The point of the electoral college

I once had modest luck explaining the function of the electoral college to someone.  It was in Michigan, some time back when there was more serious talk about piping Great Lakes water to California to alleviate their plight/malfeasance.  So, I used that as an example:

"What if it came down to a vote between California and Michigan, between Calfornians and Michiganders, all other states having no standing to participate in the discussion or having been convinced for the sake of my argument to butt out and let CA and MI hash it out?  In a purely popular vote, California wins, by a landslide, every single time."

"Well, their need is dire, real, and immediate.  I'm willing to help them."

"They're not voting to ask you for help.  They're voting to get all your water. Water rights are complicated but out west they are a high stakes concern, and the guys downstream can really throw their weight around. Just ask the Californians who live upstream.  Anyway, the state's population outnumbers ours roughly four to one.  You want to talk about your vote not counting?  That is what will happen."

His eyes got big.  "Um..."

"Yeah.  If California votes on matters of Michigan, Michigan will never come out on top, ever.  In a simple, pure democracy, California can dictate the affairs of another state just because it has more people to vote on the matter.  We have a constitution and a federal government that trumps state governments in cases of conflict expressly for the purpose of preventing one political body from oppressing another just because they have more members.  This is one example.

The electoral college is another.  California has as many electoral votes as the fifteen smallest states combined, so don't listen to any complaints about individual Californians not having their vote go as far as yours. Half again as many as Texas, almost as many as New York and Florida combined--and note that while Texas is red for now, and Florida is a swing state, New York is solidly blue thanks to NYC and Albany (and tbf Rochester).  If you grew up anywhere outside of Detroit, how would you feel about the Detroit city council deciding how your mayor and chief of police were going to handle business in your hometown?  If you lived in Detroit, how would you like it it if pinheads in Ann Arbor called the shots for Wayne County?  That's what NYC looks like to the Empire State, what Chicago looks like to Illinois, what the Twin Cities look like to Minnesota.  The Founders wanted to stop that from happening at the national level, but may have been optimistic about the electorate, or perhaps concluded it was too intrusive to decide for the states whether or what kind of safeguards they might put in place for themselves to keep the same from happening at a smaller scale."

So, a few new thoughts...

 Yeah, I've been quiet lately.  Been spending more of my time in prayer, which is more useful than anything else I'm in a position to do.  When I write this, things are still up in the air, but the "president-elect" theater is so thick on the ground you'd think it was an official thing and not just "the guy who looks like he will get most of the electoral votes in December, assuming a normal election." But I think a few observations need to be made.

Whichever outcome you think is best, there are some concerns about how we've gotten to where we are, and where we seem to be headed.

Until now, only third-world dictatorships have stopped ballot counts partway through and then either flat-out declared a winner or made a show of resuming counts with suddenly overwhelming democratic support.  Now it's happened here.  Will it ever be otherwise in the future?

The Dems told us their game plan.  They tried to soften up our resolve with predictions of a "red mirage," which sounded like wishful thinking until they started using the phrase "by any means necessary."  Considering things now look shady, apparently that wasn't hyperbole.  

And yes, whether you like the putative outcome or not, this is sketchy.  We gave Gore the opportunity for recounts twenty years ago, and all he did was demand re-recounts in traditionally Democrat districts hoping to squeeze out more (D) votes, but every time it went further against him.  And also he tried to stop military ballots from being counted due to a discrepancy in absentee voter laws, knowing that those votes go predominantly (R).

But not only did the red mirage seem to happen, not a single late-counted mail-in ballot went to Trump.  Not one protest vote, not one crank, not one error, not one ambiguous ballot; and not one with down-ticket votes.  We happen to know already that Democrats don't comprise the entirety of mail-in voters, so where did the Republican voters go?  And why did Trump do better than Hillary in every state except for the ones that stopped counting around 11 pm and resumed after they found enough ballots to reverse Trump's lead?  States, I might add, that are swing states headed by Democrat leadership--or at least, were headed by Democrats.

Even if everything is above board--I'm sure a few things will shake out in unexpected ways, but assuming everything we suspect now is righteous--why are they acting like they have something to hide?  Judges are throwing out requests for hearings to present evidence on the grounds that they weren't provided the evidence in advance.  Georgia is destroying ballots even though state law requires they be kept for 22 months.  The media are telling us it's over and there's no news to cover regarding the recounts and lawsuits.  The recounts in 2000 were so belabored that by day 37 everyone was tired of the uncertainty and a lot of Gore voters were willing to concede if Gore would just stop being an ass about it.  Now all we're hearing is "dolphins still missing, nothing to report."

I still hold out some hope that we're finally going to wise up about election security and fraud minimization.  People who say voter fraud is better than voter suppression either don't understand that those are morally the same thing, or they're lying because historically voter fraud as a specific thing has gone their way and voter suppression as a specific thing has not gone their way.  But if the KKK had diluted legitimate votes in predominantly black precincts with thousands of fake ballots instead of just scaring them away on election day, those "any type of security is still racist even when I run out of reasonable arguments against protections that have been known to work elsewhere in the world, so you still can't do it" folks would be a lot more circumspect about how to balance the one species of procedural corruption against the other.  

And that's all it is.  Being able go into a booth and pull a lever or darken a bubble isn't some magic invocation of human rights.  Being able to participate in the process at all, and legitimately, is.   

Actually, one last thought...

 I'm not going to laud everything Trump has said or done.  I'm not going to defend his character, although the spiritual rhetoric I've heard him use lately sounds a lot more like that coming from a believer than the stuff I hear from the other side, which sounds like they're trying to talk the way conservatives and Christians talk but they only know it from how liberals and non-believers tell each other how Christians and conservatives talk.

But I used to say my biggest complaint about him qua president was he wasn't very presidential.  He was crude, inelegant in speech, prone to trolling in social media, and could have done a better job neutralizing the negative spin the MSM put on his works and words.  

Now, though?

He's the most patriotic president we've had since Regan.  He doesn't just express a love for America and a respect for hoi polloi at large, he does so consistently.  He bothers to show up to meet the people. And when he faces criticism, he may make fun of career politicians who still haven't learned the lesson about glass houses and throwing rocks, but he doesn't call concerned citizens bad names, nor does he call their race into question for daring to be circumspect and nuanced about their own political opinions.

That's a lot more presidential behavior than we've seen in a long time.

There has been so much outrageous stuff in the political sphere (never mind Pope Francis's...follies) that I haven't been able to keep up.

 So, I'm just going to hit a few bullets, while I still can.  I'm getting burned out anyway and hopefully I'll be able to make more religious or merely theoretical political posts in the future.

Or I guess several bullets.  Sorry I couldn't keep this briefer.  It's actually better than my initial drafts....

• I've been getting Scientific American weekly e-mails for years but finally unsubscribed when they got as bad as the NY Times weekly headline e-mail.  I never read every article but the last straw was today when there was one article of interest to me, one apparently scientific article that didn't really float my boat, and several political ones claiming they're not really and never were all that political but it's time to change (especially now that Trump has gone all COVID denier...not sure if that was supposed to be before or after he shut down travel from China to the complaints of Leftists that he was going overboard).  Between that and the transparently biased sources they cite, I'd had enough.  Crying out loud...multiple articles said they and scientists at large (excepting academics, who are predominantly leftist in this era; at least they owned up to that) tend to be apolitical so risking taking a stand should mean something.  Buh?  Where have you been during global warming, SA?  If you forgot that you've been politicizing it ever since Gore lost the election--and no, I don't mean just talking about policy solutions--then you're not competent to write professionally.  
• Twitter, Hunter Biden...not much I can add.  Just gonna emphasize that Trump's been harassed and impeached for what the Bidens apparently consider to be business as usual.  And if they didn't do anything wrong, why the media blackout?  After four years of weak counterarguments, open lies, and you're-only-fooling-yourself defenses like "Debunked!  There weren't 30,000 people there, there were 25,000!" the silence is deafening.
• People are saying the Left is so enraged at Trump because they thought they'd be able to usher in USSR Mark Two in 2016.  Makes some sense, but the Long March has got to be a hundred years long by now; what's another four or eight?
• I wish people at large would think about their prior knowledge when they get presented with propaganda.  Do they even ask themselves "what about what I used to know?" when they're told some contradiction?  This isn't even Gell-Mann, although maybe it's a subsequent effect.
• Various talking heads: "Trump hasn't even agreed to make a peaceful transition if (or I hope when) he loses!" Dude: You’re the only one taking this seriously. He’s clearly trolling you—you’d know if you read more than half his tweets. After all, you’re the one who thought to raise the question—you’re either drinking your own Kool-Aid or lying. Meanwhile, put a lid on your characterizations of tyranny. You know what else is that kind of behavior? Changing voting rules during the early stages of an election. And he’s not the one doing that; you are.
• Trump is like Zaphod Beeblebrox. The only problem is, in this cynical and bitter galaxy, instead of letting him distract from the real work of whatever constitutes running a country these days, everything’s just getting exposed because he’s distracting them from what constitutes running a country these days.
  
• Some protestor: “This movement isn’t going to stop until it sees real and substantive change.” Fine, but at some point that’s going to mean not causing more property damage and injuries to innocent bystanders and not further provoking law enforcement. Are they willing to come to the table or, like they’ve said, are they going to burn it all down as long as they haven’t gotten whatever they haven’t decided yet will be good enough?
• "I'm politically correct.  Unlike you, I don't think you should force your opinion on others' lives." Oh, but your whole position is that some people should do so, under certain--or broad--circumstances.  You just think I shouldn't get to be one of them.
• "We didn't build a wall; the world built a wall around us."  Okay, clearly hyperbole, and that's fine, but what that means is the rest of the world thinks building walls does work.  Message received.
• I have a much longer post on different strands of socialism I'm still incubating that I still haven't decided to post, but considering the entities and bodies--you know, I'm going to use the term "bodies" for guerrilla type organizations in the future because they might not be hierarchical in quite the same was the military or the Church is, but they are nonetheless cellular--that brought most of the actual violence to 2020's protests, I will say this:  it is disingenuous to say fascism is rightist because it focuses socialism at the state level.  A genocide that gets focused in one city instead of across a whole region does not turn into an affirmative action movement.  It's just the same thing with a few administrative alterations.  
• Pursuant to that, if the crybullies and SJWs were truthful and right in their claims to fear the government, they would already be getting disappeared.
• Someone said once "Socialists like to claim that public roads are socialist so I must be a hypocrite if I'm okay with those, but I like to tell them 'I'd be more amenable to your position if you stuck to building public roads."  In the same vein, communism is frequently defended with assertions like "It's never really been tried!  If we had the right people in charge, we could make it work."  I think you're lying to me or at least yourself when you say that, but even if that might be true, before you start talking about implementing socialism to the degree where it will lead to Maoist degrees of granularity in federal involvement in your personal life, can we have a conversation about how you expect to make sure only these elusive right people get put in charge?  Because socialism sure seems to attract people who have more of an interest in the power itself, and they pay a lot of lip service, but when we get to late stage communism, where Marx and Stalin claimed that the state apparatus would just whither away (I guess by the proletariat getting habituated to just doing whatever the right thing is; they weren't explicit on this point, understandably), these not-the-right-people just end up kicking the can down the road so they can keep what they got.
• When you call someone racist, and they tell you you're projecting, it's because you say things like "being non racist is racist."  It is incoherent to say "racism is bigotry plus power"--which sounds like the position you'll be in if Biden wins, so you'll have to wear the label racist even by your own logic--but then here turn around and accuse individuals of the same thing.  It's why when you call people racist, they don't even bother refuting it anymore; you've overused the epithet and even people who aren't racist aren't bothered enough to take it seriously.  Meanwhile, consider the circumstances of Phillip Anderson and Mouat Freelon.  If you didn't accuse every white person of supremacist attitudes, real ones wouldn't be able to come out into the light, and if you didn't oppose free speech, you wouldn't know these people for what they were until they erupted into opportunistic violence like you've been seeing.
• Think twice before attempting to uplift the Black Man with your patronizing politics.  It's infantilizing and othering.  Maybe we're all equal beneath the state, but he's not beneath you.  Engage him like an adult.
• When you gloat about how web sites that suffer sanctions for promoting fake news have a disproportionate negative effect on conservatives, stop and consider for a moment that your zeal to connect those dots makes you look like you don't really have a good answer to Trump's accusations of you propagating fake news--you know, the anti-conservative stuff that used to be the only thing most people heard because the so-called independent media have a cartel that used to monopolize the channels of communication--and are left with making the "I know you are but what am I?" defense. And we both know that doesn't cut it.
• I won't begrudge anyone for having their preferred information/news sources.  We've all got to decide for ourselves what's best to take in.  But we should make a point of listening honestly to people we disagree with who can support what they claim to whatever threshold you find to be the bare minimum of "not some tin-hat wing nut."  If you don't...if a source you trusted ever did lie to you, how could you ever know?
• "You're the people history warned us about!"  ("Leave Britney alone!") You sure?  Because w're not the people who are changing dictionaries on the fly to "enhance" support for current events.  Back in the day, it's people who were talking like you, like a majority terrified of a tiny, insurgent conspiracy, who were screaming out of fear for the fate of the Dritte Reich at the hands of the Jews.  Just sayin'.  
• People like that, and like the ones who have been knocking out black men's teeth for the sake of critical race theory:  are they doing this because this is what they think activism normally looks like?  Do they have some vague image of Kent State in their heads and figure this is Just What Is Done?
• Was looking at an information source (I won't call it news) I don't usually read and there was so uniformly pro-Biden/"Facebook is fake and Republican" that I started wondering if I had been thinking myself into a corner all this time and relying too much on unreliable sources of my own. They were going on about the Hunter smear campaign and how it had been debunked and all that. Even comments like "Trump is the worst president ever!"  Then I realized two things.  (1) I'm willing to look at the other side and ask myself if this is what's happening to me.  Even Wikipedia lets its contributors do that, no matter how their final product turns out.  (2) I saw the video for myself where Joe bragged about playing hardball with Ukrainian officials to get personal benefits ("turns out Hunter wasn't that influential," another defended, but that's just it, isn't it?  He was there to collect a salary that his dad would "tax" and to maintain a point of contact--all before Trump ran for office).
• As for Trump being the worst, let's see...Harding is widely considered a bad president just in the general not-suited-for-the-office sense.  Jackson was instrumental in the movement that led to the Trail of Tears.  Andrew Johnson thwarted Reconstruction.  FDR put Japanese Americans (not Japanese-Americans, thank you) in concentration camps during WW2.
• The "mostly peaceful" protests...okay, maybe numerically they are and only the riots get the press coverage, but one has to question the integrity, the competence, the motives of media that will stand in front of an instance of arson in progress and use that phrase to describe it.  But I'm less concerned about the--what?--alleged 97% peacefulness than I am about the 3% who are killing and burning and looking but aren't getting any pushback from their mostly peaceful co-marchers. But on the other hand, that 97% apparently had no problem with the status quo until George Floyd died, so I'm a little skeptical about motive even then.

In 2008 Obama was elected and people started talking a lot how Bush should immediately resign so, despite all succession laws and the fact that presidential terms, per the Constitution, run January 20 to January 20,  Obama could take over early and get a head start on his "progress." Now, RBG has gone off to whatever her reward is and despite the fact that Trump is still president until January 20 at least of 2021 (so hold off on your “until a new president” talk), certain entities want him to wait for him to do a well established part of his job until what they want is to believe is a referendum on his performance to choose a replacement. And meanwhile, you're openly talking about packing the court and expanding the riots--so that's an admission that you're actively engineering this unrest, this destruction of cities across the country for political reasons, as well as the odd admission that you assume your winning the presidency this fall is a foregone conclusion--and trying to rationalize it by saying things like "the precedent has been set--no nominations in an election year."

Well, that's a lie and wishful thinking.  In the 20th century alone there were at least 10  successful nominations and 2 unsuccessful ones, by Democrats and Republicans alike, during election years.  So if there's a precedent, it's twofold:  (1) the president isn't paralyzed in the last quarter of his administration just because he might turn out to be a lame duck (2) you can be relied on to threaten violence and dishonesty and unethical when you don't get your way.  LBJ tried to pack the courts, FDR tried to pack the courts, and now here you are.

We get it, you don’t really believe in the rule of law, but what would your argument be if he didn't announce anybody now, but still wins in November and then announced someone?

odds and ends from socmed

 "Don't criticize the post office for failing when the US military gets so much more money in your tax dollars."

The army doesn't charge me directly for providing a personal service.

"Beauty and the Beast is such hogwash.  Reverse the roles and see how ridiculous it would be.  No one tells a guy who give an ugly girl a chance because she's nice."

1. Beast wasn't a nice guy who happened to be ugly.

2. Guys get told "she has a great personality" all the time.  It's a meme older than socmed itself.

"Strong nationalism...government-controlled media...xenophobia...all signs of fascism and they're all happening here and now."

Yeah, except the things you call "strong nationalism" and "xenophobia" we call "vet immigrants, and welcome in those who are willing to play by our rules;" and it's not the politician you don't like who controls the media, it's opposition party politicians in other branches of government that are anti-nationalist who want to import voters who will be loyal only to them.  If you're still not sure, ask yourself which faction is trying to control the words you use and sometimes even admits that this is an effort to modify the way you think.  Whether it's well-intentioned or not, this is a tactic of fascists, communists, and other varieties of socialists.  If this seems like a granny knot of competing standards and morals, then you might just have tasted a red pill.

"A 1% dip in the market is a recession; the 2.5% dip was called the Great Recession; a 6.5% dip is a depression; what do you call the 35% dip we're going through right now?  The Trump Effect?"

Recessions and depressions aren't a simple matter of degree.  1% is a large fluctuation for an economy of this size but you have to figure in longstanding effects on prices and employment.  Meanwhile, there's a pandemic that we've collectively decided to handle by staying home instead of going to work.  If you don't like that, I have some really bad news for you about socialism....

"We didn't build a wall, but in the end, the rest of the world built one around us!"

So you're saying that there is consensus in the entire rest of the world that proactive border controls work. Meanwhile, in Scandinavia where they didn't shut everything down like you're happy to insist on here and then blame Trump for, their infection statistics are way down.  One would think the goal you're actually pursuing is not the well-being of this country, which leads one to wonder why you want Trump out of the picture.

*mouth foaming about antifa*

Do a Google video search for something like "Seattle May Day protests."  You'll find articles and multimedia about violence erupting on the Left Coast at "demonstrations" that aren't even in opposition to questionably-violent organizations, organizations that--whatever their reputations and legacies--aren't even present; easily going back ten years.  Whom are we supposed to blame for that?  Unless you count the successfully-woke Starbucks, there isn't an openly capitalistic entity in sight; there might be a few individuals floating around, but they don't refer to Oregon and Washington as being "ultraviolet" because purple has red mixed in with it.

A while ago I got in an argument with some relatives.

Several of us were on the same text message thread when one posted something tentatively hopeful about Covid treatments.  Another one tore into her for believing Fox News, whence the article originated.

OP and I were a little taken aback.  This was supposed to be a light, if a dim one, in the darkness; why was it relevant to attack us for "trusting" a news source they didn't like?

I'd been quiet for a while but tired of it quickly and called for moderation:  I pointed out that Fox has no monopoly on error (which is a little weaker than my personal position, but that was part of my point), and I hear enough ignorant back-and-forth at work, so could they please not include me in the conversation?

*bam* Links to MSM articles allegedly exposing Fox News in barefaced lies.

Dude:  I just got done saying I don't really trust anybody.  How do you think it makes you look when you get even more strident while trying to bring more evidence to the table that one side is dishonest, but it all comes from the other side?  

I don't need one more person telling me some of the "news" I take in is disinformation.  I take it in order to compare with the stuff that many people like my relatives appear to swallow whole.

It's difficult to walk the line in the middle; easier it is, to take a side, accept it wholesale, and then only let yourself see enough of the opposition's arguments to further convince yourself that they're still just making things up.

Things have been getting crazier lately so I wonder if we're getting close to a point where the MSM superfans aren't going to be able to explain away the cognitive dissonance between the beliefs they still strongly hold and the narratives they're told that change more quickly than their minds. 

I was listening to someone or other's channel on YouTube more recently (and this really isn't changing the subject), someone who I think is a little Left but mostly libertarian except on a few social issues, and very much capable of being fair to and having civilized discussions with conservatives.  She made a point that erenow I had not realized needed to be put so succinctly into words:

Conservative news and progressive news, whatever you think of them, are in the business of polarizing their viewers. 

Fox News might have been created not really as a lone voice in the wilderness to give succor to lonely conservatives, but moreso to provide merely a dramatic foil to CNN and MSNBC.  Which is not to criticize the on-air personalities (although a few self proclaimed Catholics could try a little harder to be orthodox before being conservative) as much as the top level executives who are all politically inbred.

Look at how the summer 2020 riots were covered.  In broad strokes:  Fox showed pasty young white people wearing black as-good-as-uniforms causing most of the damage and didn't shy away from black people burning down black neighborhoods, blaming Antifa and cultural problems in the black community itself; CNN & Friends showed peaceful protests and white people dressed in civvies causing problems, and blamed what they deemed conservative racists.  I'm sorry I come off as biased here but I tried to avoid getting sucked in and since I don't have TV at home I was rather at the mercy of the viewing preferences of some of my social associates.

The point is that neither side is really interested in telling the whole truth.  Maybe some individuals are, maybe they're not all drinking their own Kool-Aid.

What they're interested in doing is taking a page out of Bob Lutz's book (I mean specifically Guts, which is worth a read for his business anecdotes, but I'm also speaking generally).  Lutz believed--and I think he's right--that you'll have a healthier customer base if you put out product that is polarizing.  It won't much affect people who already love or hate your work, but it will motivate people who are on the fence; you'll drive a few of those folks away, but you'll get commitment from others who might have gone elsewhere, and that's the proverbial bird in the hand.

The problem is that news isn't a product.  Okay, in a sense it is--you or advertisers pay for an information service--but when it's this processed, it may not really be facts and analysis anymore, which is what they claim to be selling.

Also, to bring this back to the YouTuber's point, a polarized people is a divided people.  I can throw in a quote or platitude about hanging separately or houses divided against themselves.  But in the end, the highest level people with the most money and the least publicity at Fox will greet their equals at CNN and congratulate each other for keeping the populace too fragmented and off balance to really rise up and make a substantive difference.

It's not all about social engineering and tinfoil hat territory.  But it does help explain why stupid shit persists instead of winning a social Darwin Award.

Two inadequately explored questions that pertain to the 2016 and 2020 elections

1. Considering the benefits that had obtained to, for example, Biden, which we learned of during the Russian election interference probe, what benefit did Russia hope to gain by helping the political opponent of the previous administration gain the office?
2. If electronic tampering was such a problem, and considering that any improvements in polling security have been so modest that they hardly make the news to reassure the voters, then why are certain elements still insistent on relying on electronic balloting (on-site or remote/mail-in), without bothering to reassure us; instead of coming up with more sanitary ways to vote in person?

It's not that there are no answers to these questions.  The suspicious thing is that no one is really talking about the answers.  They're fighting about the questions to keep our attention focused there.

So AOC, in the current illiterate book-burning craze of tearing down statues for any or no reason, wants to get rid of St. Damien of Molokai...

(edited 8/16/20)

...to which I reply "WTF is wrong with you?"

Of course, he's Flemish, so that should be a good enough reason, right?

Not by a long shot.

St. Damien was not a "colonizer."  He was not an oppressor.  Say what you will about Europeans in Hawaii at the time in general, but St. Damien was there to serve the leper colony that lived on that island.  He eventually contracted leprosy himself and died there.

Not denying that colonization happened, or that it brought trouble with it.  But St. Damien was amongst those who were trying to take some responsibility for and mitigate the harm done, and made the ultimate sacrifice--whether that's good enough or not, it's the most anyone can be asked to do.  He didn't drive Europeans out of Hawaii like St. Patrick and the snakes of Ireland, but the lepers would still be suffering from leprosy whether or not white men were still around.

If your woke anti-colonialism won't permit someone to do that much, then most of the Woke Left needs to sit down,  shut up, and think about how your life got to a place where your outrage justifies erasing history but not actually alleviating the pain of people you claim to care for, because they're not doing anybody any more good than that.

Yeah, yeah, he taught Catholicism.  He was still instrumental--biases in Western reporting against indigenous contributions to these efforts notwithstanding--in improving the life of people in the Molokai colony.  He dressed lepers' ulcers, helped build homes and schools, organized farms.  I know this still constitutes impurity of action to the Woke, but I don't see the Woke doing even this much good.  Just some symbolic gesture so inflammatory that it is counterproductive.

You're being behalfist over the Hawaiians.  Being disrespectful to their beliefs is othering and infantilizing.  And all your Marxist-derived critical theory is European, anyway--didn't you realize Marx was an old white German man who abused his family and domestic staff?  Knowing that, shouldn't you be asking if his class warfare theories are just some next-level patriarchy that is merely hiding behind Wokeness?

See the pattern again?

Russian election collusion turns out to be nothing, but COVID is an emergency.  We're not sure it is, but we're being overly cautious; it's handled problematically on all sides, but we haven't seen something like this in a hundred years, so call that a wash.  But people are getting tired of being pushed around and kept at home and they're seeing through the wannabe Stalins petits testing the waters.

Then George Floyd died.

They tried to blame Trump with the racial narrative they'd been toying with for five years, they tried to convince you that it was he and not some other billionaires who bussed in violent protest infiltrators (wearing black, not tank tops and the Stars and Bars) and pallets of bricks (not ARs slung over shoulders) in an event they couldn't decide would spin better as a surprisingly huge number of KKK adjacent groups that apparently fill middle America finally deciding the iron's hot enough to strike; or whether they're really just staging false flag operations that look exactly like what BLM events have always devolved into, except on an unprecedented scale.  But in the end, it was opportunistic leftists and anarchists and I-don't-care-I-just-want-a-bag-of-shoes-to-go-with-my-TV-ists burning down their own cities and destroying their own neighborhoods and a few white sympathizers who got lost amid the whites who thought they could hide behind patronizing signage and even more vandalism

After a few weeks that peters out, because utopia doesn't spontaneously erupt from chaos or even a tabula rasa, and the progressive politicians who were so supportive before, found themselves hypocrites and the proverbial "mugged liberals," and decided enough was enough.

Luckily for them, the virus didn't honor the grace period from sheltering at home, so now that it's a full incubation period after the riots, there's a spike in corona cases that they can now blame entirely on the reopening.

That'll be Trump's fault.  That'll be why his numbers are consistently falling behind where-is-he-now-and-what-is-my-name Biden.  That and Russia is back.  

It's all just too convenient not to be true.  The facts, the causality, the interpretation, the omissions from the news.  Trump will lose again, just like he did in 2016.

So some talking heads--talking voices, I guess, although that sounds less clever--on the radio were defending the pollsters from the 2016 election

I didn't catch the whole segment, so I don't know if they distinguished the raw data (which were, I am reliably told, within sampling error of parity, which happens to align with the popular vote numbers we saw) from the reported results of 90% or 95% or 99% in favor of Hillary, whatever it was.

But that extreme error is what they were defending.

They went on about how people being polled were reluctant to appear too in favor of such a contemptible fool as Trump, lest it turn out that the pollster was a DNC employee testing the waters for an opportunity to dox a defenseless alleged bigot--even though doxxing wasn't so widely known a thing back then--or worse yet, the people polled felt that they would come off as bigoted even though they still wanted to vote that way.

So the pollsters apparently just struggled with trying to discern how the non-responses would have broken down by party lines, and how many dishonest results they got from paranoid voters, and so on.  

Those are fair concerns, but those are the concerns that define the pollsters' job.  This wasn't some historical anomaly that just coincidentally led them all right into the blind spot that corroborated every modern electoral conspiracy theory.  That, I would have excused if they had looked at the roughly 50/50 numbers and came back with a solid lead for Hillary but Don still making a competitive showing.

Ninety-plus percent, though?  

A landslide would be putting it mildly.  How much closer to a unanimous vote would it have to have really seemed to them before they stepped back and said "You know what, we better double check our methodology."  They wouldn't even have to admit to themselves any realistic bias like "Hillary is one of the more polarizing figures of the decade and we better make sure we don't undercount the people who hate her and still turn out to the polls."  All they should do is say "raw counts make it a toss-up, final analysis shows Hillary did almost twice that well and Trump got almost nothing; isn't that a stretch?"

No, I don't think it was an honest mistake.  I think it's a "mistake" they plan to make again, if our memory is short enough to let them, and they're trying to prime us with the suggestion that they're generally responsible people who happen to completely fubar their job but can be trusted to do better this fall even though times are even more uncertain all around.

Have you noticed they tend to demand the dismantling of police forces now...

...but dreaming up a replacement, such as it might be, is only a subsequent concern?

Do they really think, or want us to think, that anarchy is a preferable alternative to some kind of gradual and measured and deliberate transition?

Or is chaos simply their goal?  Is their goal to make things bad quickly so in the collective panic that ensues, hoi polloi will accept any solution, no matter how bad?

Radio personality: "Grats to the LGBTs on the recent SCOTUS decision! If only black people could get the same rights...."

Is that nascent cracks in the alliance I'm starting to see?

Systematic racism is...personal, not institutional?

Larry Correia does some schooling on the shape of racism in the getting-paid part of the publishing biz.

Correia made a few good points in particular that I want to focus on for a minute.

For one thing, the publishing industry is heavily blue.  Most publishers' headquarters are in Manhattan, and they fit the stereotype.

So if there's racism going on, whose fault is it?  After being in the business for in some case literally centuries, there's really no one else to blame.

That's the loophole for them, though.

Like everywhere else in America, law prohibits discrimination on the basis of ethnicity, with a few exceptions for hiring practices.  So any racism literally can't be baked into the system as we are asked to believe.  The Constitution discusses slavery as a fact of life, but it was on its way out, and the fact that 1776 happened before we crossed that watershed is not germane.

So the only way that racism can persist is in the attitudes of the people who want to propagate it.

There are some back doors, of course.  Laws that affect certain demographics but seem colorblind until you note that there are well-known correlations.  But this isn't always racism.  Certain investment laws prohibit people using certain tools or strategies if they don't have enough liquid assets to back them aren't just to be mean to minorities or generally lower and middle class people, they exist to prevent amateurs from causing damage to the market with their ignorance.  But even where it might be, like with certain kinds of inner city zoning laws, if you've got people who know what's wrong getting elected...why are they still unable to set it right?  If you're a bleeding heart mayor who wants to help your city and you've been in office for thirty years, at some point the governor and state legislature stop being valid excuses.

But swap everyone in the system out for people who are equally competent but not indoctrinated, and there's no reason to expect the same things to keep happening.  Selective misanthropic unwritten policies should evaporate overnight, and bad laws that take advantage of artifacts of history will take a little longer for these unbiased replacements to weed out once they stop enforcing them.

And when a crisis like we're having these days happens, someone can always find some statistics that might be damning, or might not but can be dressed up to look that way, and so all these progress-leading Manhattanites can clutch their pearls and signal-apologize for nothing more specific than being part of the problem, and then after a few days of putting color-coded banners on their web sites and tweaking the language of their boilerplate, it's back to business as usual.

It's like they're springing the Kafkatrap of the retail clerk on themselves just so they can get out of it.  It's pretty clever, I'll give them that, but the problem with reminding yourself too much that you're clever is it gets very easy to forget that anyone else has any sense.

Like the black people you just signaled to.  Which is probably why you keep doing it and thinking that it's going to keep working.

Here's what I mean by the retail clerk Kafkatrap.  I borrowed this from somewhere but don't remember exactly where; I'll give credit or change the example if I find it or a kind reader points me in the right direction:

You're working in a store.  A black customer and a white one walk in at the same time.  Whom do you approach first to serve?  The white one because you're more comfortable?  Or the black one because you think on some level they're not to be trusted and need to be watched more closely?  Or the white one because you don't want to show that you might think that of the black person?  Or the black person to subtly contribute to elevating their social status?  The point isn't to reach an answer; the point is to think about it so In The Future You Can Do Better.

But what does "do better" in a case like this mean?  Eventually you have to stop the analysis paralysis and do your job.

But that's the Kafka trick.  When you're setting up the scenario as if to trap yourself instead of someone else, you don't have to answer.  Just framing it is the solution.  Let hoi polloi worry about what the actual right answer is; you've shown yourself to be woke enough to be above such things, and can choose to do whichever you want.  Since you're woke, it's always the right choice.

Well, not forever.  What amuses me about the explosion of obsequious fangirling is how everyone is suddenly an expert in this stuff.  In truth, they're not.  Many of 'em took good notes in their critical theory studies gen eds, but in most parts of the country there's not a lot of use, so their skills will whither; meanwhile, progress keeps moving in whatever direction is declared forward.  The wannabes are going to get left behind or consult the wrong focus group or use an obsolete phrase because even the MSM can't keep up, and eventually their virtue signal will be heard as an obsolescence signal.  And they will turn on their own.

Elaborating on lessons learned

I wanted to go into a little more detail.  That last post was long enough and dwelling on the specifics would have taken away from the overarching themes.

The two-dimensional political axis opens up a lot of understanding, but it obscures some things, too.  First off, nothing is simple, and a two dimensional space is generally better than a linear one, but even then it doesn't capture all the nuance.  Some specifics don't map neatly onto a political spectrum of any dimension because they are affiliated for historical reasons rather than logical or thematic ones.  That's why you hear about "liberals versus progressives" and conservatives and libertarians describing themselves as "classical liberals" whereas twenty years ago there were just "liberals" on the left and they were on average moderate enough for conservatives to have conversations and alliances with.

The two dimensions perhaps would be better considered as an evolution of the political landscape than as a diagnosis.  It's still common to look at conservatives and say "Hey, they want to restrict abortion, and drugs, and marriage not to mention sex itself, and liquor, and shut down businesses on Sundays, so how can they claim to be the party of liberty?" But as the arguments have developed, so have the stances on the positions, regardless of the positions themselves.  Democrats used to be the party of "keep your morality off my pursuit of happiness," but now you're more likely to see people who vote (R) saying "as long as you meet the low bar of not distressing my children in public, I'm more than happy to let you do your own thing  and to mind my own business."  The ones who vote (D)?  They're either saying "your disagreement with me is violence and it needs to be curbed whether or not you express it," or they're saying "You're perpetuating systematic if not acute violence and if promoting thought police is the best way to stop wrongthink from perpetuating white guilt, then so be it."

This has been their game for fifty-two years, but I think as their tent gets broader to include more obscure and artificial victim demographics, the tent poles of popularity won't be able to hold up all the canvas.  We're looking at pleas to accommodate people whose struggles have sunk to somewhere between "never experienced enough hardship not to take inconvenience personally" and "My coworkers oppress me with their coffee club because I prefer pop to java."  Sure, gender identity--whatever it is--is a more grave matter, but it's also something that usually is only called into question in cases of early abuse, and when it's not, is something that is usually outgrown when placed into its proper context (e.g. a girl might be a tomboy, but that doesn't make her a lesbian, nor does it make her a boy, even if it's not just a phase).

As for the boogaloo....

My first thought, wen I realized the "talks of CW2 are going mainstream" article wasn't just a report on that fact, was that it was an effort to preemptively paint it as a white nationalist movement.  Get the narrative in front of the truth, so to speak.

For one thing, white supremacists aren't ashamed of who they are.  They usually know to keep their mouths shut in mixed company but still tend to assume that everyone white still agrees with them secretly.  When they come out in force, there is little doubt.  I'll admit the Confederate flags muddy the waters a bit, but those being matched by Antifa flags, I don't think it's something one can honestly claim a difference of opinion on once the context is established (i.e. Lansing versus Minneapolis).

Secondly, for this to be white supremacists instead of Antifa, there would have to be protracted coordination between white bigots and BLM.  Do you seriously believe they would deign to do such?  Especially when the Ferguson riots and everything since have proved that urban American communities are enough of a powder keg not to need any outside help?  It supports their argument better than them planting shills and confederates to catalyze all the burning and looting and then claiming superiority.

It would also require them to be so numerous and well organized that they could spontaneously trigger riots not just in Minnesota, not just across the country, but in Europe and Asia.  Why would they even go to Korea to stage a riot?  Why do Europe and Asia care enough about a single additional case of police brutality ending in the death of a man with a rap sheet, to erupt like this?  I know our precious Wokes think they're so sensitive, but are they really so ethnocentric that they still think America is the center of the world?  Hong Kong is still getting crushed; why aren't we hearing about that from the MSM?

I mean, really--unless they're putting on white hoods, which they're not, they're not as organized as Antifa.  those confederate flags are over a hundred and fifty years old--not literally, but the movement--and these guys are pining for their erroneous dream of glory days; the MSM claims Antifa is a decentralized grassroots movement, but only sometimes, and they don't just bring flags to events, they have a de facto dress code, and a consistent M.O., and web sites where you can buy their swag.

The funniest part--not really, but you know what I mean--is all the concern some people are expressing about the lines out of the door at gun stores, where all the people are white.

Yeah, if you've only read the MSM stuff that puts white nationalism in the front of your mind, I can see the concern, but there's a glaring unasked question:

If it's the instigators of the riots who are buying guns, why did they wait until now to arm up, and if it's them, why are they falling back on bricks and molotov cocktails in the riots themselves?

I suspect a part of the answer is rioters bussed in from out of state can't get guns where they live, and don't want to risk getting caught during transport, so they fall back on the usual weapons of civilian insurrectionists.

And Antifa itself?  I don't know why people bother defending their legacy, no matter how lofty they claim their motives are.  "They're not really violent, violence just follows them." Do even they make that claim? Sure, they may not always do the provoking when real skinheads show up--usually it doesn't take much to get those guys to cross the line, no criticism there--but I submit it is not a coincidence that the two go together.  Especially when you see people in their uniform, and you see their flags, and you see them directing waiting rioters to particular storefronts and stashes of bricks, and then themselves get filmed breaking windows and starting fires.  After all that, the violence that spreads is a foregone conclusion.

Now, maybe Antifa are white supremacists in that condescending way that progressives tend to be--all compliments to minorities are backhanded, their claimed efforts and motives are patronizing and even infantilizing, and beyond the degree to which our self-proclaimed elites treat hoi polloi in general.  You know, how it's not just that white men actively held down all minorities and particularly black people but not particularly Chinese or Korean or Japanese people, but it's so ingrained and so pervasive that a victim can barely even make a healthful decision in his own life even if he's woke and unimpeded/*.  I'd certainly think so, considering they all seem to be white young men in black clothing and masks, and if I stuck to the MSM and social media I'd be told as much, but when you go to look them up...it's all suspiciously vague and oblique.

One might think they weren't really involved, if it weren't for the uniforms, and the flags, and the dearth of denying responsibility.

I learned a few things recently

And it's at least mostly my fault for not realizing them sooner.  Soon I'll post on where this is coming from and where it's going.

First, we've all heard about how socialism is slightly leftist, and communism is radically leftist (politically, anyway; I'm not sure how neatly Marx's vision maps onto the identity politics that pass for class warfare these days), and fascism and naziism radically rightist--or I guess, reactionary.

And you've heard me talk, at least if you've been snooping through my drafts, about these last two are actually wrong--that they're all leftist.

If you've read or seen Atlas Shrugged, let me remind you that of the scene where the government stooge shows up at Hank Rearden's foundry to tell him how to manage his orders.  It's still Rearden's facility, but this loss (or attempted loss) of authority to run it himself is an aspect of fascism.

The difference from socialism?  Socialism has more direct involvement; depending on the degree, industries may be nationalized and corporate management acts mainly as lieutenants to government agencies, or government agencies perform activities normally expected of the companies themselves. Roads aren't socialist, but the Eisenhower freeway system might be considered such; the FDA isn't quite fascist, but doctors and nurses who only receive federal stipends and are bound in their diagnoses and treatments by state instead of corporate actuaries would be communist.

So at fist I thought the accusations against libertarians and patriots and Republicans was just the Left projecting again, picking a random villain from recent history and speaking the name often in the hope that it sticks.  The USSR and Third Reich didn't get along well, so I wouldn't be surprised by lingering institutional animosity.

Well, it turns out that last bit is the crux of the biscuit.

I was trying to read up on Antifa the other day.  They're not much in the MSM currently, which surprised me until I stopped to thin about it.  The Wikipedia page turned out to be quite informative, though.  I knew it had started in Germany as a movement to oppose any residual Nazis or Naziism, but it turns out that is...not exactly wrong, but somewhat inaccurate, and not the whole picture by a long shot.  Well, communists being no true friends to Hitler or Stalin, they were happy to foment such action.  And what was something they did?  Categorize capitalism as fascism.

This actually makes no sense because the actual free market doesn't impose drudgery and toil on people.  Those things do happen, but it's an effect of the human condition, not a feature of capitalism.

But if you can dig up some early Cold War propaganda from that side of the Iron Curtain, you'll see all kinds of imagery about how Americans are wage slaves working in sweat shop conditions, while freedom and leisure for the soviet thanks to efficient central planning were just around the corner.

I used to work with a woman who emigrated from Ukraine after growing up there during the Cold War.  We used to laugh at how similar our attitudes as nations were toward each other--the other guys are bad, they live miserable lives, they're just going to bomb us if they decide to attack so all these infantry drills are silly, etc.  That was good time.

So okay, it makes sense on the propaganda level.  Conflate the existential opponent of communism with the historical one, then just make them sound even worse.

Thus I'm no longer frustrated when I see people compare the optics of German military culture to that of Latin American military culture, declare the latter to be an overall benign communism, and then force Germany to the other pole of a binary scheme; or even if they say "Well, there's communism versus capitalism on one axis, but then there's totalitarianism versus libertarian on another, and fascists are really free market totalitarians," which again makes no sense as such but when you live in a world where it's a question of degrees you can get away with it for a while even when you're being honest.

So that's the first thing.  The second dovetails with the first.

I was arguing with a loved one about some of the stuff that's been going on lately.  I know her personally so I can't dismiss her foggy thinking as another case of some anonymous idiot who thinks she's well informed because she consumes above average quantities of lies and propaganda.  I'm not sure I'll reach her because sometimes I have to end a conversation before I say something that would hit a little too close to home, but I have some hope in taking the indirect approach--like, if a discussion starts going sideways and she accuses me of relying on the lies of Fox News, I can remind her that none of the points I made were based on anything from Fox News.  It's also easier than getting caught up in a race to see who can send the most damning articles, and it helps me to keep an open mind if she brings up something I didn't know or actually was wrong about.

Anyway, she's been talking a lot about the patriarchy and white supremacy as if the whole country is 1950s Dixie.  I usually just ignore it and hope she'll learn I'm not interested in a discussion if she's coming out of the gate with name calling and middle school levels of nuance.  And then she sent me an article about the "boogaloo," which I'd heard of third or fourth hand as a sort of foreboding over how ripe the polarization in this country is going to get.  The article itself, of course, couched it all in terms of a white supremacy movement.  They didn't invoke the KKK or Tea Party, but when you've got the whole MSM on your side, even NBC can make the association while eliding labels and facts.

I'll write later about how the facts from that perspective don't add up; my point here is just that an epiphany I had watching the riot coverage on the they-call-themselves-news channels opened my eyes to my loved one's fears.

So for starters I don't blame her for having an objective fear of white nationalists.  Whether they're a credible threat, goodness never follows them, so I wouldn't be happy to hear about them gaining power or popularity even if it wasn't in my back yard.

But there's that "if" that made me suspicious.  Was this Screwtape scaring people into stocking up on fire extinguishers to deal with another flood?

What I noticed about the riots is that there seem to be three groups.  There's some overlap, but I think most of that is logistical or a subterfuge.  The first group is the actual protesters, people who are fed up and even strident but still in enough control to keep it from going past chanting and shouting and such.  This was a pretty mixed group.  The second group is the rioters, who as near as I could tell all were white people wearing black clothing and masks.  The third group is the looters, who partook of some recreational rioting but mostly raided stores for TVs and shoes and so on; it tragically perpetuates the stereotype so I'm not going to elaborate.

So I've been assuming, when no one was saying it, that the second group is Antifa.  Some might be the confederated grassroots types who think they're doing good and just not afraid to throw down with "actual" Nazis wherever they show up, but also the organizers who brought in pallets of bricks (check the Twitter feeds of the affected police departments; it's not just a rumor) and busted windows on the stores expected to be favored by the looters.

This is all going on and my dear loved one mentions a gun store near her home, where there was a line out the building all of white people.

She's white so I do find it a little precious for her to be so woke, but we can still talk about other things, so there's that.

My epiphany was that she made no distinction between the rioters I think are Antifa but she apparently doesn't (can't remember her ever using the word), the white supremacist boogeyman who dominates the news (I'm talking the specter of militant rednecks, not any actual people, except for Trump), and the white people she saw lined up at the store.  To her, it's all just escalation.

I'll save the rest for later.  Just wanted to point out that this really helped me understand the other side.

So I'm paying attention to the media....

I see a clip of a press conference where the governor of California says he's recruiting an "army" to start going door to door to check on people who are sheltering at home.  He says the next phase in that endeavor will be that, if someone tests positive but is living with people who test negative, the patient will be removed from his home and placed in some kind of care facility to..well I guess to ride out the disease and get what I hope to be actual treatment if necessary.

Got that?

During a pandemic of modest severity but significant (read:  self-inflicted) economic impact, a government official is recruiting civilian collaborators to round up people from their homes and stick them together somewhere.  Does this sound like anything students of history should recognize?

"Sticking people together somewhere," specifically nursing homes, is what got the governor of New York the worst infection rate in the country.  Maybe that was an honest mistake at the time, but in hindsight it was an obvious one and it needn't be repeated.

Meanwhile, next to New York we have Pennsylvania, and someone from that otherwise-fine state called in to Breitbart News to report that in her attempts to ensure treatments for the covid would be available to her mother who is in a nursing home, she was led via from facility management through the governor's office to the state department of health (whatever they call it), where they asked the mother's age and then said flat out that no treatment would be provided even if she tested positive.

To be fair, I don't know that this has been corroborated yet, but I can think of few dumber policies to enact.

Are you a post-Marxist communist who wants to get rid of some useless eaters this way?  It may well work, but if people start getting sick and not getting treatment, they will start infecting more valuable citizens, and there's your next wave of the pandemic.  You're just not going to be able to keep it under control by refusing to take certain obvious treatment steps.

But all that is not directly what my point is about.  I want to tie those things together with the other anecdotes we've heard about needless infractions on civil rights and thoughtless would-be concessions to people who want to reopen.

I'm talking people staying in cars in a parking lot and lone paddle boarders getting ticketed or arrested for violating social distancing.  I'm talking restaurants being told they can reopen but not with a seating capacity high enough to support a clientele that could provide enough custom for the restaurants to stay open.

The former is giving license to totalitarians in blue uniforms, to men who don't really want to protect and serve but just want to be able to drive fast and talk shit.  I'm sorry, I respect the institution and the badge, but there are people like that.

The latter is how how central planners failed to prevent bread lines in the Eastern Bloc (or possibly were able to deliberately effect them; I haven't looked at every case outside of Stalin and Mao).

So what I'm saying is this:

The natural goods are a lot like the moral goods that God gives us.  You can sacrifice a higher one for a more proximate one--lie to get out of jail, give up freedom for security--but statistically it will turn around to bite you in the ass.

"God will not be mocked" is not some warning that He is a bad sport who can't take a joke.  It is the insight that He cannot be without some blowback being put in motion--He's not just that vigilant; it simply can't happen.  It is the abstraction from the principle that if you burn your hand on a hot stove "I was only kidding" will not make it better.

So go ahead, criticize people who won't shut up about civil liberties if you want--again, I'll be fair, this is uncharted territory and we should all be patient with each other while we establish new precedents--but it's looking like they were right after all.

What people don't want to look at

Every so often—too often, yes—there is a mass shooting, and usually it’s a massacre. And there is a cry to ban guns. And it is pointed out that banning guns won’t make violence just stop and it won’t stop would-be criminals from utilizing other weapons or improvised weapons.

And this is admitted, but it’s pointed out that at least it would help.

And conservatives point out it wouldn’t be enough to make up for the other problems that would come from flouting the second amendment and effectively taking guns away from law abiding citizens but not other criminals or the government.

These are worthwhile things to discuss, don’t get me wrong.

But there is an opportunity here, and I think the reason it is not taken advantage of is that it doesn’t actually achieve the real, unstated goal.

You want to make even modest efforts to restrict school violence? Okay. Gun rights advocates have pointed out things they think would work better than a gun ban. So you’re not going to get a ban rammed through Congress tomorrow. So why not try to achieve the things that nobody is opposing?

Maybe it won’t be as good as your pet project, sure, but you already admitted you’d rather achieve a partial victory than none.

So how about it? Willing to put your money where your mouth is?

Or do you want to keep blaming the other side for every failure that results from your preference for ideological purity?

On crying wolf over "dog whistles"

If you’re the only one who hears them—and we know this is true because you’re the one going around telling people what they’re not hearing—maybe it’s not the accused who is racist and trying to use them to send some kind of secret signals to other metaphorical dogs.

Maybe you are.

Letting a good crisis go to waste

A year ago the secprogs were praying, after their manner, for a recession that would get Trump voted out of office in 2020. It does happen in such a circumstance; look at Carter and George H.W. Bush and Herbert Hoover.

But they can't seem to stick to one script, and in the era of social media, it's a lot harder to talk out of both sides of your mouth without the same audience hearing opposing stories from the same person. When there was a little less information and a lot more control, a lot of people will hear one bad story, and a lot of other people will hear another bad story, and most of the rest will hear both but only in small enough parts that it will seem less like a contradiction and more like a complex mass of bad news. The few who grok both prongs of the conspiracy for what they really are, were few enough not have much electoral impact.

Not anymore. Now most of us have the whole story at our fingertips. There's still more information and disinformation than we as a society are savvy enough to see all the way through yet, but the genie is out of the bottle.

So now when false rape accusations get made against high profile political appointees, we still have people picking sides based on inadequate evidence, but everybody can see how embarrassing the process of sausage making is. Faith in the old institutions is eroded, but not just in the targets that those who stooped to low tactics hoped to disparage.

And when a potential crisis arises in Hubei, the Dems poo-poo Trump for overreacting and don't let him do anything but cut off trade with China, and say "go to the Chinese New Year parade or you're racist."  When that turns out to be inadequate, they poo-poo him for not having done enough, and cite as evidence a bunch of watery out of context quotes that were intended to give people some hope and instill peace, and stay mum about having discouraged social distancing at a critical time because it may have been too early to know but racist signaling in retrospect is really not a fair counterpoint to a public health concern. When the damage that was done continues to blossom, they poo-poo him for his optimistic naïveté and start doing their Chicken Little impressions.

So now we're basically in a recession. If this all ended tomorrow, maybe it wouldn't qualify as a real recession; it's not so much that people are fiscally battening down the hatches to weather out a storm of low confidence, but everybody just putting their business on hold.  The demand is pent up, not gone, and the big companies that operate a lot on LTAs are stuck between trying to get out of them and just trying to manage them in the new situation.  But after a while people run out of the capacity to keep waiting, and businesses do board up, and workers do try to find alternative sources of income, and after a while longer the chances of the band getting back together start pointing at zero.

But even now this isn't really a recession. The stock market's behavior is just a symptom. What this is, is a crisis. And a crisis is like a war: the leaders who demonstrate the willingness and intent, in word and deed, to help America survive and thrive, are the ones who will keep or gain the reins of power until normality returns.

But the Dems have been telling us for over a decade now that, either by name or by effect, America needs to end, and we either ought to be subsumed in either some kind of global identity or anonymized under a swarm of immigrants and intersected identities that still think the brass ring known as the American dream is still here to be grasped.

Whatever the world as a whole is going through, these considerations are a luxury that Americans are decreasingly willing to indulge in. We finally have a real taste of toilet paper shortages and bread lines, and "well, at least the billionaires can't hoard any more than the rest of us" no longer sounds so comforting.

In the end, who is more likely to keep the power?  The known quantity, or the challenger who has no relevant experience (remember when that was a meaningful criticism)?  In the end, who is more likely to win the election?  The guy who stumbles along the way but at least tries to remind us that this isn't the end of the world and is actually trying to do something, or the guy who still thinks pronouns and replacing convicts in prison with socially distant paddle boarders are more pressing concerns than toilet paper and access to food?

Governor Whitmer, if you were trying to recoup your executive failure by appealing to Trump to shut down Michigan for you...

...this was not the way to do it.

See here for my original, recent post on the Michigan governor's "audition for VP" theory.

But she ran primarily on a "fix the roads" platform, which to be fair was a high priority before the pandemic.  That's kind of like Ralph Nader running on an airbags platform, except she won.  Now what, though?  This is harder than a state infrastructure crusade, isn't it?

Maybe the powers that be are thinking "ja wohl, she might be our kind of people after all," and hope that in seven or fifty-five months people will only remember the name and face when they go into the booth.

So they for three years periodically accused Trump, by dint of doing anything they didn't like, of being a dictator, as if exercising his duties in well precedented ways they didn't approve in his particular case, constituted by itself or in any degree tyranny.

But then the Wuhan virus hits and after poo-poohing him for overreacting, they "suddenly" panic and demand martial law, they demand shelter in place rules, they demand money be printed (or at least taxed) to support people who can't go to work and then divert some of it to the Kennedy Center, which lays off performers anyway.

My favorite example: the governor of Michigan begs after a fashion Trump to do the things I enumerated above, and then does them herself when she gets tired of waiting.  She should have done it herself immediately; if she has the power now, she had it when this all started too, and it was her duty to tend to Michigan more than it is his.

Like a friggin' cop who shows up and then calls 911.  Call for backup if you want, but you still have a job to do while you're waiting.

Apparently her strident posturing is to win the electoral affections of Biden, but I think it worked the other way. I'll explain in a minute.

Trump has the authority to impose martial law. He does not have the authority to violate the peaceable assembly clause. Whether groups of ten in this circumstance don't meant the peaceable criterion is debatable, but either way it's not the president's purview to regulate such things.
A governor, on the other hand, can make the state national guard enforce her will to some degree, including forcing large groups of people to disperse. It's been done before.

Ms. Governor of Michigan, the Mayor Ray Nagin Memorial Bus Depot is on line one. They'd like to interest you in some ironic optics about exercising executive power.

So it's weird how the Left seems so ready to invest more and more power in authorities and then when they have an opportunity to exercise some power, they run crying to daddy.  Even if daddy is a Republican.  Do they think they can bait and frame him with something more unpopular than their esoteric political aesthetics?  Do they still fail to understand they don't have the clout to overcome all the Constitutional checks and balances and electoral memory that would prevent them first from inventing tyrannical laws and then preventing the other side from ever getting the chance to use them?

Best I can figure is it's sort of a litmus test. Nagin failed; he did provide an opportunity to score some cheap points against Bush (but in those days that was like open mic night), but he did not show that he could step up and set an example. The governor of Michigan failed in the same way; she screamed her rhetoric but seems angry only because orangemanbad didn't do as soon as she wanted what she should have done, by her own power at any time, until she was I guess forced against her will to stand in the breach.  Lucky for her Trump's not running for governor of Michigan.

Pols who can take the reins in a crisis have a chance of a national career. Some people who never have the opportunity of such a crisis get there anyway. But pols who don't, finish their careers like varsity athletes who peaked in high school, periodically calling to the public mind what was so important about them but never accomplishing anything greater ever again. And I wonder if the DNC looks at it exactly that way.

Which is not to criticize. It's not uncommon to see people make a professional error of some magnitude and then find themselves, whether they ever realize it or not, off the career track. But it's interesting and it makes me wonder to what extent such figures are merely tolerated for what little they can contribute after all, and not "encouraged" to move on and let newer blood prove itself.

This is a little more politically hot than I usually like to get into, but...

...have you seen #filmyourownhospital?

I suppose there will always be a few hospitals that aren't as busy as the ones that we keep seeing footage of on the nightly news, but after a while it will be fair to ask "is the real crisis ever really going to happen?"

It may still be premature on my part, true, but I'm starting to smell a parallel between a couple things.

The first is three years of "the proof of Trump's collusion with Russia is imminent."

The second is "the coronavirus surge is no longer racist paranoia but imminent."

The scientist in me is interested in seeing what kind of data we'll get from this epidemiological experiment.  But the historian in me wonders how many patriotic sheriffs are out there who will refuse to support the encroachment on civil liberties that is happening because of all this.

I'm not talking about real threats to public health.  I'm talking about one guy paddle boarding by himself getting accosted by two boats and arrested.  I'm talking about 19 year old Pennsylvania girls getting $200 tickets for driving after "curfew" despite being socially distant from everyone except the cop that pulled her over in the first place.  

I'm also talking about the strange policies that sound like they're supposed to reduce human contact but in effect only make it worse.  Does a store get 100 customers during the ten hours it's open each day?  That's about ten customers an hour.  Cut that down to five hours and the hundred customers now have half the time to go shopping, and if it's an essential business like a grocery store, people on average aren't going to stop coming.  In the short run it may, since people will binge shop and then stay home, but when people come back to find empty shelves, they'll come back more often hoping for a restock, and thus we have more shopping trips than we would have seen otherwise.  So we have 100 customers coming in five hours instead of ten, and thus instead of ten customers per hour, we have twenty.  Twice as many.  Was this just stupid, or was it irrelevant to the real goal of the exercise?

The historian in me also wonders if the patriots who are staying at home for now and issuing warnings about post-Weimar Germany on social media will notice when the last chance to stand up, to draw the line in the sand, comes and passes.

I recently heard...

...that, due to the economic slowdown from corona, about 1/3 of all investment wealth (I think in the US) has been lost.

 This predominantly affects the wealthy, since they not just invest more in terms of absolute number of dollars, but tend to invest a larger proportion of their income or otherwise-liquid assets in businesses, the stock market, etc.

 Is this considered an acceptable mode of wealth redistribution?

I don't always buy the political stuff Neil deGrasse Tyson puts out... (edited)

...but when I do it seems like it's going to be one of those "the Left eats its own" cases.

I saw recently a tweet of his from late last summer trying to put into perspective the different high profile causes of death in America.  He showed how things like the flu and cancer cause tens of thousands of deaths a year but the total number of school shootings deaths is still in the hundreds.

Of course, we can't let facts get in the way of condemning guns, so someone tweeted back how we're doing so much to reduce the number of deaths to influenza and cancer but we're doing f-all about guns, and that's why people are disproportionately upset.

The hell "we" aren't.  

Hell, I'll say it again without sarcasm quotes:  the hell we aren't.

Cosmetic AR-15 bans, bump stock bans, permits to buy ammunition, magazine capacity restrictions, "gun-free zone" laws and signs where laws might not apply, increase in the presence of "resource officers" at schools around the country.

It's not that we aren't doing anything.  It's that most of the things they try aren't working.  NDT's point is that getting mad but insisting we try the same ineffective things even harder is not going to help.  We've been fighting the flu and cancer for  as long as people have been getting sick, and yes, we have made progress, but the one is a disease that looks like it will never really go away, and the other is a disease that really we barely even understand.

Really, it's a bad analogy.  Let me draw some parallels.

You’re not working to reduce medical errors by taking away scalpels.
You’re not working to stop the flu by taking away tissues.
You’re not working to stop suicides by taking away guns. Well, you are, but....
You’re not working to stop car accidents by taking away cars or roads.
But you think taking away guns will stop homicides, and are tone deaf to the UK's creeping knife restrictions.

Why don't we get more angry at people who take a dump or sneeze and don't wash their hands?  Why don't we put more social pressure on people who still smoke in public or put undertested chemicals in food or household or other personal products?  

We've done some of that and it's helped, but there's no controversy there, even though people are still getting sick and coming in to work.

There's barely any controversy about when armed security refuses to confront a shooter, even though that's the one thing they're trained and paid to do.

Historically though we haven't held the school shooters responsible, and I'm not talking about the fact that some of them were legally juveniles.

Thank God the discussion is finally starting to turn towards what makes people go postal.

Yeah..."Postal."  Remember when that's what the problem was?

And like with corporate health and safety policies, regular people wake up from the latest environmental fad and realize it was a one dimensional issue after all.

What do I mean by that?

Look back to my brief harangue about how (in particular) New York banned plastic grocery bags, demanding we buy reusable ones or revert to paper bags--but we have to pay for those, and the first time I got one, the bag ruptured twice just in the process of picking it up.

Some of you are old enough to remember when plastic got popular, on the grounds that it was easier to recycle than brown bag paper.  Maybe the technology has changed and paper really is lower impact these days.

But in their push to ride the crest of this green trend, everyone failed or declined to consider other factors that should have gone into the calculus.

Maybe there aren't enough people like me who like using the bags as bathroom trash can liners to make a difference.  I'm skeptical of that, but to be fair all my data are anecdotal.

Back when the Chinese restaurants were open, orders were often placed in plastic bags even if they were first in a paper bag, because plastic is waterproof so if my mo shu leaked I wouldn't get stains on the passenger seat in my car.  Most people don't order enough at one time to fill up a cardboard box like is sometimes used, and those are bulky enough you'd need to have a catastrophic spill to soak all the way through before getting home, but the restaurant probably wouldn't have enough boxes to go around, anyway.

Anyway, fast forward to the pandemic and everybody suddenly realized that reusable bags can accrue germs when the sit on the floor of the car, or on the ground, or soak up spills.  That's not good for the home team.  Or for the immunocompromised team.  So now plastic bags are back on the menu.

I'm just going to leave it at that.  Next time, can we at least try to anticipate some unintended consequences first?

So now Biden was accused of...things far worse than hair sniffing.

Back in the 90s, this was, and she told people at the time, so this isn't some Russian-fomented bimbo eruption.

If you like your evidence from one side of the spectrum, there's a sufficient article  here.  Another one that is in the Lifestyle section instead of Politics or...I don't even know if they have something like a police blotter section...can be found here if you want another example of the different levels at which journalistic bias can be engineered.  If you want to read something from the other side of the spectrum, look here.

The flip-flopping in social media by people who were outraged by the mass of accusations they felt added up to evidence against Brett Kavenaugh, the insistence that it doesn’t matter because Trump has more accusations (I'm not even sure that's true) just telegraphs you're not on any moral high ground, you're just doing the marketing work for your favorite team.  (h/t to Shoe0nHead for the metaphor).

If you can't even demonstrate that your side is actually better, if your best attempts to do so only make it worse, why should we be swayed by the skin suit you peeled off a moral human being and put on to parade around in front of us?  Didn't it occur to you we'd be even more off-put?

Same thing with the virus "hoax.”  Anybody who says Trump meant "the virus is a hoax" instead of "this is another political opportunity like the hoaxes that brought vaporous impeachment charges," especially since he was already trying to do something about it, wants it to mean that, don’t even want to acknowledge the perfectly neutral fact that he was in the crosshairs for years, it failed, and they’re trying to do it again with this—without even having to argue about whether it’s real.

America is so laden with propaganda...

...that white, tenured professors and journalists who barely have three credit hours each of history and economics still succeed in making generations of Americans believe that capitalism leads to a few rich billionaires and a destitute lower class, without even thinking to ask the questions "where'd the middle class come from, then?" and "why aren't we talking about the dearth of historical evidence that any alternative to capitalism has not just fewer billionaires but fewer middle class people and more poor people?"

Never mind Russia....

We need to look into China's meddling in American political affairs.  

The election isn't here yet so the disruption of legitimate political activity could still be minimized--at least, where there's nothing untoward that might be uncovered--and any collusion not uncovered would still be chilled as dishonest agents who wanted to stay below the radar, kept themselves below the radar.

Why is that when pro-choicers point to programs intended to help break the cycle of poverty as part of their efforts that have the effect of reducing abortion...

...they don't allow pro-lifers to make the same argument?

Maybe someone volunteers at soup kitchens, helps minorities in juvenile detention learn reading and other life skills, but if he goes to pray one rosary across the street from an abortion clinic or goes online, he's accused of not taking a holistic approach to honoring the dignity of human life and therefore isn't sincere at all.  Meanwhile his accusers do nothing but show up to shout at him, vote D, and then say "we pay our taxes to support these things."

Yeah, and he pays the same taxes.  Then he donates time and money willingly where he thinks it will make the biggest difference.


"Studies have shown 100% of abortions are carried out on women who don't want to be pregnant, and 0% on conservative white Christian men, so butt out."

Nice rhetoric, but you can only get that 100% figure by including women who don't want an abortion but aren't allowed to be shown alternatives, and women who want to have their babies but are dragged to clinics by their boyfriends who may use phrases like "do the responsible thing" but actually mean "avoid paternity hearings," and girls who are reluctant but undecided yet whose mothers drag them to the clinic on the grounds of "you live under my roof and I drive you around and feed you and I'm supposed to raise you, but since I failed to teach you to be 'responsible' then you must also have not learned what it takes to be a mom, so instead of showing you we're doing this," and girls who are reluctant or undecided yet whose boyfriends drag them to clinics while using phrases like "do the responsible thing" but actually mean "avoid statutory rape charges."


As for the 0%...there are atheist pro-lifers, and liberal pro-lifers, and female pro-lifers, and none of them is negligible in number, so why don't you stand your ground and defend your position, and log off or stay home for a while when you get tired of being reminded that people exist who disagree with you?

So much hangs in the balance....

Earlier this evening Mark Levin was justly mocking various high level leftoids for using melodramatic rhetoric about the importance of the November elections--stuff like "civilization as we know it hangs in the balance!"

I think, though, that they're technically correct.

If they win, the United States will be the point source for more societal poison administered by marxists and the caliphate, pushing us farther down a sleep and slippery path to cultural suicide.   This just happens to be what they want, as long as they can keep their hands on the reins.

If they lose, western civilization as we know it will last a little bit longer, and who knows how much there will be to hope for in 2022 or 2024?

This is how one knows one lives in a post-Christian society

They go on social media and post memes like "If you see a problem, you can pray about it, and it will be quick and easy and absolve you of the responsibility of solving it, and it won't solve anything, but if you put in the effort, it won't be quick or easy or absolve you of responsibility, but you will have solved it."

All the while assuming that what you and they might agree are social problems are things every decent human being anywhere across the world and throughout history would would also recognize as social problems that both must and can be fixed (or, at least, deserve the attempt).

This is, of course, not true.  

Look back to the founding of our country.  Most people at the time were not giving slavery as an institution a good prognosis in the long run, but there was some doubt as to whether it might be eradicated entirely and freedmen might really be able to enjoy the benefits of all that rhetoric about liberty.  

Look farther back, and you find concubines common not just in secular royal courts but even in the Vatican where it was doubted that the ideal of sexual continence was even possible.  I know, rumors and scandalous news articles these days support the notion that it's aiming a bit high, but plenty of priests and religious have shown that it is possible and that it need not settle for being honored more in the breach.  

Look elsewhere, and almsgiving is an obscure concept.  In India dying people are stepped over.  In China you are likely to be asked why you're tipping the homeless.  When religious orders go to such countries and do what little they can with the resources they can scrounge up, they're criticized for not meeting FDA standards (which no one outside the US honors, so...ethnocentric much?).

In the West, though?  Helping the destitute and lifting up the downtrodden are so built into our society that it doesn't occur to these "your faith doesn't fix things, I do" folks that helping the hopeless  doesn't occur to just everyone.  It's so ingrained in our secular culture they don't realize it came from religion--and the Christian religion in particular--or that they wouldn't even be motivated to criticize if they hadn't been raised to believe even that much.

Which leads to some interesting dynamics, where the believers start bringing science and logic to the table and it's the unbelievers who start getting wishy-washy about philosophical questions like "what's a person?" and "Who gets human rights?" when they're not even getting basic facts about embryology right--or they choose to categorically forget that there are pro-lifers who not only disbelieve in Christ, but disbelieve in any sort of god at all.

Then they come around and twist the establishment clause and try to school us with more memes like  "You have the right to hold your religious beliefs, but you do not have the right to impose them on others."  

Well, friend, I happen to believe murder and assault and theft and (perhaps with qualifications, but let's not get off track) the male gaze are sins, and my reasons are in no small part religious.  Do you want to take those off the table too?  

Two things I encounter in the world that make me most confident that the Catholic Church is the true Church

1)  Anti-Catholic apologists who take a contrary position to some straw man and, despite all attempts to clarify and correct, refuse to acknowledge that their understanding was in error, even in the interest of developing more relevant arguments against Rome.  They've got their arguments pat, by gum, and there's no need to let facts get in the way.

Not that this is always the case, but it happens often enough that I'm left with the impression that lame arguments are favored because good ones just aren't available.

e.g.:
"Catholics think they get a second chance at heaven with purgatory."
"No we don't.  Our fate is sealed at the moment of death; purgatory is just a matter of how Christ's sanctifying graces get applied to us once the judgment is rendered."
"That still sounds like a second chance."
"No, it really doesn't.  We're saying that for those of us who get invited to the wedding feast of the Lamb, some of us are met at the door by the maitre'd and told we will be provided with a shower and formalwear before the party starts.  It's a service that is only offered to people holding an invitation.  It's not the same thing as a bouncer stopping you and telling you to go make yourself presentable in the hope of finding an invitation that had blown into a storm drain or something."
"Seems like it to me."
"Well, it shouldn't.  Purgatory does not get you saved.  Purgatory gets people sanctified.  Only saved people get to have it.  Even if you don't accept it, if you won't recognize the distinction I'm trying to make here, I can only conclude you are willfully or shamefully declining to engage the argument, and are persisting in your misconceptions, that the Church teaches something it doesn't teach, and therefore your arguments are not intended for my ears, and I will not bother myself with more of us talking past each other."
"Well, it still sounds like..."
"I'm sorry, but 'it sounds like' isn't really an argument."
"Well then, it looks like--"
sigh.
Do not judge as man seeth, for man seeth those things that appear, but the Lord beholdeth the heart.

As it has been said, if this is the best argument that can be made against Rome, then the argument for Rome must have some meat to it.

2)  Anti-Catholic apologists who are apparently so zealous about saving Catholics from Rome they forget to be charitable and develop sweeping powers of telepathy that they handily employ in alternatingly attempting to prick our consciences and flat-out judge us (perhaps with only intent of doing the former).  The amateur ones tend to demand that Catholicism be proven by Protestant means (which is largely impossible, unless one proves that Protestant means are self-defeating, since non-Catholic policies of exegesis and ecclesiology had to be invented to justify the Reformation in the first place), and failing the presentation of a compact answer, declare themselves head and shoulders above the confusion.  The professional ones (of this sort--not conflate them with people who make a living doing this sort of thing) tend to dredge up the material that usually goes into Catholic arguments, declare the preponderance of history to be on their side, and conclude that we Catholics are too stupid or lazy to find our own way out of the maze of Romanism.  These claims are quite bold, considering they are often repeated liberally, and often applied to individual arguments that are only intended to rebut particular claims, often to individuals who have not contributed enough to the debate to allow any fair party with the normal range of senses to judge the extent of their education, let alone the quality of their motivation or the state of their soul--and oddly, often paired with reminders that they are only being rude out of a charitable concern for our eternal destiny.
Some people do have a gift of discernment, but applying it so sloppily, like a politician would twist the words of an opponent, only suggests that the alleged discerner is not accurately gauging the knowledge intuited to him, or that he is merely speculating being judgmental for political or personal reasons, or that he is lying. In none of these cases can he be relied on to provide meaningful information at face value.