Weather-Wise

While everyone talks about how much it rains in Seattle, being a native of Chicago, I find that is mostly drizzles. I miss the heavy, audible, rain and the rumble of distant thunder that used to be a fairly common occurrence, and so when it happens here, it is something to be savored.

(Unless, of course, I'm on the road. Because for someplace where it allegedly rains 14 months out of the year, a number of people seem to have remarkable difficulty with wet pavement.)

That said, drizzly and dry are not the same, even if they both are something other than genuinely raining. While Winters in the Seattle area don't have the same homicidal instinct that that Midwestern cold can often exhibit, they're still a poor time to not have a home to be inside. I wonder how many people find themselves here in (admittedly short) Summers, and think they've found a clement place to get back on their feet, only to realize that a good nine to ten months of off-and-on precipitation has been awaiting them. Recently two whole weeks passed between rains, and nearly set a new record for January being dry. But the wet is back, and while it doesn't require an umbrella, it's much more pleasant with a roof.

Misread

Print magazines are no less susceptible to a bit of bait-and-switch to lure in readers than online news sources. After all, sometimes, they're the same publication. The cover headline of the February issue of The Atlantic proclaims Donald Trump Wants You To Forget This Happened, under a photograph of January 6th, 2021. Mr. Thompson's actual story is titled: Is this what patriotism looks like? And it's the story of one of the January 6th rioters; one who assaulted police officers, but was pardoned by President Trump.

But let me stick with the cover headline for a bit, because while I think that it will resonate with a lot of people (after all, these things are not chosen casually), I also happen to think that it isn't true. There's a difference between seeking to erase a narrative, and seeking to change one. Historical revisionism is just that... revisionism, and that's closer to what I think that President Trump is after.

For a lot of people, mostly, but not exclusively, Democrats or Democratic-leaning, January 6th 2021 is a story of partisans being sore losers. Deluded, or cynically dishonest, about the nation's opinion of Donald Trump and his performance in his first term in office, they sought to use violence to overturn a free and fair election and act out their grievances against Congress.

Trumpists, unsuprisingly, profess (honestly or otherwise) to see things differently. For them, the President's nationwide popularity is an article of faith; the idea that enough people would vote for the Biden-Harris ticket that Donald Trump would lose the popular vote, let alone the Electoral College, was unthinkable. Malfeasance was the only possible explanation. And so the events of January 6th weren't a crime; they were a principled, even heroic, stand against the forces of corruption and the people who enabled it.

And that's what Donald Trump wants the historical record to reflect. An angelic light on the people who support him. Yes, there are things that the President would prefer to have removed from the annals of history. The Trail of Tears, for instance, is not something that can be readily spun into a narrative of American moral superiority. But revolutions, even failed ones, can be turned into tales of national (and perhaps ethnic) greatness. And so that's the way that Donald Trump, his acolytes and supporters would prefer it to be remembered.

I offer no opinion on whether they will succeed, and, if they do, on what timeline. But that it is the goal, I'm reasonably certain of. 

Line of Fire

"Too many cases do not appear to meet the test of objective reasonableness with regard to the use of deadly force," the report found. "[I]n some cases agents put themselves in harm's way by remaining in close proximity to the rock throwers when moving out of range was a reasonable option."
CBP has a history of excessive force. Critics say they were unprepared for Minnesota

This isn't a new criticism of law enforcement. It was raised in the media in the aftermath of the Amadou Diallo shooting, and that took place in 1999. I suspect that the tendency of court cases pertaining to potentially unlawful uses of deadly force to concentrate solely on the immediate lead up to the point when an officer pulls the trigger is a large part of this. If the timeline is never wound back far enough to get to the point where it's reasonable to ask: "Should the officer have been in so vulnerable a position in the first place?" there will be little incentive for officers to avoid making themselves vulnerable.

The Trump Administration's reflexive defense of every shooting, and the immediate casting of the person killed as dangerous or a terrorist also ramps up the danger level. Not only because officers can come to feel secure in the idea that the Administration will back them, but as I was taught when I spent a summer as a security guard, a dead person can't contradict your version of events. In this sense, fatal shootings become easier to justify than non-fatal ones, where there is a survivor who can demand evidence of the allegations against them.

But perhaps the central problem is the polarization of the general public... or at least between those people who see themselves as ardent supporters or critics of the Administration. For people who see the Trump Administration's crackdown on economic migrants and asylum seekers alike as warranted (or even long overdue), interference with it, or even protest against it, makes one a bad person. And if the actions of law enforcement mean that bad people are hurt or killed, what's the harm?

The one thing that Americans appear to dislike more than fighting with one another is not having anyone to fight with, and the current Administration understands that it will be forgiven a certain amount of overzealousness, so long as it's directed towards perceived enemies of its base of voters. And as long as there's a significant segment of the public that's willing to ignore law enforcement personnel putting themselves in situations that they then feel the need to shoot their way out of, there will be little incentive for change. 

Misbelief

I read Ross Douthat's Believe recently. It's not a long book, about 200 pages, generally devoted to the proposition that there is a generalized obligation for people to believe in some sort of higher power, and for those people who are uncertain which one to believe in, one of the four primary contemporary religions (Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism) are the best bets.

I was only on page 2 when I realized that I likely wasn't in the target demographic for Mr. Douthat's book. I'm not the sort to regard secularism as "an uncomfortable intellectual default." In other words, I wasn't looking for permission to believe. But I also don't believe that it's "just too difficult to be a thoughtful, serious modern person and embrace religious faith." I don't have faith in higher powers, myself, but that's because I don't perceive any real need for them, not because I find them somehow irrational.

Because Believe is a book for people who already want to believe, it doesn't set out to answer the question of "Is this true?" Rather, it's an answer to the question of "Why is this true?" Accordingly, Mr. Douthat starts from the proposition that God is real, and this lends the book the air of begging the question at times. "Nonbelief requires ignoring what out reason has revealed about the world around us," to quote the dust jacket, because Mr. Douthat's faith admits no ambiguity in reason's revelation. This is a bit at odds with the fact that he admits to assuming certain things to be true: I don't come to different conclusions about the world than Mr. Douthat does because I'm cynically engaged in motivated reasoning... I literally have a different starting point than he does, and that differing vantage point means that my view of the landscape is going to differ from his.

I have a number of notes about the book, but I'm sure that many of them come from my tendency to overanalyze things, so I'll cut to the chase. Mr. Douthat seems to want to avoid falling into Pascal's Wager, but the basic gist of his argument is the same: That what the higher Power wants from people is their belief. There's no indication that belief is a means to an end; that once someone chooses to believe, that then, and only then, can they embark on some project, or come into alignment with the story into which they have been placed. This makes it difficult to square the idea that it's not of primary importance to believe in the correct understanding of that Power.

If, as Mr. Douthat says, "It would be a strange God indeed who cared intensely about how we spend our money or what votes we cast or how we feel about ourselves, but somehow didn't give a damn about behaviors that might forge or shatter a marriage, create a life in good circumstances or terrible ones, form a lifelong bond or addictive habit, bind someone to their own offspring or separate their permanently," isn't is also a strange God who is only moderately interested in which faith, and thus which set of instructions one follows? The idea that the various differences in how different religions dictate that people spend their money, cast their votes and live their sex lives are minor details doesn't seem in keeping with the importance of maintaining a conservative outlook on sexuality.

In the end, it was an interesting read, but the limits of the target audience is worth keeping in mind. Believe isn't for people who are fine where they are; it's for those who find themselves standing outside of a religion, hoping to be invited in. 

Only One

It took me longer that it should have to get the joke. I'm impressed that decals this specific can be found for sale.