The Dish

Facebook just acquired Oculus, a virtual reality company, for $2 billion:

Like the shift to mobile, which has taken a couple years but has nonetheless happened, Zuckerberg says that the future of social interactions over the internet are going to be in “vision.” That becomes a much easier jump to make when you own the company that’s doing it best. “We think vision will be the next big platform. It might take 5-10 years to get there, but we’re thinking about the next platforms,” he said. “To help push this forward, [buying Oculus] became a clear decision … it was about what we could add to each other’s efforts.” And that, for Facebook, meant a company that can actually make hardware. Facebook’s own forays into hardware have been nightmares, and Zuckerberg said that the company knows when to give it up.

Alexis Madrigal compares the acquisition to recent investments by Apple and Google:

All these moves are about technology companies looking to create businesses off the computer/mobile screen. In a world where smartphone sales growth is going to level off soon, where social networking growth has already slowed, where everyone already uses Google … where do companies go to continue the revenue growth that is baked into their current share prices? Maybe they go after a share of TV money, or bet on the Internet of Things, or get in early with the explosion of consumer robotics. These massively valuable companies need to grab some land in whatever big technology wave comes next. And they are starting to buy where they think the fertile territory is.

Megan Garber explains why Oculus has so much potential:

Its technology represents a significant improvement over previous, clunky incarnations of virtual reality. (Remember the disaster that was Nintendo’s Virtual Boy?) VR may have been a pipe dream since the ‘60s and a joke since the ‘90s; Oculus Rift is promising to make virtual reality a desirable consumer product. And many critics think it can keep that promise.

In part, that’s because Oculus VR’s technology has managed to create digital spaces that resemble physical ones much more closely than previous VR devices have. The Oculus, according to Business Insider’s Steve Kovach, “makes you feel like you’re truly immersed in a virtual environment. It’s one of those things you have to try to fully understand.” In the words of another Oculus tester, “Oculus games make Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty played on a TV look like Pong.” Using the headset, furthermore, was “one of the most completely bizarre, wonderful, unique, laugh-out-loud, ‘holy cow!’ video experiences I have ever had.”

Will Oremus sees the move as part of Facebook’s growing takeover of our lives:

Freddie DeBoer gives out a cri de coeur:

Academics are my people. Leftists are my people. I have been around both my whole life. I am unapologetically a member of both tribes. I have no desire to slander or misrepresent them. I would love to tell you that the notion of a declining commitment to free speech in their quarters is a conservative fever dream. And like all people, I am constrained by my own personal experience, which is necessarily limited and biased. But I can only honestly represent to you both my personal experience and my read of the current journalism and literature on this subject, and both tell me that there is a distressing current of antagonism towards free expression within the social justice left.

His previous post on the hostility to free speech on the social justice left is here.

I am mercifully insulated from the academic left, so I cannot know all the details of Freddie’s observations. But it seems to me that the ideology that virulently (and rightly) opposes racism, prejudice, homophobia, sexism, et al. has a weakness. These new sins of the left can easily become the only sins that really matter (which is ridiculous), and the punishment for those sins can easily morph into an attempt at cultural control and coercion. That’s particularly true, as I found living in New York, when there’s almost no one who disagrees with you. In that climate of epistemic closure (far more acute in the academy), these sins can get out of perspective and morph into eternal truths that require of the zeal of virtual lynch-mobs to enforce them (like the brutal attempt to kill off Brandon Ambrosino’s career). Freddie details how bad it’s getting again:

I would cite, for example, the rise of “free speech zones” on college campuses; of protesters shouting down invited speakers and preventing them from speaking, rather than of protesting those speakers while allowing them to speak, offering a rebuttal, or inviting a counter-speaker; increasingly heavy-handed trigger warning policies for college instructors and similar efforts to regulate course content; and harsh crackdowns on student activists, such as the pro-Palestinian activists at Northeastern University. You might well say that pro-Palestinian activists are the kind of people who would be working alongside those who push to regulate speech on campus, but that’s just the trouble. Are Jewish students who claim to be unfairly affronted by pro-Palestinian demonstrations that different from students who claim that Things Fall Apart triggers them? When you let the genie out of the bottle, there is little telling who and what it may harm.

The impulse to punish and purge sin through these kinds of illiberal tactics is not reserved to the left. But I wonder how many leftists willing to suppress bad speech understand their similarity to their Christianist opponents on the right. At some point, you have to pick between liberty and social purity. I pick liberty every time.

A reader writes:

As the Democratic Party speechwriter (for another week, anyway), this post hit home. A-fucking-men! I’ve had to write so many speeches for GLAAD-type events, to the point where I’m being discouraged from writing “gay” because LGBT is more “inclusive.” One problem is that the acronym doesn’t lend itself to a plural, meaning we have to say “LGBT Americans” again and again. Eight clumsy syllables! Thank God I haven’t had to write any remarks that deal with the persecution of gays in other countries, because I don’t even know how I’d refer to that group of people in the plural.

Human beings are fairly sophisticated social creatures. There are many, many words that are capable of causing offense, but we don’t feel the need to silence all of them, because where do you start and end? I wish we could just agree that every word within a language can be used, and if we insist on taking offense at an utterance, let’s be offended not by the word itself but by the context.

Another adds sarcastically, “Isn’t the politically correct acronym now LGBTQIA? Just check out UC Davis.” Another alternative:

If you don’t like “LGBT”, you may prefer the version a friend coined: translesbigay. It just rolls off the tongue.

“BLT” is much easier to pronounce:

Another reader:

One problem with “gay” as a replacement for “homosexual” is that “gay” has become a sexist term. Half the time, “gay” refers only to gay men. “Gay porn,” for example, is gay male porn. If one wants to refer to both sexes, one must therefore say “gay and lesbian.” But half the time, “gay” refers to both men and women. A “Gay Pride” march includes both gay men and lesbians. Feminists have long objected to using the word “man” to refer to all human beings, male or female. What does it mean that we use the specifically masculine term “gay” as a universal term for all “homosexual” people? Why is there no currently acceptable term for both gay men and lesbians?

Interestingly, in the lesbian community, the universal term “woman” also means “lesbian.” I don’t know what that means.

Another dissents:

You make a fair point on the term “homosexual,” though I understand GLAAD’s resistance to the term, given that it has mainly been used by anti-gay groups. Whatever; I don’t know many gay people that feel very strongly about it. On the other hand, you are far too cavalier about “queer” and “fag,” which have historically been insults that the gay left has attempted to – ugh – “reclaim.”

It’s a beautiful notion, but practically speaking it doesn’t work. Dave Chapelle tried a similar intellectual tack by repurposing several words and images (including the dreaded N-word) to take them away from racists. All he accomplished was creating a new white audience that used offensive words while being ignorant of their social context, or worse, who thought they were exempt from normal rules of polite society because they were trying to be funny.

We’re seeing a similar thing happen now with “queer.” Now it’s a word that college students use to mean everything from gay to gay-friendly, understanding that it’s still an epithet in the dictionary but thinking they are exempt from blame because they simply do not mean any harm. (God, if only it were true that people who don’t mean harm couldn’t cause it.) Many of us have had that word directed at us in a derogatory way, so hearing rich college kids bandy it about out of a need to feel special or tolerant doesn’t comfort us. It’s intensely irritating at best and offensively ignorant at worst.

Of course, the irony is that we, gay people, are responsible. Until we can talk about ourselves using language that is universally understood to be respectful, how can we expect anyone else to do so?

Another makes an interesting point:

Regarding you being fine with “fag,” I think it’s a generational thing, but also an English thing on your part. Perhaps look at whether you’d like to be described as a “poofter.” Somehow I doubt it. I think the key is what age you were when you first heard the derogatory description of who you are. At this point I’m fine with being an outsider, but the 12-year-old in me is still outraged that anyone would dismiss me so easily with that one f’ing word.

“Woofter” and “shirt-lifter” were more common in my youth. But I do think the fact that I wasn’t ever bullied for being gay affects me perspective on this. I recently reunited with several old classmates from my high school and they all said they didn’t know I was gay so didn’t call me those things. My nerdiness helped me slip below the radar. A female reader illustrates the impact of being way too sensitive to words:

For a year or two my brother and I (he lives next door) have not spoken much. We wave if we pass each other on the dirt road that leads to our houses. We live in a rural community outside of Tucson, AZ.

The reason for our estrangement is a word: “puto”, which in Spanish means faggot, sissy, male whore. Growing up he always used that word and I have always hated the word. I finally had the balls (that’s probably a hated word to some as well) to call him on it and our argument escalated to the point that we do not speak to one another now. We are in our early sixties, but he is for gay marriage and not a homophobe, he says. He occasionally yuck-yucks with his straight friends about gays, as in, “And I don’t care if they fuck ducks”. He is pro gay marriage and equality for his sister and her wife and everyone else. (Nancy and I were married in Seattle this past year.) However, when I asked him to use another word to describe someone he was trying to put down, he went ballistic. We are of Mexican-American heritage and I think the machismo man is emphasized and no one wants to be described as a sissy. Thus, I think it is a pejorative.

Looking at historical precedents, Harry Enten finds that Democrats have little reason for optimism in 2014:

The only year in which the president’s party improved its position by more than two percentage points was 1958, when Republicans under President Dwight D. Eisenhower picked up nearly six points on the generic ballot. The party holding the White House gained two points or less in four other years (1970, 1974, 1982 and 1994). Every other year saw at least a small decay in the presidential party’s position on the generic ballot. The median year was 2010, when the Democrats’ position declined 5.3 percentage points compared to the Republicans’. In the past five elections, the median drop was similar — -5.7 points.

Bernstein adds his analysis:

Is there any good news for Democrats here?

Not much. First, most of the large poll movements in Enten’s chart appear to be regression to the mean. Three of the four instances in which polls changed more than 10 points — all negatively for the president’s party — came after the president’s party held a 20-point lead or more in the generic ballot early in the presidential year. So perhaps a major decline for Democrats is unlikely. Unfortunately for Democrats, however, the one significant movement in favor of the president’s party was probably a result of exactly the same phenomenon. In 1958, Republicans improved from an awful 20-point deficit to a less awful 14-point gap. They received a shellacking in November, anyway. With the generic ballot measure essentially even now, there is no precedent for a sizable rally by the president’s party under similar circumstances.

Beutler flags evidence that the ACA “is experiencing an enrollment surge”:

Charles Gaba — an ACA supporter and data Hoover — has been documenting the March surge, state by state on his Twitter account and his site, ACAsignups.net. Gaba has the best numbers out there, and has been accurately forecasting official enrollment statistics for weeks. He currently projects total exchange enrollment will hit 6.2 million by the end of the month, not counting enrollment in off-exchange plans, and puts the grand beneficiary total (including Medicaid beneficiaries and “young invincibles” on their parents’ plans) at 11.9-15.6 million as of Saturday. Conservatives are thus, to no one’s surprise, furiously attempting to “un-skew” his figures.

But Kate Pickert notes that many Americans are still uninformed about the March 31st enrollment deadline:

The latest tracking poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that, among uninsured adults, 43% don’t know when the deadline is or refused to answer. Five percent believe the deadline has already passed and 13% think it’s later this year.

Which may be why the administration is relaxing the deadline slightly. Avik Roy pans the extension:

It’s yet another improvisation by the administration, designed to get as many people under the Obamacare tent as possible, to ensure that the law is impervious to repeal. But the upshot is that people who haven’t bought insurance, and recently fallen ill, can now buy coverage at the old rate. So while the extension may increase enrollment figures by a few hundred thousand people, it will also ensure that the pool of people signing up is even sicker and older than it would have been otherwise.

Arit John is much calmer:

The Washington Post reported on Tuesday night that people who attempt to enroll in a health care plan through the federal exchange by mid-April will be given a special enrollment period of an unknown length. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that the Obama administration was planning on creating some kind of work around for people who experienced technical problems. While detractors of the law will argue that this is another sign of “the unintended consequences of the Democrats’ failed healthcare law,” as Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus put it, it’s not. Insurance companies expected this and are waiting to see what the full plan is, and the precedent for special enrollment periods is well established.

Drum is on the same page:

Unlike the renewal delay and the employer mandate delay, which are both calculatedly political and of long duration, this one is merely an attempt to allow as many people as possible to enroll. It’s pretty justifiable, and it only extends the deadline by a few weeks. Nothing to get hot and bothered about.

Finally, taking a step back from today’s news, Dylan Scott sets the bar for Obamacare’s long-term success:

The real data for measuring Obamacare’s success aren’t in yet, but they eventually will be. At the top of the list: What happens with premiums in 2015? Plus: Do insurance companies leave the market or enter it? And the ultimate barometer: Has the number of uninsured Americans dropped significantly?

In simpler terms: Did Obamacare, in year one, create a sustainable insurance market for the long term?

Weigel parses a recent poll (pdf) on the Koch brothers:

So 13 percent of Americans view the Kochs favorably and 25 percent view them unfavorably. By contrast, “Wall Street” has a 29/39 favorable/unfavorable rating, and the most prominent libertarian in America, Rand Paul, is at a robust 38/30. There you go—the Kochs are by miles the least popular icons of the pro-business, libertarian right. It only makes sense to pummel them. And when you pummel, you realize that “all Americans” will not be the electorate in 2014. The electorate will consist of maybe 40 percent of registered voters. Democrats need that electorate to grow a bit and include more Democrats. Anything that scares or angers them and makes them vote, they’ll use.

Drum passes along the chart above:

Given their low profile, you’d hardly expect the Kochs to be a household name. And yet, nearly half of all American have heard of them, and among those who are in the know they’re very unpopular. So maybe the Democratic strategy of personalizing the robber-baron right by demonizing the Kochs is paying off. Give it another few months and maybe the Kochs will be a household name.

Cillizza doubts the strategy will earn Democrats votes:

We’ve long believed that attacks on two relatively low-profile billionaires isn’t likely to work for Democrats simply because, as this poll shows, people don’t know who the Koch brothers are.  And, beyond their low name identification, the reality is that voters almost never use campaign finance or money in politics as a voting issue.  Yes, in polls people will say there is too much money in politics and that it’s a bad thing. But, time and time again in actual elections they don’t vote on it.  Take 2010 when, in a last-ditch attempt to change the narrative from one focused on President Obama and Obamacare, the White House and its allies insisted that the “dark” money that groups like American Crossroads were putting into the system was going to be a major issue for voters. Um, not so much.

David Graham largely agrees. But he sees few other juicy targets:

In 2014 the White House (and congressional Democrats) once again have few choices. The Republican presidential field two years ago was weak and diffuse; Mitt Romney’s ultimate victory came after boomlets for Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, and, yes, even Herman Cain. At this early stage, the 2016 GOP field promises to be much stronger, but it’s still a wide-open race and Romney has shown no interest in giving it another shot, so there’s no obvious bogeyman. So who else do Democrats have to attack? Reince Priebus isn’t exactly a household name either.

Ed Morrissey’s take:

[T]his is red meat for the base. Most everyone else could care less, mainly because the “look — billionaires!” scare tactic is so blatantly hypocritical.

Earlier Dish on the Kochs here.