The Wrecker

I was reading an article on Politico about political pundits' speculation on Donald Trump, and a couple of things stood out for me.

Paul Begala notes:

When it comes to Mr. Trump, I know this: he reflects the views of today’s Republican Party. Here’s proof: 64 percent of Republicans agree with the broader statement that, “President Obama is hiding important information about his background and early life.” And 34 percent of Republicans go full-on birther: saying of Republicans think it’s likely that president Obama is not a US citizen; that he was not born in America (Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. poll, Dec., 2014). This, of course, is an issue Mr. Trump has highlighted.

68 percent of Republicans say Mr. Trump is right on immigration. (Fox News poll, July 17, 2015). This was after he said those rather, umm, controversial things about Mexican immigrants. 22 percent of Republicans even agree with his hateful attack on John McCain—saying McCain was not a war hero (PPP Poll 7/22/15).

And Mary Matalin says this:

[Common Sense] America is, and has been for some time been, so over the incompetent, posturing national politicians as well as their irrelevant agenda issues and their counterproductive policies. They are aching for candidates with authenticity who will address their everyday concerns. AND do not presume a preference for their common sense world makes them redneck philistines.

Taken together, the message is clear - that Trump speaks to a significant portion of the traditional Republican base - those that Mr. Begala describes as "angry, white and male" and Ms. Matalin refers to as Common Sense America. And, assuming that these two are correct, that could present a problem for the GOP.

The biggest danger for the modern Republican party from its reputation of being the party of White male grievance (grievance that a lot of people feel is undeserved) comes from the chance that it energizes the people who fear that they would be the targets of that selfsame angry, white and male demographic. The wave that President Obama rode into the White House turned out for him to check what they felt was a Republican agenda that lead the nation into ruin. Despite calls for a more positive and optimistic political discourse, the fact of the matter remains that the best way to get people to the polls is to play on their fears of, and aversion to, losing what they already have. A Republican agenda that appears to have the rollback of gains by (liberal) women and minorities as its goal will drive those voters to the polls in droves to protect themselves. And while conservative Whites may be angry about their relative loss of status, people tend to be less motivated by potential gain (or, in this care, re-gain) than they are by potential loss. Therefore, the more the GOP seems to focus on punishing non-Republican voters by taking things from them, the more they're likely to prompt a new wave of Democratic votes as those people rush to defend themselves. (I also think that this will manifest itself in fewer votes for left-of-center third-party candidates, especially longshots such as, for example, Jill Stein. To vote for someone who is widely considered to have no realistic hope of winning, one has to either be a True Believer or uninvested/confident in the final outcome, and the latter are likely to be scarcer than normal as fears of Republican base grow.) And in this way, Donald Trump does potentially serious damage to the "Republican Brand," which has already been taking it on the chin. Democrats are already preaching their choir that Mr. Trump accurately represents the GOP, and as his inflammatory rhetoric continues to elevate him in the polls, more and more people are likely coming to that conclusion on their own.

In the end, it's likely a new win situation for the Republican Party. As they become more and more centered around a demographic that's losing ground to faster-growing groups, they'll enter a state, if they haven't already where they can't win with them, but can't win without them. The Republican Party will founder at a national level, as the state and local enclaves that it controls grow smaller and smaller. Aggressive gerrymandering may allow the GOP to hold on to the legislature past the point where their a minority party in a given state, but that won't save them forever, and they'll wind up banished to the political wilderness while they attempt to forge a new core demographic out of the very people their candidates (embraced or not) railed against.

Shuffled

Once upon a time, I was in a business meeting. While there were enough chairs to go around, space at the actual table was limited – most of the chairs were lined up along two walls of the room. It was a long meeting, and as time passed, people would leave the meeting, and other people would enter. After a few rounds of people coming and going (including myself), an interesting situation presented itself - all of the seats around the table were taken by white men. All of the women and minorities in the room were seated in the overflow chairs around the edge of the room.

Watching the process unfold, it made sense - when someone seated at the table excused themselves, someone from one of the other chairs would move into that seat, and whenever someone entered the room, they first thing they would do would be to scan the table for an available seat. So eventually, you hit a particular point in time when the shuffle resulted in all the seats at the table being filled with White men. And it didn't last for the remainder of the meeting. But a look around the room for in that moment seemed to speak to everything that people say is wrong with the technology industry.

But what I realized was that almost all of the people who were seated at table had been in the room when I had first arrived, and didn't appear to have ever left. And there are times when I think that informs a large part of the way industries shuffle themselves. While I'm in technology now, I'm a relative latecomer to it as a career - I started out in social services. And, as a result, I find myself working with people ten years my junior, who, nevertheless have more experience in my career path than I do - simply by virtue of having started out there.

When I talk to people I worked with back then, they're quick to tell me that we were all woefully underpaid. But had you asked me at the time, I would have told you that I was making a phenomenal amount of money - after all, I'd doubled my take-home pay in a job that, that I had no education and little experience for, and was less physically and emotionally demanding than what I'd been doing.

The easy lesson, perhaps, from that conference room is to alter the seating arrangements - set aside a certain number of seats for certain people. But I think that a better lesson might be to add more or larger tables, so that there are enough seats to go around. I was fortunate in that I stumbled into the technology sector during a time of rapid expansion - when employers couldn't afford to be terribly picky about who they hired. When I describe it to people I tell them that the standard wasn't whether or not you knew the work, it was whether or not you could be educated to do it in a reasonable time. And that situation created thousands of opportunities for people - including latecomers and people who needed to step away for a while - which prevented the shuffle from homogenizing things based on experience.

Of course, it's easier to add tables to a conference room than it is to add businesses to an economy. But we've done harder things...

Opinionated

About a dozen links to a column on opinions landed in my social media feed today. So I read it. and the following line caught my attention:

There’s nothing wrong with an opinion on those things. The problem comes from people whose opinions are actually misconceptions. If you think vaccines cause autism you are expressing something factually wrong, not an opinion.

There's a problem with that. That's not the definition of opinion.

Opinion
noun opin·ion \ə-ˈpin-yən\

1  a:  a view, judgment, or appraisal formed in the mind about a particular matter
    b:  approval, esteem
2  a:  belief stronger than impression and less strong than positive knowledge
    b:  a generally held view
3  a:  a formal expression of judgment or advice by an expert
    b:  the formal expression (as by a judge, court, or referee) of the legal reasons and principles upon which a legal decision is based

The author goes on to say: "Nor does the fact that many other share this opinion give it any more validity."

Under this logic, the fact that many people draw a bright-line distinction between facts (correct or incorrect) and opinions does not mean that they have an accurate understanding of any difference, given the dictionary definition of the word "opinion." There is nothing in the dictionary definition of opinion that prevents a misconception - or a correct conception, for that matter - from being a person's opinion. Okay. So allow me to let Mr. Rouner (who, incidentally, gives no reason why he should be regarded as an authority on what constitutes a valid opinion) off the hook for the dictionary definition of the word opinion, and concern ourselves with the connotation of the word.

For many of us, opinions are different from facts. "That cell phone is black," is a fact, while "Black is the best color for cell phones" is an opinion. This jives with Mr. Rouner's statement that opinions are those things that cannot be verified outside of the fact that the holder of the opinion believes them. And that's fine. But it's not the only valid connotation of an opinion. In a culture that seems to have raised arguing (or bickering, if you prefer) into an art form, sometimes you don't want to have the mount a thesis defense of everything you say. And that has given rise to a use of the word "opinion" to mean: "something that I believe to be true, yet I am unwilling, unable and/or unready to mount an in-depth defense of at this time." Or, and this comports with the definition given by Merriam-Webster: "something that I believe, but do not know with certainty."

One of the points that Mr. Rouner makes in his column is that opinions have no bearing on the reality of a situation. Whether someone is of the opinion that the Holocaust is a historical fraud or that the ancient Egyptians were displaced sub-Saharan Africans, these understandings of history don't actually alter history. In fact, they don't alter much of anything. So why bother caring? I noted the opinions called out in the column as things that are actually simply incorrect:

• "Vaccines cause autism"
• "Slavery was not the driving cause of the Civil War"
• "The Holocaust was fake"
• "Whites face as much discrimination as people of color"
• "Planned Parenthood is chopping up dead babies and selling them"

It seems to me that the whole point behind this column is to allow people on the Left to feel comfortable attacking wrongthink under the guise of separating out opinions, which are not subject to tests of proof, from facts, which are. Okay. But what useful purpose is served by attacking wrongthink? What is served by browbeating people into either claiming to believe what you believe or admitting that they're foolish or uninformed, other than ego inflation for those doing the browbeating? For a person to whom the Flag of the Arny of Northern Virginia is a symbol of their Southern heritage no amount of telling them "no, that's not an opinion - it's a misconception" is going to convince them that their grandfather or great-grandfather was essentially a proto-Nazi. And being unable to argue that point directly, "it's just an opinion" becomes an attempt to disengage from the debate.

As obnoxious as it may seem to allow people to persist in wrong thoughts, perhaps it's also the wisest course of action.

Time for a New Anthem?

The last lines of the first verse of "Defence of Fort McHenry," now known as "The Star-Spangled Banner" are fairly well-known.

O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave,
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

Referring to the United States as "the land of the free and the home of the brave" likely became popular about 30 minutes after the song itself did, if not before. Which is fine - people like to find virtues to attach to themselves. But it's important that we stop short of believing our own hype, because it often blinds us to instances where our reality and our rhetoric don't match up. In a way, describing the whole of the United States as "the land of the free and the home of the brave" has always been bogus. "Defence of Fort McHenry" was written in 1814 - the end of legalized slavery was still some 50 years in the future and it's difficult to see any particular bravery in laws like the Sedition Act of 1798.

Freedom and bravery are not, regardless of how we may have become accustomed to viewing them, unambiguously Good Things. You can do a complete SWOT analysis of them, and identify inherent Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. But, understandably, we tend not to, usually limiting ourselves to extolling our own perceived Strengths and the Opportunities we understand that they bring us. But whether or not we understand the Weaknesses and Threats in our society, they are there, and given long enough, they will assert themselves.

Retired General Wesley Clark, one-time candidate for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States and Franklin Graham, son of the famous (or notorious, depending on one's opinion) Evangelical preacher Billy Graham have become strange bedfellows in illustrating this. Note President George W. Bush's remarks about the War on Terror that began after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in September of 2001.

We're taking action against evil people. Because this great nation of many religions understands, our war is not against Islam, or against faith practiced by the Muslim people. Our war is a war against evil. This is clearly a case of good versus evil, and make no mistake about it -- good will prevail.
President George W. Bush. Ontario Convention Center, Ontario, California. January 5, 2002

And President Obama has followed up on this theme, telling the United Nations that "At the same time, we have reaffirmed that the United States is not and never will be at war with Islam." Clark and Graham, however, have concluded that we ARE at war with Islam, and, therefore need to return to the sorts of practices that were employed against citizens of the Axis nations - and American citizens whose families hailed from same - during the Second World War - only this time, we need to treat members of a religion as potential enemy agents.

We have got to identify the people who are most likely to be radicalized. We've got to cut this off at the beginning. There are always a certain number of young people who are alienated. They don't get a job, they lost a girlfriend, their family doesn't feel happy here and we can watch the signs of that. And there are members of the community who can reach out to those people and bring them back in and encourage them to look at their blessings here.

But I do think on a national policy level we need to look at what self-radicalization means because we are at war with this group of terrorists. They do have an ideology. In World War II if someone supported Nazi Germany at the expense of the United States, we didn't say that was freedom of speech, we put him in a camp, they were prisoners of war.

So, if these people are radicalized and they don't support the United States and they are disloyal to the United States as a matter of principle, fine. It's their right. And it's our right and obligation to segregate them from the normal community for the duration of the conflict. And I think we're going to have to increasingly get tough on this, not only in the United States but our allied nations like Britain, Germany and France are going to have to look at their domestic law procedures.
General Wesley Clark, interviewed by Thomas Roberts on MSNBC Live

Graham goes somewhat further than Clark, effectively saying that we shouldn't wait for signs of radicalization.

We are under attack by Muslims at home and abroad. We should stop all immigration of Muslims to the U.S. until this threat with Islam has been settled. Every Muslim that comes into this country has the potential to be radicalized--and they do their killing to honor their religion and Muhammad. During World War 2, we didn't allow Japanese to immigrate to America, nor did we allow Germans. Why are we allowing Muslims now?

Not exactly what comes to mind when I think of a commitment to courage and freedom. And of course, Moslems are not the only threat that people are sounding alarms about - Donald Trump is making waves with his implications (to put it mildly) that the government of Mexico is slyly undermining the United States by exporting its undesirables (along with a few good people) north of the border.

On the one hand, I get it - the Constitution is not a suicide pact. Or, as Thomas Jefferson put it: "[S]trict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means."

On the other hand, necessity, self-preservation and saving our country when in danger are all very subjective considerations (especially when they aren't contained in the written law), and history has shown us that we haven't been as good at understanding what actually constitutes and existential threat as we may have thought that we did - after all, Jefferson made his statement in defense of purchasing the Louisiana Territory from France - which hardly seems like the desperate act of a threatened nation. Likewise, Clark's, Graham's and Trump's visions of necessity, self-preservation and saving our country look suspiciously like things that confirm the fears of conservative, older, White Christians who feel that the changing demographics of the world risk doing unto them what their parents, grandparents and earlier generations did unto others. Which is understandable. Payback is a bitch, and I don't blame people for wanting to avoid it being visited upon them, especially when the actual perpetrators of the crimes for which payback is being sought are long dead.

But there is a difference between a perceived threat to one's own interests, and an actual threat to the enduring safety of a nation. It's helpful to keep that in mind. We can't be "the land of the free and the home of the brave" if we allow people to be locked up every time something convinces a segment of the mainstream that they have something to be afraid of.

Won't Someone Please Think of the Foolish?

I stumbled into another conversation about how mass shootings are, at least in part, a result of "the Media" giving shooters wall-to-wall coverage, and making them "famous." As is always the way with such discussions, the solution that was floated was that somehow "the Media" should limit their coverage to sympathetic portrayals of the dead and injured, and this would remove the incentive for people to shoot people.

While I understand the argument, the idea of a broadly-based embargo on information about murderers seems unrealistic. But it also seems based on wonky data (well, anecdotes, to be precise). As I do every time I'm in a discussion like this face-to-face, I asked if anyone there could name one of these mass shooters - this time, I chose the gunman from Aurora, Colorado, considering the fact that he's just been convicted. No-one could. That doesn't seem very famous to me. Now, I don't contest that there are people out there who are VERY interested in the guy. I'd be unsurprised to find that he's already on a trading card or something. But I find it strange that people who feel that the 24-hour news cycle makes random crooks into celebrities can never seem to name the people themselves. Now, one of the people I was speaking to immediately sought to draw a distinction, claiming that he wasn't a good example. And so I asked him who was.

What I usually wind up taking away from the "15 minutes of fame" argument is the idea that there are a bunch of people who will blindly attach celebrity to anyone "the Media" places in front of them - just never the people making the argument. And so it seems like, to borrow a phrase, "the smart man's burden." Smart people have to alter social policy to protect dumb people - who tend to be people that the smart person has never actually met - from themselves by shielding them from information that they aren't smart enough to handle appropriately, because their poor reactions trigger would-be fame seekers to do bad things.

Yes, various facets of the news and opinion media can blanket the airwaves with someone's name and crime, and more detail about that person than any one human being would ever want to know. But that's different than being famous. And I think that to the degree that a lot of would-be shooters don't realize that, mental illness and/or self-fulfilling prophecies have to factor into the picture. Once someone has been out of the news cycle for 24 hours, the Earth may as well have swallowed them whole. It doesn't take a particularly astute observer to understand that only a small handful of people become household names for anything for very long. Anyone looking for enduring fame as a result of shooting up a place is bound to be disappointed - despite what people might have to say about it. Although there is a part of me that suspects that the constant hand-wringing over how people are being made famous for killing people is part of what gives people the impression that they'll achieve lasting fame by killing people.