Current Affairs – US

In the past 24 hours I have observed the following on social media:

1. Different commenters describing the opposition by IBM to the Texas “bathroom bill” as “political communism” and “fascism”.
2. A commenter on LInkedIn declaring that the campaign to force BenchMark Capital to divest their investment in Uber (following the scandals that led to the departure of the previous CEO Travis Kalanick) is the revenge of “the PC Lib stranglehold”
3. An assertion that I am “biased” because I posted a couple of rather pointed messages to Facebook about the demonstration in Charlottesville (which, I have to remind readers, featured a drive-at-a-crowd murder by a man who seems to have been on the same side as the original demonstrators).

(1( and (2) are excellent examples of attempted argument by cutting and pasting slogans. This is about on a par with attempting to argue using memes, which for some reason people seem to think is an effective method of persuasion on social media.
Here’s the problem. Cutting and pasting slogans and memes is not making an argument. It simply demonstrates that the commenter can cut and paste. It is analagous to plagiarizing content for your high school essay and expecting the teacher to give you a good grade. Most teachers, if the determine that the content is cut and pasted, will give a failing grade, because absolutely no original thought went into the process. Ditto arguing in slogans and memes. That’s not your voice. It’s the voice of a sloganeer, who in all probability did not have a cogent argument in the first place, hence they used slogans. I cannot take this form of communication seriously. it is fundamentally lazy and unserious. It also tends to show that the commenter is confused or incoherent, as in calling IBM “communist” and “fascist” simultaneously.
3 is interesting. So, I am biased.
OK.
We all have biases. This is not revelatory, nor is it an argument.
On one level it is a statement of the obvious. On another level, however, it is a form of indirect speech. It is an attempt at a shut-down of the conversation, as in “I am not taking you seriously because you are biased”. It is, in some respects, a form of the ad hominem fallacy.
If somebody wants to be taken seriously in discussion, they need to stay away from rhetorical tricks like this one, and, you know, construct an argunent that contains a proposition for which they offer evidence.

A collection of nativists and racists, some of them wearing Nazi-themed clothing items, have just demonstrated in Charlottesville VA.
A guy driving a car also murdered a counter-demonstrator, and injured a number of other people.
All of us who dislike authoritarianism and racism are pissed off. These events tell us a lot about the pathology of many US citizens, and it is not a pretty pathology.
Being pissed off is OK.
What is not OK is for people opposed to the nativists and racists to try organizing the same persecution against them for their beliefs that they would probably attempt in a heartbeat if they were allowed to. That would be Un-American, and would also be descending below their level.
It is not a crime to be a racist or a fascist, or a Sovereign Citizen, or a Marxist, or an anarchist, or a member of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Everybody is entitled to their views, no matter how weird, wacky, unpleasant or repugnant, and they are also entitled to express them.
Whether they get to express those views without consequences depends on time, place and context. The First Amendment mostly only applies to government bodies, so if, for example, an employer in an “at will” state discovers that one of their employees was wearing Nazi regalia and yelling slogans, and they decide to fire that employee, they can probably do that. Whether it is a reasonable action may become a matter of debate. Personally I am against punitive actions against individuals based merely on constitutionally protected actions, since it tends to convert the individuals into martyrs, and can lend their actions a gravitas and credibility that they would not otherwise attain.
If these racists and nativists start to actively organize to subvert the democratic process, or start engaging in violent or illegal acts, then I hope that law enforcement throws the book at them. I hold the same opinion about Antifa and other anarchist organizations. Until they do engage in illegal acts, however, we need to combat their ideas and proposals peacefully, and not start to engage in petty harrassment and persecution.

One of the characteristics of fascists is their contempt for democratic processes and institutions. They regard their party and leaders as the only legitimate group capable of governing, and the opposition are demonized and derided as unpatriotic and subversive.
They also, sooner or later, attempt to subvert and destroy the democratic process, usually by the tactic of claiming that the process is illegitimate because it is biased or rigged against them. Their reaction to suggestions that Donald Trump may have committed enough malfeasance to justify his removal from office (using the checks and balances in the Constitution and the legal system) is instructive, and backs up my conclusion that their worldview is profoundly contemptuous of democratic process and norms.
This pathology is alive and well amongst many of those partisans who supported Donald Trump in 2016, and Trump’s active and passive enablers in the Republican Party. There are also numerous supporters of that worldview in the media and on the internet.
JJ MacNab’s tweet summarizes the pathology on display this weekend quite well.

As far as I am concerned, we are reaching the point where the people who supported Donald Trump in 2016 have a fundamental decision to make. Whether they like it, or even want to accept it, they were enabling the pathology that we see surfacing in Charlottesville this weekend when they voted for Trump in 2016. Trump, throughout his campaign, issued both subtle and unsubtle messages to nativists and fascists that he was sympathetic to their worldview. He has populated his ranks of advisors with nativists and fascist sympathizers.
The people who voted for Donald Trump can claim that they didn’t know what they were going to get. They damn well should know now.
Trump voters have to decide whether they want to speak up against the sort of racist, fascist groups who are marching today, or keep quiet. If they speak up, they may well be forgiven and gain back credibility. if they keep quiet, their credibility simply leaches away, like water in dry soil.

We live in a strange world where it is increasingly difficult to be pragmatic and thoughtful without one or another group of people excoriating your worldview.
I have been accused directly (leaving aside the juveniles who prefer to substitute “libtard” for anything resembling an argument) of being arrogant, lacking empathy, and being too sympathetic to nasty people on multiple occasions in the recent past.
Accusing somebody of “arrogance” is what is known as tone trolling. It is a complaint about perceived style, not substance. If people want to discuss something with me, they need to stick to substance. If they want to make it about my “arrogance”, I’m not playing. That simply allows them to retreat into dismissal based on emotion. It reveals them as unserious.
The “lacking empathy” and “being too sympathetic” allegations are much more interesting. To me, they are actually rooted in a misconception of the meaning of the words empathy and sympathy, which are not interchangeable.
Let’s take the example of a person who is a hardcore alcoholic, unable to control their intake of that substance. They may have been through multiple failed attempts at rehab, but they are unable to stop uncontrolled ingestion of alcohol, and their life is slowly spiralling downwards, out of control. Outside observers can see nothing good in their future, absent a change in behavior.
I have a lot of empathy for those kinds of people. They are trapped in a dangerous place, and their lives are not in the slightest bit positive or fun. This must be horrible.
However, my sympathy for many of them is limited, since in many cases they have been given multiple chances to change their behavior, usually at family or public expense, and they have somehow been unable or unwilling to take those chances and make something of them. To recycle an old saying, they have visited the Last Chance Saloon more than once.
Unlimited sympathy often results in excessive tolerance. This in turn results in people who are behaving badly being enabled to continue their bad behaviors.
To use another example, a friend of my ex-wife was married to a bully. His bullying behavior was learned from his father, who was an abusive, bullying family patriarch. The main reason why he was the abusive bullying patriarch was that the rest of the family walked on eggshells around him at family events, unwilling to confront his bad behavior by challenging him to stop behaving like an asshole. As he saw it, his behavior was OK because nobody was complaining about it.
Empathy and sympathy are not the same concepts. Beware that conflation, since it can be used by people at both binary ends of an issue to justify their own positions by attacking yours claiming that you either have too much empathy/sympathy, or not enough. When you hear or read that kind of messaging, turn on your bullshit detector.

In the last month, I have been informed in two separate discussions of the following:

1. I would change my stated opinions on abortion if only I talked with a woman who has had an abortion

2. I would modify my stated opinions on law enforcement if I went on a police beat or did some training about police work

The implication in both of these contexts is that because I have never had an abortion, or worked as a police officer, my views on both of these topics are deficient and can be ignored. I suspect the people making these points both believed that I lack empathy with the other side’s viewpoints.
I call bullshit on this.
We form views and opinions all of the time on subjects about which we have no practical experience. It doesn’t automatically make our opinions worthless. What really matters is whether viewpoints and opinions are based on the processing of facts and information in a way that allows us to not only justify those viewpoints to ourselves (which can be rather easy due to confirmation bias) but also to others.
Both (1) and (2) above are intellectually lazy forms of retreat from good-faith argument. They are a form of shut-down rhetoric. They substitute “you don’t know what you are talking about” for reasoned discourse.
In both of these cases, the people trying these rhetorical devices also fail to realize that, being the sort of careful person that I am, I actually do have some knowledge on both topics derived from talking to people from a different viewpoint. I have talked with two women in the UK who had abortions. I was married to a woman in the UK whose father and middle son were both serving police officers. I talked to them extensively about the day to day reality of law enforcement in the UK.
So, when you try to steer a conversation with me by accusing me (in a roundabout way) of lacking empathy by virtue of lack of knowledge of people with different viewpoints, you’re signalling that you are less interested in a good-faith discussion than you are in shutting down the interaction and escaping back into the security of your own worldview.

…a supposed supporter of Donald Trump. However, as this analysis shows, the account fails to pass the smell test.

Folks, when Barack Obama was President, I never took much notice of the activities of Michelle Obama. That was because, as I recall, her name was not on the ballot in the two Presidential elections.
I similarly take relatively little notice of the activities of Melania Trump, for the same reason. I would have to say that my level of interest in the family of the current POTUS is slightly higher, but only for the reason that the current POTUS seems to think that it is OK for him to have family members take his place at sessions of international summits with other country leaders. As far as I can recall, this did not happen under the previous POTUS. It is also, in geopolitical and government management terms, a Really Bad Idea.
As for the weird concept of the wives of Presidents being “classy” or not “classy”, well, I never heard a male person described as “classy” in the same context, which makes me think that the idea of “class” in this context is a male judgment. In other words, so what?
As I said at the outset, I don’t generally vote for political candidates based in any way on the image or superficial behavior of their spouses. Maybe when a politician tries to run for office while married to a paroled axe-murderer I will take a slightly different view, but not at this time.

…brings a new complexity to the phrase “it’s complicated”…

…courtesy of the ACLU, which has filed an Amicus Brief in support of the defendants to coal business owner Bob Murray’s attempt to silence media outlets because They Are Mean To Him.