Weekend Reading: On Empathy

You should read Katha Pollitt on empathy toward Trump-voters, or rather the lopsided demand that the "lefty elitist" show such empathy, but must not demand any back in return.

Empathy is valuable and even necessary, as I wrote in my earlier post (which also referred to that problem of lopsidedness).  But our empathy should be aimed at the economic troubles of rural towns in some parts of the US, and our understanding should be applied to solving that problem and the associated problem of poverty-driven drug addictions.

It's not empathy toward certain right-wing values* that is needed, but empathy toward all who suffer, even those who might wish us to suffer more, and the best way to demonstrate that empathy is through proper economic policies, good education systems and an adequate safety net, with encouragement for people to be self-reliant and hard-working and so on.

As an aside, two questions about this conversation fascinate me:  First, why is it assumed that if I lean left politically I am not hard-working, self-supporting or resilient?  In other words, why do many assume that the stereotypical left and right values cannot be held by the same person?

Second, note the sleight-of-hand in the way the basic problem is so often defined by first constructing all of the left as "elitist" (and not the party of the poor, say) and then demanding that those "elites" -- because they now are viewed as elites -- must attend to the grievances of the down-trodden Trump-voters (who are actually in power)?

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*  Unchanging human hierarchies based on either presumed divine decrees or essentialist biological thinking, patriarchal gods telling all of us what to do, flawed market models as a form of religion and so on.

On Duterte's "Rape Joke"

Rodrigo Duterte, the president of Philippines, has branded himself as the most vicious junkyard dog, the one that would bite ISIS dogs in the butt.  His supporters lap his threats of violence up.  If violence has rained down from the other side, then a violent bully in one's own corner feels good.

That's the background to use for understanding his May "joke" about raping women:

“You can arrest any person, search any house,” Duterte told the soldiers Friday.
“I alone would be responsible” for anything they did under martial law, he said. “I will go to jail for you. If you happen to have raped three women, I will own up to it.”
This last comment — absolving his soldiers for any future rapes — was widely reported as a joke, and if it was, it wouldn't be the ruler's first attempt at the genre.
Before he won the presidency last year, Duterte joked that he “should have been first” in the gang rape of a woman who was held hostage, raped and killed in the 1980s.

Let's make a thought experiment:  What if Duterte had said "If you happen to have throttled three babies, I will own up to it."?  Did anything change?

I believe something did change.  The "rape joke" has an aspect of titillation, of almost-pleasure.  It's not just a way to tell the soldiers that they can violate human rights as much as they wish, that they can use whatever violence they regard necessary.  It's also a promise of the kind of violent sexual release which wars have traditionally promised soldiers:  The "right" to rape the enemy's women*, because those women belong to the enemy in the same way that their goods belong to them.  Thus, rape and pillage are identical "rights."

When Chelsea Clinton tweeted about that "rape joke" she made the mistake of taking it out of context by writing: "Not funny.  Ever."  It wasn't intended to be funny to a woman, after all, ever.

But Duterte's response to her moved the "joke" even further away from its actual meaning.  He said:

"When your father was screwing Lewinsky and the rest of the young girls there in the office of the president, on the table, on the floor, on the sofa, did you raise any" criticism? Duterte said Thursday.

Duterte used the identity sign between philandering or adultery and violent rape by strangers.

And so did in a way the article I quote for that comment, because it describes Dutarte's language as "foul-mouthed" and "profanity-laced."   I could be truly foul-mouthed without advocating any violence at all.  It's the violence-laced language of Dutarte which troubles me, not any profanities. 

The mixture of sex and violence Dutarte uses in his speeches amounts to a primitive kind of rough heterosexual male bonding, with a strong stench of entitlement.  It will be interesting to see if similar speeches become more common in the US now that Trump has opened the door for Bannon and his white male supremacist brethren, or if the "awful" forces of "political correctness" can still manage to rein it in.

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Or their sons.  Or anyone who isn't an actual combatant but is viewed as "belonging" to the enemy.

I Heard Comey

By reading his prepared statement and by listening to some of the hearings themselves.  The prepared statement, covering several meetings between Trump and Comey, contains these sentences which Comey attributes to Trump:

The President then returned to the topic of Mike Flynn, saying, "He is a good guy and has been through a lot." He repeated that Flynn hadn't done anything wrong on his calls with the Russians, but had misled the Vice President.
 

He then said, "I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go. He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go."

And:

On the morning of March 30, the President called me at the FBI. He described the Russia investigation as "a cloud" that was impairing his ability to act on behalf of the country. He said he had nothing to do with Russia, had not been involved with hookers in Russia, and had always assumed he was being recorded when in Russia. He asked what we could do to "lift the cloud." 

Comey interpreted those statements by quoting Henry II on the topic of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury:

Maine Sen. Angus King was pressing Comey about how he interpreted phrases President Donald Trump used in a one-on-one February dinner, in which Trump urged Comey to drop the probe into just-fired national security adviser Mike Flynn.

King, an independent, asked Comey if he interpreted language like "I hope" as directives from the President.

"Yes. It kind of rings in my ears as, 'Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?'" Comey said.

...

Those words, some historical accounts suggest, were interpreted by Henry's men as him wishing for Becket to be killed.

The next month, four knights loyal to Henry tracked Becket down and killed him.

What a pity we don't have video recordings of those meetings.  For instance, did Trump ask what Comey's people could do to "lift the cloud" while was sighing, staring at the ground and nervously wringing a wet hankie?  Or did he go wink-wink-nudge-nudge while talking about that cloud lifting?  Comey's statement strips all those potential nuances and leaves us with just his interpretations of the words themselves.

But in any case the evidence suggests that Trump wanted various investigations to be terminated.

The hearings themselves were not terribly interesting, though John McCain did appear to argue that perhaps Hillary Clinton used Russian connections to orchestrate her own electoral downfall.

That argument differed from the other Republican arguments only in being more bizarre:  All the Republicans I heard tried to obfuscate the issues by drawing our attention to that heinous criminal,  Hillary Clinton, and her crime of having  used a private e-mail server for classified documents while being the secretary of state.  That Comey had recommended no criminal charges for her and that the investigation has been concluded makes no difference in these political games*.

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*  Neither does the fact that previous politicians had committed similar blunders and were not investigated on those.

Political Polarization. Wear Your Seatbelts, For Turbulence Is Predicted.

Political polarization in the United States may be the main reason why we now live in the Turd Reich*.  Enough people think like Mark Levin:

MARK LEVIN (HOST): So, the spectacle goes on. The enemy is on the move, Islamo-Nazis are on the move, the Russians are on the move, the Chinese are on the move, the North Koreans are on the move, the Iranians are on the move, and the Democrats are on the move.
Let me ask you this question: Who threatens our country more? Who threatens our country more? The Iranians, the North Koreans, the Chinese, the Russians, or the Democrats?

There ya go.  If you are a registered Democrat, you are the enemy of Mark Levin, comparable to all sorts of foreign states, some of which, at least, do not dote on the US.

The left, the liberals, the progressives and/or the Democrats are not blameless in the polarization of opinions.  But the left did not start it. 

Indeed, for a long time (and perhaps even now) the Democrats were the mumbling milquetoasts on political debate shows while the Republicans breathed fire and promised hellfire to the opposition.  Still, the Democratic base is now getting to slightly resemble the Republican base in the way the "internal enemy" is dehumanized.

Whether all this began with the right-wing radio shows, Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News can be debated.  But the fertilizer which made political extremism grow in this country has the name of that right-wing media on it**. 

The audiences loved hearing how vile the Democrats are (because who wouldn't like to be told that everything is the fault of someone else, someone truly evil, so there's no need to feel guilty about that anger), and so the shows gave them more what they liked.  Then the shows stepped one step further by giving their audiences not only right-wing opinions but also only those facts or factoids which fit the right-wing worldview.  (I still get e-mails from The Judicial Watch, a right-wing organization which "fights for accountability and integrity in law, politics and government."  They are still all about about Hillary Clinton's e-mails, and their representative was on Fox News yesterday).

I see faint echoes of that when I visit the left Twitter or read the comments on lefty blogs, though the extent of distortion on the two sides is not comparable.  Still, we should avoid copying what happened on the extreme right (which is now most of the right), because it is crucial to know what "facts" or facts people hold and to try to have a conversation, with data and analysis,  aimed at deciding on some shared set of evidence.

Right now Republicans and Democrats live in separate political information bubbles.  Sure, some live in disinformation bubbles, but even those people are human beings and compatriots.

The Internet exacerbates the dehumanization process.  Others do not appear as multi-dimensional people online, but often become condensed into one mistake, one opinion, one aspect of their characteristics.  Empathy seems difficult to maintain toward such one-dimensional invisible strangers who we often only experience as angry ranters on, say, Twitter.  Those angry rants elicit angry rants back, and -- yippee -- another step has been taken toward even greater polarization.***

But that is not where the process began, as I noted above. 

So where is the process heading?

I don't know the answer.  The "elitist" left (which is elitist for some odd reason I can't quite fathom) is asked to stop being so horrible to the heartland folks, assumed to have voted for Trump, though I have never seen appeals for the "elitist" right to stop being so horrible about the bi-coastal Liberal rabble. 

There is contempt on both sides, and both sides should address that contempt.****  There might still be time for something different than a society consisting of two separate cultures which loathe each other, where the paradise of one is the hell of the other. 

But time is running short on that.

A post-script:

Writing this post was like drinking cod-liver oil.  I didn't enjoy the task at all, because the emotional and angry Echidne strongly disagrees with the (more?) rational Echidne who insisted on boring everyone with a Goody Two-Shoes post.    

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*  Because some have argued that the vote for Trump may have largely been a fuck-you vote for the Democrats and for eight years of the Obama administration.

**  I'm not giving a politicians an out on that, either.  How many of you get fund-raising emails from politicians which imply that the world is going to end tomorrow because of the evils of the internal enemy, unless you chip in ten dollars?  Triggering a panic response helps with political fund-raising, but it also increases the likelihood of dehumanizing one's neighbors, co-workers and compatriots.

***  Add to that the online information bubbles.  It's a good idea to get out of one's own bubble, occasionally.  I recently saw several rather nasty comments by a woman who loves Trump.  When I checked her Facebook page, I found that her life is centered around dog rescue, something I have also done in the past. 

The point, of course, is that we human beings have many dimensions.  The Internet doesn't show all of them, and it might be a good idea to keep in mind that the other users are also human beings.  Some are pretty deplorable, but none of us are perfect.

****  I'm not sure how to engage those who believe that I might be the enemy, as Mark Levin seems to think, and I have little hope that I could persuade a misogynist or a racist about the value of people who are women and/or people of color.  But a national discussion about basic values could be worthwhile.  Even getting people together in the meat-space could be valuable, to show that the opposition doesn't have horns and red eyeballs.  Unless they do, of course. 

So. Will Your Vote Be Counted in 2018? In 2020?

The leaked NSA hacking report and the woman, Reality Winner, who allegedly leaked it are all over the news.  The whole case reminds me of a large Spanish onion, with many layers, and each of them worth a closer look.

But let's look at the very core of that onion, the part which I find most indispensable to examine: 

Are future US elections safe?  How can you tell if your vote is not going to be altered at some later point in the process?  And what would be so bad about paper ballots and real people counting them?  It would be a lot harder for both foreign powers and either of the domestic parties to meddle with that process.

I have followed the US elections since the Florida debacle in 2000, and have spotted an odd aspect of the elections integrity debate:  Nobody, but nobody, is willing to even entertain* the possibility that the software in the voting machines could be manipulated.  Even the Democrats refuse to entertain that possibility.  Even anonymous people online mostly refuse to entertain it.**

Nobody should assume that the machines have been hacked by the Russians, say, without evidence that it happened.  Rationality requires that.  But neither should almost everybody assume that the machines have never been hacked by anybody, that they cannot be hacked, that even querying the possibility turns one into a member of the tinfoil hat brigade.

I keep reading that the voting infrastructure in this country is safe, but when I ask for the evidence on transparency, on how we can verify and double-check votes, I'm given answers such as the one where voters get a paper receipt of their vote.  To take home.  Which is then not available for verification of the later total machine counts.

Here I lift my tinfoil helmet long enough to look into your eyes, without blinking, while I firmly state that I do not necessarily believe that the voting machines were manipulated in 2016.  But neither do I believe that someone with political motivations would go all out to influence everything about the elections, including hacking the voter registration rolls, and then suddenly face his or her conscience and decide not to affect the votes themselves.

If it can be done, it will be done, by someone, somewhere.  Given that, the systems should be inspected to see if they truly are safe from manipulation, and we should be given thorough reports which prove that nothing comparable can take place in 2018 or 2020, whether it's the hacking of voter rolls or the hacking of the machines themselves or the suppression of the votes of people with African ancestry and/or of students and so on. 

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* Even in an intimate dinner party with no leaks to the press.

**  I get some of the reasons for that.  First, some sites commenting on vote fraud in the past have turned out not to have strong evidence, thus sliding into the tinfoil sphere.  Second, if the elections themselves are meaningless in, say, the trigger states, then American democracy is already dead, and most of us don't want to even think that, let alone entertain it in our homes.  Third, it could be (and here I firmly step into the tinfoil territory) that both parties have always gently massaged the results and so nobody really wants to change the system.  Well, nobody in power today.

I don't believe that last sentence, but unless I am clearly shown how transparency in the voting system is guaranteed, in every single district, I have no way of refuting what it says.

Free Skies? On Privatizing Air Traffic Control.

Why do the Republicans want to privatize air control? This article summarizes the reasons, I guess.

But how fascinating that the ultimate way we would measure the productivity and efficiency of an air traffic control system is utterly ignored in that push for privatization in everything, just because the freemarketgods should be getting their sacrifices:

While both sides of the privatization debate may laud the system's clean record, critics point out its "WWII-era radar technology" and process of physically passing paper strips with an individual's aircraft information and flight plan from controller to controller. FAA's NextGen program to introduce digital communications and GPS systems to replace decades old technology in one of the world's most complex airspaces has been slow; too slow for many in Washington, D.C.

What guarantees are there that a privatized system would produce the same clean record?  I think the probabilities work in a different direction.  For instance, what should the optimal distance between airplanes taking off be?  If that decision is not made purely on safety, but also on the basis of the profit motivation of large airlines, the calculations could be different and the outcome could be a dirtier record, with more accidents.*

And the way digital communications might be introduced should be carefully thought out, because we now know how good various groups of hackers can be.

This post doesn't mean that I would necessarily be opposed to privatization of air traffic control (though that's my initial stance, for safety reasons).  But the debate appears not to have enough data to justify Trump pushing it.  Neither did he campaign on it.

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*  Partly, because there are jobs where trying to keep salaries low and working hours long is extremely counterproductive.  Private firms have different incentives in how to weigh various risks, and the pressure to suppress earnings is stronger for profit-oriented firms.  But tired and disgruntled air traffic controllers are something I don't want to contemplate before flying.

The Small Matter Of A Female President

Michelle Goldberg has written an excellent article about the dreams and nightmares of those who would like to see one half of humanity a little bit more often represented in positions of power.  Of course, to even address this question is for some a clear sign of identity politics.  What's not identity politics is to always have men leading countries, and in the US, with one exception, white men.  That last sentence is for clarification, in case you are unclear about what non-identity politics might be.

You should read Goldberg's article, because it is nuanced and also gives the results from many studies which suggest that being female is a negative for politicians.  What I wish to discuss is one quote from the article, by the researcher Dan Cassino who has studied the role of sexism in not voting for women politicians:

According to Cassino, the long-term solution to male anxiety about female leadership “is that you run women so often that it becomes absolutely unremarkable.” Seen that way, the next primary could mark the beginning of this process. “It’s a coming of age,” Lake says. “It’s not just about a woman candidate. It’s that all the best candidates are women.”

This reminds me of early work by Virginia Valian (or at least reported by her) in her book Why So Slow.  She describes studies where the study participants were asked to rate various job applicants for a job in a firm.  Both the applicants and the firm were fictitious, but the participants were told what percentage of the firm's labor force already was female,  and they also knew the sex of the various applicants they were asked to rate.

The results of those studies tell us that if the number of women the fictitious firm was already assumed to be employing equaled or exceeded some critical mass (possibly 30%), then female applicants were judged as just people with particular job skills.  If, on the other hand, the fictitious firm was supposed to employ fewer women than the critical mass, the female applicants were judged as representatives of "womanhood" first, and that judging was likely to elicit all the stereotypes the participants, both female and male, had about women.

If the same results apply to politics*, then what Cassino suggests could be true, and also a detour around the road blocks the sexists have erected on the basis of Hillary Clinton's candidacy.

It's her almost unique situation as a very powerful political woman in this country that makes assessing the role of sexism in her treatment so difficult.  A sample of size one lends itself to few clear conclusions, though I'm pretty sure that Hillary Clinton has been scrutinized through a magnifying glass while one Donald Trump has been allowed to get away with anything, and that suggests to me that Clinton's sex had a role to play.

Clearly, then, we need many more women to enter politics.  That sounds awkward, given the treatment they might expect, but if the critical mass could be achieved the sexist treatment would fade away or at least look for other interesting targets for attack.  On the online, say.

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*  I see something of this sort happening when newspapers etc. report on the filling of important posts.  If the job goes to a woman the article rarely even addresses that, with the exception of jobs where the appointed woman is the first female job-holder ever.  What the comments to the articles say is naturally a horse of a very different color.  But nothing good comes from reading unmoderated comments.

  



 

More Presents From Trump To His Base

These are fun ones.  For example, you are now more likely to die or be financially devastated in a hurricane or other weather disaster, because of our Dear Leader:  Both NOAA, the agency overseeing weather forecasting and FEMA, the agency responding to disasters, are without leaders, though the latter has a nomination pending.  Then there is this:

For states and communities hit by floods, tornadoes, wildfires and other disasters, the Trump budget slashes another important source of recovery funds. The Department of Housing and Urban Development provides money that helps communities rebuild after a disaster, after FEMA has moved on. The Trump budget cuts that $3 billion fund to zero.

Trump's great managerial skills are reflected in all that, I'm sure.

And remember how he promised to drain the swamp in Washington, DC?  To get rid of all those lobbyists?  Well, that promise isn't much honored:

The White House disclosed Wednesday evening that it has granted ethics waivers to 17 appointees who work for President Trump and Vice President Pence, including four former lobbyists.

 Among the high-profile figures who received waivers: White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway, who were both permitted to engage with their former employers or clients. In addition, a blanket waiver was given to all executive office appointees to interact with news organizations — a move that gives chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon permission to communicate with Breitbart News, the conservative website he used to run. 

The rate at which the Trump White House has handed out waivers is far faster than that of the Obama administration, which issued 17 exemptions for White House appointees over eight years.

Bolds are mine.

Isn't that delicious and juicy?  Trump is clearly much more productive than Obama ever was.  And Stephen Bannon, the white male supremacist, can continue communicating with Breitbart News, to equally productively steer the conservative media.

But of course the assumption that the swamp in Washington DC referred to lobbyists is for our consumption.  Trump-voters fully know that the swamp referred to the Democrats, and that Trump promised to get rid of every single one of them.

Finally, the Trump administration is considering handing back the Russian-occupied properties which Obama shut down:

The Trump administration is moving toward handing back to Russia two diplomatic compounds, near New York City and on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, that its officials were ejected from in late December as punishment for Moscow’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

President Barack Obama said Dec. 29 that the compounds were being “used by Russian personnel for intelligence-related purposes” and gave Russia 24 hours to vacate them. Separately, Obama expelled from the United States what he said were 35 Russian “intelligence operatives.”

 Those guys are part of Trump's base, though that the Trump administration would consider this move seems shocking, given that

...[the] administration and former Trump campaign officials are under congressional and special counsel investigation for alleged ties to Russia.

Our Dear Leader is the Gift That Keeps On Giving.

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I'm not sure why I bother to writer about all this.  I very much doubt any Trump-voter reads here, what with the news bubbles and the two separate theories about how the world works.

 

"Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die." On Trump And Climate.

That (from the Bible, of all things) is the proper interpretation of Trump's decision to drag the US out of the Paris climate accord.  It's the refusal to consider the lives of future generations, even the lives of Trump's own grandchildren or their children, perhaps because Trump agrees with Louis XV (or Madame Pompadour) that whatever happens after his death is of no consequence:  Après nous le déluge.

It's a big fuck-you gesture to those who worry about the giant refugee floods which will follow when parts of the world become uninhabitable or incapable of feeding their populations.  And it's a humongous fuck-you to the "elites", the experts (i.e., those who have actually studied something), and anyone who didn't vote for Trump.

Coal will not return to Pittsburgh, even though Trump uttered this inanity:

“It is time to put Youngstown, Ohio, Detroit, Mich., and Pittsburgh, Pa., along with many, many other locations within our great country before Paris, France,” he said. “It is time to make America great again.”

It is an inanity because the Paris climate accord is not about the city of Paris at all.  It is about this planet, and Trump pretends to put the towns of Youngstown, Detroit and Pittsburgh ahead of all humankind. 

And it is also an inanity, because many more jobs are lost for other reasons than the climate accord,  in other industries, such as retail.  But those jobs are not the types of manly-man jobs the Republicans like to use as political bait.

So let's eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.  At least the capitalists can make money by selling us our last dinners, on styrofoam plates.

Trump's stupidity is a scourge in itself, but the implications of his behavior, including this most recent travesty, are much more serious:

Those who used to be the allies of the United States now receive Trump's wrath, those who do not have the best interests of Western liberalism* in mind now receive his praise and his submission.  The risks in international politics are rising, and the principles of democracy are losing.

It is that possibly terminal illness of the basic values of democracies that still horrifies me:  The world has turned its face toward fascism, religious extremism and radical klepto-capitalism, and enough people in the world like what they see there.

Stephen Bannon, a white male supremacists who is now the main strategist of this country and who wishes to destroy the administrative state (to replace it with what? anarchy?) is one of those people.  The linked New York Times article notes that it's his sweaty fingerprints we can see in Trump's climate decision:

The president’s decision was a victory for Stephen K. Bannon, his chief strategist, and Scott Pruitt, his Environmental Protection Agency administrator, both of whom had argued forcefully to abandon the global agreement in favor of a clean break that would clear the way for a new environmental approach.

But let's not just demonize Bannon (though he hardly needs external help in that).  Let's also note that most Republicans applauded Trump's decision.  It is, of course, a victory, if one's goals are only about oneself and only about short-term selfish satisfactions.



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* By that term in this post I mean countries which are, at least in theory,  built on basic concepts of fairness and equality: universal suffrage, freedom of speech and the media, equal treatment of the sexes and the races, full protection for sexual minorities and legal systems which provide citizens with basic safety nets and rein in the worst aspects of capitalism.

Final Fund-Raising Post

My sincere thanks to all who have contributed toward the purchase of a new computer for the Snakepit Inc.  This one is nine years old and a bit doddering.

There's still time to give me money!

As a general thank you, this is Karri, a gentleman cat, who would send me money if he had any:

The Gifts of Trump Administration to the Ladies

I get that Trump's tweets are fun to take apart, and I get that other similar behavioral and linguistic outrages are what draws most attention.  But what ultimately matters to all of us are the policies.  Those boring granola topics which nevertheless can bring you security and comfort or pain and anxiety.

So let us see what the Trump administration is promising to women in their policies:

Fund-Raising Post. And On Trump's Language Through the Ages.

There is still time to contribute to the survival of this blog.  The instructions are in the left column.  My warmest thanks to all who have contributed and to all who read here.

Trump's limited vocabulary has troubled me for some time.  It is an odd aspect of the most powerful man on this earth.  His basket of adjectives is oversupplied with "greatest" "tremendous" "crooked," "corrupt," "bad" and "evil," all very emotional and basic adjectives, easily used for the purposes of exaggeration.

But it's not just Trump's limited vocabulary which troubles me, it's also the way he describes the day-to-day policies and politics of his job as the president of the United States.  If Trump was female,  critics would immediately see the way he evaluates other heads of states based on how he likes them as people and how nice they were to him,  because those are assumed to be stereotypical female characteristics.

All this made me want to know if Trump has always used the same limited vocabulary in the same self-centered and emotionally concrete manner*, or if that is a new development.  Note that should the latter turn out to be the case, we still wouldn't be able to tell why his vocabulary might have changed.  The changes could be a conscious policy, an attempt to come across as a simple man-of-the-people, or they could be evidence of verbal deterioration or both.

To learn more about this I went to YouTube and chose several videos from 1980 to 2017 where Trump was being interviewed on television**.  Interviews provide a context for speech that stays roughly constant over time, though the topics of the interviews do differ.  The earlier interviews I found are about Trump's real estate deals, while the later ones are more focused on politics.

It's important to stress that this tour of Trump's language over time is not a proper research piece.  That would require the kind of skills linguists have.  All I wanted to do is to see if anything obvious would stick out when one speed-listens to Trump speak over the last 37 years.

And I'm not sure what might stick out.  My tentative conclusions are these: 

1.  If we compare the Trump of 1980 to the Trump of 2017 the differences in the dexterity with which he uses language, in his demeanor and in the emotional content of the speech are pretty clear.

But that might be true just because of the passing of the time and the changes in the topics which are covered in the various interviews.  For example, the 1980 interview is about his real estate business, an area where he stood on the firmest of grounds, while the 2017 interviews were given after the first hundred days of his much-criticized presidency.  He would feel more threatened in the latter circumstances.

2.  Trump hated the media a long time before he decided to use that hatred as a Republican meme. 

3.  His use of certain strong-and-simple adjectives ("great," "tremendous," "bad") is not entirely recent, but its frequency seems to have increased from 2007 onward (though this, too, could be an artifact of some interviews having more anger-causing topics).

4.  The self-praise and self-congratulatory aspect of Trump's current speech is very much stronger than anything I could find in his earlier interviews.  If he gave himself credit in those, he did it in a much more subtle manner.

I would love to see a proper study of this topic.



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* I can't think of a better term for the kind of concreteness I believe his speech conveys.  He seldom leaves the narrow emotional word around Donald Trump, even when he talks about global politics.

** If you wish to spend some time on videos of that type, here are the ones I watched yesterday: Trump 1980,  Trump 1988 (from 16:14 onward), Trump 1989, Trump 1990, Trump 1998,  Trump 2005 (with Melania Trump), Trump 2007,  Trump 2010,  Trump 2014, Trump 2017. 

The Tweeting President

I have no idea if Trump's twitter account has suddenly purchased several million pretend-followers*, as this story tells us, but if that indeed is the case, what is Trump planning to do?

Notice how paranoid I'm getting under the Turd Reich?  If the government strives to be opaque and refuses to be open, those who try to understand what it might be up to must use the flight -- or the twittering -- of birds to make their predictions.

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* Or if someone else has purchased them to make Trump look even worse.

When Trump Plays Tic-Tac-Toe, Others Play Multidimensional Chess

Trump's isolationist and sulky international politics have repercussions which may not have popped into his mind:

Reflecting on the fraught new era of U.S. relations with Germany, and Europe at large, German Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke on Sunday at a beer hall, and contended that her continent-mates “really must take our fate into our own hands.”
Those jitters about already weakening transatlantic alliances were surely heightened as President Trump took to Twitter on Tuesday morning and accused Germany of maintaining a trade imbalance and under-contributing to NATO. Trump has also suggested that he might withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on combating climate change, which Merkel has championed.
Merkel on Tuesday reiterated her sense that Europe must seek new alliances, telling reporters in Berlin, “The times in which we can fully count on others are somewhat over, as I have experienced in the past few days.”

The reference to the "past few days" is a reference to Trump, but not only to Trump.  It's also a reference to the American voters' most recent choice and the lessons the Europeans are learning from that in the longer-run:  Americans are unpredictable, easy to manipulate and willing to elect a megalomaniac, narcissist and ignorant president.

Americans are not alone in apparently preferring megalomaniac dictators as both history, especially German history,  and recent elections in countries such as Russia and Turkey tell us.  But while Putin and Erdogan understand the games they are playing, I doubt that Trump does.

For instance, when Merkel states that Europe can no longer count on the US, what are the alternatives she might have in mind?  More nuclear weapons development in Europe?  Closer cooperation with some of the rising super-powers?

Whatever they are, the consequences to most of the world and to the US are unlikely to be positive.  Besides, the increased uncertainty and unpredictability of international politics is a risk on its own.

Day Three of My Fund-Raising Week

It's not too late to donate money to guarantee the future of this tiny blog.  As I mentioned earlier, do not give if it would cause you hardship.

Thanks for reading!

Here are a few fun stories about women, to balance all the not-so-nice stories I feel compelled to write:

Brenda Milner is 98-years old and still works three days a week as a cognitive neuroscientist.

Maria Lorena Ramirez, a 22-year old indigenous Mexican runner, won the women's fifty kilometer ultra-Marathon competition in Puebla, Mexico, last April.  She ran wearing basic sandals (made out of recycled tire rubber), a skirt, hat and a kerchief.

And Rhonda Grayer's family company, WT Stevens, is one of just four companies to be awarded a contract to replace the contaminated water pipes in Flint, Michigan. 

Justice in Bangladesh: A Parable.

Bangladesh is a case study of a country which is slowly becoming more fundamentalist.  Consider the most recent example:

Under pressure from Islamic hard-liners, the Bangladeshi authorities in the predawn hours on Friday swiftly and quietly removed a sculpture of a woman personifying justice from outside the country’s Supreme Court building.

The hard-liners argue that Islam does not allow the depiction* of living beings in art.  Bangladesh's prime minister, Sheikh Hasina appears to have consented to the removal of the statue which was only erected five months ago.

I cannot tell if she believes that such a compromise would make the hard-liners content or if she has other political motivations.  Nevertheless, Bangladesh already suffers from extremist violence:

In recent years, its authorities have struggled to contain extremist violence against religious minorities, foreigners, gay people and secular intellectuals. Attendance at madrasas, or Islamic schools, is swelling, and more women are wearing the hijab, or head scarf.

What drives this radicalization in Bangladesh?  Is it supported by the petro-dollars or is it home-grown or both?  Whatever the seeds that have been sewn, the harvest is not something the world might want to gather.

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*  This is based on the sayings of Mohammed, the hadiths, and not on the Quran, as far as I can tell.  The original intention was most likely to ban idolatry. 

Note that Bangladesh is nominally a secular country, though with Islam as its state religion. 

Signs of the Times: Gianforte, Trump and Mulvaney

1.  Greg Gianforte, the Republican candidate in the Montana special election, joined the war against the media by allegedly assaulting Ben Jacobs,  a reporter for the UK Guardian.  Gianforte's spokesman gave a statement which ends with:

It's unfortunate that this aggressive behavior from a liberal journalist created this scene at our campaign volunteer BBQ.

There ya go. What did Ben Jacobs do to make Gianforte so mad?  Sounds like the kind of stuff domestic abusers say (you made me do it).

2.  Our Dear Leader is working hard to be the PR person for the United States.  It's great comedy or would be, if I was watching it with nectar and manna at hand on some other planet. 

The man has no social intelligence.  I guess he has never needed it, what with having been born with a golden hoof in his mouth and having grown up the little king of his world, surrounded by yes-men and yes-women.

3.  Mick Mulvaney, Trump's director of the Office of Management and Budget removes his human mask and bluntly states his views:*

For years, we’ve focused on how we can help Americans receive taxpayer-funded assistance. Under President Trump’s leadership, we’re now looking at how we can respect both those who require assistance and the taxpayers who fund that support. For the first time in a long time, we’re putting taxpayers first. 

Taking money from someone without an intention to pay it back is not debt. It is theft. This budget makes it clear that we will reverse this larceny. The president’s budget will put our country’s budget back into balance.

Taxation is theft, eh?  I doubt Mulvaney thinks that giving even more money to the already-bloated US military is theft.  But subsidizing the health care costs of poor people certainly is.

Let's see what thieving Mulvaney's budget plans to stop:

President Donald Trump's budget plans to cut the Children's Health Insurance Program by at least 20% over the next two fiscal years and slash Medicaid, which covers millions more children.
Millions of poor and working families could lose their health coverage if his proposed budget, released Tuesday and called "A New Foundation for American Greatness," gets through as-is. It would hit children's health care hard and break Trump's campaign promise to "save" Medicaid "without cuts."
Over the next decade, the proposed budget would cut Medicaid more than $800 billion, or nearly a quarter of what the health care program is projected to spend on poor families.
Poor children are covered by a complicated mix of programs. Medicaid covers 37 million children. The Children's Health Insurance Program, known as CHIP, has 8.9 million enrolled. Together, these two programs cover about one in three American children, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Elsewhere Mulvaney states that he believes in the social safety net, but that he doesn't want it to be misused:

“If you’re on food stamps and you’re able-bodied, we need you to go to work,” Mulvaney said during a briefing with reporters on Monday. “If you’re on disability insurance and you’re not supposed to be, if you’re not truly disabled, we need you to go back to work. We need everybody pulling in the same direction.”

But the way to fix such misuse should be to supervise the basis on which help is given, not to cut the total amount of money going into, say, the CHIP program.  Children shouldn't have to go back to work or be punished for having bad parents. 

Their job is to go to school, and healthy children will do that job better and end up more productive and useful citizens, ultimately benefiting everyone in the society, even Mick Mulvaney.

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* This proposal may never turn into reality, but it tells us what the Trump administration would like to happen.

Time To Pay The Piper

Or the start of my begging week* which will run to the end of next week's Wednesday.  This year I have an actual project (other than the usual expenses), and that is my need for a new computer.  This one (bought by my lovely readers, by the way, in 2008) is beginning to misbehave.  It's slow as molasses in January, and I want to be ready for its demise.

Please do not give if you are poor.  The ways to give are described in the left column.  If you prefer not to use PayPal, send me an email about other ways for me to get money for a computer and chocolate.

May I take this opportunity to thank you all for reading, for your past contributions and for being you.  I also want to thank those of you who send me a little every month.  I only recently found out how to send those folks thank-you emails.  My silence was not ingratitude, in other words.

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*  That odd part of Echidne must pick the worst time of the year for the funding week!  I still feel embarrassed about asking for money, even though I do work very very hard on the stories I put up here.

The Isla Vista Killings

Happened three years ago.  I wrote about Elliot Rodger in 2014.  That post, sadly, is still relevant, given the misogynist online sites.

A Political Paradox: The Anti-Extremist Ideology Center in Riyadh.

The glowing orb in this picture, taken while our Dear Leader was visiting his BFFs in Saudi Arabia, is a decoration in a new center in Riyadh.  The center is intended to combat extremist ideology. 

Most politics has those incredible paradoxes, the kinds which any observer from outer space would immediately place one of her twenty-one fingers on and then shake her three heads with great sadness, trying to understand them.  In this case the paradox is why the country* which is the home of the most extremist religious ideology in Islam would now build a center to combat its own messages to the rest of the world.  

After all, the petro-dollars have financed Wahhabist mosques all over the world, including in Europe,  and it is the ur-conservative and extremely literal Wahhabist interpretations of the Quran which the terrorists in ISIS, for example, have partly used  to create their own theological justifications for terror attacks, slavery,  the wholesale killing of those whose religious beliefs differ, and the extreme oppression of women.

But then similar paradoxes abound elsewhere, too.  The United States is not exactly innocent in that respect, either.

Still, it's imperative to address the long-term negative effects of religious extremism which is rearing its ugly head not just in Islam but also in Christianity and Hinduism. 

This is particularly crucial for the equality of women and men, because extremists/literalists always base their views of women's proper roles on what ancient nomadic herding societies thought those were,  and then desire to make them today's norms.  Indeed, one might even argue that the rise of religious fundamentalism may be a partial response to women's increasing rights.

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*  The word "country" is here used to refer to the rulers and clergy of Saudi Arabia, not the ordinary citizens of the country.