The Dictator observations thread.

[gkbill]

gkbill passed this along to me because of the academic angle, but I think there's a larger point that others likely experience regularly: https://archive.ph/W7aXy

While there is plenty of good evidence to suggest over-management of people—solutions in search of problems—these kinds of critiques tend to also overstate "the good old days." That is, if there is more regulatory restrictions of various kinds in our lives, in the past there were also plenty of restrictions in the form of cultural pressures and the quiet power of elites. If the HR boss can make your life hell with all kinds of regulations, in decades past social expectations or the whims of the boss could do the same. Given that those who are most inclined to making these arguments while invoking how things used to be are white men like Brooks, it makes me wonder if the underlying complaint is about how the good old days were when being white and male meant the cultural norms benefited them. (For the same reason that so-called cancel culture only became an alarming thing when those historically empowered to cancel others became targets.)

To use an obvious example, if there are all kinds of restrictions on office speech that mean the bar for sexual harassment is lower and can seem like innocuous comments will land a person in hot water, in the 1950s the cultural norms made it quite easy for men to torment (or worse) women. And those same cultural norms placed women in a situation where they mostly had to suffer in silence or believe it was just the way the world works.

So, yeah, it's not that I disagree with Brooks, at least on the surface, but he's operating on a skewed history. The change isn't more freedom becoming less freedom than one form of power to restrict and coerce being replaced with a different kind.

Hello,

Agreed wholeheartedly on the point regarding the change eliminating the benefits of being an older, white male (full disclosure - I'm an old, white guy). My concern with the growth of administrators is they don't go away. I view this through the lens of my experience at a large public school on Ohio. When the enrollment grew and state money per student was good, I can't tell you how many Associate Dean for Student Life's were hired - at better wages than faculty. When the school began to struggle with declining enrollment (and some very stupid decisions by even higher level administrators), staff reductions were introduced. Faculty were cut while the Associate Deans were kept. Those administrators were like cockroaches - you couldn't get rid of them.

If there's a true need (and diversity is still a need n higher education - both in faculty and educating some old white guys), an good administrator is invaluable. However, they tend to multiply. Where I currently teach, we are smaller and were less diverse among faculty and administrators - there has been a sincere (based on my perceptions) effort to improve in these areas. This is likely due to our student population becoming more diverse and the good administrators understanding that it is healthy for students to see people that look like them in official capacities within the school. I have the benefit of being in a mixed marriage with a mixed/colored/blended son who is a student here thus my experience is different than most of my old, white, male colleagues.

I'm sorry if this seems to ramble but that original opinion piece struck a chord with me. Go listen to the new Green Day stuff.

[Dr. Medulla]

gkbill passed this along to me because of the academic angle, but I think there's a larger point that others likely experience regularly: https://archive.ph/W7aXy

While there is plenty of good evidence to suggest over-management of people—solutions in search of problems—these kinds of critiques tend to also overstate "the good old days." That is, if there is more regulatory restrictions of various kinds in our lives, in the past there were also plenty of restrictions in the form of cultural pressures and the quiet power of elites. If the HR boss can make your life hell with all kinds of regulations, in decades past social expectations or the whims of the boss could do the same. Given that those who are most inclined to making these arguments while invoking how things used to be are white men like Brooks, it makes me wonder if the underlying complaint is about how the good old days were when being white and male meant the cultural norms benefited them. (For the same reason that so-called cancel culture only became an alarming thing when those historically empowered to cancel others became targets.)

To use an obvious example, if there are all kinds of restrictions on office speech that mean the bar for sexual harassment is lower and can seem like innocuous comments will land a person in hot water, in the 1950s the cultural norms made it quite easy for men to torment (or worse) women. And those same cultural norms placed women in a situation where they mostly had to suffer in silence or believe it was just the way the world works.

So, yeah, it's not that I disagree with Brooks, at least on the surface, but he's operating on a skewed history. The change isn't more freedom becoming less freedom than one form of power to restrict and coerce being replaced with a different kind.

Hello,

Agreed wholeheartedly on the point regarding the change eliminating the benefits of being an older, white male (full disclosure - I'm an old, white guy). My concern with the growth of administrators is they don't go away. I view this through the lens of my experience at a large public school on Ohio. When the enrollment grew and state money per student was good, I can't tell you how many Associate Dean for Student Life's were hired - at better wages than faculty. When the school began to struggle with declining enrollment (and some very stupid decisions by even higher level administrators), staff reductions were introduced. Faculty were cut while the Associate Deans were kept. Those administrators were like cockroaches - you couldn't get rid of them.

If there's a true need (and diversity is still a need n higher education - both in faculty and educating some old white guys), an good administrator is invaluable. However, they tend to multiply. Where I currently teach, we are smaller and were less diverse among faculty and administrators - there has been a sincere (based on my perceptions) effort to improve in these areas. This is likely due to our student population becoming more diverse and the good administrators understanding that it is healthy for students to see people that look like them in official capacities within the school. I have the benefit of being in a mixed marriage with a mixed/colored/blended son who is a student here thus my experience is different than most of my old, white, male colleagues.

I'm sorry if this seems to ramble but that original opinion piece struck a chord with me. Go listen to the new Green Day stuff.

Can't disagree about your assessment of academia being top-heavy with administration. A combination of a growing and demographically diverse enrollment but especially universities assuming more varied purposes beyond just the classroom, whether that's doing research for government or social justice endeavours. Fundamentally, complexity and growth produces managers—in business, government, or education. And managers, understandably, seek to preserve their existence, and being higher in status than basic labour—be it a factory worker or a professor—they'll sacrifice labour before themselves. The only way to shrink bureaucracy is to shrink the institutions and the population they serve.

[Flex]

gkbill passed this along to me because of the academic angle, but I think there's a larger point that others likely experience regularly: https://archive.ph/W7aXy

While there is plenty of good evidence to suggest over-management of people—solutions in search of problems—these kinds of critiques tend to also overstate "the good old days." That is, if there is more regulatory restrictions of various kinds in our lives, in the past there were also plenty of restrictions in the form of cultural pressures and the quiet power of elites. If the HR boss can make your life hell with all kinds of regulations, in decades past social expectations or the whims of the boss could do the same. Given that those who are most inclined to making these arguments while invoking how things used to be are white men like Brooks, it makes me wonder if the underlying complaint is about how the good old days were when being white and male meant the cultural norms benefited them. (For the same reason that so-called cancel culture only became an alarming thing when those historically empowered to cancel others became targets.)

To use an obvious example, if there are all kinds of restrictions on office speech that mean the bar for sexual harassment is lower and can seem like innocuous comments will land a person in hot water, in the 1950s the cultural norms made it quite easy for men to torment (or worse) women. And those same cultural norms placed women in a situation where they mostly had to suffer in silence or believe it was just the way the world works.

So, yeah, it's not that I disagree with Brooks, at least on the surface, but he's operating on a skewed history. The change isn't more freedom becoming less freedom than one form of power to restrict and coerce being replaced with a different kind.

Apologies, if needed, to gkbill and doc if either of you viewed the Brooks column favorably. But it made my eyes twitch as I was reading. Enough for me to do this:

Sometimes in this job I have a kernel of a column idea that doesn’t pan out. But other times I begin looking into a topic and find a problem so massive that I can’t believe I’ve ever written about anything else. This latter experience happened as I looked into the growing bureaucratization of American life. It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.

One of the first problems with this column is that Brooks refers to his "job" - which is not in any sense a real job as anyone outside of the New York Times stable of op-ed columnists understands the word - and then seeks to understand the material realities of work and life for the millions of Americans for whom he has been utterly detached from for at least as long as I've been alive. That his beat as a "Real America Understander" has kept him employed and still taken seriously (well, seriously-ish) for as long as it has is probably a greater problem for America than any amount of bureaucracy could possibly be.

But lets see what he has to say about this "bureaucracy" he learned the other day that all us regular folk deal with.

Once you start poking around, the statistics are staggering. Over a third of all health care costs go to administration. As the health care expert David Himmelstein put it in 2020, “The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy.” All of us who have been entangled in the medical system know why administrators are there: to wrangle over coverage for the treatments doctors think patients need.

Brooks, understandably, leads with what is obviously his strongest case about the perils of the expanding bureaucracy: our American health care system. He - very correctly - notes that an entire, ever growing, layer of management has been added to our health care system for the exclusive purpose of trying to deny us as much health care as possible. Ah, the predatory nature of BUREAUCRACY strikes again.

It's interesting that he didn't spend a single, solitary sentence acknowledging the obvious: that our health care apparatus has a growing layer of management all geared to deny coverage when it can because we operate a private, for profit insurance system. The bureaucracy of the insurance companies is simply a rational result of a system where these companies are encourage to make as much profit as possible. Why doesn't Brooks mention this? Well, for one thing, he opposes reforms like single payer health care or other forms of nationalized health coverage. Instead of noting a true problem and assessing its root cause, it's politically expedient for Brooks to point to a nebulous, undefinable (and, funnily enough, essentially unaddressable through any public action or reform) "bureaucratization" that is taking place rather than state the obvious: we are experiencing the logical consequences of the capitalist systems we've set up. I say "politically expedient" because of where Brooks goes a couple times in the column, and we'll get there.

The growth of bureaucracy costs America over $3 trillion in lost economic output every year, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in 2016 in The Harvard Business Review. That was about 17 percent of G.D.P. According to their analysis, there is now one administrator or manager for every 4.7 employees, doing things like designing anti-harassment trainings, writing corporate mission statements, collecting data and managing “systems.”

You know, at one of my old jobs I used to work with someone who would leave copies of the Harvard Business Review on his desk to try to impress the CEO of our company with his business acumen. And it worked!

Heaven fucking forbid we put people in place to do useless shit like design anti-harassment trainings, though. Thanks for getting on top of that one, David.

This situation is especially grave in higher education. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology now has almost eight times as many nonfaculty employees as faculty employees. In the University of California system, the number of managers and senior professionals swelled by 60 percent between 2004 and 2014. The number of tenure-track faculty members grew by just 8 percent.

Look, as has been attested by our own educators right here, there's definitely a bureaucratic expansion happening at the Academy. This anecdote tells me nothing meaningful, though. I don't know what these people's jobs are and even the articles he cites say that these budgets are complex and there's a lot of grey area between Useful Shit and unnecessary expenditure. Anyways, in the UC article it touches out this being an issue for labor advocates - and that's absolutely correct. It's curious that Brooks doesn't connect this issue to obvious correctives like expanded unionization.

You know, now that I think about it, it's weird that he keeps ignoring these left-coded solutions to the problems he's complaining about and has already made a swipe at stuff like anti-harassment training. Probably nothing to it though- oh wait:

Conservatives complain that diversity, equity and inclusion administrators are injecting a dangerous ideology into American campuses. That’s true.

Ah, here we are.

But the bigger problem is that these workers are among the swelling ranks of administrators.

The administrators have gone woke!!!!!

The general job of administrators, who are invariably good and well-meaning people, is to supervise and control, and they gain power and job security by hiring more people to work for them to create more supervision and control. In every organization I’ve interacted with, the administrators genuinely want to serve the mission of the organization, but the nature of their jobs is to enforce compliance with this or that rule.

Sure, whatever. I've played Civilization too and chuckle when it says "the bureaucracy has expanded to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." Thank you, David, for providing me with the same insight a computer game did 20 years ago.

Their power is similar to what Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic has called the “time tax.” If you’ve ever fought a health care, corporate or university bureaucracy, you quickly realize you don’t have the time for it, so you give up. I don’t know about you, but my health insurer sometimes denies my family coverage for things that seem like obvious necessities, but I let it go unless it’s a major expense. I calculate that my time is more valuable.

First, ol Davey needs to make sure to share his highly relatable personal anecdote that he usually doesn't even bother when his health insurance tries to fuck him and family over because - and he needs us to know this - his time is simply more valuable than yours, you peon who actually has to spend your weekend dealing with this shit. Second, yeah, this shit sucks. Health insurance is ass and does shit like this because of specific policies and laws we have in place that we have the power to change if we want to. Again, David never mentions that part.

As Philip K. Howard has been arguing for years, good organizations give people discretion to do what is right. But the trend in public and private sector organizations has been to write rules that rob people of the power of discretion. These are two different mentalities. As Howard writes, “Studies of cognitive overload suggest that the real problem is that people who are thinking about rules actually have diminished capacity to think about solving problems.”

Philip K. Howard self-identifies as a "radical centrist" so it's hard to know how seriously to take any of this when he obviously has a brain made out of tapioca pudding. That said, sure, "too many" rules are bad. If you read the piece Brooks cite (well, skim it anyways, Howard is even more tedious than Brooks apparently) Howard's conclusion is "[t]hat’s why America should abandon modern bureaucracy and rebuild a governing framework grounded in human responsibility." Oh, okay. We'll get right on that. Thanks.

Not long ago, an airline accidentally canceled one of my flight reservations. I called the 800 number and the guy on the other end of the line seemed truly unable to wrap his mind around the idea of getting me on another flight, because the rule said that my reservation was nonrefundable. I had that by now familiar feeling of talking to a brick wall.

1) There's absolutely no way that Brooks didn't accidentally cancel his own flight reservation. 2) the only real example outside of health care that Brooks can come up with of overly burdensome and pernicious bureaucracy is him being a dick to some poor travel agent on the phone because Brooks (probably) accidentally canceled how own non-refunable flight. Terrific effort all around.

This state of affairs pervades American life. Childhood is now thoroughly administered. I’m lucky enough to have grown up at a time when parents let children roam free to invent their own games and solve their own problems. Now kids’ activities, from travel sports to recess, are supervised, and rules dominate. Parents are afraid their kids might be harmed, but as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have argued, by being overprotective, parents make their kids more fragile and more vulnerable to harm.

Look, I'm in favor of giving kids more of a free reign to solve their own problems and whatnot here too. But this is just more socially conservative "things were better back in the Good Old Days" nonsense. It's also essentially a non-sequitur. I think I understand the connection he's trying to make here (too many rulezzzzzz all around) but 1) he doesn't make it, and 2) I'd need a lot more evidence from actual people who know what they're talking about before I accept that helicopter parenting has some sort of cause/effect relationship with bureaucratization.

High school students design their lives to fit the metrics that college admissions officers require. And what traits are selective schools looking for? They’re looking for students who are willing to conform to the formulas the gatekeepers devise.

Take a tip from your Cool Uncle Davey Brooks: when you get to the part of the admission form where they ask you to check "yes" or "no" to whether you promise to "conform to the formulas the gatekeepers devise" you gotta be checkin' that "yes" box!

More paragraphs complaining about higher ed

I can't keep doing this. Brooks complains for several more paragraphs about higher ed these days. Most of it is just warmed over culture war nonsense about how colleges don't let you be an idiosyncratic republican white male anymore, complete with citations to right wing freaks like the Liberties Journal. Whatever. Almost all of this op-ed is really just to try on a different shade of lipstick to the usual complaint that academia isn't friendly to conservatives anymore and there's too much effort trying to prevent men from raping women on campus (and in the workplace). That's it.

Organizations are trying to protect themselves from lawsuits, but the whole administrative apparatus comes with an implied view of human nature. People are weak, fragile, vulnerable and kind of stupid. They need administrators to run their lives. They have to be trained never to take initiative, lest they wander off into activities that are deemed by the authorities to be out of bounds.

Objection, this nonsense paragraph assumes facts not in evidence.

The result is the soft despotism that Tocqueville warned us about centuries ago, a power that “is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.” In his Liberties essay, Edmundson writes that this kind of power is now centerless. Presidents and executives don’t run companies, universities or nations. Power is now held by everyone who issues work surveys and annual reports, the people who create H.R. trainings and collect data. He concludes: “They are using the terms of liberation to bring more and more free people closer to mental serfdom. Some day they will awaken in a cage of their own devising, so harshly confining that even they, drunk on their own virtue, will have to notice how their lives are the lives of snails tucked in their shells.”

If citing Harvard Business Review is how you try to suck up to the boss in the business world, citing Tocqueville is how you try to suck up to your weird, kinda right wing social studies teacher when you're a junior in high school. Also, Brooks can't stop complaining about how there's too much effort to stop workplace sexual harassment now. That's probably not any kind of insight into the kind of person Brooks is, though.

Also, lol that his real complaint here is that bureaucracies prevent presidents and CEOs from acting like completely dictatorial freaks. Wow, way to channel the rage of the common man: "the guys at the top don't have nearly enough power to fuck with me on a whim."

Trumpian populism is about many things, but one of them is this: working-class people rebelling against administrators. It is about people who want to lead lives of freedom, creativity and vitality, who find themselves working at jobs, sending their kids to schools and visiting hospitals, where they confront “an immense and tutelary power” (Tocqueville’s words) that is out to diminish them.

In conclusion, the Trumpists were right all along. The End.

[Dr. Medulla]

Nothing for me to disagree with or add to your spicy mustard bomb, Flex. As I said in my initial comment, the very surface level stuff, I agree with, but Brooks' analysis comes from a lousy socio-historical place that so much right-wing culture war does. We'd all like to have less coercion in our lives, but eliminating bureaucracy won't do that—it'll allow a different expression of coercion to reassert itself. Modern life is complexity, and complexity produces tiers of management to deal with that. Reduce the population to, say, 1850 levels and the kind of freedom Brooks is talking about becomes a possibility again.

[Flex]

Nothing for me to disagree with or add to your spicy mustard bomb, Flex. As I said in my initial comment, the very surface level stuff, I agree with, but Brooks' analysis comes from a lousy socio-historical place that so much right-wing culture war does. We'd all like to have less coercion in our lives, but eliminating bureaucracy won't do that—it'll allow a different expression of coercion to reassert itself. Modern life is complexity, and complexity produces tiers of management to deal with that. Reduce the population to, say, 1850 levels and the kind of freedom Brooks is talking about becomes a possibility again.

Since Brooks is already taking his cues from the Trumpists, he should ask them who to get rid of to bring our population back down to 1850 levels. I'm pretty sure they have some concrete recommendations for him.

[Flex]

Also, if I did this professionally, I'd have been sure to catch Brooks complaining about the constrained power of the president of the united states by those sniveling DEI bureaucrats followed literally two sentences later by his endorsement of Trumpian populism.

[Dr. Medulla]

The other thing about complaining about bureaucracy is what you get from people who complain about paying taxes—the idea that everything about the process and experience is negative. You pay taxes and get nothing for it, just as bureaucrats offer nothing but restrictions. Eliminate all taxes and the services they fund, eliminate all the managers and what they do, and the kind of freedom that creates would be unhappy for everyone. That's not some kind of argument for a nanny state, or that we've become trained seals for cradle-to-grave statism, only an assertion that caricaturing it all as this leviathan that generates no benefits in a complex and diverse society is willful blindness.

[gkbill]

Hello,

I enjoyed reading the responses. This is not my area of strength so I will only touch base on a few thoughts.

Firstly, education and healthcare should not be treated like businesses. If healthcare should truly be treated as a business, what do healthcare administrators do with people that they decide "Yeah, it would be too expensive to keep you alive"? How does research into new medicine survive? Regarding education, what do education administrators do with people that they decide are "too dumb thus too expensive to educate"?

I'm better aware of the lack of free play and children. I speak with many parents (both helicopter and snowplow parents - but admittedly anecdotal) and describe their desire to help their child - substituting organized play for free (unsupervised) play. The number of skills that do not receive sufficient developmental opportunities (creativity, problem-solving, conflict resolution, etc.) results from the parents efforts. There is literature to support this.

When I speak to these groups, I'll concede I'm about to tell them what was better about the good old days but make them aware of the things that were much worse in the good old days.

[Dr. Medulla]

Canadian context, but a study suggests 20% of advertising during sports broadcasts is for gambling. Experientially, that seems about right. And again experientially, the normalization aspect is real in that it's become like background noise to me. Thankfully I don't have that gambling impulse—the irritation of losing is always greater than the thrill of winning—but for those who do, it's fucking pushing. I have no issue with legalized gambling, but advertising should be banned.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/marketplace/spo ... en%20games.

[Flex]

Canadian context, but a study suggests 20% of advertising during sports broadcasts is for gambling. Experientially, that seems about right. And again experientially, the normalization aspect is real in that it's become like background noise to me. Thankfully I don't have that gambling impulse—the irritation of losing is always greater than the thrill of winning—but for those who do, it's fucking pushing. I have no issue with legalized gambling, but advertising should be banned.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/marketplace/spo ... en%20games.

Yeah, that's where I am too. I've tuned out the commercials but the integrated gambling shit into the actual games and broadcasts and sports "news" coverage close to infuriates me. I'm not a gambler, but I've had someone in my extended family who was a gambling addict and it basically ruined their life for a long, long time. It's fucking awful and the people preying on these addicted folks are disgusting scumbags. Just another thing that has made Sports Watching lose its luster more of late.

I'd be fine banning alcohol commercials too, for what it's worth. I'm normalized on that shit enough that it doesn't cause the same visceral reaction when I see it, but I rationally realize there's a lot of the same predation on the addicted going on.

[Dr. Medulla]

Canadian context, but a study suggests 20% of advertising during sports broadcasts is for gambling. Experientially, that seems about right. And again experientially, the normalization aspect is real in that it's become like background noise to me. Thankfully I don't have that gambling impulse—the irritation of losing is always greater than the thrill of winning—but for those who do, it's fucking pushing. I have no issue with legalized gambling, but advertising should be banned.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/marketplace/spo ... en%20games.

Yeah, that's where I am too. I've tuned out the commercials but the integrated gambling shit into the actual games and broadcasts and sports "news" coverage close to infuriates me. I'm not a gambler, but I've had someone in my extended family who was a gambling addict and it basically ruined their life for a long, long time. It's fucking awful and the people preying on these addicted folks are disgusting scumbags. Just another thing that has made Sports Watching lose its luster more of late.

I'd be fine banning alcohol commercials too, for what it's worth. I'm normalized on that shit enough that it doesn't cause the same visceral reaction when I see it, but I rationally realize there's a lot of the same predation on the addicted going on.

Yeah, that I oppose gambling ads, for consistency I have to oppose booze ads. It's so ubiquitous I never think of it, which is part of the problem.

[JennyB]

Canadian context, but a study suggests 20% of advertising during sports broadcasts is for gambling. Experientially, that seems about right. And again experientially, the normalization aspect is real in that it's become like background noise to me. Thankfully I don't have that gambling impulse—the irritation of losing is always greater than the thrill of winning—but for those who do, it's fucking pushing. I have no issue with legalized gambling, but advertising should be banned.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/marketplace/spo ... en%20games.

Yeah, that's where I am too. I've tuned out the commercials but the integrated gambling shit into the actual games and broadcasts and sports "news" coverage close to infuriates me. I'm not a gambler, but I've had someone in my extended family who was a gambling addict and it basically ruined their life for a long, long time. It's fucking awful and the people preying on these addicted folks are disgusting scumbags. Just another thing that has made Sports Watching lose its luster more of late.

I'd be fine banning alcohol commercials too, for what it's worth. I'm normalized on that shit enough that it doesn't cause the same visceral reaction when I see it, but I rationally realize there's a lot of the same predation on the addicted going on.

Yeah, that I oppose gambling ads, for consistency I have to oppose booze ads. It's so ubiquitous I never think of it, which is part of the problem.

There's this guy named Pat Shea I follow on Instagram. He's a guy who was drafted by an NHL team, but never really made it, so he's pivoted to comedy. It's extremely niche, but his videos where he satirizes high school hockey players crack me up, just because it's basically my life right now. Anyway, he started partnering with Draft Kings and I am super, super annoyed.

[Dr. Medulla]

Canadian context, but a study suggests 20% of advertising during sports broadcasts is for gambling. Experientially, that seems about right. And again experientially, the normalization aspect is real in that it's become like background noise to me. Thankfully I don't have that gambling impulse—the irritation of losing is always greater than the thrill of winning—but for those who do, it's fucking pushing. I have no issue with legalized gambling, but advertising should be banned.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/marketplace/spo ... en%20games.

Yeah, that's where I am too. I've tuned out the commercials but the integrated gambling shit into the actual games and broadcasts and sports "news" coverage close to infuriates me. I'm not a gambler, but I've had someone in my extended family who was a gambling addict and it basically ruined their life for a long, long time. It's fucking awful and the people preying on these addicted folks are disgusting scumbags. Just another thing that has made Sports Watching lose its luster more of late.

I'd be fine banning alcohol commercials too, for what it's worth. I'm normalized on that shit enough that it doesn't cause the same visceral reaction when I see it, but I rationally realize there's a lot of the same predation on the addicted going on.

Yeah, that I oppose gambling ads, for consistency I have to oppose booze ads. It's so ubiquitous I never think of it, which is part of the problem.

There's this guy named Pat Shea I follow on Instagram. He's a guy who was drafted by an NHL team, but never really made it, so he's pivoted to comedy. It's extremely niche, but his videos where he satirizes high school hockey players crack me up, just because it's basically my life right now. Anyway, he started partnering with Draft Kings and I am super, super annoyed.

I've never really sat down to think about it, gather evidence, etc., but my gut sense is that every "celebrity" I've felt positive toward, my feelings remained, at best, steady, but usually went colder. Especially when it became a whole series of ads.

[gkbill]

Canadian context, but a study suggests 20% of advertising during sports broadcasts is for gambling. Experientially, that seems about right. And again experientially, the normalization aspect is real in that it's become like background noise to me. Thankfully I don't have that gambling impulse—the irritation of losing is always greater than the thrill of winning—but for those who do, it's fucking pushing. I have no issue with legalized gambling, but advertising should be banned.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/marketplace/spo ... en%20games.

Yeah, that's where I am too. I've tuned out the commercials but the integrated gambling shit into the actual games and broadcasts and sports "news" coverage close to infuriates me. I'm not a gambler, but I've had someone in my extended family who was a gambling addict and it basically ruined their life for a long, long time. It's fucking awful and the people preying on these addicted folks are disgusting scumbags. Just another thing that has made Sports Watching lose its luster more of late.

I'd be fine banning alcohol commercials too, for what it's worth. I'm normalized on that shit enough that it doesn't cause the same visceral reaction when I see it, but I rationally realize there's a lot of the same predation on the addicted going on.

Yeah, that I oppose gambling ads, for consistency I have to oppose booze ads. It's so ubiquitous I never think of it, which is part of the problem.

Hello,

Watch an EPL game. A good number of kit sponsors (the company on the front of the shirt) are gambling services. Check the sign boards around the field as well.

[Dr. Medulla]

Ken "Popehat" White on how privileged people perceive the legal system when they're on trial: https://www.popehat.com/p/bret-stephens ... inst-trump