The Eleventh Commandment: Do Not Normalize The Ideology of Donald Trump

1.  Do not normalize Trump values.  Do not normalize bigotry and hatred because it was expressed in a folksy way.

Some already  interpret the election results as a right to go out and kick people who don't look exactly like they do.*  Many are now afraid of their fellow citizens, what they might do, and how far Trump might allow it.  He has appointed an out-and-out racist-misogynist-whitemalesupremacist as his chief strategist, and that man has his ear.  That man's news organization is also suing the media for stating that the organization is one for white supremacists, despite this statement by Bannon himself:

"We're the platform for the alt-right," Bannon told me proudly when I interviewed him at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July.

 For more on that, check out my post below.

2.  Do not expect that Trump will act as an outsider**.   The Republican Congress still aims to give the rich humongous tax cuts, aims to destroy Social Security and Medicare as well as all environmental  protection.  No, we are not going to get Trump-the-billionaire-outsider; we are going to get both the old wingnut fundie your-wombs-are-ours stuff and the old wingnut big-wallet-boyz stuff, but on top of that we are going to get white supremacist horrors.

3.  Stop the bickering about who caused Trump's coup on our side of the aisle.  It's a waste of time, even if the purpose is to learn for the sake of the future, because it's like sitting in your living-room, trying to figure out how to buy better fire insurance while all the time the house you are in is on fire.  Besides, the wounds that bickering cause will fester much longer and create a revenge-is-best-served-chilled mentality in all  participants.

It is the voters who ultimately bear the responsibility for both getting informed and for the way they voted.  A large enough minority of Americans voted for Donald Trump, and that minority will now rule because of the Electoral College.

4.  Stop normalizing what is needed to cooperate with the Trump administration.  You can cooperate with him, but you cannot normalize the vicious hatred in order to do so, you cannot explain that Breitbart News is just an ordinary news organization for just very conservative conservatives when it publishes articles with headlines such as this:

 ‘Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?’

Equal rights for more than one half of this country's population is like cancer?
We cannot allow that way of thinking to be seen as normal.  We cannot collude with those values by normalizing Bannon's messages.

5.  The time to fight back is now.  It is much harder later on when the Trump Reich is in full swing.   And small attempts to destroy the underpinnings of democracy, such as the idea of the president suing the media for what they write, should be extremely strongly protested, because if they are ignored we will soon have no free press.

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* The main targets for attacks have been African-Americans and Hispanics, but women in general have also met with a higher level of attacks and more online threats, and anti-Semitic symbols, such as the swastika, are used more.
 For some recent incidents see here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

And lest you think that feminist bread-and-butter issues will not be affected, note that misogynists also feel empowered.  For one example of how "might makes right" see what this commenter to one of the hate sites has to say about us women:

**  He might, because he is utterly unpredictable.  But what I have seen so far is that he is going to pass all the normal governing to extremist Republicans, while he gets the accolades (and presses the nuclear button, should someone insult him).

Meet Stephen Bannon, Trump's New Strategist

It's a sign of these times that my first reaction to hearing that Trump's Chief of Staff would be Reince Priebus was a sigh of relief!  Please, someone, turn off this nightmare.

If you can't do that, you might be interested to learn that the man I feared would hold that position, Stephen Bannon, will be Trump's chief West Wing strategist.

Stephen Bannon is an extremist right-wing media provocateur, the executive chairman of Breitbart News,  a website which has published articles with these titles under his rule:

“Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy.”
“Political Correctness Protects Muslim Rape Culture.”
“Suck It Up Buttercups: Dangerous Faggot Tour Returns to Colleges in September.”
“The Solution to Online ‘Harassment’ Is Simple: Women Should Log Off.”
“Two Months Left Until Obama Gives Dictators Control of Internet.”
“There’s No Hiring Bias Against Women in Tech, They Just Suck at Interviews.”
“Trannies Whine About Hilarious Bruce Jenner Billboard.” 

My friends, this is the man who now has continuous access to the president of the United States, and he is a beauty!

This article argues that he is connected to the White Supremacist Movement, and he certainly is connected to the Alt Right, which I think is the White Male Supremacist Movement:

"We're the platform for the alt-right," Bannon told me proudly when I interviewed him at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July.

...

Exactly who and what defines the alt-right is hotly debated in conservative circles, but its most visible proponents—who tend to be young, white, and male—are united in a belief that traditional movement conservatism has failed. They often criticize immigration policies and a "globalist" agenda as examples of how the deck is stacked in favor of outsiders instead of "real Americans." They bash social conservatives as ineffective sellouts to the GOP establishment, and rail against neo-conservative hawks for their embrace of Israel. They see themselves as a threat to the establishment, far bolder and edgier than Fox News. While often tapping into legitimate economic grievances, their social-media hashtags (such as #altright on Twitter) dredge up torrents of racist, sexist, and xenophobic memes.

I have visited the Alt Right websites.  First and foremost they are racist.  But they are also sexist.  White women are needed to populate the white Vaterlands, but they are certainly not viewed as equal participants in the movement.  More like the resources the movement requires, something along the idea that women's sphere should be limited to Kinder, Küche, Kirche.

That's the background of our Stephen.  We shall soon learn what he has in mind for the citizens of this country.  Sadly, that is now likely to depend on the race and ethnicity of those citizens.  Oh, and of their wives, of course. 

Voters Were Fed Up With LIars

I was told that those who voted for Trump were fed up with lying politicians, such as the crooked and vicious Killery, and that's why so many voted for Trump, the super-liar.

And because he is an outsider.  Only outsiders fly in their own helicopters and own several houses where those can land.

But now we are told that Killery isn't even a killery!

In his first television interview since winning the presidential election, Donald Trump described on CBS News' "60 Minutes" his phone call with Hillary Clinton and said that the former secretary of state is strong and smart.
"It was a lovely call, and it was a tough call for her, I mean, I can imagine. Tougher for her than it would have been for me. I mean, for me, it would have been very, very difficult," Trump sad, referring to Clinton's call after Trump secured victory. "She couldn’t have been nicer. She just said, 'Congratulations, Donald, well done.'"
"And I said, 'I want to thank you very much, you were a great competitor.' She is very strong and very smart," he added in the interview set to air in full on Sunday.

The lies, they are never-ending.

Also check my post below for the evidence of Donald-the-weathervane.  He is running away from his wider base as fast as he can, straight into the arms of the money boyz and Christianists.  But he has not said anything about his narrow base of white supremacists misogynists, the people who just might be doing all that recent harassing of minorities and white women.  I haven't heard a peep from him about the importance of respect and so on.

The Morphing Face of Donald Trump. Or How Quickly Campaign Promises Are Forgotten

Now imagine this:  All those wonderful promises that Donald Trump made have already started to disappear or to morph into your usual ultra-right-wing fanaticism.  And he has been president-elect for four full days!

1.  Trump campaigned against lobbyists, but they are part of his transitioning team.   He vowed to drain the swamp that is Washington.  Instead, he is petting all the swamp critters and inviting them into the White House:

In the final weeks of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, he pledged to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C. by, among other things, introducing tough new restrictions on lobbying.

“I am proposing a package of ethics reforms to make our government honest once again,” Trump said during the October 17 appearance in Green Bay, Wisconsin where he first used the “drain the swamp” line.

It appears Trump is already backtracking on that pledge. Politico reports that “lobbyists are all over” Trump’s transition team. Those lobbyists include Cindy Hayden of tobacco company Altria; Michael Torrey, owner of a lobbying firm representing the American Beverage Association; Steve Hart, chairman of the Williams & Jensen firm; and Michael McKenna, who lobbies on behalf of Dow Chemical.

2.  Trump's transitioning website has had some careful alterations.  For instance, he never campaigned on the privatization of Medicare, but now his site tells us that Medicare will be "modernized," a euphemism for privatization.

3.  And a new insertion concerns the rights of all health care professionals to control the behavior of slutty women and to determine exactly how they should suffer while receiving health care.  The so-called "conscience clause" is an integral part of the religious right wing's demands, and Trump is going along with them.  I've read that ninety percent of them voted for the man with three serial wives and several additional mistresses, perhaps, because gods send weird messengers.

But note that Trump did NOT campaign on that issue.

4.  Neither did he vow to strongly cater for egg-Americans, but his transitioning site promises that his government will

Protect innocent human life from conception to natural death, including the most defenseless and those Americans with disabilities

I'm not sure if that means the immediate banning of all abortions for any reason whatsoever, once the Supreme Court has been stuffed with Christianists, but that's the most likely outcome.  As an aside, it seems that only innocent human lives will be protected, and only if they die in a natural way.

Very bad framing, all that, though of course I get the subtext:  That euthanasia is out and that egg-Americans have not yet murdered anyone.  Wonder what he plans to do about those egg-Americans who are not in the soon-to-be-socialized wombs of this country's womb-men.

5.  Finally, remember how Trump railed against Wall Street and bankers in his campaign speeches?  Only a few days later:

Trump’s reliance on insiders goes beyond lobbyists. His financial advisory team is full of veteran Wall Streeters such as former Goldman Sachs banker Steven Mnuchin, the Wall Street Journal reports. Both Mnuchin and former JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon are reportedly in the mix to be Trump’s Treasury Secretary.

All this makes perfect sense from Trump's angle:  He gave the speeches he needed to win.  Once he won, the ideas in those speeches had done their job which was to secure him a victory.  They have no further use value for him, and are thus tossed out with the garbage.  Because he doesn't care about those promises at all, and neither does he care about those who voted for him.

The promises are replaced with things Trump has been persuaded to include to satisfy the arch-conservatives and Christianists among the Republican base.  It looks to me that someone is influencing him.

Very very sad.  Humongously sad!  Sad in a bigly way, especially for those who believed Trump's messages.

But perhaps even sadder for the rest of us.

 

And Here We Go, Indeed: The Death of Medicare

Talking Points Memo tells us that Paul Ryan intends to phase out Medicare and replace it with a private insurance plan for the elderly.  The New York Magazine tells us a little more:  That Ryan is lying and just wants to kill Medicare.  Trump didn't talk about Medicare in his campaign, so there's no way to know if he likes Ryan's idea or not.  But here's the gist from a Fox interview with Bret Baier:

“Your solution has always been to put things together, including entitlement reform,” asks Baier, using Republican code for privatizing Medicare. Ryan replies, “If you’re going to repeal and replace Obamacare, you have to address those issues as well. … Medicare has got some serious issues because of Obamacare. So those things are part of our plan to replace Obamacare.”

Ryan tells Baier, “Because of Obamacare, Medicare is going broke.” This is false. In fact, it’s the complete opposite of the truth. The Medicare trust fund has been extended 11 years as a result of the passage of Obamacare, whose cost reforms have helped bring health care inflation to historic lows. It is also untrue that repealing Obamacare requires changing traditional Medicare. But Ryan clearly believes he needs to make this claim in order to sell his plan, or probably even to convince fellow Republicans to support it.

What would it mean if Medicare was replaced by private insurance?  Would the elderly get a lump sum government subsidy, to take and to turn into a private insurance policy?  And what would the size of that subsidy be?  What would the private insurance cover?

And how would the premia be set?

Remember this:  The elderly have very high health care costs, on average.  If they are going to be put into their own class, the premium for that class will be high, and the subsidies needed to cover those premia will also be high.*

Would that be better than the current system, in any case?

The answer is a resounding no, because Medicare has lower administration costs than private insurance plans and because its centralized purchasing power means cost savings to tax payers.

Because those articles don't tell us about the subsidy the elderly would get from the government it's hard to know what else might happen.  For instance, the subsidy might be set too low to cover a good insurance package, and there wouldn't be that much the elderly could do about it.  In any case, I think the idea of the frailest elderly having to shop for an insurance plan that would accept them is macabre, because insurance plans have a strong incentive to keep the high-risk users out.

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* If, on the other hand, the insurers are forced to offer them insurance with the same average premium as is used more generally, the premia will go up for everyone enrolled in that plan.

My Election Feelings

I move slowly in a nightmare world where the United States has chosen as its leader a man with a severe personality disorder, an extremely thin skin, fingers which itch for the nuclear button, utter lack of expertise and knowledge the president is supposed to have, and arrogance combined with a thorough lack of interest in any values or principles that are not about his own glorification.    That is the short version.

An even shorter version is that now anything could happen, anything at all.

That all the branches of the government are in Republican hands could mean that the welfare state will be dismantled, but even if it does not, the frailest and most needy among us will certainly suffer, while tax cuts go to fatten the already fat wallets of the one percent.

I sincerely doubt that those who voted for Trump for reasons of economic desperation will find any improvement in their status.  It's more likely that their handicapped children will be stripped of any government support they are getting now, and that grandma or granddad will have to move in with them.  It's more likely that corporations will gain and that workers will lose, all over the country, because Trump will abolish as many regulations that he can, possibly including any that have to do with the safety and security of jobs.  And jobs returning to the US on Trump's say-so?  I have a bridge for sale to those who believe that he can accomplish that.

Naturally I want to be wrong.  I want Trump to be something greater and better than the man I have learned to know during his campaign:  A miserly mind, taking insult from everything and everyone, writing down enemy lists, proposing things which are against the Constitution, seeming, at least, to suggest that suing journalists will be something he is going to do.  And the first tweet he has made since becoming President-Elect (and being allowed back to access his Twitter account by his minders) is yet another childish, petulant complaint about the media.

As R. McGeddon wrote in Eschaton comments:

He's going to get the nuclear codes, while his staff couldn't trust him with a Twitter account?

That is the roots of my fear, and fearful I am.  Trump is too erratic, too unpredictable, simply too frightening as the president of the United States. What would trigger him?  What would he react to in international politics with threats and bullying?   I cannot predict him, at all, but some of the choices he has made suggests to me that he plans to drive this world to its end, if necessary, for his personal comfort, and he also plans to follow the old Republican model of appointing those who hate a particular government department to run it.  To the ground, that is.

Finally, an even longer and more personal reaction:

Remember When Trump Spoke About the Election Being Rigged?

Well, it was, in a way, because this was the first election without the full protection of the Voting Rights Act.  Ari Berman writes this about Wisconsin:

 For example, 27,000 votes currently separate Trump and Clinton in Wisconsin, where 300,000 registered voters, according to a federal court, lacked strict forms of voter ID. Voter turnout in Wisconsin was at its lowest levels in 20 years and decreased 13 percent in Milwaukee, where 70 percent of the state’s African-American population lives, according to Daniel Nichanian of the University of Chicago.

And more generally:

 On Election Day, there were 868 fewer polling places in states with a long history of voting discrimination, like Arizona, Texas, and North Carolina. These changes impacted hundreds of thousands of voters, yet received almost no coverage. In North Carolina, as my colleague Joan Walsh reported, black turnout decreased 16 percent during the first week of early voting because “in 40 heavily black counties, there were 158 fewer early polling places.”
Even if these restrictions had no outcome on the election, it’s fundamentally immoral to keep people from voting in a democracy. The media devoted hours and hours to Trump’s absurd claim that the election was rigged against him, while spending precious little time on the real threat that voters faced.

The ability to vote is fundamental for democracy to exist.  To take away that ability, to make voting much harder in some places and some people, that is not democracy.  The Republican Party is using an anti-democratic strategy to keep those likely to vote for Democrats out of the voting booth.  

President-Elect Trump's Plan For The First Hundred Days

Is ambitious!  Just on the first day Trumpmas:

Laying out the aims of his administration, Trump said he will “repeal and replace ‘Obamacare,’” “immediately suspend the admission of Syrian refugees,” “order a review of every single regulation issued over the last eight years,” “begin lifting all regulations that are hurting our workers and our businesses,” “terminate every single unconstitutional executive order signed by President Obama,” “restore the rule of law to our land,” “begin implementing plans for construction of a wall along our southern border” and “get rid of” international gangs of thugs and drug cartels — all on his first day.

Repealing Obamacare means that Trump will bring back what existed before Obamacare, albeit in a more stringent version.  There will be Health Savings Accounts!  They are subsidized in the direct proportion of the tax-payer's actual tax rate, so the rich get larger subsidies than the poor.  And of course the rich can afford to save much more for later ICU expenses.  But very few of us can save enough for even a week in the intensive care ward, sigh.

That will really really help those voters who chose Trump because of their dire financial status.

Immediately suspending the admission of Syrian refugees is good for international relations.  Other countries will admire the United States for its generosity and kindness toward those who lost everything.

I adore the idea of lifting all regulations that hurt workers and businesses, because what hurts workers and businesses is not necessarily the same thing (so how does one choose?) and because it would be easy to insert almost all regulations, whatever their benefits,  into that basket, to be tossed out.

The last three points (about restoring law-and-order, the wall against Mexico and the one-day-operation of getting rid of all international gangs of thugs and drug cartels) are just so much hot air coming out of the President-Elect's mouth, and law-and-order is conservative code for a societal pyramid where some perch on top and others silently obey.

But clearly Donald is going to work very hard.  After the first day he will start fixing the country's place in the world and the climate crisis:

Trump has said he will renegotiate the Iran nuclear deal, call a NATO summit to update the organization’s mission and rebalance members’ “financial commitments,” cancel payments to the United Nations’ climate-change programs and divert that money to domestic infrastructure improvement.

At least we will have nice new streets when we gag to death from air pollution.

Fascinating, though, to see what the Trump voters will get on the first days of Trumpmas:  Health Savings Accounts and no more "Mexicans."  Now consider that 33% of Latinos and 26% of Latinas voted for Trump.  Granted, that's considerably less than the equivalent white (Anglo, I believe?) percentages of 63% and 53%, but at least the latter group isn't directly attacking itself.

The rest of the first-day-presents go mostly to firms who will be allowed to rampage freely on those nice new streets. 

The Morning After

And the sun rose!  For a while I thought it might not, given the other "black swan" experiences of yesterday.  Donald Trump is now the most powerful politician on earth.  He also seems to be an utterly unpredictable one, and that is frightening.  What will he do?  His list of impossible promises doesn't add up.

Will he really abolish the ACA and replace it with subsidized savings accounts (aka no insurance for anyone but the very rich)?  How is he going to reconcile the immense tax cuts he has promised with his pledge not to cut Social Security or Medicare?  How many wars will he initiate?  How is he going to force firms to return jobs to the United States?  What international treaties does he plan to break?  How is he going to build that wall and make Mexico pay for it?

Nobody knows the answer to those questions.  Whatever I might think about George Walker Bush, at least he was a politician who worked within the framework of his party, and that made him somewhat predictable.  Trump is a loose cannon, a man with the thinnest of skins who takes umbrage at everything, whose reactions cannot be easily predicted, whose skills for the job he has won are non-existent.

No wonder the financial markets have jitters.  And no wonder many of us are shell-shocked.

None of the polls I read before the election  foretold the events of last night.  Why was that the case? 

I have been told that the white working class turned up to vote in much larger numbers (for Trump)*, that the base of the Democratic party did not turn up in sufficiently large numbers,  and that something akin to the Bradley effect might have operated with those Republican voters who were going to vote for Trump, come hell or high water, but weren't going to admit to it when pollsters queried them.  Other explanations are no doubt possible.

Then, of course, the Republicans will also dominate the House and the Senate, and will nominate new Justices to the Supreme Court.  Those Justices are very likely to be either religious fanatics of the Christian type and/or in the pockets of large corporations.

At least one exit poll study has already appeared.  Treat it with some caution, given that it is based on exit polls, not actual votes.   Still, it offers some data on the demographics of Clinton and Trump voters.  For instance, here's the split by race and sex:

Note that white men went overwhelmingly for Trump and that the majority of white women did, too.  That is a pattern familiar to us from prior elections:  The base of the Republican Party consists of whites, especially of older whites.

But this is fascinating:  See how inside each racial or ethnic group more men than women voted for Trump?**

All the tables in that survey are interesting.  I want to pick out the income table, because it raises some questions about the economic motivations Trump voters state they have:

Finally, this is a fun table:  How much Trump's treatment of women bothers the respondent in the survey:

So it goes.

Well, better buckle up, because we are in for some turbulence. 




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* But note the income table later in this post.   It suggests that the Trump voters are not particularly economically disadvantaged.

** The same pattern is visible for Independents, too, and within each of the two major parties slightly more men than women chose Trump. 
  

Logic According to the Trump Campaign

Roger Stone does this hilarious shtick about Hillary Clinton being too old to run for president, about how she has no agenda at all, about her vindictiveness and so on.

It's good for a laugh, because all those things he mentions apply more to Trump than to Clinton:  He is older, he is tremendously vindictive and he has no realistic agenda of any kind.  Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has reams and reams of stuff on her policy proposals.

But watching that short video clip is a learning experience.  There are many folks in this country who watch crap like that day in and day out.  No wonder they live in an alternate reality.

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Added later:  Of course what "too old" means for women and men in the mind of someone like Roger Stone is not the same thing.  Women need to be nubile to be seen, though not still heard.  Men just need to still breathe to be an acceptable age for presidency.

VOTE! And No Peeking!

These snapshots of Donald and Eric Trump voting remind us why voting by mail and similar otherwise excellent inventions might not always guarantee the integrity and privacy of one's vote:

From here.

And:

Now, the Messrs Trump might not be peeking there, even though it looks like it, but I wish they had those curtained booths back.

Go vote if you haven't already.

Feel Good Election Stuff

Susan B. Anthony's grave has become a site for pilgrimages.  She worked for women's suffrage in the United States, and now her tombstone is covered with "I Voted" stickers.

The secret Facebook group Pantsuit Nation was created as a safe haven for those who support Hillary Clinton for president.  That such a safe haven is needed is worth a post or two, by the way.  At the present time it has over two million members.

This site, I Waited 96 Years,  gives pictures of women who were born before women could vote in the US of A.

Go Vote!

Rankings And Positions in Soccer at Harvard University

I'm sure you have come across the story already:  Harvard University 2012 men's soccer team decided to rank the incoming members of Harvard University's women's soccer team in terms of their fuckability or lack thereof.  These rankings were circulated online.

When this "scouting report" became public, Harvard suspended the men's team for the remainder of the season:

University president Drew Faust said in a statement on Thursday night that an investigation into the 2012 team found their “appalling” actions were not isolated to one year or the actions of a few, but appeared to be more widespread across the team and continued through the current season.

“The decision to cancel a season is serious and consequential, and reflects Harvard’s view that both the team’s behaviour and the failure to be forthcoming when initially questioned are completely unacceptable, have no place at Harvard, and run counter to the mutual respect that is a core value of our community,” Faust said.

I strongly recommend that you read the wonderful response by several players of the women's soccer team. Because those women are not mean-spirited, the response doesn't consist of producing equivalent rankings of the men whose "scouting report" resulted in these events.

But imagining such a reversed report is a learning experience.  Some guy's most basic physical characteristics are discussed online, possibly in very negative terms!  What's not to like about that?

A large group pondering whether a man is at all fuckable, whether he'd be best served with parsley, in a cream sauce or with an apple in his mouth,  all that is just innocent and intoxicating fun!  Besides, it's great for female bonding, for reminding everyone that men are meant for stud use, not for sports, and for demonstrating one's societal power over others.

So I am mean-spirited, sigh.  Do remember to vote.

The Candidate of the FBI: One Donald Trump

Several articles have questioned why FBI decided to use the ten days or so before this election to tar the Hillary Clinton campaign with as many brushes as it could find.  Could this be politics?  Or just stern and impartial investigators following the tiniest letter of the law about when to publish new information?

I cannot tell.  But it turns out that last week's giant Clinton scandal has already fizzled to nothing, as Comey's most recent letter about the FBI investigation into Hitlery* demonstrates:

In other words, this new investigation has found nothing new, Hitlery won't be sent to prison or burned as a witch, at least yet.  For that you must wait until the impeachment rounds begin, should she win on Tuesday.

But isn't it delicious to see the FBI again in the J. Edgar Hoover terms?  A state within a state, a sovereign power with its own political goals?   The Guardian writes that the FBI is "Trumpland,"  where many agents openly discuss their desire to have Trump as their boss.  Vanity Fair tells one story about the hilarious happenings inside the FBI:

Throughout her campaign, Hillary Clinton has battled accusations of fostering a “pay for play” culture at the State Department, giving undue access to major Clinton Foundation donors. So far, Republicans have failed to find a smoking gun, but the narrative has served its purpose: tarnishing the public perception of the Democratic nominee and her family’s namesake charity. For this, no one deserves more credit than Peter Schweizer, Breitbart editor-at-large and the author of Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. The controversial, mostly discredited book has been held up by many as irrefutable proof of wrongdoing, or at least common venality, by the Clintons. It also found plenty of eager readers within the Federal Bureau of Investigation, The Wall Street Journal and New York Times report, galvanizing a number of F.B.I. agents to launch an investigation into the Clinton Foundation, based mostly on assertions made by Schweizer in the book.

Why is that hilarious?  Because the author himself admits that his book doesn't prove any wrongdoing:

The argument is certainly a compelling one. Even Schweizer—whom the Journal reports was interviewed on several occasions by the F.B.I. agents interested in the Clinton Foundation—has conceded that he does not have any “direct evidence” to prove that the Clintons have done anything beyond the pale. During an interview with ABC’s This Week in April 2015, the author said, “The smoking gun is the pattern of behavior,” and when pressed by host George Stephanopoulos, added, “It’s not up to an author to prove the crime.” 

I suffer from this odd naivete which assumes that people who work in, say, the FBI are actually trained in how to investigate evidence.  Then I wake up to news of this sort, and dark humor is the only good response.  But imagine someone launching an investigation just on the say-so of a propaganda book!  I've read enough of those books to know that you have to be very biased not to interrogate the evidence in them.


Then there's this tweet:

 That sentence may be the first one in which I love acronyms!

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*  Hitlery is the endearment the Trump people use for Hillary Clinton.  Note that last week's campaign probably did what it was intended to do:  Stop some voters from bothering to vote for H. Clinton.

Snippet Posts 11/3/2016: Women Priests, Honey Badgers and Sexist Stuff

1.  The Never-Never-Land in the Never-Never-Time:  That's when and where women can become priests in the Catholic Church, according to the pope (who is not a woman), who quotes another pope (who wasn't a woman, either):*

Pope Francis said on Tuesday he believes the Roman Catholic Church's ban on women becoming priests is forever and will never be changed, in some of his most definitive remarks on the issue.
He was speaking aboard a plane taking him back to Rome from Sweden, in the freewheeling news conference with reporters that has become a tradition of his return flights from trips abroad.
A Swedish female reporter noted that the head of the Lutheran Church who welcomed him in Sweden was a woman, and then asked if he thought the Catholic Church could allow women to be ordained as ministers in coming decades.
"St. Pope John Paul II had the last clear word on this and it stands, this stands," Francis said.
Francis was referring to a 1994 document by Pope John Paul that closed the door on a female priesthood. The Vatican says this teaching is an infallible part of Catholic tradition.
The reporter then pressed the pope, asking: "But forever, forever? Never, never?
Francis responded: "If we read carefully the declaration by St. John Paul II, it is going in that direction."

The Three Big Guy Religions are one of the biggest reasons why progress on women's rights is slow.   Not too surprising, given that they were all created a very long time ago and reflect patriarchal norms of that time and place,  but extremely sad, because those norms are interpreted by many men and women as the never-changing values determined by a divine power.

2.  This video might be about those who will rule this planet after humans have committed mass suicide in various forms (climate change and wars, including religious wars, short-sighted greed and short-sighted overpopulation).

3.  Mila Kunis makes a point about the difficulty of figuring out when someone is treated unfairly because of sex, race, ethnicity and so on.  The dilemma is that such unfair treatment is based on the group one belongs to, but it cannot always be distinguished from treatment resulting from an individual's own acts:

The Bad Moms star penned a strong and lengthy open letter in A Plus magazine detailing sexism she's experienced in the entertainment industry.
"Throughout my career, there have been moments when I have been insulted, sidelined, paid less, creatively ignored, and otherwise diminished based on my gender," she wrote. "And always, I tried to give people the benefit of the doubt; maybe they knew more, maybe they had more experience, maybe there was something I was missing. I taught myself that to succeed as a woman in this industry I had to play by the rules of the boy's club. But the older I got and the longer I worked in this industry, the more I realized that it's (expletive)! And, worse, that I was complicit in allowing it to happen."

That problem applies to the treatment of Hillary Clinton, too.  Is she treated more harshly because she is a woman or because she is the person she is?

You decide.  But the various t-shirts and pins worn by some Trump supporters do suggest that the contempt towards women, as a class, is certainly one aspect of the Hillary hatred:

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*  And so on, all the way down to who wrote the Bible  or the Koran or the Talmud (mostly) and who made decisions at various religious councils.  It's possible to get this beautiful, water-tight (drowning) and air-tight (can'tbreathe) explanation which actually doesn't use a single woman's  opinion, but is attributed to the entirety of all the faithful.

But you knew that, already.

The Job Interviews. Applicants Trump and Clinton.

Imagine this:  You are looking for someone to hire for a job in your firm, and you conduct the job interviews without much mention of what the job entails.  Instead, you talk about baseball or dogs and cats or beer and hairstyles.

Then imagine this:

Since the beginning of 2016, ABC’s World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News have devoted just 32 minutes to issues coverage, according to Andrew Tyndall.
Differentiating issues coverage from daily campaign coverage where policy topics might be addressed, Tyndall defines issues coverage by a newscast this way: “It takes a public policy, outlines the societal problem that needs to be addressed, describes the candidates' platform positions and proposed solutions, and evaluates their efficacy.”
And here’s how that kind of in-depth coverage breaks down, year to date, by network:
ABC: 8 minutes, all of which covered terrorism.
NBC: 8 minutes for terrorism, LBGT issues, and foreign policy.
CBS: 16 minutes for foreign policy, terrorism, immigration, policing, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
And this remarkable finding from Tyndall [emphasis added]:

No trade, no healthcare, no climate change, no drugs, no poverty, no guns, no infrastructure, no deficits. To the extent that these issues have been mentioned, it has been on the candidates' terms, not on the networks' initiative.

Policy is boring!  It's not like Wiener's wiener!  It's not like Trump's reality show brags!

But wait!  There's more:  In this job interview for one of the most important jobs on the globe one candidate's utter lack of relevant expertise is entirely ignored.  It doesn't matter.  The other candidate's relevant expertise is regarded as a disadvantage, because it makes her an insider.

And I haven't even gotten to the part where only one candidate's purported misdeeds are viewed as clear evidence of a criminal mind.

 

On Buttermilk

1.  My grandmother believed that buttermilk was the healthiest drink a child could have.  I hated the taste with the fire of a thousand suns.  Because she was a clever woman, one summer she served me the first strawberries from her garden in buttermilk.  Because I was a sneaky child, I waited until she left the kitchen for a moment and then rinsed the buttermilk off the strawberries.

2.  If you are so inclined, you can buy two different sorts of buttermilk in Finland.  One is the kind you can buy here, the other, called "long buttermilk" consists of strands which are cousins to snot.  If you upend the container, the strands dangle menacingly in front of your eyes.

3.  As you may have figured out, I would never date buttermilk.  But I love the buttermilk cake!  Go figure.

Here's the recipe, in metric units (sorry, American bakers).  If you have a measuring cup with both Imperial and metric units, you can use that one.  If you don't have one of those, my translations are in parentheses.*

Ingredients:

2.25 deciliters of buttermilk (0.95 cups)
a drop of cream (tablespoonful)
1.5 teaspoons of baking soda
1.5 deciliters of white sugar (0.63 cups)
1.5 deciliters of molasses (0.63 cups)
1 teaspoon of ground cloves
2 deciliters of raisins (0.85 cups)
1.5 deciliters of melted butter (0.63 cups)
4.5 deciliters of white flour (1.9 cups)

Butter and flour a bundt pan**.  If you have them, use bread crumbs instead of flour.  Heat the oven to 350F (175C).  Mix all ingredients in the order given***.  Pour the batter into the prepared pan and bake about an hour or until a toothpick or a fork comes out clean.

Two important observations:  The first time I made this by grinding the cloves right at the point of adding them I found out that one teaspoon of freshly ground cloves will take the top of your palate off and release smoke from your ears.  If you like that effect, go ahead and follow the recipe with freshly ground cloves.  I tend to use only half a teaspoon of them now, but one teaspoon is probably correct for pre-ground cloves.

Second, I detest raisins even more than I detest drinking buttermilk****.  I have never added them and the cake turns out just fine without them.  It would be turned into the garbage with them at the Snakepit Inc..

The cake is not very sweet, it gets better over a few days, and it's very nice with coffee.

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* I'm imagining someone carefully trying to follow those measurements!  My guess is that you can round off without anything horrible happening.

**  You could probably use some other kind of pan, too, such as one of those oblong bread pans.

*** This is what makes the cake so easy!  No beating, no kneading, no nothing, just add everything and mix.

****  They really are rabbit droppings.  People pretend that they are food.

IOKIYAR: On The New FBI Witch Hunt

That acronym means It's OK If You Are Republican, and it applies to many aspects of American politics.  For instance, Republicans can be rude, because it's part of their brand, but Democrats can't be rude, because it's not part of their brand.  Democrats must pretend to be bipartisan; Republicans can openly be as partisan as they wish, and the press will only report the failings of the Democrats.

This has been going on for years.  President Obama extended a hand across the political aisle several times.  Sometimes he had his hand bitten, sometimes it was ignored.  I'm not sure if he learned his lesson.

Anyway, he was the person who appointed James Comey to the directorship of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI).  Comey is a Republican.

It's that little fact which makes judging his Friday news dump difficult.  Is he acting for the Republican Party here?  Or is he just following the letter of the law about what he has to do?

If you have been having fun or visiting some other planet (lucky you), this is the letter James Comey sent on Friday:

Perhaps he had to send it?  Some legal experts believe so.

At the same time, the letter is surprisingly empty of content:  "Because those emails appear to be pertinent to our investigation, I agreed that we should take appropriate steps to obtain and review them."

In other words, Comey hasn't seen them.

Later he writes:

"At the same time, however, given that we don't know the significance of this newly discovered collection of emails, I don't want to create a misleading impression."

Put that into your pipe and smoke it.  The Trumpeteers are certainly doing so, believing that they have something wonderfully illegal and intoxicating in that pipe, something that will lift Trump high.  In fact, we have no idea if any of the emails are from Hillary Clinton, and I have read that they are not from her private server.

It's the timing* of Comey's statement which has received most criticism:

Comey’s letter to Congress has subjected the FBI director to withering criticism. Top Justice Department officials were described by a government source as “apoplectic” over the letter. Senior officials “strongly discouraged” Comey from sending it, telling FBI officials last week it would violate longstanding department policy against taking actions in the days before an election that might influence the outcome, a U.S official familiar with the matter told Yahoo News. “He was acting independently of the guidance given to him,” said the U.S. official.

How about the timing of other email scandals in various past US governments?  Now that's a pertinent question, I would think, so I went searching for similar strict adherence to laws, ethics and regulations.

And I found interesting items, such as this one:

Clinton’s email habits look positively transparent when compared with the subpoena-dodging, email-hiding, private-server-using George W. Bush administration. Between 2003 and 2009, the Bush White House “lost” 22 million emails. This correspondence included millions of emails written during the darkest period in America’s recent history, when the Bush administration was ginning up support for what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq with false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and, later, when it was firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons.

Like Clinton, the Bush White House used a private email server—its was owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails.

And this one:

Did Colin Powell suggest that Hillary Clinton should use her private email account as secretary of state—as he had admittedly done in that same job several years earlier?
Last week, The New York Times confirmed that Powell did offer her precisely that advice, based on an account in my forthcoming book on Bill Clinton’s post-presidency. Yet Powell has responded by insisting that he has “no recollection” of such an incident.

Toward the end of the evening, over dessert, Albright asked all of the former secretaries to offer one salient bit of counsel [to Clinton].... Powell suggested that she use her own email, as he had done, except for classified communications, which he had sent and received via a State Department computer on his desk. Saying that his use of personal email had been transformative for the department, Powell thus confirmed a decision she had made months earlier.

And these cases:

Recently Jeb Bush released a large volume of emails from the personal – i.e., non-governmental – email account that he routinely used as Florida governor, and then praised his own transparency with self-serving extravagance. The only problem is that those released emails represent only 10 percent of the total. The rest he has simply withheld, without any public review.

When Scott Walker served as Milwaukee county executive, before he was elected Wisconsin governor, he and his staff used a secret email system for unlawful campaign work on public time; that system emerged as part of an investigation that ultimately sent one of his aides to prison (another was immunized by prosecutors). Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal has used a personal email account for government business, as has former Texas governor Rick Perry. So have Florida senator Marco Rubio, and various congressmembers who have been heard to spout off about Clinton’s emails, such as Utah Rep. Jason Chaffetz.
Those examples epitomize hypocrisy, of course — yet none compares with the truly monumental email scandal of the Bush years, when millions of emails went missing from White House servers – and many more were never archived, as required since 1978 by the Presidential Records Act. Dozens of Bush White House staff used a series of private email accounts provided by the Republican National Committee (whose loud-talking chairman Reince Priebus now mocks Clinton as the “Secretary of Secrecy”). The RNC’s White House email clients most notably included scandal-ridden Bush advisor Karl Rove, who used the party accounts for an estimated 95 percent of his electronic messaging, and by Rove’s staff.
Among many other dubious activities, Rove aide Susan Ralston used her private RNC email to discuss Interior Department appointments with the office of crooked lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who wanted to influence the department on behalf of gambling interests. According to Abramoff associate Kevin Ring, another White House official explained to him that “it is better not to put this stuff in their email system because it might actually limit what they can do to help us, especially since there could be lawsuits, etc…” While Rove was forced to surrender some emails involving his notorious exposure of CIA agent Valerie Plame, he retained the capacity to delete thousands of emails.

I quote in such length because it's worth doing:  The rules are different for Republicans.  I also suspect that the rules might be particularly harsh for female Democratic politicians.

Comey's letter has effects similar to the ordeal by water in medieval witch trials:  Throw the woman in the water!  If she floats, she is a witch and must be burned.  If she drowns, she was innocent.   The similarity is in the outcomes from this letter.

The accused cannot win, and neither can H. Clinton, not really, because she cannot defend herself against accusations which are utterly unspecified.



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* See also this article which argues that Comey acted as the rules required him to act, except for the timing:

15) Did Comey breach law enforcement norms by sending yesterday’s letter?
Yes.
For starters, the Justice Department is very cautious about taking major actions in politically loaded cases in the immediate run-up to an election and has policies expressly limiting this kind of activity. This caution exists because our political culture doesn’t want the FBI to influence elections by opening or conducting investigations in a fashion prejudicial to one of the candidates. A 2012 memorandum from Attorney General Eric Holder to all Justice Department employees articulating this policy says that “If you are faced with a question regarding the timing of charges or overt investigative steps near the time of a primary or general election, please contact the Public Integrity Section of the Criminal Division for further guidance.” While the Public Integrity Section declined to comment on whether Comey followed these guidelines common sense suggests that Comey, by consulting with Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and the attorney general herself, did something more than consult with Public Integrity. And it’s not clear that the steps he has taken (authorizing a review of emails) count as “overt investigative steps” anyway, though the letter to Congress might.
That said, this is a case in point of why this policy exists.
Here Comey opened a new set of questions about one of the major party candidates with 11 days to go in the campaign—questions he has all but said he can’t answer yet. Doing so offers an open-ended opportunity for Clinton’s opponents to make inferences about her conduct. And Trump has done exactly that, saying yesterday “they are reopening the case into her criminal and illegal conduct that threatens the security of the United States of America. Hillary Clinton’s corruption is on a scale that we have never seen before.”
More generally, as discussed above, Comey’s willingness to talk about his investigative findings is itself atypical—and generally frowned upon.
Notably, the attorney general and Yates appear to have cautioned against what Comey did. Prior to his announcement, the attorney general allegedly “expressed her preference” that Comey follow the Department of Justice’s practice, described above, and not comment. Despite her advice, at least one administration official has said that Comey felt “obliged” to inform congress because he had promised to do so if there were developments in the case.

Butt Grabbing. The Trump Chronicles, Episode Twelve.

This would be the twelfth woman who has accused Trump of inappropriate sexual advances:

Miss Finland of 2006, Ninni Laaksonen, stated in an interview with Iltasanomat, a Finnish tabloid newspaper, that Donald Trump squeezed her butt, hard, while photos were taken* before an appearance at the Late Show with David Letterman:

Picture:  Eddie Mejia/Splash News


Here's the interesting thing:  Ms Laaksonen did not come forward with the allegation.  It was Iltasanomat which contacted all the Miss Finlands** who had had contact with Trump, and her statement was in response to the questions the newspaper posed.

Beauty pageants are pretty problematic from a feminist angle, especially when there are no equivalent pageants for handsome young men.

But they become even more problematic if the participants are viewed as almost the property of the guy who runs the pageants, if the assumption is that he has some sort of extra access to the contestants, or if he can, for example, bring in a pack of his older male friends to watch the rehearsals and to holler at the contestants, as happened according to another Miss Finland, Bea Toivonen (2014).

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* This picture is not intended to show butt squeezing.  But it was taken at the same occasion that Ms. Laaksonen mentioned the butt squeeze.

*Misses Finland?  How does one do the plural?

Something To Read, For Your Brain, 10/25/2016

A couple of long-form pieces, both well worth the time they take to read:

First, this piece on Trump's populist support may be somewhat disjointed, but it makes several important and thought-provoking arguments.   

Second, this article on the use of anti-trust laws in the United States is also worthwhile, even though it may fall in the category of brain-bran (good ultimately for your mental digestive processes, not that tasty to consume). 

The Federal Trade Commission no longer seems that interested in enforcing the pro-competitive laws that still exist.  The most recent AT&T case should be compared in that respect with the forced dissolution of Mama Bell.  Someone de-fanged the anti-trust laws, and nobody is offering it any dentures.  Ultimately both consumers and workers will suffer from that.

Now, whether focusing on actual (as opposed to imaginary) competition-increasing solutions would rejuvenate the Republican Party* is a very different question.  But I believe that much stronger pro-worker and pro-consumer economic platforms are needed.

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*  Because you can't be both for the one percent and for the kind of economic policies that the working classes and the ordinary consumers of this country need.  On the other hand, the stupid campaign financing laws mean that both parties end up living in the wallets of their richest donors.  Sadly, the incumbents have little incentive to work at changing those, even though the current situation has come close to the case where every dollar has an equal vote, and because many dollars live in just a few wallets, those wallets have a lot of votes.

The Awful Alternatives

Contents:  Racism (lots!), misogyny


The Awful Alternative in the US and Europe would be the Alt Right movement.  You can read all about it here, here, here and here.  As you can see from those sources, the movement is essentially a white supremacist one or at least a white nationalist one.  This depiction seems roughly correct to me:

Bannon’s Breitbart also realized that there was a large online community that naturally gravitated to Trump, a mix of people who saw themselves as far too radical to be accepted by polite society. Among them, conservative suspicions of diversity, inclusion, feminism, and political correctness had metastasized into something much darker.
This was the alt-right, a collection of racists, pick-up artists, men’s rights activists, and other noxious trolls of the internet. There’s no real dogma or central text to the alt-right, and no Buckley figure, though plenty are interested in taking the mantle. It’s a loose grouping with a few unifying figures, such as Trump and the Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos.
It was the openly-gay Yiannopoulos who became the first real alt-right celebrity, and he parlayed his internet fame into a series of speaking gigs that he called the “Dangerous Faggot” tour. His catchphrase is “feminism is cancer” and he first rose to prominence as part of the GamerGate movement, a thing you’re free to Google. He’s also Breitbart’s tech editor and most prominent columnist.*

So I put my waders on and went to the Alt Right sites.  My impression is that the movement is extremely racist, and very openly so, though it also has odd anti-democratic tendencies.

Some of what I read reminded me of my research into the way the theologians of ISIS think,  given that ISIS (and other similar terrorist organizations) can be seen as another awful alternative for Iraq and Syria and even elsewhere:



Democracy is Bad.  Some other source (in the case of ISIS an assumed divine power, as interpreted by the ISIS theologians, in the case of Alt Right the white man writing the stuff) knows better how a society should be governed than the ignorant hordes.

Outsiders are Evil.  ISIS views all who are not extreme Sunni Muslims as infidels, Alt Right views all others except white men as outsiders.  The former can lead to views about the infidels as people who can be killed or enslaved.  The latter leads to views about outsiders which can mean the cleansing of "white homelands" of those who are not white.

The concept of a tribe is central to both ideologies:  For ISIS the tribe consists of only those men who share a certain extremist interpretation of Islam, for Alt Right the tribe consists of only white men who are not Muslims.

The place of women in those tribes is ambiguous:  In some contexts they are part of the tribe (as in the European right-wing arguments about protecting "their" women against rapes by migrants or refugees or in the ISIS arguments about avenging the rape of Sunni Muslim women**), but in most contexts women are viewed as a resource, as something that must be made to do the right thing (which is to obey, to provide sex, but only to the man in charge of a woman, to stay at home, and to have as many children as the overlord deems necessary).***

Belief in Group Inequality.  That women are viewed as inferior in both ideologies goes without saying, and it is also the reason why feminism is so hated by both groups.

But neither are all men regarded as worthy of equal treatment.  ISIS decides the internal ranking of men on the basis of their religious affiliation (though stories I've read suggest that racism also exists in the ISIS-land), whereas Alt Right decides that ranking on the basis of the man's race first and then on the basis of his religion.  It views different races as inherently unequal.****

Rage At The Society, which has failed to  provide what the members of these groups view as their utopia:  a society where they would be the top dogs and where everyone else would meekly obey.  That rage may have different sources, with the ISIS believers finding their justification from religion, say, but both are angry at egalitarianism and human rights.

--

Those comparisons shouldn't be taken too far.  The extreme and sadistic violence of ISIS belongs to a very different category from the net harassment that some members of Alt Right engage in, and despite that skepticism concerning democracy, the Alt Right is not advocating for a violent overthrow of governments or violence, in general, but for a political movement.

It's also likely that the real numbers of the two groups are very different, though it's hard to get firm numbers of the nebulous group which constitutes the Alt Right.



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* More on Yiannopoulos can be found here and here.  He is currently touring American college campuses.

**  Even this might just be about one's property being soiled, rather than about truly seeing the women as members of the tribe, or as an insult to the men in the group.

***  The Alt Right theologians might give women more rights than the ISIS theologians do.  For instance, I read a proposal on one site to make (white) women's right to vote dependent on them already having produced more than 2.1 children.  That's a backwards-pedaling of only a hundred years or so, to the era when women had to be over thirty to vote in some places, whereas the ISIS would take us back 1500 years.

But it's not clear what rights women might be allowed to keep in that Alt Right dystopia.  The same site also had a piece about the perfidy and sluttiness/prudishness of all women:  Women have wanton sex, only not with the right man (the writer). 

Born manipulators, we women are, what with Evolution having made us so.  A flavor of the pickup artists, there:  The false generalizations of the worst examples to all women, the feeling of entitlement to plentiful sex and the rage when it is not forthcoming, as well as the complete disappearance of women as anything but sources of sexual satisfaction and children.

As an aside, note also that most of these right-wing and religious extremist groups really really need to have all women stay at home, away from any public influence and the prying eyes of other men.  That a single wage-earner in each family tends to doom many of those families into poverty, at least in the market economies, seems to be utterly ignored.  But then I didn't see much economic theory on the Alt Right sites I visited.  The movement, if it can be called one, is not about economics at all, not even the small-government Republican economics.

****  Note that this is not the same thing as admitting that different individuals have varying skills, tendencies and intelligence, because the argument focuses on group differences.  All people inside a group are painted with the same wide brush.  Because of this belief in group inequality, equal opportunities for all and other similar concepts are meaningless for the Alt Right men.   Rather, the laws which provide for them are seen as favoritism towards groups which deserve to be treated as inferiors, because they are inferior. 

The Third Debate: The Nasty Woman Won. Did Democracy?

The third presidential debate of the 2016 US election is over.  The nasty woman won it.

Donald Trump called Hillary Clinton a liar several times and a nasty woman  (a more polite form of a bitch) once.  He was able to turn one of the institutions of the democratic process into reality television, a  format for entertaining but not informing the audience, and in his case a format very much dependent on him being  outrageously insulting.

Then he stepped further away from the idea of democracy, and that made me angry.  I have spent enough time watching what happens in countries with dictators to know what the real alternative to this weak and wounded and barely functioning democracy might be, and I don't take Trump's insinuations lightly.

Julia Azari and David Firestone on fivethirtyeight.com make  my point about those insinuations:

When asked whether he would accept a Clinton victory in November, Trump’s ultimate response was, “I’ll keep you in suspense.” I don’t mean to editorialize here, but this is perhaps the most alarming thing I’ve heard a presidential candidate say on a debate stage. In some ways, this is almost as bad — or maybe worse — than Trump coming out and saying he wouldn’t accept a loss. There are two principles at stake beyond accepting the legitimacy of the election system. The first is being honest about one’s plans and stances. The American presidency is not the latest Tana French novel — leaders can’t keep the people in suspense. The second is that presidential candidates cannot cast themselves in the role of investigating elections. Trump can’t do this, Clinton can’t do this. The only answer is that evaluating the fairness of the election is up to the commissions that are appointed to do this, not to the candidates themselves. Regardless of your policy beliefs, this is not how democracy works.

And

The debate is going to move on to standard debate subjects now, but it’s impossible to forget that a truly extraordinary moment just occurred, one that will become the signal clip from this debate and possibly this campaign. A candidate representing one of the two major parties refused to accept the outcome of an American election. Think of the implications of that: Not only does it risk civil violence on the part of supporters who will be similarly encourage to resist an election, but it undermines the most fundamental democratic institution on which the country is based. Imagine the reaction of countries struggling to achieve democracy when a candidate questions whether an American ideal is legitimate. The political system will survive Trump, but the cynicism and doubt sown tonight will take a long time to heal.

Trump says, over and over,  that everything is rigged and corrupt:   Not only the election process itself, not only Hillary Clinton, not only the Democratic Party, but the whole leadership of the United States, the whole global order, and  all of the media.  Indeed, there is nothing that is NOT rigged, except, naturally, one Donald Trump, the bestest, the greatest and  the most honestest and informed presidential candidate ever.

Hearing Trump say that about the election results felt like ice water down my spine.   It made me think of Putin, of Erdogan, of Assad, of Saddam, of earlier dictators, both openly dictatorial and quasi-democratic,  both fairly benign and truly evil, and it made me think of the impossibility, absent democracy, of getting rid of a nasty dictator, except through the shedding of blood.  Whatever the weaknesses of democracy, and those are many, it is the only political system I know of where an unsatisfactory ruler can be deposed of without anyone having to die.

And when democracy functions poorly, the correct solution is to improve it, not to displace it with dictatorships.

And  how about that "nasty woman" statement?  You may have come across this pyramid about how to argue on Twitter:

 


The goal is  to debate as high on  that pyramid as you possibly can.
Few politicians climb all the way to the top of that pyramid in public debates, but I  have never seen anyone stay as low as Trump does.  The sad thing is that he dragged H. Clinton further down on those levels than was necessary, though she never quite sank to Trump's average level.

Much of political commentary consists of analyzing the game, of explaining why pragmatic politicians do what they do, of analyzing the wonderful plots to take power from  those who think differently, through all sorts of unethical-but-legal devices, of discussing the battle for power as if it was a baseball game.  And I get the fun in that, I do.

But I wouldn't write about the topics I cover if I didn't think they mattered greatly.   Democracy matters.  It's a messy system, it's  nowhere near close to giving power to all those who are governed and ruled under the US system, but it's bucket loads better than the other real-world alternatives.  That Donald Trump seems to disagree with that should leave the whole world gasping for breath.

The Posts Not Finished

The ones which sob and moan in the middle of the night when I can't sleep, the ones which I tossed into the deep snow where they wander shoeless and coatless, in cold pain, looking for mama.  The ones which had so much care and work and effort spent on their nursing but which, nevertheless, I cruelly rejected and abandoned.

Those posts.

How does that beginning sound?  I veered off the topic there, because the posts I want to talk about here, the ones never finished, are not of the emotional sob-story kind.  No, they are statistical posts, based on an enormous amount of work by me:  Calculations and spreadsheets and all sorts of other boring yet electrifying crap.

Why these posts have never stepped into the limelight of this humble blog vary.  For example, I worked long on a post about the US Congress, about how representative it is for various demographic groups (such as, say, comparing the percentage of Latinas in the Congress to their percentage  in the US population).

But I gave up on it because of all sorts of tricky statistical problems, such as trying to find out if Latino Congress members are also counted again in the race categories, and if so, what I should do about it.  I got extremely uninformative answers to my queries from those who had compile some statistics I tried to use.

And then I wondered if anyone would be even interested in the findings (which suggest, as one would expect, that white Anglo men are over-represented, but which also suggest that not all minority groups are under-represented to the same extent, or at all, and that women, in general, are under-represented within all racial or ethnic categories).

Then there are the police shootings data, the fatalities among black men, white men and other population groups.  I spent quite a bit of time analyzing the Washington Post surveys for 2015 and 2016, going through their data case by case, calculating all sorts of averages and percentages.

And I may still write up that work.  But when to post it?  The time never appears to be right, because the work I have done is not emotional work.  It doesn't seem fit to post it when yet another black man is killed by the police, because it would sound like an instrument in the orchestra playing a different tune from all the others.  To post it at any other time would limit its exposure.

Then there are all the questions I have about those data sets.  How are they verified?  Why is the race of so many who died not recorded?  Is it because the data comes from newspaper articles?  If so, how many cases are not reported at all or reported wrong?  Whose reports are used when deciding if the killed person* was armed or not?

Finally, the data sets themselves seem to show a lot of short-term variation.  The relative number of Hispanic men killed by the police in 2015 was considerably higher than the relative numbers in the first half of 2016, though the relative numbers of black men killed remained fairly stable**.  It would be good to understand that, and other data characteristics better before writing about the surveys.

So are you sufficiently bored yet?  How about this topic for a post:  Suppose that before you are born you are told that one third of your life will be spent on practicing being dead.  Wouldn't you feel cheated out of all those years?  But we don't think of sleep that way.

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* Those killed persons were, by the way, overwhelmingly men, especially in the unarmed category.

** And how do those who create the data set decide if the killed man was white or black or Latino?  Latinos can be either white or black, too, or can belong to other racial categories.

 

Short posts 10/18/16: Millennial Women Lukewarm for Clinton?, Tamika Cross and Some Fun

1.  This survey of the millennials about the coming presidential election is moooost interesting.  I quote:

Only 47 percent of millennial women support Clinton, and 18 percent support Trump. Another combined 18 percent back either Johnson or Stein.
Among men, 65 percent back Clinton and only 6 percent combined support third-party candidates.

Now parse those differences!  My first thought on them was that the researchers have made a coding mistake on gender.  Studies use a zero-or-one code for the respondent for being female or male, but there's no established rule about which sex you assign to one or to zero.  So a coding mistake is possible, and it would explain the odd findings pretty well, given that they would then look the same as the findings for other age groups (where the support for Trump is always higher among men than among women).

Such a mistake is pretty unlikely in a study of this sort (which would have a lot of double-checking before going public).  Still, I'd like to see similar results from another pollster (given that this poll looks at least like an outlier),  before spending brain calories on possible reasons for the lack of feminist support for Clinton among young women.  Or for greater feminist support among young men.  Or for the idea that there are more young women than young men who dislike Clinton's policies.

2.  This happens:

People across the country were horrified to hear of the way Tamika Cross, a doctor, was treated on a recent Delta Airlines flight from Detroit to Houston. A patient faced a medical emergency mid-flight and the crew asked if there were any physicians on board. Cross immediately signaled to the crew that she was available to help. But according to reports, the flight crew didn’t respond as you might think. They weren’t grateful. Instead, they doubted whether this young African American woman could actually be a medical doctor. They declined her help.

Cross has three strikes against her:  She is African-American, female and young.

Granted, airlines must have policies to be able to tell whether someone actually is a physician when help is sought, and Delta Airlines' answer to Cross's complaint was that out of the three individuals who offered to help only one had acceptable proof of qualifications with him.

But Cross's Facebook post suggested that he hadn't presented those qualifications and that the flight attendant treated Cross in a condescending manner:

A couple mins later he is unresponsive again and the flight attendant yells "call overhead for a physician on board". I raised my hand to grab her attention. She said to me "oh no sweetie put ur hand down, we are looking for actual physicians or nurses or some type of medical personnel, we don't have time to talk to you" I tried to inform her that I was a physician but I was continually cut off by condescending remarks.

...

Another "seasoned" white male approaches the row and says he is a physician as well. She says to me "thanks for your help but he can help us, and he has his credentials". (Mind you he hasn't shown anything to her. Just showed up and fit the "description of a doctor")

 It could be that Cross didn't see the other physician show his credentials (calling card???) to someone.  But it's still likely that we all have stored images of how physicians are supposed to look, how professors are supposed to look and so on, and those stored images will affect that crucial first reaction.  That's part of what economists call statistical discrimination.

3.  This five-day-old video on Trump supporters from the Daily Show is good for a cleansing laugh.  I know that the respondents are not picked randomly, but hearing their arguments is still fun.