About Those Monopoly Ads...

 

A somewhat off-topic comment on a post on Ethics Alarms got me thinking about Monopoly, and indeed about the two recent commercials I’ve seen for the board game. 

It’s now well-established that the game was actually invented by a leftist stenographer named Elizabeth “Lizzie” Magie.  Her idea, for a game called the Landlord’s Game, was originally intended to have two sets of rules: one in which everyone was rewarded if wealth was created, and a monopolistic version, in which players seek to accumulate all the wealth by crushing all the opponents.

Were Curmie of a cynical disposition (perish the thought!), he might suggest that the former represents the “rising tide lifts all boats” rhetoric of the predatory capitalists at the top of the economic food chain, and the latter represents their actual practice.  Magie wrote that the game “might well have been called the ‘Game of Life,’ as it contains all the elements of success and failure in the real world, and the object is the same as the human race in general seem to have, i.e., the accumulation of wealth.” 

The latter version of the game, the one we now recognize as Monopoly, although patented, was essentially stolen by a scoundrel named Charles Darrow, who made minor changes and sold the idea to Parker Brothers, making millions.  In turn, they simultaneously pretended that the game was Darrow’s invention and also bought the rights to Magie’s game for an absurdly low price.

In other words, the history of the game mirrors the game itself: it is a story of greed, shrewdness, and opportunism supplanting ethical behavior as a guiding principle.  Oh, and don’t forget luck.  It’s better to be lucky than good… in Monopoly and in life.  There are advantages to having a skillset in both, but it sure is easier IRL to have Daddy give you a few million dollars to start your business or in Monopoly to land on Boardwalk when it’s for sale rather than when someone else has a hotel there.

Interestingly, the reverse of this latter phenomenon happens if you go to jail.  It’s a disadvantage early because you can’t buy anything, but late in the game staying in jail means you’re not landing on someone else’s hotel-bearing property.  (One is tempted to note that a certain IRL late-in-the-game real estate mogul currently facing the possibility of jail time might actually benefit politically from incarceration by claiming to have been unjustly tried and convicted.)

It strikes me that, contrary to the arguments made by others on that Ethics Alarms thread, Monopoly stands alone (or at least virtually so—Curmie doesn’t claim to know all the other possibilities) as a game.  It is, in some ways, not about winning, but about your opponents losing.  It’s certainly not about the mutual benefit of all the competitors, as the other set of Lizzie Magie’s rules would have it. 

Even Life, the other board game from Curmie’s youth to involve “money” rather than points, usually ends with winners who have more money than their opponents, not all the money.  Yes, there’s a chance of winning at the end by literally going for broke (and heading to the poorhouse 90% of the time), but that just adds a little late-game interest to a game that is almost exclusively decided by luck.  No one suggests that the winner employed any particular skill, as there’s only one choice: go to college or don’t.

Let Curmie respond to comments by EA readers: Baseball games involve only two teams at a time, and despite the occasional shutout generally end with scores of 3-1 or 7-2 or whatever: not all the runs on one side.  And whereas there is an element of luck—the line drive right at the 2^nd baseman, the bloop double, the blast that fades foul or stays fair by inches, and so on—the ratio of skill to luck is significantly higher there than in Monopoly.  Poker lasts as long as it lasts, except in high-stakes tournaments.  There’s not a sense of an unfinished competition if the game ends at midnight or after 20 hands or whatever.  It doesn’t require all the chips to be in a single player’s possession to call it a night.  Sure, games like Risk involve the annihilation of the opposition (and strategy often involving deceit), but they’re not being marketed to primary school kids. 

For all its heritage as a critique of the landlord class, Monopoly has come to be regarded as a paean to capitalism, just as Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” has somehow been transformed in the public imagination to a patriotic anthem to be blared over the speakers to the accompaniment of 4^th of July fireworks.  It’s pretty clear that Lizzie Magie knew that kind of transformation might happen: a society smitten with financial wealth will envy the “haves,” and will jump at the chance to live that life even if only in a fictive world.

So… about those ads…  Curmie has seen two of them for the standard game (there are far too many variations on the theme than Curmie wants to contemplate).  The first, known as “8-Year Old Landlord,” shows, as the title suggests, a little girl in Leona Helmsley drag.  She’s owner of Park Place Apartments; we see her firing the janitor (her father), raising rents on her brother and the family dog, and issuing her pregnant mom a final notice before eviction.  The tag is “It’s all in the name of the game.  All is fair in Monopoly.”  Curmie supposes the ad is cute in a creepy sort of way, but it certainly condones if not encourages behavior we’d find objectionable in real life: the sort of legal but acquisitive and narcissistic impulses many renters see in their landlords.  Still, that focused amorality is a strategy for winning at Monopoly.  Can’t complain too much.

The other commercial, however, is far more problematic.  The title character and narrator of “Grand Theft Nai Nai” (“nai nai” is Chinese for “grandmother”) tells us that being 75 has its perks, notably that “People just trust you.  Blindly.”  In her capacity as a bank teller she steals a huge amount of money from customers and/or the bank itself, stuffing wads of bills into her clothing, even into her shoes.  We then cut to a shot of her doing the same thing with Monopoly money as she gloats about her wealth.  It may be that it’s her own money she’s stuffing up her sleeve in the image above, but then the parallelism is fractured.  The context certainly suggests that she’s taking money from the game’s bank, just as she did from the real-life bank for which she works.  Again, the tag is “All is fair in Monopoly.”

Except that it isn’t.  The young landlady of Park Place Apartments may be unfeeling and rapacious, but what she does is legal (well, the rationale for raising the brother’s rent may not be, but it goes by so fast that virtually no one will notice).  The old lady in the other ad is engaged in actual theft.  That’s against the rules in real life, and guess what, Gentle Reader?  It’s against the rules in Monopoly, too!  All is not fair in Monopoly; this isn’t Calvinball, where the rules are made up as the game progresses. 

Does this ad really encourage cheating?  Well, actually, yes.  The other commercial may demonstrate how to win at Monopoly; this one shows how to get arrested in real life, or at least how to deserve to be.  That’s not a good look, even for a game that has for years de facto conflated success and wealth.  Metaphoric, legal, stealing—tax breaks on yachts and private jets, huge “loans” that miraculously don’t need to be repaid, that sort of thing—is one thing.  Literal theft is another.  Hasbro (which acquired Parker Brothers and therefore Monopoly in 1991) needs to ditch the ad, no matter how cute they think it is.

Observations on the Violence in Dublin

As those who know me personally know, Curmie has spent about four months in Ireland, mostly in Dublin.  I’ve led seven Study Abroad programs there and led walking tours from O’Connell Bridge in the center of the city up to Parnell Square, a kilometer or so to the north.  I’ve spent dozens of hours in that area—at the Gate Theatre, the Hugh Lane Gallery, the Garden of Remembrance, the (alas, now defunct) Dublin Writers Museum.  The last time I was in Dublin, on a whirlwind research visit in 2019, I stayed at a b&b a few blocks east of Parnell Square.  It was a long walk to the National Library south of the Liffey, but finances dictated that necessity.

One of the first things I saw on my Facebook feed this morning was a statement from the Abbey Theatre, which is a couple blocks east and a block north of O’Connell Bridge.  It said they were “thinking of all of [their] neighbours in Dublin 1,” but that the evening’s performance of Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow would go on as scheduled.  I wondered what happened in Dublin 1, went to the Google machine, and encountered a headline in the Irish Times saying that Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Leo Varadkar had estimated “tens of millions” of Euro in damages caused by riots that started in the Parnell Square area and moved south as far as the area around O’Connell Bridge. “Whaaaaaat?  Riots in Dublin?  That hasn’t happened in decades.  Surely there’s some mistake,” I thought.  Alas, no.

In the early afternoon Dublin time Thursday, moments after the Macy’s parade was starting in New York, four people, including three small children, were injured in a knife attack outside the Gaelscoil Choláiste Mhuire, a primary school across the street from the Garden of Remembrance.  As of this writing (Friday evening in the US), one little girl and the childcare worker (it’s unclear whether she’s a teacher or other staffer) who launched herself between the attacker and the children remain in critical condition; the girl is said to be “fighting for her life.”  The only good news is that the perpetrator seems to have been acting alone.

This story is horrible enough.  But somehow this attack led to riots, with bus drivers pulled from their vehicles, petrol bombs thrown at refugee centers, public transport vehicles set alight, looting of over a dozen stores, and multiple injuries to gardaí (police).  The facts—or, rather, the closest we can come to facts—enumerated here are drawn from a variety of sources: the Irish Times, Irish Independent, Irish Mirror, RTE, ITV, the BBC, the Guardian, and the Telegraph.  I’m not going to bother to try to link every statement to a specific source: this is a blog piece, not an academic article.  You can, as they say, do your own research, Gentle Reader.

The principal rioters were young—in their late teens or twenties—but they seem to have been egged on by folks of an older generation.  Hundreds of people were involved in the violence.  As I write this, arrests from the riots number in the 30s; “many more” are promised after the authorities examine CCTV footage.  Curmie is no fan of the level of government surveillance that is common in Ireland and the UK, but if regular people have to put up with Big Brother, then at least that technology can be used to arrest and convict every one of these assholes.

If government sources are correct, the riots were a coordinated effort by what Garda (Police) Commissioner Drew Harris describes as a “complete lunatic faction driven by far-right ideology.” Varadkar added, “These criminals did not do what they did because they love Ireland. They did not do what they did because they wanted to protect Irish people. They did not do it out of any sense of patriotism, however warped.  They did so because they’re filled with hate, they love violence, they love chaos and they love causing pain to others.”

Whether or not these characterizations are accurate, and indeed whether or not this kind of violence was predictable, as opposition pols have suggested, there does appear to be ample evidence that the riots can be traced to anti-immigrant animosity.

Posts on social media identified the perpetrator of the knife attack as an immigrant, and that was enough to enflame the loonies.  Trouble is, the assailant was an Irish citizen, albeit foreign-born.  He’d lived in the country for twenty years.  Oops! 

You know who really is a migrant?  The guy who stopped the knife-wielding attacker.  BIG OOPS!  Deliveroo is an Irish equivalent of DoorDash or Uber Eats.  One of their delivery drivers is a man named Caio Benicio.  He’d been in Ireland for only a year or so, trying to make some money to send home to Brazil, where his restaurant had burned to the ground.

He was riding his motor scooter past the area, saw the knife and the threat to children, and went into action.  He says he didn’t have time to be afraid; he just responded to what he saw.  He stopped his bike and ran towards the scene while removing his helmet, with which he proceeded to clobber the assailant over the head, knocking him to the ground.  Others grabbed the knife and restrained the perp.

(Side note: there’s a GoFundMe appeal called “Buy Caio Benicio a Pint.”  Folks are encouraged to donate the cost of a pint of beer at their local pub to Mr. Benicio.  At the time of this writing, the pot now stands at over €300,000, or over $330,000.  It would take a lot of overtime at Deliveroo and some very generous tips to make that kind of money.  Mr. Benicio doesn’t see himself as a hero, just someone in the right place at the right time: another reason I don’t begrudge him a penny of that GoFundMe haul.  I just wish the woman who was seriously injured while protecting her young charges would receive similar assistance.)

Of course, the riots were spawned by people believing what they saw on social media, an even riskier proposition than trusting journalists.  The temptation to indulge in a little confirmation bias borders on the overwhelming.  But that’s only part of the problem.

Back in the Dark Ages when I started college as an undergraduate Government major, one of the distinctions made between traditional liberalism and traditional conservatism was that the former looked for trends involving groups of people (sexes, races, religions, etc.) and the latter centered on the individual.  There are appeals to both points of view: the former stands more explicitly against racism, sexism, and the like; the latter points out that this particular person of a “privileged” class isn’t necessarily an oppressor and that particular person from a “disenfranchised” class isn’t necessarily a victim.  (Oprah Winfrey is actually a little less oppressed than the average white male Walmart employee.)

But I become increasingly convinced of the wisdom of the horseshoe theory’s suggestion that the far left and the far right share an interest in authoritarianism that makes them more similar to each other than to the more libertarian mainstream manifestations of either philosophy.  And that means a tendency to stray from the positive attributes of those political perspectives.  (So says this civil libertarian, at least.)  In this case, it appears that the far right disregarded the individual and classed all “foreigners” as the Other.  (Curmie struggles to resist the urge to say “as usual.”)  And, of course, getting the facts right was of secondary importance, if it mattered at all.

There is plenty of cause for re-evaluating the Irish government’s policies on immigration.  The same could be said for virtually any country, including our own.  Looting department stores and setting fires to police cars would seem a rather counter-productive means of achieving that end, however.

Of course, even if there were a few hundred rioters and even if they were all right-wingers, they still represent a tiny minority of the Dublin population.  The left needs to recognize that “not all conservatives” remains as legitimate an argument as “not all immigrants.”  Who knows?  Maybe they’ll actually understand that.  Just don’t bet the rent.

Eye Black Is Not Blackface. Duh.

If you see blackface here, please leave
this page.  It’s for intelligent people.

A few days ago, I commented on a post on Ethics Alarms regarding the high school principal in Sherman, Texas who declared that the musical Oklahoma! contains “mature adult themes, profane language, and sexual content” “would come in third place in a battle of wits with a sack of hair and an anvil.”

Gentle Reader, I hereby retract that characterization.  It appears that Sherman Principal Scott Johnson was merely a good soldier, enforcing the dictates of a superintendent and school board that can’t decide if the Victorian age was a little too permissive.  So… Johnson appears capable of giving that anvil a run for its money. 

The good news is that the international attention this case received resulted first in a decision to re-instate the original student cast but in a shortened “kids” version of the musical that would have cut the solo from Max Hightower, the trans student at the center of the controversy, and finally—when the students and parents refused to accept that utterly stupid “compromise” or the notion that Oklahoma!, of all plays, ought to be bowdlerized—a return to the original version with the students the director cast.

More to the present point, when compared to Jeff Luna, the principal at Muirland Middle School in La Jolla, California, even the folks who did make the idiotic decisions that led to the kerfuffle would appear to embody all the best attributes of Solomon, Socrates, Confucius, Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci rolled into one.  We do sorta know what Ado Annie means when she laments her inability to “say no,” after all.

I was about to say that what Luna did surpasses credulity, but, alas, it does not.  There are a lot of adjectives that do apply—“boneheaded,” “irrational,” and “unconstitutional” come to mind—but unfortunately “unbelievable” has no place on the list.

Last month, a Muirland 8^th-grader identified as J.A. attended a high school football game, looking like he does in the photo above.  That is, he wore eye black, just as he’s seen countless football players (and not a few baseball players) do; I won’t bother you with the literally dozens of photos of players of all races doing so.  Now, whether eye black has any direct practicality is a matter for debate.  It started as a means of keeping glare out of the eyes.  I have no idea whether it actually does that, and even if it does, it doesn’t require the amount used by J.A.  But that, of course, is irrelevant. 

There’s little difference between J.A. and those fans who paint their faces red because their favorite team is the Alabama Crimson Tide or who wear “cheeseheads” to support the Green Bay Packers.  Maybe the allure is primal, maybe it’s that face-painting is linked to war paint.  But there’s no “maybe” about the fact that used as J.A. did, it’s completely and utterly harmless… not to mention the fact that, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), “many game attendees wore face or body paint.”

There were, of course, no incidents at the game in question, and literally no one took any offense.  That’s because most people have more than a couple of brain cells.  Not so, apparently, the Idiot Luna.  A week or so after the game, he called J.A. and his parents to a meeting, at which the boy was suspended for two days and barred from attending future athletic contests.  Why?  Because, according to the official paperwork, J.A. “painted his face black at a football game,” which qualifies as an “offensive comment, intent to harm.”  In other words, Luna would need to undergo a couple of millennia of evolution to attain the mental acumen of pond scum. 

You can read an excellent delineation of the facts in the letter from FIRE’s Director of Public Advocacy Aaron Terr.  A brief précis: 1). J.A. “emulated the style of eye black worn by many athletes.”  2). “J.A. wore his eye black throughout the game without incident.”  3). “J.A.’s non-disruptive, objectively inoffensive face paint was constitutionally protected expression.”  4). “The complete lack of disruption is unsurprising, as the sight of fans in face paint is familiar to anyone who has ever attended a football game or other sporting event.”  5). “The claim thar J.A.’s face paint constituted blackface is frivolous.”  6). “Muirland Middle School has no authority to discipline J.A. for his non-disruptive, constitutionally protected display of team spirit.”

The only part of this missive with which anyone could reasonably demur even slightly is the characterization of the eye black as a display of “team spirit.”  I doubt it was necessarily that, but it was certainly inoffensive, non-disruptive, commonplace, and constitutionally protected.  Terr needs to be more polite than I do, so I’ll allow his characterization of the assertion of blackface as “frivolous,” as opposed to the more accurate “fucking ridiculous.”

But, as they say in the late-night infomercials, “Wait!  There’s more!”  The family appealed the suspension, but the appeal was denied by the San Diego Unified School District, suggesting that they, too, are cognitively impaired.  The correct response, of course, would have been to uphold the appeal and fire Luna.

It’s difficult to tell if Luna is a Social Justice Warrior run amok, or simply a sports-ignorant walking example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, like the buffoons a few years ago who decided that the universally recognized gesture to denote a 3-point shot in basketball was a gang sign.  Ultimately, that distinction doesn’t matter—willful ignorance and blinkered paranoia are all but interchangeable—but it does matter that, alas, the situation is worse than even FIRE suggests.  

Whereas it is obvious that J.A.’s actions are utterly innocuous, and that the punishment is about three steps beyond absurd, that isn’t always the case.  Racial animus does indeed exist, and it is occasionally manifested at sporting events; there was a case less than an hour from Chez Curmie a year or so ago. 

I’m not going to get into whether expression that actually is offensive is constitutionally protected on school property.  Racism and its cousins in prejudice are unethical even if legal.  Luna and the district have demeaned all attempts to protect the Others (whoever that might be in terms of race, religion, gender identity, etc.) from harassment based simply on who they are. 

What is at play here is a variation on the Boy Who Cried Wolf.  When we accumulate enough examples of utterly inane allegations being brought by authority figures, we start to discount all such claims, even those which have merit.  J.A. and his family are bearing the brunt of this outrage, but we all suffer the consequences.

This is a slightly edited version of an essay that first appeared as a Curmie’s Conjectures post on Ethics Alarms.