The Right Partner

The sister of Trump's ex-press secretary is launching a conservatives-only dating app

Hmm. I guess even with the FBI searching Mar-a-Lago for mishandled documents, Salman Rushdie being stabbed and the Inflation Reduction Act making it through the House of Representatives, it's a slow news week. Although I suppose a little click-bait never goes amiss in the news business.

Not that there isn't the kernel of an interesting news story here. While I don't find the involvement of Ryann McEnany (or the color of her jacket) in an announcement video for yet another niche dating site at all newsworthy, the idea that "The Right Stuff" is leaning into culture war issues could be something worth following up on. Granted, it seems that this is pet project of staff members of the former Trump Administration, and the money comes from Peter Thiel, so it's possible that this is more about politics than business. (After all, there is already a dating site called The Right Stuff - aimed at Ivy League and medical school students, graduates and faculty {because that could never go sideways...}.) But still, people are putting money, time and effort into the idea that single Conservative Americans care about having a site they can visit to perhaps meet people who firmly believe that there should only be two gender identities and that the pronouns used to refer to someone should be obvious. I don't know how many dating sites and/or mobile applications are out there. Forbes estimated some 8,000 back in 2013, 2,500 of those operating in the United States. Granted, a lot can change, and has changed, in 10 years. I'd be surprised to find that the 2,500 market participants in the United States holds true today, but even if the number has dropped to 1,500 as some newer estimates claim, that's still a lot of competition. So there's a fair chance that once the breathless coverage of this tenuously Trump-aligned site dies down, that the site itself dies with it.

But in the meantime, the idea that the conservative echo chamber needs another dating site (I refuse to believe that there aren't several already.) strikes me as something worth following up on. Because that, if anything, is the news story here. Granted, Peter Thiel seems to enjoy bankrolling Conservative causes, but a gay man putting money into an app that's "currently focused on heterosexual relationships" seems like it bears some discussion. Not out of the idea that Mr. Thiel is some sort of hypocrite, but in the sense that this exclusion is somehow important enough to the project to be necessary. After all, homosexual Republicans are nothing new, so it seems strange that they'd be so clearly sidelined in something like this. It speaks to who the American Right finds to be important to their chances, moving forward. It also speaks to the Right's embrace of a technology that it seems they'd have little time for. Are Conservative single people so thin on the ground that the traditional ways that people have met and courted over the years are now simply unworkable? That strikes me as unlikely. Daniel Huff, a staffer in the Department of Housing and Urban Development during the Trump Administration, said that Conservatives are "an important, underserved market." But it's not like people have been ignoring the idea that there's a market there.

And maybe that's why it's the click-baity celebrity-adjacent part of the story that's driving the coverage. The idea that some Conservatives are loudly complaining about how put upon and discriminated against they are is old news. So it doesn't drive coverage any more. But if that's not really worth taking note of, I'm not sure what part of this story is.

Unwilling

Trumpism is not a creation. It is a consequence. It is a consequence of the fact that while a government of the people, by the people and for the people may be accountable to the people, the people, writ large, are not accountable to anyone. If the people perceive that a given member of the political class has made this or that error, that person can be voted out of office at the next election. It may even be possible to recall them from office or force them to resign.

But a large enough group of the public at large is more or less beyond all accountability in a representative government because it's impossible to shelter all of the rules that run the government from them. Or to enforce them in the face of enough opposition. This has been the story of the United States from its inception.

I pretty much tune out people who speak about "political will." It's a tired phrase that people bandy about as a criticism of people who failed (assuming they even attempted) to push the populace at large into something that said populace is completely uninterested in doing. Today, I happened to hear on the radio some or another activist holding forth about how "the United States needs political will." But the reason why the United States has no political will is simple. The United States is, effectively, an inanimate object.

Institutions, even nation-states, are not hive-minds. They have no will of their own. It's their citizens that have will, and who act upon it. Every lack of political will is really simply the lack of effective advocacy. And effective advocacy is difficult.

Donald Trump is a remarkably successful politician because, whatever else one might say about him, he is adept at finding people's anxieties and insecurities and offering those people solutions, even if otherwise ephemeral or unworkable, that align with their views of themselves.

No-one with any realistic view of the world believes that Donald Trump could return manufacturing to the United States. Because the people of the United States are, for the most part, too price-sensitive to buy manufactured goods at a price that would support the wages they're willing to work for, and too committed to affluence to work for wages that would allow for the prices they'd be willing to pay. And the vague hope that people have that someone else would eat the costs is simply never going to come to pass. Donald Trump simply spoke to, and speaks to, those issues better than pretty much anyone else.

Because no-one else has managed to find a way to advocate for their solutions in a way that people feel is advocacy for them. Donald Trump's border wall had little to do with the border itself, or the people coming over it. There are more effective ways to deter people from coming to the United States than attempting to wall off the southern border. But Donald Trump's advocacy for that specific solution felt, to people who'd come to understand that the political system ignored them, like he cared for them more than he cared for the people who sought to enter the country.

And that is where "political will" comes from; the idea that whatever policy is being enacted is being done specifically because it's good for people. People supported Donald Trump's vapid border wall idea because they felt that it was being done out of concern for them. And Mr. Trump's advantage is that he is a skilled enough communicator to convince people that he cares for them without first needing to prove it materially.

Donald Trump understands that he is accountable to his supporters, and that they, in turn, are accountable to no-one, because they are the body that legitimizes accountability. The Democrats may find someone who is capable of accomplishing the same feat. Although it strikes me as unlikely any time soon. Which is kind of too bad. Because if the Democrats, too, had someone who understood how to communicate with the public in a way that allowed masses of people to feel acknowledged and cared for, they could compete better. And the resulting engagement might be a good thing all around.

No False Christian

Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary: Don't worry. A Christian politician cannot be racist. So we should never hesitate to heavily challenge our opponents on these issues. Be sure Christian values protect us from going too far.

David Folkenflik, Media Correspondent, NPR News: It was as though he was dismissing the idea that he could be criticized on such grounds simply because he professed to be, and may well be, a practicing Christian.
Biden's Big Week, Christian Nationalism At CPAC, And A Mayor Who Is A Horse

Sigh. And people on the Left wonder why conservative Christians see them as hostile.

Prime Minister Orbán's comment is quite simple, really. Christian values don't allow for racism. Therefore, a Christian cannot be racist. The Prime Minister is a Christian. Accordingly, he is not racist. And the same goes for any other Christian politician. QED.

I've spoken with any number of Christians over the years who have deployed this sort of reasoning in a debate. It's simple self-righteousness, although it looks a lot like a No True Scotsman argument. While No True Scotsman is considered a logical fallacy, for many Christians, holding to certain virtues is seen as a requirement for being Christ-like. So the problem isn't the No True Scotsman's problem of assigning (or denying) a trait that is unrelated to being a Scotsman (or in this case, a Christian), but rather the assumption of the right to determine for oneself that they (or another person) are a proper Christian, and therefore free of vices that only attach to non-Christians. In other words, rather than defining a set of behaviors, and then using adherence to said behaviors to determine one's practice of their faith, Christians like Prime Minister Orbán declare that those whom they believe appropriately are necessarily adhering to certain behaviors.

This isn't a particularly rare outlook on the world. It's common for (conservative) Christians to believe that they're competent to determine whether another person is or is not being correctly Christian, and therefore what they are, or are not ready, willing and able to do. It's something that comes up often in conversations where the topic of Christian moral or ethical superiority is at issue. And that's why I'm surprised that David Folkenflik seems to be unfamiliar with this particular train of thought. Has he genuinely never had this sort of conversation with someone before? That's unexpected, from such an experienced journalist.

PSA

I was doing some reading the other day and I came across a long-form article on one man's experience with treatment-resistant depression and suicidal ideation. And it started like so many other articles that deal with suicide do: with a statement urging people who may be considering suicide not to act on their feelings, but to contact organizations that would help. Something like this:

Dial 911 in an emergency. Or call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, or use the Lifeline Chat at the Lifeline website. The Lifeline is free, confidential, and available to everyone.

In all honesty, these messages barely register with me anymore. They're like the side-effects part of pharmaceutical advertising; if I haven't checked out by the time I get to that point, I'm certainly no longer paying attention once it starts. I think the only reason why I noticed anything this time out was that it opened the article, rather than being tacked on to the end. Still, I think I would have simply blown it off were it not for the fact that I'd been reading other articles that dealt with potentially self-harmful behavior, and there had been no such message.

So why aren't articles about, say, excessive drinking or violent crime prefaced with the same sorts of public service announcements? If it's understood that it's possible to connect to a person who may be considering killing themselves (or their families/acquaintances) via a message like this, why not other people who may be considering behavior that society would like to prevent? It's not like such messaging doesn't exist. Anti-drug messages are scattered around the landscape like so many fallen leaves in the Autumn. But particular messages about how to receive help with a drug or alcohol problem aren't a ubiquitous feature of articles about people attempting to deal with such problems. Likewise, articles about people seeking to avoid, or end, entanglement in criminal activities don't always come with pointers to resources that may help.

Which lead me to wonder: Are the anti-suicide messages at the beginning or end of articles about depression for a depressed depressed person who may be reading, or for the rest of us? The downside of being unable to understand what happens in other people's minds is that it leaves us without a solid way of judging the effectiveness of such messaging on what I would think is the intended audience. Sure one can ask people who present (or are in) treatment or the like if they've seen such messages and what part they've played in those people's thinking, but for people who've killed themselves, there is no such avenue for understanding. From my limited understanding of depression, it seems that such messaging is unlikely to make a difference. Not to be snide, but were it that easy, there wouldn't be as large of a problem. Part of it, I think, is a general difficulty in relating to people suffering from mental illness, mainly because they don't always see themselves as ill. Plenty of people, however, speak to those suffering from mental illness as if they were instead suffering from a physical malady, and one they should wish to  be rid of. I've been guilty of the same. An uncle succumbed to Schizophrenia and it was intensely difficult for me to speak to him appropriately. Of course, my simply telling him that he wasn't the Messiah wasn't going to suddenly cure him and restore him to the person I remembered. But to listen to me, one would have concluded that I sincerely believed that I might somehow convince him.

Part of me suspects that such messages are legally mandated, but my Google-fu was not up to the task of tracking down any such regulation. And besides, it's not like this would be the only journalistic convention that had attained broad adoption across the industry.

Me being me, I suspect that a lot of what's happening is that I'm simply overthinking things. For all that there may be a general understanding that hopelessness and despair are overly common in American society, reactions to them are often based on a combination of the perceived outcomes and the level of sympathy towards the sufferer (two factors that may themselves be intertwined). While there are religious strictures in some faiths that hold that despair is a sin, and suicide along with it, for many people, a loss of hope leading to self-harm is basically a tragedy, and the story ends there. Despair that leads to injury to others, or to the risk thereof, tends to be brushed aside, in favor of explanations that cast the actor as morally culpable. So a young person who turns to burglary out of a sense that they have no other way to a workable standard of living is cast as lazy and/or greedy, because to see them as despairing seems to foreclose salving feelings of injury by punishing them. Likewise, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary, there is still a widespread understanding that addiction comes from a lack of willpower or other personal moral/ethical failing, rather than being a means of coping with difficulties in life.

My personal conclusion is that suicide is something that people care about. The belief that stories about suicide and suicidal ideation encourage the same (as if people would never think of such things on their own) dies hard, and journalistic outlets understand that they may be blamed if someone kills themselves and it's found that they read an article without an attendant anti-suicide message. And I don't begrudge people their caring, or their choices of what to care about, and what not to. I do wonder, however, if a greater show of caring for other matters may be effective in blunting their impacts on society.

Over the Sea

Ticonderoga-class guided-missile cruiser USS Lake Champlain kicking it in Seattle.

The annual event known as Seafair is happening this weekend, and that means that the Navy has come to town. Which I find to be cool. I have always had a child's enthusiasm for military hardware, and this is the first time that I've ever seen a warship up close. So, unsurprisingly, I hauled out my camera and snapped away.