Musings from an iconoclast and hater of nonsense
Jim Wright points out a pervasive media double standard when reporting on social unrest.
White people be like: it's not a riot, yo. It's a celebration! https://t.co/GQYw7u1b2e
— Stonekettle (@Stonekettle) September 25, 2016
LOOK: Tennessee fans are burning couches in celebration of beating Florida https://t.co/CgJn8hIY9v pic.twitter.com/6Xqiv2v9oN
— CBS Sports CFB (@CBSSportsCFB) September 25, 2016
One of the drivers of the current trend towards nativism and xenophobia in the Western world is the Golden Age Fallacy. People imagine the world as they think it once was. Usually that feels like nirvana, at least compared to today. The fact that the world 100 years ago was a much more dangerous place on many levels, and they might not even have made it past early adulthood, much less lived to old age, is never considered.
One of the myths that nativists cling to is what I term the “pull up the drawbridge” myth. This myth is based on the idea that because a country was self-sufficient in the past, it should be easy to return to those Good Old Days. We see it in the grand pronouncements of Donald Trump, who has promised to cancel just about every trading agreement that the USA has with the rest of the world. He seems to think that the USA can go back to being some sort of trading island, the original shining beacon of freedom, just without the pesky problems of interacting with those inferior nations. Well, the USA would still interact with them. What I believe that Donald Trump hopes will happen is that the USA will simply send out a carrier group or two to “persuade” other countries to do our bidding or give us Stuff (like oil). In other words, a return to exploitative militaristic colonialism.
This story unfolding in South Korea offers a stark reminder that the “country as island” worldview is beyond obsolete. Hanjin, one of the world’s largest container shipping companies, has formally lurched into bankruptcy.The company had been in financial trouble for some time, but the creditor banks have now triggered the bankruptcy by refusing to extend any more credit.
The result is likely to be massive disruption to other businesses, the entire container shipping industry sector, and possibly impacts to countries. You could not get a better illustration of the realities of modern international trade. The mess is going to take years to sort out. Right now, dozens of Hanjin ships are impounded in ports or aimlessly sailing in international waters to avoid legal actions.
There is a bigger underlying story also, namely that, like the airline industry, the container shipping industry sector has been largely unprofitable for years, due mainly to chronic over-capacity. The recent downturn in Chinese exports exposed the underlying lack of viability of many container shipping companies and the network of suppliers (mainly shipyards) that fuelled the industry’s growth. Many of the non-viable businesses will probably be bailed out by governments, because businesses like shipyards are labour-intensive and therefore politically “too big to fail”.
Now, on one level, I could see fans of “pull up the drawbridge” arguing that this is precisely the reason why the USA needs to back out of those pesky bilateral trading agreements and Go It Alone. That is superficially attractive, but then the practical question emerges of how to do this. We can see a real-world example unfolding right now in the UK, where the government is now trying to work out how the hell it is going to negotiate the UK out of the EU, in accordance with the Leave vote in the recent referendum. It is going to be a train-wreck that may cause the break-up of the UK.
Leaving the interconnected world is not an option. Well, it is an option, if you want to push your country into a recession that might make the Great Depression seem like a minor economic blip.
“I’m offended”.
I found a posting on my Facebook this morning saying this.
It’s about the the controversy over obeisance to the national flag and the National Anthem (as if you couldn’t guess).
I’m offended.
OK.
So what do you expect me to do about it?
Seriously.
And why are you telling everybody this?
I don’t know, but I think I can make one or two educated guesses.
Firstly, you are emotionally disturbed by whatever it is you are talking about. People who are emotionally unaffected by events almost never use phrases like “I’m offended”. They might say “I disagree with xxxx”, but “I’m offended” is primarily an expression of a reaction that is rooted in emotion.
Secondly, you seem to think that the rest of the world needs to know that you are offended.
I’m not sure why you think that is a good idea.
You see, when I read people huffing and puffing and using phrases like “I’m offended”, my experience of interacting with these people leads me to conclude that what they are really saying is “I intensely dislike what other people are doing and saying on an emotional level and they need to stop doing it. NOW”.
This is where I am always reminded of Robin Skinner’s perceptive comment about abusive relationships.
“People who cannot control their emotions react by trying to control other people’s behavior”.
One of the virtues of living in a reasonably free society is that, most of the time, other people don’t get to tell you what to do, or what to think.
But “I’m offended”, in my experience, is far removed from that approach. The people using the phrase are invariably emotionally invested in their view about whatever it is that has offended them to the point that they think that the cause of their offense deserves to be forced to change their behavior or sanctioned, penalized, eliminated, whatever. (it’s the source of the satirical Donald Fagen song lyric from the title song of “The Nightfly”… “So you say there’s a race of men in the trees/You’re for tough legislation, thanks for calling/We wait all night for calls like these”).
It is no coincidence that one of the more common reactions to the actions of Colin Kaepernick in kneeling for the National Anthem has been a call for him to leave the USA and live somewhere else. On one level it is just a juvenile discussion-closer, unworthy of being taken seriously. But the sentiment is actually rather revealing. People who claim to be offended almost never want to discuss or negotiate with whoever or whatever they perceive offends them. They just want whatever it is that offends to stop. NOW.
It is at this point that Skinner’s comment becomes highly appropriate.
So you are offended? So what.
Firstly, why should I care?
You control your own reactions. If you cannot keep an even keel and a cool head about an issue, that is not my problem. It’s your problem. It gives you a problem with me, because I am unlikely to be sympathetic to a person who cannot make an intellectually-based case for anything they feel strongly about. It’s like the authoritarian parent yelling “Shut up and just do it!” at a child. (If the parent is dumb enough to confuse respect with fear, they probably think that is an OK way to get the child to do their bidding. They will probably be disappointed with the long term impact).
Secondly, why should people or society enact controls, (social or legal) on other people’s actions and behavior just to cope with your offense? If the behavior is non-threatening and legal, there is no reason why any society should be in the business of pandering to people’s hurt feelings by enacting measures to control other people’s behavior.
(By the way, changing tack and claiming “but lots of us feel this way” doesn’t make your argument any more powerful or compelling. So ten thousand of you are offended? That’s now a mob. I have seen how mobs reinforce each other, both close up in person and on the internet. Mob rule, as history shows us, is not useful, pleasant or constructive.)
Here’s my bottom line.
Beginning a posting with a loud “I’m offended” certainly gets my attention briefly. Emphasis on the word “briefly”. It signals that you are emotionally disturbed, and that most likely you are also going to be making an incoherent argument that invariably revolves around you wishing you could control, or trying to control, other people’s behavior in a way that is not correct for a free society. At this point, I am going to move in the direction of Away. You don’t get to control the behavior of others by demanding that they think and act like you. That’s not how a free society should work.
One of the more interesting features of this election cycle is the apparent resurgence of racism in the USA. The GOP candidate, Donald Trump, has been actively supported and endorsed by a variety of white supremacist and racist leaders, including David Duke, and has not exactly done a lot of pushing back against that support.
Within my online universe, which includes both Facebook and Twitter, I see a lot more overtly racist comments and accounts. Not only are a significant number of self-identified Donald Trump supporters on Twitter openly espousing racist ideas, a lot of anti-Semitic folks appear to have showed up also.
Of course, we have people attempting to claim that this is somehow Obama’s fault. My view of that claim is that it is nothing more than an intellectually risible combination of dislike of the POTUS coupled with an attempt to rationalize the reality that an African-American POTUS, by virtue of his two terms of office, has drawn attention to unresolved issues with race in US society. We also have the growing realization that police actions in many parts of the USA disproportionately target black and immigrant people. Barack Obama did not go to Ferguson and ignite civil strife. The police lit the match under that tinderbox. I find the attempt to blame President Obama to be below unserious.
Nativism, xenophobia and racism are currently enjoying a resurgence throughout the Western world. The end of the Industrialized Era in these societies is leading to a societal crisis for indigenous blue-collar workers, whose jobs have already mostly disappeared to a combination of offshoring, ending of extractive industries, and automation. Many of those people are struggling to even stay alive, never mind thrive, and the Gospel of individual self-reliance that people tend to preach here in the USA does not exactly help.
Whenever people feel they are in a crisis, it is SOP for them to blame outsiders, and immigrants and anybody who looks different are the #1 target. They also have a tendency to be seduced by strong-sounding demagogues pretending to be “different” and offering grandiose simple solutions. The history of 20th Century Europe will tell us what can happen if enough angry people decide to vote for demagogues offering those simple solutions. If that happens here in the USA, it won’t be pretty, and racial and ethnic strife is certain.
My other complementary take on the hand-wringing about the resurgence of racism is that legislation against racism, which was passed in the UK at around the same time as the US Civil Rights legislation, did not eliminate racism, contrary to the hopes of social progressives. It simply made it socially unacceptable in most communities and social situations. So racists rapidly learned to only talk about their own racist worldviews in private among trusted family and friends, while listening carefully to others for “tells” and “dog whistles” indicating support for their worldview. Hence the rise of political “dog whistles” to signal tacit approval of the idea of discriminating on the basis of race.
So I tend to think that there is no major resurgence as such. All that is happening is that the collection of various types of individuals who normally keep very quiet about their racism have been emboldened in this election season to start not only talking about it, but in some cases revelling in it. The shallow end of the Twitter pool is currently awash with those kinds of people.
I might also add that my experience of contact with people in the UK who were racists and/or religious bigots, and particularly looking at Northern Ireland, is that once people become cognitively wedded to a worldview containing racism as one of its components, it is unlikely that they will modify that part of their worldview. Sadly, it may be the reality that only death ultimately removes those worldviews from active circulation.
Well, this should make for some interesting side-conversations at academic conferences…a Chemistry professor at the University of Manchester is recognized acting in porn movies and ends up resigning from the university.
Damn, and I thought those lecturers in my Geology department were so conventional…maybe I was wrong all along.
1. Politicians not paying attention to experts? Surely not…
The British government is facing awkward questions now that it has emerged that the brand new airport built on the South Atlantic island of St. Helena is likely to be unusable in its current location because of excessive wind shear.
It emerged that the Meteorlogical Office in the UK had warned the government that this was likely to be the case; however, nobody thought to ask them until airport construction was already in progress…
In the meantime the airport may end up as a white elephant even worse than the billion-plus Cuidad Real Airport in Spain. At least that airport was actually opened, although not enough people used it to prevent the operating company from going bankrupt.
2. Accomplishments
One of the new nonsense memes circulating on the internets is one claiming that Hillary Clinton has no accomplishments.
Accomplishments.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
What I think the people who post these memes are really saying is that they do not think that Hillary Clinton has done anything for them. This is probably true. However, that does not mean that she has no accomplishments. Most people would regard being elected to the US Senate and becoming the US Secretary Of State as accomplishments, so trying to post a meme contradicting that really shows that the posters are, on this topic at least, profoundly unserious. Most likely they dislike Hillary Clinton for whatever reasons, and the meme is just another juvenile internet slam. Yawn.
3. Racism, Facebook hacking and personal responsibility
I work in IT, where corporations are expected to be responsible for securing their own data and the data of their clients against attack or theft. If my employer allows an unauthorized third party to hack into its network and steal information, or make unauthorized updates to data, that’s on us. We can blame the hackers, but in reality we should have prevented the hack in the first place. Certainly the third parties filing lawsuits will not be chasing the hackers. They will file against us, because it was our responsibility to secure data and we failed to exercise that responsibility.
Which brings us to the interesting story of Patsy Capshaw Skipper, the interim Mayor of Midland City Alabama. On August 25th Ms Skipper lost the Mayoral election to an opponent who is black. Shortly afterwards, her Facebook page showed a woman by the name of Patsy Capshaw Skipper moaning “The Nigger won” when asked about the election result.
Perhaps rather predictably, when this was noticed, Skipper deleted the messsage thread and then claimed that her Facebook account had been hacked.
Here’s the bad news Patsy. Even if your account was hacked, this is on you. It’s up to you to ensure that malicious people don’t hack your Facebook. Facebook is one of your windows to the wider world. Anything on your Facebook page, as you can see now, is viewed by the world as your property, a representation of you. Thanks to this reality, a lot of people in the world now think of you as a mean-spirited racist little chickenshit. No, blaming hackers doesn’t get you off the hook. It’s up to you to protect your online accounts. Not Facebook, or God, or the tooth fairy.
After all, you belong to the political party that constantly bloviates about “personal responsibility”.
4. There are reasons why I am occasionally contemptuous of Christian churches. Here is one of them
This church in Colorado apparently thought it was OK to not report felony sexual abuse of a 12 year old by a Church official because they determined that Biblical counselling would suffice.
OK.
I would like to see every person involved in that decision hauled into court. This would include the father of the 12 year old girl, who clearly has no interest in obeying the law, having the church obey the law, and who appears to regard his daughter as church property, a sexual chattel to be abused on request by church leaders.
Seriously. This is basically a conspiracy to cover up felonies.
One of the more amusing aspects of the Donald Trump show is how he seems to think that he can plonk his posterior down in the Oval Office and do stuff Just Like That.
The last time a self-proclaimed “different” person ran for office and gained a significant share of the vote was in 1992, when Ross Perot ran as an Independent. At the time, in interviews that I saw in the UK, Perot behaved a lot of the time like the highly successful businessman that he was. He consistently made comments indicating that he saw the USA as simply like EDS, only a lot bigger, and that he would bring some of his successful “business discipline” to bear on the USA if elected, and SHAZAM! things would be better, and damn quick.
The thing was, I had seen how that panned out when tried in the UK in the early 1970s. The Conservative Party, partly as a reaction to what they saw as the dangerous tendency for the Labour Party to listen to input from trade union leaders, began a campaign to get business leaders to enter the government. They persuaded John Davies to quit his business job, arranged for him to be given a “safe” Member of Parliament seat, and promoted him to be Trade and Industry secretary.
The move was a disaster. Davies had no idea about the very real differences between being a CEO and being in government. He was a poor performer on television, was a terrible speaker in the House of Commons, and failed to form any constructive working relationships with civil servants, who are essential enablers in the UK government system for Getting Stuff Done, and he soon discovered that the sort of hard-nosed thinking that leads to uneconomic private businesses being shut down is not applicable to large national industries that are labor-intensive, where closedowns have the ability to lead to governments being un-elected. After several years, he gradually withdrew from politics, and returned to business.
I was thinking of this when I saw Ross Perot being questioned by interviewers on his policy ideas in 1992. He sometimes became irascible and short with interviewers who asked him penetrating questions, which is something that I have seen and heard about with people who build businesses from scratch. Many of them are not used to having their ideas questioned, much less criticized. It is my belief that Perot, for all of his ideas and energy, would have been a lousy President. He would have become frustrated in a matter of weeks when he discovered that no, Mr. President, you cannot just Do That. It needs Congressional or Senate approval. That pesky three co-equal branches of government thingy would have reduced him to grinding frustration quite quickly.
Which brings us to Donald Trump, the man of the expansive promise to Do Stuff. How the hell he thinks he is going to do most of what he says he will do, given the constitutional limitations on the authority of the President, is a mystery to me. This tweet provides the most likely explanation:
@Popehat you have to remember how Trump thinks the presidency works. He thinks it's the CEO of America.
— Jason ̆̈ (@XaiaX) September 21, 2016
Teacher and educator Jay Adams, who writes the excellent blog the36review, has this speech he gives to his high school students at the start of the year:
I begin each school year by telling high school students some version of the following:
“I believe you are capable of adulthood right now. I do not believe you have to wait for a certain age, or society’s permission, or a diploma, to become a person worthy of my respect. In fact, I am desperate to treat you like an adult, because I think the world is falling apart because it’s run by mental children. But I can only treat you with as much adult respect as you will let me, so please earn it.”
For most kids I teach, it’s the first time they’ve ever heard anything like that. And it works.
1. A lack of understanding of the word “Freedom” in Beaumont TX
In which players who kneeled during the playing of the National Anthem were informed that if they did it again they would be removed from the team. As the article makes clear, some of the supervisory leadership of the Beaumont Bulls are astonishingly ignorant not only of settled law (they need to go read this case in detail for starters) and are also utterly lacking in understanding of the roots of the protest.
See this summary of some of the issues and questions surrounding kneeling for the National Anthem.
2. Trump’s appeal is almost entirely based on him behaving like he is unfiltered
As J.D. Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” explains in this interview, a large part of Donald Trump’s appeal lies in his (probably deliberate) use of language that sets him apart from other contemporary politicians. Those politicians communicate in an articulate, measured and careful style, that has become regarded with suspicion and contempt by many of Trump’s supporters, who see them as shysters and hucksters who do not give a damn about them as people.
Effectively. Donald Trump talks much like the bar-stool bloviator down the street, using poorly structured, rambling sentences with little or nothing in the way of coherent solutions. However, many people like this because this is exactly the way they wish that they could talk to professional politicians. The fact that many of Trump’s grandiose promises are hopelessly impractical or unrealistic is not something that many of his supporters even want to consider. The fact that somebody understands them is enough for the time being.
3. Today’s unbelievably stupid question from network television
The question and the best response so far on Twitter…
Short answer: YES
Long answer: YES, OF COURSE, YOU USELESS ASSHUFFING TABLOID TV SHITWEASELS pic.twitter.com/dxy0ha9kKO
— Micah J Reid (@mjreid) September 21, 2016
4. The practical realities of Brexit
As I said at the time of the referendum, the UK vote to leave the EU was the equivalent of an 8 year old child having a petulance attack and shouting “I HATE you and I’m leaving home NOW”. Those 8 year olds soon discover that leaving home at that age is not easy or achievable. Ditto the UK now that they have to not only negotiate their way out of the EU, but also negotiate separate trade agreements with dozens of countries, when all of the trade negotiation experts work for the EU. This is going to be a train-wreck, and the voters who voted Leave are going to find out the hard way that not only is it not as simple as it looked at the time, but the results may not be to their liking.