In response to the review of The Young Tiger, a reader writes:
I think you should watch the movie Cherry 2000 and review it for our reading pleasure.
I’ve actually seen the first 15 or 20 minutes of that, maybe two months ago. Couldn’t hack it. Terrible stuff.
But I must admit to a growing irritation with imputations of requirements to the wrong entity. For instance, this White House press release on the recent meeting between President Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Abe:
They also reaffirmed that North Korea needs to abandon all weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs.
I realize it’s possible to suggest there’s an unwritten addition to the sentence, in order to gain our approval and buy-in to the agreement. But I remain irritated, as such assumptions are at least open, if not prone, to error. I’d much rather see a direct declarative:
The President and the Prime Minister require North Korea abandon all weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs before we can be signatories to any agreement concerning the Korean Peninsula.
It properly denotes who’s driving this requirement and, stylistically, is simply superior.
But maybe I’m just crabby.
It’s been my observation over the years that the Kung-Fu genre of movies has at least three sub-genres. First, there are the old faux-historical stories, dating anywhere from some unstated ancient time to the end of the last Chinese emperor’s reign, or perhaps a few years into the warlords’ era. Second, there are those movies that are “contemporary,” by which I mean they are set in the same period as they were made, and treat the issues of the day in Taiwan or perhaps Hong Kong (this is before Hong Kong was absorbed by China at the end of the British treaty). And, finally, there is the modern era of movies, which take advantage of modern cinema technology to introduce new generations to the stories, and have taken advantage of this opportunity to, mostly, rework the stories into something more appealing than those stories populating the first two genres. While all genres can have a certain sense of magical realism, it’s stronger in this third sub-genre, as evidenced by, say, Kung Fu Hustle (2004).
The Young Tiger (1973) falls firmly into the second category. Set in 1970s Taipei, I think, Chien Chien, a promising kung-fu student, accepts a challenge from a stranger on the behalf of his teacher, and bests the young man. The next time he sees the challenger, he is being beaten up by a gang, and before Chien can save him, the stranger dies. Chien is knocked unconscious, and the gang frames him for the murder.
The balance of the movie involves his avoidance of the police while weathering the disapproval of his mother, with some romancing of the girlfriend. In his spare moments, he works on tracking down the gang, and each time the gang assaults him, he picks off a few more. The scene in which the gang, in two cars, tries to run him down as he wheels along in his scooter/ice cream cart is particularly memorable, both for its odd tableau and for how painfully long they stretched it out.
Eventually, the big boss (we know he’s the boss because he keeps shouting at his diminishing minion force You fools!) decides to direct the assault himself, but Chien, who appears to be a close relation to the Energizer Bunny, proves to be too much for the mob boss, and boots him into the pool of shame just as the police show up.
It suffers from many of the shortcomings typical of movies of the second category: awful dialogue, dubious stories, bad cinematography. I’m less certain if the mannerisms of these movies – the short-tempers, forced laughs, and a few others – are part of Chinese stagecraft, a product of Chinese culture, or just bad bad acting.
In any case, I found it difficult to keep my attention on this one. Don’t waste your time on it.
Long-time readers know that I occasionally have speculated that the GOP will slowly shrink, not only as a matter of demographics (it’s base being composed mostly of older white males), but due to the mechanics of “purity.” Those who are insufficiently loyal to the current set of principles, or in more primitive circumstances The Leader, are eventually tossed out of the Party. Then the cycle repeats, because that’s how you ensure power – when you’re a paranoid power-monger. Hell, it happened to a friend of mine twenty or thirty years ago, tossed out of the Minnesota Independent-Republicans for being insufficiently conservative.
What I did not foresee, even though it was bloody obvious, is that this would also happen with the associated organizations. RedState is a long-time, almost legendary conservative collective blog founded long edited by Erick Erickson, who is now with The Resurgent. Today, CNN is reporting a drastic cut in its staff by current owner Salem Media. Who took it in the neck?
Multiple sources told CNNMoney that they believed conservative critics of President Trump were the writers targeted for removal.
“Insufficiently partisan” was the phrase one writer used in a RedState group chat.
“They fired everybody who was insufficiently supportive of Trump,” one of the sources who spoke with CNNMoney said, adding, “how do you define being ‘sufficiently supportive’ of Trump?”
But if it was about politics, it was also about money.
I include the last paragraph to be thorough, although money may not have been a reason so much as an excuse. I expect there will excuses given about removing the deadweight, budgets, and that sort of thing. For me, a couple of thoughts come to mind.
First, if they do use those excuses, they may be sincere, but they’re also signs of failure and doom for RedState, because it’s a signal of the application of a business model to a profoundly non-business entity. Politics is not a business, it’s about winning the right to govern, and then governing effectively. I’ve been through this before and shan’t bore my readers by repeating myself; new readers should find at least some enlightenment here, where I discuss the problems of moving societal sectors’ processes to foreign sectors, and why this generally doesn’t work. This may be the beginning of the end for RedState, if it doesn’t gain a leader (an editor or whatever they call it) who understands what it means to publish, rather than run a business.
Second, this is a signal of how the intellectual political environment of the GOP is slowly sterilizing itself. Intellectual subjects nearly always grow through conflict. In science, for instance, it’s competing hypotheses concerning reality that are measured for congruence with that reality. The reason that sounds nice and easy and clean is because science, ideally, takes an objective approach to these things.
Politics, governance, and that whole lot are not nearly that clean.
But to get on with my argument, a political environment without conflict is a limping movement, a beast that is fighting off a deadly poison[1]. Those who fight the tide are, sometimes, those who are in the business of saving the organization from a major mistake. That is what the Never-Trumpers have been doing, for example. When the people who present reasoned arguments against the current momentum are removed from the arena, it becomes poorer because the other side then doesn’t have to work as hard to justify their side. Their arguments become weak, they are distracted by deadly self-interest, and soon they find themselves to be in a cesspool from which they daren’t leave, because, well, all the usual reasons – wealth, near-wealth, fear of poverty, and their friends – who they really don’t like – are part of the group.
The politics of purity simply means the group becomes smaller, the umbrella less effective. Ask every religious cult that has been afflicted with terms such as blasphemer, and then ask those who did the afflicting. Those who survive the perpetrators or the victims will agree that it was a terrible error which drove them apart – and made them weaker.
The United States has been strong precisely because it’s impure, even though its citizens sometimes hate that. The GOP is, in essence, engaging in anti-American activities, in spirit only, everytime they engage in purifying the movement.
1Oddly enough, in software they say if you’re not fixing bugs in your product, it’s a dead product. Perhaps that’s irrelevant.
Steve Benen notes that Defense Secretary Mattis likes the Iran nuclear deal, also known as the JCPOA, and Israeli defense chief says the JCPOA is working. Then Steve recounts Trump’s reaction when he was told that the Iran nuclear deal is working:
As president, Trump went into “meltdown” mode when his own team has told him that the policy is actually working as intended, because the facts were simply inconceivable to him. He knows the policy is a disaster, so when reality pointed in a different direction, Trump found it necessary to reject reality.
I’m not sure Steve has Trump’s psychology down pat. I think that Trump’s greatest success was as a reality TV star. In such a setting, the most important thing to accomplish in order to be successful is to satisfy the audience’s expectations. Firing XYZ would accord with the audience’s expectations? Fine, “the Donald” fires him. The show was a hit and undoubtedly fed into his ego. This is important because anything that inflates the ego also acts as a training process. That is, if if it makes you feel good, then you repeat it and learn how to make it bigger and better. You become addicted to it. Holds true for mice in labs, holds true for humans. Especially tremendously insecure humans like Trump.
Now he’s in a new reality TV role, and the audience, trained by a conservative media that puts politics over national security, expects him to say that the Iran nuclear deal is bad, won’t work, and needs to be dismantled.
It’s not that he “knows the policy is a disaster,” as Steve says, it’s that his audience, the GOP base, wants it to be wrong. It’s another Obama project, and because the GOP base, nevermind its conservative media handlers, can no longer be mature enough to admit that the political opposition can occasionally be right on anything, it must be a disaster. They were inflamed by the Republican leadership when the infamous letter from the Senate was written, they’ve been trained into thinking the deal is a bad thing, and Trump has simply ridden that wave.
But now the reality TV star is running into, ummm, reality. The Israelis are starting to admit that the JCPOA works. His own Defense Secretary says it’s well structured. Any ordinary politician might have the balls to admit that they were wrong and that it is successful. But Trump has sold himself as the politician who’s never wrong. Worse yet, his instincts are telling him that his survival depends on his keeping his audience satisfied. It’s a narrative that speaks to their need to believe they’re still on top of the world, that those damn experts and those allied with them with their damn patronizing liberal attitudes are wrong, and the man without a plan has it all right.
Trump cannot jeopardize that. Not even because he’ll lose his base – but because he fears he’ll lose all that positive reinforcement.
And so we’ll see the self-destructive behaviors of the addict.
A friend in chat, talking about a peregrine falcon sitting on a fence in his yard:
I’m sure it kept an eye on me while drinking some coffee.
And do falcons take cream in their coffee?
Out in the local fast food joint’s parking lot:
Amir Ali on Take Care is taking care to remind Chief Justice Roberts of how one bad decision can define a court:
In the short, five-year period that Harlan Fiske Stone presided as Chief Justice, the Supreme Court contributed several decisions that continue to shape the judiciary and American life. For instance, Stone himself authored International Shoe Co. v. Washington, a seminal decision known to every first-year law student and which judges still apply every day to determine which people or corporations they have jurisdiction over. Yet, today, no one could feel secure discussing the Stone Court without acknowledging its deepest mistake, Korematsu v. United States, in which it acquiesced to President Roosevelt’s internment of tens of thousands of Japanese Americans.
And thus, concerning the travel ban argued yesterday at the Court:
We also know this is a similar evil because the President told us so. When Trump was asked how he could justify banning Muslims from the U.S., he repeatedly and openly cited the internment of Japanese Americans with approval. “What I’m doing is no different than F.D.R.’s solution for Germans, Italians, Japanese, many years ago,” he said.
All of this should make clear that it’s not President Trump’s legacy at stake. Regardless of what the Supreme Court says, everyone knows what President Trump stands for—if he has been one thing, it’s transparent.
It’s the legacy of the Robert’s Court on the line. The Stone, Fuller, and Taney Courts all should have known they were in the wrong at the time they decided their respective failures. But the Roberts Court has perhaps the clearest warning of any—the President’s own invocation of decisions that are already viewed as the Supreme Court’s darkest.
If the Roberts Court acquiesces, history will remember it—perhaps over all else.
Amir may be stretching a point, but nevertheless I think his focus on Chief Justice Roberts’ concern for legacy may turn out to be the key if the Court rules against the travel ban.
After another frenetic day, perhaps this will be calming.
Gastral drumming:
We have known since the 1960s that several species of wasp perform “gastral drumming” from time to time – banging their abdomens against their nest walls in a series of short bursts.
The scientists who first reported this behaviour thought it may be a signal that the wasps were hungry. Meanwhile, other researchers suggested the wasps might be telling nestmates about food sources. Such “recruitment” behaviour is common in social animals, from house sparrows to naked mole rats. [“Wasps drum with their stomachs to tell each other about food,” Richard Kemeny, NewScientist (14 April 2018)]
As Jonathan Chait in New York reports:
While many reporters have described President Trump’s aggrieved psychology, his phone call this morning on Fox & Friends gave outsiders unfiltered access to the sorts of rants he routinely imposes upon his staff. In the interview, Trump’s sense of persecution was so acute he was barely able to concentrate on an open invitation to tout his own success, the thing he does best. Asked to grade his presidency to date, Trump began by denouncing the “phony cloud” placed over his head by the deep state, briefly regained his balance to give himself an A+, and then returned to the calumnies inflicted upon him by his enemies in the media and the justice system. “A horrible group of deep-seated people,” he insisted, “are coming up with all sorts of phony charges against me and they’re not bringing up real charges against the other side.” Trump’s belief that his enemies, not he himself, should be the subject of legal investigation overwhelmed even his ability to boast about his great success.
Sorry, dumb Leader, those of your opponents who needed investigation have been investigated and either cleared or dealt with, except for McCabe, who’s still in process. Now it’s your turn, and you keep giving off clues like other people give off halitosis.
I really wish I could write with conviction that this is the beginning of the end of the amateur movement, but I think there’ll be too many excuses made, too many conspiracy theories constructed, for Trump supporters to come face to face with their own failing – their failure to properly vet Trump, and accept that he is not suited for the Presidency. From literally hundreds of lies (“crime has never been so high!”), to empty boasting (saving jobs), invocations of xenophobia (Mexican rapists), his willingness to say anything that would make the current audience happy (“clean coal”), to promises that he could not keep, or if he could keep them would ruin the Nation (ludicrous military boosts in spending), it was clear, starting in the primaries, that he was completely unsuitable and, worse, unwilling to do the work necessary to become suitable.
But I fear the Trump supporters will mostly go to their graves convinced that the President was railroaded, because that’s how this will be presented to them and, because it fits with their preconceptions, they’ll not further investigate, as they should.
He’ll probably turn into some damn martyr, and we’ll run into “believers” from time to time.
And, in the meantime, another test faces the American loyalists in the Federal government, denying Trump what he childishly wants – direct control of the Department of Justice. I wish everyone from Sessions on down the good judgment to tell the asshole No.
And maybe Ryan will get off his fat government ass and start impeachment. While I sympathize with Comey’s view that the voters should just boost Trump, and by implication all of his adherents, out of government, I worry that it’ll take too long.
A few nights ago – maybe last week – Colbert on The Late Show said something along the lines of “Trump choking Sessions in a hot air balloon wearing a bridal dress,” and all I could think was … well, courtesy of my Arts Editor:
It seems weirdly apropos.
For those who worry about SCOTUS becoming more and more conservative as Neil Gorsuch, IJ, joins the court, the news from Empirical SCOTUS is not what you may expect to hear:
Gorsuch joined the Court at a unique time. While there is much discussion about how this Court could be the moving towards the right, especially if Justice Kennedy (or any of the more liberal justices) retires with a Republican President at the helm, other statistics show the Court at the present is actually more ideologically liberal than it has been in years. According to the Martin-Quinn (MQ) Scores, the ideological metric commonly used to measure the relative positions of Supreme Court justices, at the end of last term the Court was the only one in recent memory with five primarily liberal justices and four predominately conservative justices (scores greater than zero denote conservatives while less than zero denote liberals). The justices scores at the end of the 2016 term, Gorsuch’s first partial term on the Court, look as follows:
Source: Empirical SCOTUS
It’s interesting that Kennedy is inclining towards the liberal side of the spectrum, although of course the entire political spectrum analogy sometimes is a poor measurement of any single person, and in his case a poor predictor of future performance.
But for pure surprise, my money is on Roberts. He’s the guy with the biggest sense of legacy, and thus most likely to ignore expectations.
Dioecious:
FOUR palm trees have been spotted changing from male to female for the first time.
While many plants have male and female sex organs, palm trees were thought to be either male or female, or “dioecious”. [“Palm trees have been spotted changing sex for the first time,” NewScientist (14 April 2018)]
I was reading about the latest jaw-dropping admission of corruption from a government official, as detailed here in The New York Times:
Mick Mulvaney, the interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told banking industry executives on Tuesday that they should press lawmakers hard to pursue their agenda, and revealed that, as a congressman, he would meet only with lobbyists if they had contributed to his campaign.
“We had a hierarchy in my office in Congress,” Mr. Mulvaney, a former Republican lawmaker from South Carolina, told 1,300 bankers and lending industry officials at an American Bankers Association conference in Washington. “If you’re a lobbyist who never gave us money, I didn’t talk to you. If you’re a lobbyist who gave us money, I might talk to you.”
At the top of the hierarchy, he added, were his constituents. “If you came from back home and sat in my lobby, I talked to you without exception, regardless of the financial contributions,” said Mr. Mulvaney, who received nearly $63,000 from payday lenders for his congressional campaigns.
It’s not even clear he gets it.
I shan’t guess his name, as he – or she – might have a lawyer.
And it finally came to me. “Draining” was used merely in a newspeak sense. It’s been redefined as “getting as much as I can.” So the draining the swamp rhetoric which Trump used over and over and over to presumably attract moral, fiscally conservative voters was actually a siren song to all the, well, alligators are actually not what comes to mind. Think lamprey. Yep, that thing off to the right. Yep, every time Trump cried Drain the swamp! he was actually calling all those lamprey-like creatures to come to him, where he could give suckle.
Ugh, this analogy got downright ugly in a hurry. The sad part is that it’s not even in jest. If you think Mulvaney is an exception, you need to read up on EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt, who appears to be even worse than Mulvaney.
Returning to this dormant thread, the concern was that the latest in a series of technological revolutions might not follow the general pattern, which is that each eats up a certain category of jobs, by automating them, but more are created than are lost, making for a net gain – and a lucrative one at that. Well, the early returns are in, as NewScientist (14 April 2018) reports:
People’s fears have been stoked by headlines warning of the robot takeover. A 2013 study by the University of Oxford, for example, suggested robots are set to replace as much as 47 per cent of the US workforce and 35 per cent of the UK’s.
But far from this apocalyptic scenario, automation resulted in an overall increase in jobs of between 1.5 and 1.8 per cent in Germany between 2011 and 2016. While robots claimed 5 per cent of jobs, more new ones were created. What’s more, most of these tended to pay better than those that had been lost.
Like I said, early returns. As AI continues to improve, as sager heads predict, perhaps the trend will fade and we will soon be praising our robot overlords.
But, so far, not so much.
The AZ-8 special election was last night, and naive Republicans are indulging in a sigh of relief as the Republican, Debbie Lesko, defeated Democrat Hiral Tipirneni by about 5 points.
The smart ones are appalled, even panicky. As Steve Benen notes,
Arizona’s 8th congressional district is a heavily Republican area. Donald Trump won here by 21 points in his presidential race, and GOP voters enjoy a 17-point registration advantage. In yesterday’s special election. Republicans ran an experienced state lawmaker, while Democrats ran a first-time candidate. Common sense suggested the race wouldn’t be close.
No doubt the Democrats were energized and the Republicans … lethargic? Or repulsed by their own party? Hard to say.
Meanwhile, The Texas Tribune reports the Republican Governor of Texas is scheduling a special election to replace Brent Farenthold (R), who resigned from his TX-27 amidst sexual harassment and financial scandals:
Gov. Greg Abbott got the go-ahead Monday from Attorney General Ken Paxton to suspend state law so the governor can call a special election to replace former U.S. Rep. Blake Farenthold, R-Corpus Christi, as soon as possible.
Responding to a request from Abbott submitted Thursday, Paxton issued a nonbinding opinion saying a court would agree Abbott could set aside the election rules under a part of Texas law that lets the governor suspend certain statutes if they interfere with disaster recovery. Abbott said last week he wanted Farenthold’s former constituents to have new representation “as quickly as possible” because the Coastal Bend-area’s Congressional District 27 is still reeling from Hurricane Harvey.
As noted in an earlier post, Farenthold was the Texas representative who benefited the most from the most recent redistricting in Texas, and in fact the same Tribune article notes that SCOTUS will be hearing an appeal from the State against a lower court ruling that the redistricting amounted to illegal gerrymandering.
In any case, this election, if it does occur, is another opportunity for the Democrats to frighten the Republicans. While an excellent showing by the Democratic nominee in a TX-27 contest would be inspirational for Democratic challengers nationwide, it would also serve as a warning to the Republicans. In normal circumstances, a warning could be used to correct problems. However, these are not normal days, what with the Republicans are weighed down by the President’s exceptionally poor record, as well as the party’s many failures in Congress, and the party’s transition from a center-right governing party to a fringe-right party of extremists who just happen to have the world’s finest political marketing machine.
Quite honestly, that seems to be about all they have going for them now, and it’s nothing to scoff at. See my review of The Persuaders.
Jessica Hamzelou explains in NewScientist (14 April 2018) that scientists have discovered experiences change gene expression – in your brain:
The brain seems to store memories in new connections between neurons. To do this, the neurons need to make new proteins – a process that is thought to be controlled by hundreds of genes.
While investigating how this works, Ami Citri at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and his colleagues discovered that particular experiences – be it an electric shock or a hit of cocaine – elicit different changes in gene activity in the brains of mice.
These mice were given a variety of positive or negative experiences, such as electric shocks to their feet, a sugar treat, a dose of a chemical that makes them feel ill or cocaine. An hour later, they were euthanised and the team looked at which genes were being expressed in seven areas of the brain that are involved in memory, including the hippocampus and amygdala.
Citri was surprised to find that all of the mice given cocaine, for example, showed the same general pattern of gene activity. The patterns were so clear that the team could guess what experience a mouse had been through with over 90 per cent accuracy just by analysing the levels of activity of different genes in their brains (eLife, doi.org/cm6w).
The whole euthanization thing is a bit of a spoiler, of course, for would-be scientific mind-readers. It’s a fascinating first glimpse into the mechanics of storing memories. The next – BIG – step is to predict how a specific experience will modify the brain, right? At the moment, it’s a matter of noting correlations a posteriori. If you can predict, without that specific correlation being available, how some arbitrary experience will affect the brains of a normal person, then you’re really cooking.
That should take, oh, several centuries to accomplish.
And then that atypical persons brain should also be fascinating. Oooops, subject’s dead. Damn, we should have developed the tricorder, first…
Here’s the Chandra X-Ray telescope view of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster from 2003:
Credit: NASA/CXC/IoA/A.Fabian et al.
The Chandra image shows the supermassive black hole at the center of Perseus A, seen as a white point. This image is 350 thousand light years across at the distance of the Perseus cluster. The hot cluster gas is seen as diffuse emission, and two cavities in the cluster gas are visible on either side of the black hole. Low-energy X-rays (0.3-1.5 keV) are shown in red, medium-energy X-rays are shown in green (1.5-3.5 keV), and high-energy X-rays are shown in blue (3.5-7.0 keV).
It may not be so cool as others, but it has a certain faux-retro feel to it in the graininess, as well as a slightly 3-D impression. Cool stuff.
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the report that Admiral Jackson, the US VA nominee, is now being orphaned by President Trump, is the ongoing theme of this Administration – the selection of unqualified or otherwise unacceptable nominees for positions in the government, who end up stepping aside when they fail – or, in a few cases, winning confirmation to their posts, only to leave in disgrace. Think Price, or Tillerson.
These are avoidable. These are unforced and embarrassing errors. You’d think the Administration would learn.
Repeat that. You’d think the Administration would learn.
In the natural world, one of the marks of a successful creature or entity is its capability to learn, whether how to communicate better with those it hopes to win to its causes, or where to best find prey that can be slaughtered and eaten.
And the unsuccessful? Those who never learned this simple lesson. We should have perhaps realized that this Administration is doomed to failure when we first heard about this incident, which James Hohmann helpfully reminds us of on PowerPost:
When Trump fired Chris Christie as the head of his transition team on Nov. 11, after the then-New Jersey governor expressed opposition to hiring Michael Flynn as national security adviser, Flynn and Steve Bannon, who would be White House chief strategist, celebrated by tossing binders full of potential personnel picks into the trash, according to a Politico report last year.
A disdain for careful planning and investigation marks those doomed to failure. I’m as much an off-the-cuff as the next guy – maybe more than I should be – but when we’re talking about important government matters involving the safety of the nation, throwing away material of this sort marks, for the careful observer, the people who have little more going for them than an unreasoning rage at the political opposition – hardly the mark of mature political types.
Mitt Romney’s run for the Senate in Utah has run into a snag. From The Salt Lake Tribune:
After 11 hours of political elbowing and shoving at the Utah Republican Convention — held appropriately at a hockey arena — delegates forced Mitt Romney into a primary election against state Rep. Mike Kennedy in the U.S. Senate race.
In fact, Kennedy — a doctor and lawyer — finished in first place at the convention with 51 percent of the vote to Romney’s 49 percent. The former GOP presidential nominee fell far short of the 60 percent needed to clinch the nomination outright. …
Romney blamed his second-place finish — out of a dozen Republicans seeking the seat of retiring seven-term Sen. Orrin Hatch — on delegates’ dislike of candidates like him who hedge their convention bids by also gathering signatures to ensure at least a place on the primary ballot.
Romney collected more than 28,000 signatures and was the only Senate candidate to do so.
Conservatives have for several years fought in court and in the Legislature to overturn the state law allowing signature gathering, seeing it as weakening the power of the convention and its delegates.
Which is where the extremists of either party wield the most power, because they’re willing to show up – they’ve made their politics their lives. Of course the conservatives will squawk. But Ragan Ewing on the conservative The Resurgent is uneasy:
We may still see get a fresh Rom-nom in June. The numbers were close this weekend, and Romney’s known to be a decent man with a solid, competent governing record. But Kennedy, for all of his policy agreement with Romney, displayed one thing at the convention that distinguished him from the more seasoned, recognized statesman: he openly supported Trump…not just individual actions, but POTUS himself. That, apparently, profoundly resonated with attendees.
I don’t think this bodes well for November. I don’t just mean for Romney/Utah, but for the GOP’s chances overall. If this event is evidence of a wider trend across the country, the tribal instincts of much of the grassroots Republican constituency appears to be recklessly doubling down on Trumpism. We know Democratic voters en masse are energized for the Fall, craving payback for ‘16 (not to mention a firewall against a conservative replacement for Justice Kennedy if he retires from SCOTUS). If the GOP base continues to eschew self-awareness and reject qualified faces like Mitt Romney for their alleged impurity, they doom themselves to permanent minority party status. I’ll cop to getting it wrong, with countless others, in 2016. That does not, however, convince me that crass populism is a template for repeated victory in the future.
I’m not saying Romney is the right guy for the job. Only that the current internal party cleansing may be less of a swamp-draining and more of a self-immolation. Pray for sanity.
Romney certainly was a good governor of Massachusetts, but that’s not the same thing as making laws from the legislative side of things – but I’ll stipulate it, because Ragan is echoing a lot of what I’ve been saying for the last couple of years. From Romney as Presidential nominee to a possible rejection as nominee for the Senate, defeated by a little-known hardliner, it seems that at least the grassroots is rapidly moving towards the extreme. The primary will indicate whether the rest of the party is moving to the right, or whether it’s just the grassroots.
Yesterday, Gary Sargent had a similar observation:
Two new articles — one in the New York Times, the other in National Journal — illustrate what’s happening in many of these GOP primaries. The Times piece, by Jeremy Peters, reports that in West Virginia, GOP Senate primary candidate Don Blankenship is running an ad that says: “We don’t need to investigate our president. We need to arrest Hillary … Lock her up!”
In multiple GOP races across the country, the Times piece reports, candidates are employing phrases such as “drain the swamp,” “build the wall,” “rigged system” and even “fake news.” The GOP Senate candidate in Tennessee ran an ad that promises to stand with Trump “every step of the way to build that wall,” and even echoes Trump’s attacks on African American football players protesting systemic racism and police brutality: “I stand when the president walks in the room. And yes, I stand when I hear ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”
Meanwhile, National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar reports that in the Indiana Senate GOP primary, Mike Braun, the candidate who is most vocally emphasizing Trump’s messages — on trade, the Washington “swamp” and “amnesty” — appears to be gaining the advantage. Braun’s ads basically recast true conservatism as Trumpism in its incarnation as populist anti-establishment ethno-nationalism.
If Romney loses the primary, leaving a hard-right extremist running for the seat of the retiring Senator Orrin Hatch, then – shockingly, in my mind – a safe seat for the Republicans is suddenly in play. I had the Utah seat pegged safely Republican, mostly because the Mormons may not be progressives, but they tend to be sensible conservatives. If they’re faced with a choice between another authoritarian nutcase, rather than Romney, and, say, a fairly conservative Democrat, they may choose to go with the Democrat and avoid the taint that’s dooming the Evangelicals to historical disgrace in the eyes of the rest of America.
Like I said a while ago, eventually the GOP will be down to three members – and two will be on probation for blasphemy.
Katherine Martinko on Treehugger notes how parenting styles really aren’t styles so much as judgments on other parents:
Maclean’s reported in its most recent issue that only about 100 kids are kidnapped each year in the U.S. in the stereotypical ‘scary stranger’ scenario, which is “a small fraction of one percent of missing kids each year.” Meanwhile, vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for U.S. kids between 1 and 18, killing around 1,600 kids annually. So, when parents drive a kid from point A to point B to avoid the risk of kidnapping, they’re actually putting their child in greater danger.
While everyone is entitled to their own personal phobias and has the right to choose how to act on those fears, what is entirely unacceptable is requiring other parents to raise their kids according to those beliefs.
As ]Professor Barbara] Sarnecka puts it, “I shouldn’t be legally required to act irrationally just because a lot of other people have a particular phobia.”
This, however, is the frightening direction in which our society is headed and it needs to be counterbalanced by more public discussion about the benefits of promoting independence in kids. Sarnecka recommends that parents talk positively about their own childhood memories and avoid fear-mongering conversations. Most of all, walk the talk! Fight the busybodies by setting your kids free. The more kids are out and about unsupervised (within reason), the more normal it will become.
No kids here, but given how little my parents kept an eye on me once I reached a certain age, I think, as a parent, I would have ended up having more than one conversation with police department personnel about how I was raising any kids I had.
And I would have been quite irritated about it.
There is a certain amount of short-sightedness to the worry about your kids being kidnapped. The goal of raising children should be to raise good citizens; raising people who end up terrified of their own shadows does not for a good citizen make. Fortunately, there appears to be a counter-movement over the last year or two against the wrapping children in bubble-wrap movement, so perhaps these worries about kids will pass.
Or perhaps not. In decades past, it just wasn’t possible to keep an eye on the kids like you can today. Add in the smaller size of families, and kids are viewed with more sentimentality than, perhaps, they were in yesterday. I’m just speculating, of course, since actual measurements of sentimentality seems a dubious effort, but it does make some sense.
A reader identifies what I thought was some sort of antenna cable:
It’s heat tape to keep the downspout from clogging with ice.
Oh! I would never have guessed!
I’ve finally finished The Persuaders: The Hidden Industry That Wants To Change Your Mind (2016), delayed by life and illness. If you are the sort that likes to look behind the curtain and see how things are done, especially those processes that most people don’t even suspect, and if they did they’d disapprove, then I can heartily recommend this book.
First, the author is James Garvey, PhD, listed as employed by the Royal Institute of Philosophy (his Wikipedia page says he’s the Secretary of that institution). In this book, he reveals how our urge, natural or not, for persuasion has been gradually circumvented by entities, usually corporate or political, seeking specific behaviors from the generic “us”, the citizens who have something of value they want, whether it be money, votes, or general inclinations.
His Preface gives his motivation for the book, a lecture he attended by an Oxford theologian in which, during Q&A, he lodged what he consider a “killer objection”. Did this bring the theologian to his knees? No. Garvey was simply ignored.
I began to suspect [argument and logical reasoning are] not even remotely how things actually go at all. I don’t want to overcook the point and suggest that arguments are entirely unpersuasive – but we might well over-estimate their hold on us. … I believe there is something newsworthy here, something worrying over and above all the obvious stuff, something just out of focus, on the corner of our collective vision. [p. xii]
Chapter 1 kicks things off with a little known story out of history: The Robin Hood Society of Butcher Lane, London. Created in the early 1700s, it consisted on members who argued, in a structured manner, the issues of the day. Some participated, others remained silent, enjoying the glory of the debate. Judging was strict and more or less objective In 1780, its activity abruptly became a fad, as the number of such societies escalated. Their endpoint, however, was detestable and worthy of loathing:
In the end, London’s flirtation with rationality did not last long. Largely in fearful reaction to the brewing French Revolution, the debating societies were violently repressed by the government — thugs were hired to break up debates, police constables blocked the doors, landlords were threatened with fines or worse, popular speakers were roughed up, and finally Parliament voted in the Seditious Meetings Act, effectively making public debate a treasonous offence. [p. 6]
An ominous comment on the nature of those on top.
From there it’s on to the current state of disputation: the goal, to win by any means necessary. Furthermore, he meditates upon the loss of the practice of reflection, referencing Bertrand Russell’s observation:
The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the cooperation or consent of his deliberate reason. [GoodReads]
His final observation?
So I think we have an obligation, maybe a moral one, to understand what contemporary persuasion does to us. It bothers me, and I hope that now it bothers you, too.
Chapter 2 covers public relations, including the infamous testimony to Congress prior to the American entry into the Gulf War, from an anonymous Kuwaiti girl, that Iraqi soldiers invading a hospital, taking the incubators, and leaving the preemies to die on the floor – a lie, as it turns out, formulated by a PR firm, and delivered by a member of the Kuwaiti royal family operating under cover. An unwary Congress bit on it, backing the war. He covers the history, which he begins at World War I, hitting the turning points, end with …
While I’m all in favour of education and democratic renewal … I worry that education and legislation might never actually manage to thwart an industry worth so many billions of dollars, an industry that’s better at ‘education’ than any university system, and an industry that specializes in ensuring that laws that might harm its clients’ interests never see the light of day.
Chapter 3 concerns tweaks and nudges, something many of us are familiar with in regards to our 401Ks, where the trend has been to make contributions to our 401Ks the “default setting,” rather than forcing us to actually go through the administrative work of setting up and contributing at firms which support 401Ks. Why? Research indicates people often go with default settings, as the recent Facebook debacle has highlighted.
Garvey also introduces us to the idea that we have two thinking systems. The first is the fast one, and is the one that is employed when, on a camping trip, the bushes rustle and you take off running. There’s no active, rational thinking, but rather the instinctive consideration that a mountain lion is about to leap upon you. What should one do? Run for your life. The second is the much slower, rational system, where we try to apply logic and reasoning to a situation. The goal of the Persuaders? To activate and manipulate the first system, leaving the second quiescent, through the use of keywords.
We also think we are much less vulnerable to manipulation than we actually are. Levine found that 70 per cent of those questioned said they were more aware than average of how manipulation works. 61 per cent said they knew more about manipulation than their peers.
Reminds one of those driving statistics, doesn’t? 70% of drivers think they’re better than average. These are usually the tailgaters and people who cut you off, aren’t they? So if you think you’re good at detecting manipulation, think again.
Chapter 4 works on the concept of social proof. Coins left in buskers’ cups, long lines at nightclubs, the people standing behind a candidate at a rally, and other faux clues function to manipulate you into thinking or doing something that you might not otherwise decide. He recounts the research that has gone into focusing social proof on all of us, some representative experiments, and that sort of thing. That free food that shows up at the supermarket? It’s not to introduce you to the product. It’s to induce feelings of reciprocity, so that you’ll buy something in return for their gift. And more. And more.
Chapter 5 explores the superior use of communications by various political parties, as compared to their opponents. Following Bush’s 2004 victory,
Democratic strategists found themselves consumed by insights from cognitive science and linguistics. … Not arguments, but the careful use of resonating turns of phrase was the key – words that evoked or fit into established worldviews were better heard and more strongly believed.
Framing the debate became key, and thus the presence of Frank Luntz, Republican strategist, researcher, and resource for many Republican candidates. Luntz says 80% of life is emotion, and that’s where he works. Thus the subtle appeals not to reason, but to emotion in Republican speeches – xenophobia, racism, and that sort of thing.
Garvey comments,
But even with this limited grip on political language, I now find myself turned off by political speeches. I don’t want to hear and be affected by them. Sometimes I look away and hum to myself when a politician appears on TV to respond to the news of the day.
This chapter also includes an appalling example of buzzword usage in England, which I will desist from quoting. It was quite enlightening, though, and I suggest that media refuse to broadcast messages in which the politician ignores the question in favor of answering their preferred question, or, worse, just employs buzzwords designed to elicit emotional responses. We saw the former just last week on The Late Show, when Cynthia Nixon completely ignored host Stephen Colbert’s question concerning her lack of experience in her run for Governor of New York. I was appalled, but the audience applauded, rather than booing her as they should have.
Chapter 6 gives the history and usage of persuasion in the retail world, from the days of Pompey and Herculaneum to today, including pivotal names, research, and processes. People who view shopping as a leisure or entertainment activity should read this and then hide in their bedrooms for at least a month.
Chapter 7 concerns data collection and analysis, which has been much in the news of late due to Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, and includes the amusing anecdote concerning the father of a teenage daughter who receives a coupon for diapers, is outraged, and then a week or two later discovers his daughter is, indeed, pregnant. The big retailer Target knew before the prospective grandfather. The subject of retail use of data for planning the layout of a store is explored in almost tiresome detail.
The final chapter returns to the honest subject of simple argumentation. Garvey gives a history, beginning with the poet Parmenides, who he labels the first to explore formal, reasoned debate, but,”… an awful poet.” From there, he covers the big Greek three of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, knocking down the relativists in the process, but his real purpose here is to remind us that we can be rational creatures making rational choices, so long as understand that manipulation occurs all around us.
He includes a fascinating view of his day as he tries to avoid being manipulated, identifying the various tricks used to separate him from his valuables, from money to inclinations to votes. It’s an illuminating trip, and he admits sometimes it exhausts him, as the brain needs to rest after so much effort – it is an organ like any other, after all.
So there you go.
Recommended.
How about you?
