Category: Uncategorized

Election 2018

SO…how to analyze the results of last night’s midterm elections. There is both a lot going on here, and less going on than one might suspect. Let’s get right into it.

Referendum on Trump

The big question on everyone’s mind for last night’s election was this: how is Donald Trump going to affect the midterm elections? The answer: it’s a mixed bag. He seemed to simultaneously help and hurt the Republicans, and in some ways, perhaps most indelibly, not affect them much at all, which is the really big surprise. All in all, this election was more like a run of the mill midterm election than most of us thought it would be. The results of the party in the White House losing seat in congress were pretty standard, not even coming close to a “Blue Wave” of repudiation of Donald Trump, which was the big hope for Democrats in this election. Typically, the president’s party loses 25-30 seats in the house in a midterm election, and right now it’s looking to be a loss in the mid-30s for Republicans.

What does this mean? This means, on a national level, that Trump is nowhere near the Destroyer Of Worlds that he’s been made out to be for the Republican party.

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If he was truly as toxic at the ballot box as Democrats hoped he would be, this election would look a lot more like when Barack Obama lost 63 house seats in 2010 or Bill Clinton lost 54 in 1994.

That’s right. Donald Trump did better, FAR better, as a bellwether in his first midterm election that either of the two most talented politicians in my lifetime. In fact, his party performed at about the average of the losing midterms for George W. Bush and Republican saint Ronald Reagan (George W. Bush’s first midterm was just over a year after 9/11, and should be excluded from the statistical pattern). If the Democrats thought The Bogeyman was going to drag Republicans down to bring a Blue Wave to Washington, they were wildly mistaken.

The senate races turned out to not be much of a referendum on Trump, and more a referendum on the treatment of Brett Kavanaugh in the recent Supreme Court nomination. Every close senate race that Trump campaigned for ended up as a win for Republicans, so that does indicate that he was able to rally the base to get off the couch and go vote, which is a good sign for him and the party. But it also turns out that every Democrat who voted against Kavanaugh in a state that Trump won lost their seat in the senate, and polling of Republican voters indicates that the Kavanaugh hearings were a major motivator for them. So the hail Mary to “save Roe v. Wade” thrown by the Democrats seems to have seriously backfired on them, and now Trump and Republicans have a clear path to continue reforming the federal judiciary for the next two years, and if Justice Ginsburg should fall into ill health in that time, Democrats will have basically no chance to block an even more conservative nomination, because they will almost certainly not have a single Republican senator they can convince to vote with them. If  I could offer some advice for court watchers, it would be to familiarize yourself with Amy Coney Barrett. (Hint: she’s loudly and proudly pro-life)

Based on the Senate seats up for election in 2020 (1/3 each election, as a reminder), there is almost no statistical chance of Democrats regaining the senate, so if Trump should happen to win, we can almost be guaranteed one or two more conservative Supreme Court justices. This will be a major motivating factor in the next election, for both sides of the aisle.

All-in-all, this election was not anywhere near the bloodbath that many predicted for Republicans, nor anything even resembling a rebuke of Donald Trump. Were it not for the current occupant of the White House, there would be nothing at all remarkable about this midterm election. And even worse for Democrats, since Trump was not on the ballot and many Republicans stayed home during this election, I think it can be said confidently that Democrats would not have picked up anywhere near this many seats, and that Republicans may have even held onto the house. So it’s a loss for Republicans, but no more than any average midterm loss for the party in power. What that means for 2020 remains to be seen.

Mexican Word Of The Day: Beto

As in: You Beto take down all them yard signs!

The most-watched individual race in the country was probably the election for Texas senate between Robert Francis O’Rourke and His Evilness Ted Cruz. This was the sort of election that years ago would not have even been worth mentioning or covering, Texas being, well, Texas. But it was an unnervingly close race for Republicans, O’Rourke coming within three points of defeating Cruz.

It’s not easy to read the tea leaves to determine exactly what this means, but there are a couple of major factors that are fairly apparent that caused this race to be so close. The first is the California Factor: as is by now well known, approximately 1,000 Californians have been moving into Texas every day for a few years now. They have turned the metropolitan areas of Texas purple, if not outright blue. I have some familiarity with Austin, and this city’s reputation as a delightful place to live with a vibrant cultural scene, along with its semi-recent status as a mini-Silicon Valley, has been a major draw to Californians for a couple of decades now, with a major migration starting to occur in the mid-2000s. I am less familiar with the culture and goings-on around Houston, Dallas, and San Antonio, but it appears that these cities are starting to attract these economic migrants as well. And economic migrants they are, as the class of people moving eastward to the land of ten gallon hats tend to be well-educated professionals, presumably largely of the upper middle class, and presumably moving either with a job in hand, or with highly marketable skills that allow them to move freely and find work easily. It’s hard to say if they find the lack of a state income tax appealing, but one might assume an upper middle class professional might smile a bit when they notice the effect that has on their bottom line.

The second major factor is that, to put it bluntly, Ted Cruz is the Hillary Clinton of the Republican party. O’Rourke put up a strong performance, no doubt, and is highly charismatic and photogenic, unfortunately just about the only qualities that matter in today’s tv age of elections. But he was also going up against one of the worst and weakest candidates the Republicans have to offer on the national stage. He is, much like Hillary Clinton, simply mechanical and unlikable. You can almost see the gears of ambition moving underneath his face whenever he speaks.

Now, he is a brilliant, accomplished man of substance, let there be no doubt about that. He has “authored 70 U.S. Supreme Court briefs and presented 43 oral arguments, including nine before the United States Supreme Court. Cruz’s record of having argued before the Supreme Court nine times is more than any practicing lawyer in Texas or any current member of Congress.” To say nothing of his long legal and policy experience at the state and national level. To compare his professional career and accomplishments to O’Rourke is worse than a joke, lower than an insult. A sampling of O’Rourke’s professional accomplishments prior to running for office is as follows:

Following college, O’Rourke worked as a live-in nanny for a family in Manhattan, then at Hedley’s Humpers as an art mover, before working with his uncle at a startup Internet service provider. During this time, he fell into a depression, unsure of what to do with his life. However, his friends Stevens and Klahr (along with his friend from Columbia University, David Guinn) joined him in New York, and they rented and renovated an inexpensive 2,000-square-foot factory loft in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Interested in the publishing industry, he found a job as a proofreader at H. W. Wilson Company in the Bronx, and wrote short stories and songs in his free time. He began to miss his family and lifestyle in El Paso, and returned to the city in 1998.

It might also be worth noting that he has not, to put it mildly, pulled himself up by his bootstraps. “His mother was the owner of a high-end furniture store, and is the stepdaughter of Fred Korth, Secretary of the Navy under President John F. Kennedy. His father served in El Paso as County Commissioner and then County Judge.” It also just so happens that his father in law is a billionaire (and the $20 billion kind, not the scrappier, pluckier $1 billion kind). On substance, experience, and knowledge of policy and law, there is nothing to compare here.

But O’Rourke has that magical ingredient for politics, that special sauce that’s the most important quality to get one elected to political office: he’s likable. He seems down to earth, as many aristocrats in political memory and history have seemed. He comes across as a genuinely nice guy, a trait (or affect) that many a man of privilege has been able to convey, many of whom were christened “Kennedy” or Roosevelt.”

Whereas Cruz has the core personality defect of many a successful man or woman: raw, naked, uncured ambition. For someone like him or Hillary, it seems like every sentence they speak can be translated as “I want to be president.” If their mouths don’t say it, it certainly comes across in their eyes…those creepy, creepy eyes. You can easily imagine them hyping themselves up in front of the mirror, practicing their affects, polishing their folksy aphorisms, perfecting their “aw, shucks” working class accents. It’s not a stretch to imagine someone like this with a backward-lettered motivational tattoo on their chest that they can read every morning to affirm their ambition and get them pumped up before they walk out the door.

Now this is not exactly an uncommon personality trait, and anyone who has spent time in certain social circles, particularly in places like New York or Washington, D.C., will know that this is pretty run of the mill for bankers, lawyers, politicians, and business people. And the higher up you go in the social strata of these universes, the more common and pronounced that trait is. However, since as I mentioned “likability” is a major factor in the success of a politician, it serves one well to have the good sense and common decency to at least hide it from everyone else. As well, since this is one of the most fundamental understood truths of politics, one would have to assume that people like Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz are aware of it as well, and they still are unable to hide this aspect of themselves. So what we are seeing is almost certainly a muted aspect of their true selves and real ambition, and that may say something scary indeed about how deep the river of ambition runs within them.

I happen to know one person who has met Ted Cruz, a very politically active conservative who has dedicated her life to Republican causes and politics. Her impression of him was that “He’s the sleaziest son of a bitch I ever met.” And this is from someone on his team. Imagine how he comes off to moderate voters or apolitical citizens.

So O’Rourke doing so well against Candidate Cruz is somewhat akin to Donald Trump beating Hillary Clinton…it almost certainly wouldn’t have happened against anyone else. This is not to discount the demographic changes taking place in Texas, which are sure to be a long term concern for Republicans in the future. But it is to say that we can’t read too much into or learn much from this one result, because it’s probably a statistical anomaly based on an extraordinarily weak and unlikable candidate. And let’s not also forget that he spent more money than God to lose this race (approximately $70 million), received mountains of fawning, un-probing press coverage, and was endorsed by every celebrity Hollywood could drag away from a martini for five minutes. So he had an unprecedented number of favorable factors for a nationally unknown, first time senate candidate, and was up against possibly the least likable senator of either party. There are lessons here and things to be learned in the forensic aftermath of this election, but as with the overall midterms, there is no sea-change or harbinger of a new era in American, or Texan, politics.

And of course, the final note that must be rang on the Texas senate race, the one which truly tells us what to be anticipating as we move towards the future, is that Robert Francis O’Rourke didn’t care about the senate anyways. Believe me when I tell you, he’s getting to work on 2020 TODAY. I hope you already knew this, but he had absolutely no intention of winning a senate seat to be a senator. If you thought he intended to win yesterday and spend the next 6, 12, or 18 years crafting policy and proposing legislation in the senate, I’ll give you a minute to sit back and laugh at yourself. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Ok, so now let’s get real. O’Rourke’s very obvious, transparent plan was to win a seat in the senate, and then spend the next two years campaigning for president, just like a certain someone else we know. Do you suppose that he was paused by yesterday’s defeat, or that his pride was wounded in a way that would make him step back for a second and wonder if he’s truly qualified to run the free world, or if he could even win a presidential election? Do you think that a $70 million loss might make make him stop and reflect on his ambitions, instill a sense of humility, and for one moment second guess himself? Me neither. So prepare yourself for O’Rourke 2020, and soon.

For my part, I do wonder why Democrats are so excited about electing another über-wealthy white guy who’s a child of privilege to office as a “breath of fresh air,” but I guess if you’re a dreamboat, that’s all that really matters in politics.

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And in case anyone still wonders what’s going on here, have you seen Politico lately?

Beto’s consolation prize: Running for president

Beto O’Rourke dodged a bullet. The Texas congressman came dangerously close to beating Ted Cruz on Tuesday.

Lest his groupies wallow for long in defeat, they should know there’s a lot for them to like about his loss: No getting bogged down in the drudge-work of a freshman senator in the minority or obligation to fulfill his duty to serve out his term.

And, to O’Rourke’s credit, there was no blowout, a fate that would have extinguished his star. Indeed, he showed an unapologetic liberal could compete and almost win in Texas.

O’Rourke’s narrow loss to Cruz instead sets him up to run full time for president — and jump immediately into the top tier of Democratic contenders.

O’Rourke has not yet indicated his intentions, but he has built, in the course of a few short months, a national brand and a national fundraising base that few Democrats can match. Conveniently, the chief knock on O’Rourke’s campaign, that he embraced staunchly progressive positions that played poorly in Texas, only heightens his appeal in a national primary for a Democratic Party that has been tacking leftward.

Even after beating O’Rourke, Cruz’s chief strategist, Jeff Roe, stands impressed. “The Democrats don’t have anybody like him,” Roe said. “I’ve seen all of them. They don’t have anyone of his caliber on the national stage. I pray for the soul of anyone who has to run against him in Iowa in 453 days.”

So those are the two biggest stories and take-aways from the 2018 election. There are of course other issues, Governor’s races (Florida and Georgia chief among them), voter turnout, ballot initiatives, outcomes in state legislatures, demographics and trends, etc. But unfortunately I’ll have to leave those to the professionals. I think the two issues above are the main topics of concern that are going to have the biggest impact as we move past this year’s Most Important Election Of Our Lifetime…until the next one.

I’ll leave you with a bit of wisdom from Joe Rogan, which I presume neither party is going to learn from after this election:

“When you win, you win.

When you lose, you learn.”

 

Scalia predicts Kavanaugh debacle in 2005

I haven’t yet written a post about the hearings for Justice Kavanaugh, although I did listen to most of the confirmation hearings prior to the sexual assault claims, and to every minute of testimony from both Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey-Ford before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Mostly this is because to write, fact-check, and cite everything that needs to be said about it is going to take hours and hours to author and compile.

HOWEVER

Putting aside the sexual assault allegations (and even, or especially, considering them if you get right down to it), let’s be absolutely clear on one thing about his nomination, the only thing that matters and the fact that explains everything that happened from the day he was nominated: this entire ordeal was about one thing only, and that is the fate of Roe v. Wade. There is nothing else that mattered about him or his nomination other than that he was seen as potentially the deciding vote in overturning that case and sending the question of abortion back to the states, so that each state can decide for itself how to properly regulate this matter.

Sit on that for a minute. Literally, nothing about Brett Kavanaugh or who he was mattered other than this political fact/perspective/possibility. It literally didn’t matter who he was, where he went to school, where he had practiced law, what his judicial history or philosophy was, what his reputation was among the profession, how many opinions he wrote, how he wrote them, or what issues they covered. His character didn’t matter. His personal history and professional conduct didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he could be the 5th vote in overturning Roe v. Wade. He was an empty vessel containing nothing but this political time bomb.

Antonin Scalia predicted this 13 years ago. Sadly, he was as prescient as ever, a veritable Cassandra, cursed to utter prophecies that were true but that no one believed. This is a fantastic lecture, and I highly encourage you to listen to it from the beginning, especially if you find he and originalism confounding and frustrating. But most especially, listen to the snippet below, an excerpt from the last few minutes of his talk. He explains exactly why a nomination like Kavanaugh’s was almost inevitable to happen the way it did, certain to proceed in the fashion it did during the confirmation hearings, and certain to come down to a strictly party-line vote in the senate.

Then ask yourself: is this really the way forward, and how we want this process to work now and until the end of our republic? Because I believe Justice Scalia to be right: this is the natural, inevitable, and only possible outcome from a “living constitution.”

~6:00

https://www.c-span.org/video/?185883-1/constitutional-interpretation&start=2084

The talk in its entirety

https://www.c-span.org/video/?185883-1/constitutional-interpretation

Movie Review: The Predator

I don’t know about you, but when I see a Predator movie, I’m in it for a moving message about climate change.

Anyone…?

Anyone…?

Well, that’s what you get if you go see the new Predator movie. Now there’s not really much to write as a review for a movie like this…you know what you’re getting into and what you’re signing up for, you just hope that they give you what you’re paying for in a fun, interesting, and possibly compelling manner. The original Predator movie was definitely scary and intense. I haven’t re-watched it recently, but I have re-watched it several times, and it has held up each time. It’s the perfect balance of camp, action, and suspense, as well as a splendid primary source for 80s one-liners. Needless to say, I’m a big fan.

All I wanted or expected from this movie was a few mindless action scenes and some unoriginal but fun kick-assery. Unfortunately the action was more mindless and the kick-assery was even less original and fun than I had hoped (as opposed to, say, the last two Mission: Impossible movies, which I highly recommend for compelling action). But the Big Annoying Thing That I Can’t Ignore had to show its ugly face again: blatant political messaging from some more “very brave” Hollywood writers. It’s not spoiling anything to say that a major plot point revolves around the Predators coming to earth because of climate change. It’s even painfully and obviously belabored for the better part of a minute as one by one the characters awaken to the “totally obvious” realization that we only have a generation or two left of a habitable earth, and that the inescapable Predator Logic is drawing them here to replace us once our time is up.

How I felt when the plot twist came

I’m sorry, but can I just go to one f’ing movie without getting “messaged” hard right in my face?

*insert your own imaginary gif for this*

*sigh*

I guess not. It seems now like nearly every time I go to the movies I’m going have some moral authority in Hollywood telling me what and how to think. I don’t know if it’s worse when it’s subtle or when it’s overt, but I’m pretty sure most people aren’t noticing either way, and are just absorbing it all as “patently true” social commentary. As I’ve stated before, the nonstop 24/7 political messaging in nearly all television and film is a propaganda machine/weapon that fascist regimes of the 20th century could only dream of. And no, any one instance is not that big of a deal, nor too much of a cause for outrage. It’s the cumulative effect of hundreds of these message a year and thousands of them over the course of years, subliminally sneaking is as “normal” and “RightThink.” If this doesn’t bother you because you’re liberal and you believe it is indeed the right way to think, and that people need to be told as much, just reverse the polarity of the messaging and think about how you’d view, for example, the nationalistic or imperialistic or anti-communist/anti-liberal or pro-war social messaging and conditioning of the early and mid 20th century being broadcast in almost every sort of media that people consume, all day, every day.

Alright, this otherwise awful movie has already taken up too many words and too much time. But as movies are a passion of mine, I wanted to take the time to make a note of this for the record, to add this entry to the ledger of obvious Hollywood brainwashing. The movie is regrettably not worth seeing on its merits apart from this (and I would recommend it if it was), so for any 80s/Ahnald fans who may be looking forward to a fun, campy stroll down Memory Lane, I’ll just say:

The Fate Of Intellectuals

“Two images have been with me throughout the writing of this essay. Between them they seem to show the alternative paths for the intellectual. The one is of John Maynard Keynes, the other of Leon Trotsky. Both were obviously men of attractive personality and great natural gifts. The one the intellectual guardian of the established order, providing new policies and theories of manipulation to keep our society in what he took to be economic trim, and making a personal fortune in the process. The other, outcast as a revolutionary from Russia both under the Tsar and under Stalin, providing throughout his life a defense of human activity, of the powers of conscious and rational human effort. I think of them at the end, Keynes with his peerage, Trotsky with an icepick in his skull. They are the twin lives between which intellectual choice in our society lies.”

— Alasdair MacIntyre, “Breaking The Chains Of Reason” in Out Of Apathy (1960)

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Hitchens Takes On Churchill

Literary Giant vs Historical Giant

———-

In the fateful spring and early summer of 1940 the people of Britain clustered around their wireless sets to hear defiant and uplifting oratory from their new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. On May 13, having just assumed the burden of office from a weak and cowardly Neville Chamberlain, Churchill promised a regime of “blood, toil, tears and sweat.” On June 4, after the evacuation of the defeated British army from Dunkirk, he pledged, “We shall fight on the beaches.” On June 18 he proclaimed that even if the British Empire were to last for a thousand years, this would be remembered as its “finest hour.” Over the course of the ensuing months Britain alone defied the vast conquering appetites of Hitlerism and, though greatly outclassed in the air, repelled the Luftwaffe’s assault with a handful of gallant fighter pilots. This chivalric engagement—”The Battle of Britain”—thwarted Nazi schemes for an invasion of the island fortress and was thus a hinge event in the great global conflict we now call World War II.

The foregoing paragraph could appear without much challenge in almost any English or American newspaper or magazine, and versions of it have recently seen print in the reviews of Churchill: A Biography, by the British Liberal statesman Lord Jenkins of Hillhead. One might, however, call attention to some later adjustments to this familiar picture.

• The three crucial broadcasts were made not by Churchill but by an actor hired to impersonate him. Norman Shelley, who played Winnie-the-Pooh for the BBC’s Children’s Hour, ventriloquized Churchill for history and fooled millions of listeners. Perhaps Churchill was too much incapacitated by drink to deliver the speeches himself.

• Britain stood alone only if the military and economic support of Canada, Australia, South Africa, India, and the rest of a gigantic empire is omitted. As late as October of 1940, furthermore, the Greeks were continuing to resist on mainland Europe and had inflicted a serious military defeat on Mussolini. Moreover, the attitude of the United States, however ostensibly neutral, was at no time neutralist as between a British versus a German victory.

• The Royal Air Force was never seriously inferior, in either men or machines, to Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe, and at times outgunned it. British pilots were mainly fighting over home territory and, unlike their German opponents, could return straight to duty if they parachuted down. The RAF had the advantage of radar and the further advantage of a key to the Nazi codes. The Royal Navy was by any measure the superior of the Kriegsmarine, and Nazi surface vessels never left port without exposing themselves to extreme hazard.

• The German High Command never got beyond the drawing-board stage of any plan for the invasion of Britain, and the Führer himself was the source of the many postponements and the eventual abandonment of the idea.

A close reading of the increasingly voluminous revisionist literature discloses many further examples of events that one thinks cannot really be true, or cannot be true if the quasi-official or consecrated narrative is to remain regnant. Against which nation was the first British naval attack directed? (Against a non-mobilized French fleet, moored in the ports of North Africa, with the loss of hundreds of French lives.) Which air force was the first to bomb civilians, and in whose capital city? (The RAF, striking the suburbs of Berlin.) Which belligerent nation was the first to violate the neutrality of Europe’s noncombatant nations? (The British, by a military occupation of Norway.) But these details, not unlike the navels and genitalia in devotional painting, are figleafed in denial. They cannot exactly be omitted from the broader picture, nor can they be permitted any profane influence on its sanctity. Meanwhile, who made the following broadcast speech to the British people in 1940?

“We are a solid and united nation which would rather go down to ruin than admit the domination of the Nazis … If the enemy does try to invade this country we will fight him in the air and on the sea; we will fight him on the beaches with every weapon we have. He may manage here and there to make a breakthrough: if he does we will fight him on every road, in every village, and in every house, until he or we are utterly destroyed.”

That was Neville Chamberlain, who (albeit in his rather reedy tones) delivered the speech himself. And how many casualties did the RAF suffer during the entire Battle of Britain? A total of 443 pilots, according to official sources cited in Richard Overy’s cool and meticulous revisiting of the story.

You can’t label ME! or “I’m a special snowflake!”

When discussing politics, I often hear people say things along the lines of “I don’t consider myself a Democrat OR a Republican,” “I don’t believe in labels,” “Liberal and Conservative don’t mean anything to me,” or “I’m a moderate/in the middle.” I’m never quite sure exactly what this means, and, not surprisingly, you never hear anyone mention specifics, like which things they agree with or disagree with on one side and also the other.

I’m personally not impressed with people saying “I’m not one or the other” or “you can’t label ME!” I think that’s kind of a reflex to show what a unique snowflake you are, when in reality, you’re not.

Take me as an example: I believe in low taxes, the free market, minimal regulations, strong local and state government and weak federal government (the forgotten concept of “federalism”), personal responsibility for your outcomes in life, and I reject identity politics pretty much wholesale.

Am I a “moderate?” Am I “in the middle?” No, I’m a conservative, and it would be silly of me to claim I’m somehow in the center when I’m clearly on the right. What is so bad about admitting this? Why is this so hard?

If you believe in higher taxes, “fair share” politics and the wicked “1%,” identity politics, socialized medicine, more government regulation, social engineering of personal choices like smoking and eating, and want Washington dictating social policy to the whole country rather than letting states and cities create the bulk of social and government policy, you’re a liberal, and you should just be honest about it instead of pretending to be “in the middle” when you’re not. What do you gain by pretending to be moderate when you’re not? Social standing? The appearance of open-mindedness?

It just seems like a big act that means nothing to me. Most people have a belief system, and pretending you don’t only makes it harder to solve problems, not easier. It makes it harder to have honest discussions about policy and society, because you’re playing “hide the ball” about your actual beliefs. This is somewhat different than the other common trope of saying you just want “sensible such and such regulation” in order to appear as if you really thought hard, struggled with the arguments, and considered both sides rather than just falling in line with your team’s talking points, but it’s in the same vein. Just about everyone falls in line with the majority of either liberal or conservative beliefs, and almost no one believes in half of one and half of the other, or even 60/40. Because frankly it would be pretty logically inconsistent to do so, you really couldn’t have a coherent set of beliefs or logic if you did.

If you applied similar logic to other ways to think and live, it would be like saying “I’m kind of a yuppie, but kind of a gutter punk too,” or “I’m kind of a cowboy, but also kind of a gangster rapper.” Just…no. Being or believing one thing or one kind of thing is going to logically preclude some others in most cases. Gutter punks aren’t also investment bankers and vice-versa, you’re not kind of one and kind of the other. You make choices, you have values, and you believe in certain logically consistent values and not others. And that’s ok. Just like it’s ok to be liberal, and it’s ok to be conservative, and you’re not less open-minded just because you have a consistent philosophy and worldview.

Moral Dilemma

What would you do?

You see a portly, trashy woman, missing some teeth and with a tattoo on her upper chest, sitting on the sidewalk outside your grocery store, clearly upset and in a bad way. She’s sadly digging through her purse and looking for some change, talking to someone, maybe a teenager. You look at her as you walk in, but she doesn’t say anything, and she’s not asking anyone for money.

When you walk out, you see her talking to a girl who’s probably 12 or 13, counting change, choking up and saying “We’ve got two dollars and (whatever) cents, we’re not going to be able to get much with that. What are we going to do?” As you’re putting your groceries away, you see a young girl in the car next to yours who’s probably 7 or 8, adorable, smiling kind of friendly and shy, and who just seems outgoing and smart. You wonder if she’s with this woman.

You pause at your car, wondering what you should do. You walk back to the woman, see her rocking back and forth in distress, talking to what you can only assume is her daughter, who is also adorable, smart, and who looks you in the eye as you talk to her mom. You say “Is something going on here? Do you need some help?” and she says “It’s been a tough week, our water heater went out, and…and…” She just kind of mumbles something, it seems like she’s not sure what to say, and she’s clearly mentally disabled, intoxicated, or both. Whatever is happening, she is not a functioning adult. You also notice she’s missing three middle fingers on her right hand from a birth defect, with tiny curled up pieces of skin that should have been her fingers.

As you talk to her, the little girl from the car comes up to her and starts to play with her.

What do you do?

Is Marijuana Harmless?

I was thinking about this recently, noticing how casually people seem to talk about pot in general and potheads in particular, especially libertarians and of course, potheads themselves.

Are potheads addicts?

If someone got drunk every day we’d call them an alcoholic, which means they’re an addict. If someone shot heroin or snorted coke every day, we’d call them an addict. Hell, if someone uses opioids or antidepressants every day for too long we call them an addict.

But for some reason we don’t call potheads addicts, or think about them that way. For some reason, they’re thought about and talked about in a different, far less serious way. For many people, it doesn’t have any of the negative connotations of being a drug addict, even an alcoholic.

But why? They’re using a drug every day, getting intoxicated every day. Is there some difference between smoking pot every day and getting drunk every day or snorting coke every day? Does it not affect your mind, your emotions, your health, your motivation? (Ok, I think most people will at least concede that last one…)

It’s also really interesting how defensive people get about this topic when I bring it up.  As if being high every day is somehow harmless if it’s weed. Oh that’s “different.” It’s good to be high every day if it’s weed, even healthy. It’s a really bizarre double standard and cognitive dissonance in my opinion.

I don’t really have a lot to say about this topic, but I do think this is an interesting, amusing phenomenon.

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Birthday Thoughts

My birthday was last week. I look…younger than I am. I had a lot of fun last weekend and early last week, and while I was out seeing my favorite band on my actual birthday, I was talking to a couple of women outside on a set break who are a bit younger than me. When they found out how old I am, they asked me what “wisdom” I had to impart at “my age.” I had to think about that for a minute, because *ahem* I like to think I have a lot of wisdom to share, and not necessarily related to wisdom “at my age.” So I closed my eyes a couple times, tried to feel where my intuition would lead me to an answer, and the answer I came up with was “Empathy.”

Which is kind of ironic, since one of my last posts was titled “Against Empathy,” and I have another one coming along the same lines. In fact, I have quite a lengthy and detailed argument against empathy that I think is logically sound and desperately needed in today’s society.

But there is a time and a place for empathy, and it’s important to know when that is.

My companions asked me what I meant, and what I said was an abbreviated version of this: As you get older and life does things to you, there are two sort of standard impulses that you tend to develop in response to all you experience. One is to harden. To toughen up. To strengthen your shell that faces the world, so that the bad things that have happened to you don’t happen again, so that you don’t get mistreated or lied to or hurt again. Everyone goes through this, and to some degree this is an important and necessary part of growing up and becoming an adult.

But like any other tendency or impulse, it can go too far and become an end unto itself, to become as tough as you can, to become ever harder until nothing hurts you, and nothing gets through. This is kind of the “tragic sense of life” as described in a book that I’m working on. It’s the sense that you can’t trust people, that people lie, that people don’t really care about you, that it’s better to be cold and not expect too much, perhaps to expect nothing, out of other people, out of relationships, out of life. Experiencing disappointment and developing a healthy, moderate, functional skepticism about other people and their motives is a vital and useful part of an adult perspective on the world. But taken too far it becomes toxic, to you and others, and can cause you to develop a lot of bad habits and reflexes such as never giving anyone a chance, or a second chance, or to pushing people away simply to be strong and to not get hurt.

This is what I observe and am experiencing as the “Grumpy Old Man Syndrome.” I find this happening and am very aware of it within myself. As I like to put it, every raindrop of human stupidity wears down the mountain of my patience. I started with a mountain of patience and a seemingly infinite capacity for forgiveness when I was young. Now I find myself often very quick to judge, to criticize, and to engage in conflict with others when 20 years ago I would have given chance after chance, as I said almost to infinity, for a person to change a hostile or aggressive attitude, and would have engaged with them seemingly endlessly in a conciliatory way in order to give them a chance to calm down and see reason or to understand that we don’t have to fight. Now, I’m quick to judge a person or a situation, and react almost immediately to counter aggression and respond in kind. I still give people second and third chances, but I do it a lot less than I used to, and certain levels of aggression get no chances from me at all, or a very brief second chance that I quickly close if they don’t seem willing to take it right away. I do think it is a largely rational response, and it has definitely served me well at times, but there have been other times when I could have probably resolved an argument with a person peacefully if I had been the first to forgive, if I had extended an olive branch, and I find lately that I’m just all out of olive branches.

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BUT…as I was saying to my new friends, I am trying very. hard. to counter this impulse with the other instinct that can grow within you as you age: the impulse to empathy towards others. This impulse develops as you age and you realize that a lot of your assumptions about how you’ve got it all figured out and how you’re going to conquer the world start to fade, chipped away by time, washed away by all the things you didn’t do, all the things that didn’t go your way, all the obstacles you didn’t surmount because life, as it turns out, is harder than you thought. When you’re young, it’s just sort of obvious how to live, how to succeed, and how to get what you want. It’s all so clear. If walking the path isn’t easy, at least knowing the path is, and you are going to climb the mountain and get exactly what you want out of life, because you’re strong, you’re smart, you’re together, and you’re not going to do the stupid and weak things that kept so many others who clearly never figured it out from getting what they wanted. Not you. You see the path, and you’re going to walk it. You see the mistakes and pitfalls, and you’re going to avoid them. When you’re young, it’s truly bewildering how so many people who are older than you didn’t see what you see, how they didn’t get what they want or live the life they want, the way you’re going to do.

And then life happens. Your career doesn’t work out the way you thought it was going to. Your relationships fail. You’re not as financially secure as you knew you were going to be by 30, or by 40. You make mistakes that seem easy to avoid when made by someone else. You haven’t traveled a fraction as much as you thought you would. You don’t have anywhere near the passion and excitement in your life that you were sure was your right. You never lived in New York, you never saw Paris. You’re not making six figures, or if you are, you find that you’re still living paycheck to paycheck and wondering where all your money went. You wake up too soon, sit in traffic, hold your breath until 5 o’clock, zoning out five days a week and living for the weekend, just waiting until Friday gets here so you can take a breath and relax a little. On weekends you have a few drinks, maybe see some friends, maybe do nothing, maybe camp out in front of your tv, drink in hand, and rest a bit for two days until you wake up on the next dreadful Monday to grind it out again. You’re just a regular schlub, looking in the mirror and realizing you’re not exceptional, you’re just a normal person living an average life, and you wonder how it happened. If you’re like most people, you also find that life simply just kicks your ass sometimes, that every once in a while you just get slapped around and knocked the fk out by some random event out of nowhere, and you don’t quite take on and conquer every challenge in life like you thought you would.

As years go by and you realize how fallible and human you are, little by little, year by year, you start to develop more empathy for others. You may begin to judge people less. Or you may find that at least that your judgments are tempered by a pause, a breath, a moment to wonder if there is something you’re missing, a reason that a person did or didn’t do something that seems to be the obvious right thing from the outside.

It was with all this in mind that I told my companions that the “wisdom of my age” was to try to be more empathetic towards others, especially towards those who are different than you, those who think and act differently, who are from a different background or class, even who are of a different political persuasion. Try not to assume that you know someone else’s life better than they do, that you would have made better decisions in their shoes, that you would have lived their life better, that you would do all the things right that they did wrong. Because I think you would want someone looking at your life from the outside to extend the same courtesy to you.

When you don’t understand why someone does something, perhaps you might wonder if there isn’t some aspect of their life you’re not aware of, something you’re not considering that affects the decision they made. Think of the mistakes you’ve made, of the opportunities you’ve missed, of the chances you didn’t make the most of. Maybe there’s something someone looking at you from the outside would miss. Or maybe you’re just human and made a mistake, or didn’t have the understanding to know how to do the best thing at the time. Time and the experience of fallibility, especially with mindful introspection and deliberate analysis of your decisions and your state of mind, can lead you to understand your own mistakes and frailties, and in turn make you more forgiving of those in others. I think this creates a deeper understanding of others, as well as a deeper connection to them. Empathy brings us closer, to friends and strangers alike, and I think that this is the most important lesson I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older.

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Now you’re going to see a lot from me as time goes on arguing against empathy and emotional reasoning, but there is a crucial distinction you must understand: my argument regarding empathy and emotions is about using the proper tools at the proper time, for their proper use. In brief, empathy is crucial not just for successful interactions with others and successfully navigating society, but for meaningful understanding of and connection with others, both those close to you and those you meet only briefly, or whom you are only loosely connected to. Empathy is indispensable on this interpersonal level. I will probably have to restate this many times in the future, but I am absolutely and unequivocally in favor of empathy practiced deeply and habitually in our personal interactions with others, and even to a large degree when analyzing the lives and actions of people far removed.

But it is a terrible tool for policy analysis and decision-making. I can’t say this clearly enough: an absolutely terrible, god-awful tool for crafting law and policy, for trying to decide how to analyze a social issue or solve a large-scale problem. The reasons for this are many and deep, and a subject for a later post. But keep this in mind as I write about empathy, which I am just recently discovering as a root-level issue underlying a lot of today’s political disagreements and, in my view, incorrect approaches to solving problems. I am a fierce advocate of using empathy where it belongs, and of keeping empathy and feelings out of domains where they don’t belong and have little if not negative utility.

My advice to these young ladies only increased in its poignancy with the tragic suicides of Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain just days after my birthday, two people who seemed to have it all, yet for whom the troubles of life sadly proved too much to bear. Moments like these, as terrible as they are, are valuable opportunities to remind ourselves that you never know what someone else is going through, and to practice compassion habitually and by default when we interact with others. For if life can become unbearable for people who have succeeded at the highest levels in careers they are passionate about, how difficult can it get for an average person, or someone coping with existential material concerns, or someone who has suffered a lifetime of difficulty, abuse, and setbacks?

There are a lot of lessons to be learned in life, in many aspects and avenues, but I think the most important one is the simplest: “be kind.”