which is earned by the story, but if you cannot watch that sort of thing at all, best to skip this movie.
• Agatha All Along ★★★☆☆
  Shameless fun with witchy nonsense. If you like queer shenanigans — including Aubrey Plaza in her fully unhinged mode — it’s worth another ★. Spoilers for WandaVision, so catch that first.
• Ms. Marvel ★★★☆☆
  A surprisingly sweet story hitting a lot of the notes which make Spider-Man an enduring character — a reflection on nerdy adolescence, family, and friendship.
• Loki ★★★☆☆
  A witty, almost-nonsensical romp centered on Tom Hiddleston serving up thick slices of ham. Worth watching the entire thing just to get to a scene where Richard E. Grant miraculously blindsides you with melancholy tears.
• Luke Cage ★★★☆☆
  The showrunner of this mostly-pretty-grounded story about Harlem’s local superhero says that he will never get tired of seeing a Black man in a hoodie shrug off gunfire. The show demonstrates why without it feeling like a downer.
• The Falcon & The Winter Soldier ★★★☆☆
  A frustratingly uneven thriller. There is a lot of clever stuff in it, but after it opens a door to surprisingly interesting cultural politics, it disappoints by backing off from following through.
• Wakanda Forever ★★★☆☆
  It may have been impossible to follow up the cultural moment around Black Panther even without the premature death of star Chadwick Boseman. Unable to fill those boots, this film is still solid — and also serves as a fitting requiem mass for Boseman.
• She-Hulk ★★★☆☆
  A sitcom about being a lawyer who takes superhero / supervillain cases … while also being a superhero. Loose-unto-sloppy, but fun.
• Hawkeye ★★★☆☆
  A fun trifle, part Holiday Comedy With A Hapless Dad, part Buddy Action Comedy.
• Captain America: Brave New World ★★★☆☆
  A weaker attempt at the cocktail of superhero story and political thriller which Captain America: The Winter Soldier delivered, but entertaining enough, if only to see Harrison Ford having some hammy fun. This takes place after The Falcoln & The Winter Soldier and is a bit informed by it.
• Thor: Love and Thunder ★★☆☆☆
  A surprisingly weak entry getting the band back together from the sublime Ragnarok. There is fun in there, but unsatisfying as a whole.
• Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness ★★☆☆☆
  A messy entry that has its charms if one has developed a taste for specifically-superheroic tropes or enjoys Sam Raimi’s overspiced directoral style.
• The Eternals ★★☆☆☆
  This attempt at Big Cosmic Nonsense somehow doesn’t land right, but it has real ideas and is so gorgeously shot that it is an intriguingly noble failure. As with Age Of Ultron, I find it more gratifying a few scenes at a time.
• Ant-Man: Quantumania &
  Secret Invasion &
  Iron Fist ★☆☆☆☆
  The baseline for the MCU is popcorn entertainments a little better & smarter than they need to be; the lesser works are more weak than bad, entertaining enough for a lazy Sunday afternoon. But these are real turkeys.