Political tensions and doubts…
. . . in rural Wisconsin, one of the swing areas that are crucial to Trump’s chances of reelection. It’s not a simple or monolithic picture. And it’s embodied in the falling-out of two women friends, who previously worked together for Trump’s campaign. One has changed her mind, and has had the guts to go public about it, though she’s fearful of the consequences:
“I’m worried about retribution. My barn is made of wood. People have matches. Do two plus two,”
The other expressed the pragmatic, goal-directed point of view of many evangelicals:
“I’m not voting for him to be my pastor, my father, my role model. I’m voting for him to get some things done in Washington DC that have never been done before. We forgive him because of other things.”
As a single parent in mid-divorce, she had once temporarily needed public assistance, but sees no contradiction with Trump’s cuts in food stamps:
She agrees with the move, she said, because the restrictions do not apply to families with children or those with disabilities.
“Of course, we want to make sure the children are taken care of,” she said. “But single adults, you need to get out there and work. Life is hard. Sorry. Life was hard for me too.”
She’s not against some version of public health insurance, though (“I think that’s good. Who wouldn’t?”) . . . as long as it doesn’t raise taxes too much:
If somebody told me my taxes would go up $500 a year for Medicare for All, I might do it. That’s pretty good. But if somebody told me my taxes would go up $10,000 a year, oh no.”
The two women no longer speaking to each other. Meanwhile, a pastor worries about “an unquestioning and even aggressive adulation for Trump” among some congregants who have crossed a line between pragmatism and idolatry:
“It seems like there are many evangelical Christians that are willing to die on the hill of supporting the Republican president, supporting Donald J Trump. And to me, that hill is not worth dying on. No matter who the candidate is, no matter who the individual is,” he said. “To put all your hope into that individual is a dangerous road. Scripture would warn us against that.”
I consider this a must read, especially for us city kids.
Berlinski Burrows into Iran
in its full complexity, which is less about us than we would like (and, insofar as it is about us, in ways we don’t like).
if the Iranian regime falls, it will not be because of Trump. It will be because it is a regime that’s capable of shooting a civilian airliner out of the sky and then trying to bulldoze the evidence. It will be because that regime is rotten to the core.
If the regime survives, it will not be because of Trump, either. It will be because it is a regime capable of killing as many of its own citizens as it needs to quell these protests.
As I write this, the news that the Iranian regime has opened fire on the protesters has come across the transom. That is not Trump’s fault—but this point does seem very hard for some to grasp. . . .
Unless we invade and occupy Iran, the future of that regime is in Iranian hands, not ours.
Read to the end if you have some notion of how to apportion the “blame” for Iran’s enlargement of power between Obama and Trump. Clue: Berlinski says “If you deplore one but not the other, partisanship has taken over your frontal lobe.” But what has ultimately empowered Iran is the wars in Iraq and Syria.
The bottom line:
The issue is not Obama versus Trump, Democrats versus Republicans. It is that we wish for things that cannot both be true. We don’t want to be at war, but we don’t want the world to be overrun by hostile and despotic regimes. We don’t want to go to war to prevent Iran from acquiring the Bomb, but we don’t want Iran to acquire the Bomb. We want to scare Iran. But we don’t want to be scared.
We busily project half of our incompatible desires onto the other political party, rather than acknowledging that our own desires are in conflict. Meanwhile, no one mentions that we have no recognizable strategy for anything and haven’t had one since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Amazing Stuff 2
ENHANCING, NOT REPLACING, WORKERS
I didn’t know this till just now: the new and, I think, heartening trend (tell me if I’m wrong) is to use robotic exoskeletons—first imagined in sci-fi movies, then used to empower people with disabilities—to increase the strength, speed, dexterity, and safety of human manufacturing and stock workers, instead of replacing them with all-out robots. The first link is to a serious in-depth article. Here’s a popular one. You want pictures?
FANTASY
REALITY
It turns out that the subtlety of a human brain and senses is not that easily simulated and surpassed. Since wearing and partnering with these devices (also known as cobots) will require training and skill, one can be cautiously optimistic that these will be decently paying jobs. (The devices themselves can cost as little as $1,000 to $5,000; repair and rehab for a shoulder injury runs at least in the tens of thousands.)
Maybe humans won’t be rendered obsolete after all.
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Only 700 people are left in the world who speak this Nepali language. Fifty of them live in one building in Brooklyn.
(Fascinating factoid: “Jackson Heights, in Queens, is the most linguistically diverse neighborhood in the entire US and one of the most in the world.”)
(Fascinating asides about one-block ethnic enclaves in NYC and how U.S. culture has grown at once bolder about preserving distinct identities and more relaxed about mixing them. “Interracial marriage [used to mean] an Italian Catholic marrying an Irish Catholic: both families got upset and agreed with each other that such a match was a bad idea.”)
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Here’s a trick for actually seeing the Earth spin, from Earth.
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THE MOUSERS OF 10 DOWNING STREET . . .
. . . presented in the manner of military and diplomatic history.
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SEXY BEAST
There were 14 giant tortoises of the species Chelonoidis hoodensis on the Galápagos island of Española. Now there are 2,000. This Genghis Tortoise is the single, um, handed progenitor of roughly 40 percent of them.
That makes more tortoises on Española than there are people who speak the Nepali language Seke.
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The best description of what New York City has become was penned by the late Elizabeth Wurtzel in 2013:
APOCALYPTICALLY PLUTOCRATIC.
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In 2019, this qualifies as amazing:
Only one actor of color was nominated, and no female directors are up for Best Director. Among the talents overlooked this year: Eddie Murphy, Jennifer Lopez, Lupita Nyong’o, Awkwafina, and Greta Gerwig.
White patriarchy reasserts itself in the Oscars. Drawing courage from similar developments in the 2020 presidential race?
I haven’t seen Awkwafina’s performance as an actor but I love her so much for this. (⚠︎ NSFW) Also her name.
I haven’t seen Awkwafina’s performance as an actor but I love her so much for this (! NSFW). And also her name.
YIKES! Statins could make you more aggressive . . .
. . . and Tylenol could make you less empathetic, among other unsuspected and uninvestigated emotional and behavioral side effects of common drugs:
fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans have shown that the same areas of our brain become active when we’re experiencing “positive empathy” –pleasure on other people’s behalf – as when we’re experiencing pain.
Given these facts, Mischkowski wondered whether painkillers might be making it harder to experience empathy. Earlier this year, together with colleagues from Ohio University and Ohio State University, he recruited some students and spilt them into two groups. One received a standard 1,000mg dose of paracetamol, while the other was given a placebo. Then he asked them to read scenarios about uplifting experiences that had happened to other people, such as the good fortune of “Alex”, who finally plucked up the courage to ask a girl on a date (she said yes).
The results revealed that paracetamol significantly reduces our ability to feel positive empathy – a result with implications for how the drug is shaping the social relationships of millions of people every day. Though the experiment didn’t look at negative empathy – where we experience and relate to other people’s pain – Mischkowski suspects that this would also be more difficult to summon after taking the drug. . . .
“[T]o be honest, this line of research is really the most worrisome that I’ve ever conducted,” he says. “Especially because I’m well aware of the numbers [of people] involved. When you give somebody a drug, you don’t just give it to a person – you give it to a social system.”
Mitigating factors:
- “Technically, paracetamol isn’t changing our personalities, because the effects only last a few hours and few of us take it continuously.” But it’s good to be aware of the effect, so “you don’t . . . take paracetamol [ahead of] a situation that requires you to be emotionally responsive – like having a serious conversation with a partner or co-worker.”)
- The same brain centers that host empathy govern both physical and emotional pain, so “paracetamol can make us feel better after a rejection.”
- SSRI antidepressants such as Prozac markedly reduce the Big Five trait of “neuroticism” (“epitomised by anxious feelings, such as fear, jealousy, envy and guilt”) and make people more extroverted.
A poem for this moment
Yes, Auden’s “September 1, 1939.” Yes, Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” Sure, even Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.” But this one by e e cummings is right up there.
pity this busy monster, manunkind
pity this busy monster, manunkind,
not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)
plays with the bigness of his littleness
--- electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh
and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical
ultraomnipotence. We doctors know
a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go
E. E. Cummings
I don’t have the heart
to write a post this morning, so, here are last night’s/this morning’s tweeties and emails.
And in response to a friend who said the Democrats have now effectively destroyed each other, leaving only old white men standing and women and unwhite people less psyched to go to the polls:
I’m sure the Dems had all manner of behind-the-scenes help destroying each other. Not that they needed it. But the general run of people, even as they may be (misplacedly) paranoid, are sincere, naive, and almost effortlessly manipulated. No one can keep their eye on the ball in a hurricane of distraction, incitement, and misinformation.
I’m as duped as everyone else, by definition, but it must be obvious by now that I thought Warren, with all her flaws, was probably the best candidate, in that she was the only one “impure” enough on every dimension to almost stretch across the Great Divide. The operative words are “almost” and “was.” All kinds of powerful forces don’t want any of that to happen.
The imminent threat is theocracy.
Separation of church and state may be the first casualty of a Trump reelection. (Completely destroying the environment could take a little longer than trashing the Constitution. Scissors, paper, rock.)
(Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP)
Rank-and-file evangelicals have also embraced the imperfect vessel concept [that Trump is like the biblical King Cyrus, another sonovabitch who was nonetheless “good for the Jews”] . . .
“If you’re a faith community and you make a political deal with the president, and sell your soul, you stretch to come up with a theological justification, and this seems to be the go-to, this idea,” [said Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United, a non-partisan organization dedicated to the separation of church and state].
The concept has since gone international, with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, making the comparison in March 2018.
Cheered on by these, and other, prominent figures . . . who claim Trump has been “raised up by God” . . . white evangelical Christians have continued to support Trump.
In return, they have been rewarded with attacks on reproductive rights and the freedoms of LGBTQ people, and the appointment of scores of conservative judges.
They have also watched people with the same evangelical beliefs appointed to key government positions, as Trump has stacked his cabinet with devout Christians, some of whom have been explicit about how their faith influences their approach to government. [emphasis mine]
“Many of Trump’s political appointees have, as their primary qualification, the fact that they are committed to a very distinct, conservative religious agenda,” said Katherine Stewart, author of an upcoming book The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism.
In the Trumpire,
the condition for citizenship will be swearing a loyalty oath to Dear Leader.
That’s my fantasy after pondering the fresh Irany that the trigger for Soleimani’s assassination, approved seven months ago, was to be the first death attributable to Iran of an American . . . who turned out to be a recently naturalized Iraqi-American, Nawres Hamid.
This achieves Irany in light of Trump’s slur that four American citizens in Congress, only one of whom is even naturalized, should go back where they came from.
UPDATE: The obvious occurs to me belatedly: that ethnicity and birthplace are less of an impediment to Americanness when the bearer is dead.
Maybe another requirement will be to laugh hysterically at Dear Leader’s non-jokes. If this tweet is what passes for “hilarious” in the Trumpire, that alone will be grounds for emigration if not secession.
“I think that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the Republic.”
That’s why Rick Wilson, ruthless Republican operative, is offering his advice to the Democrats. They (and maybe you) won’t like it. But the man does have a track record of getting swing voters to swing the way he wants. And he does openly call Trump “a liar and a corrupt asshole and a scumbag.” His new book, Running Against the Devil, out January 14, is bound to be as breathtakingly entertaining, brutally frank, and pragmatic as his first.
“[Wilson] thinks Democrats are making a huge mistake in the campaign so far – by telling voters who they really are. The main candidates are veering too far left, he thinks, away from the disaffected Trump voters they will have to turn. . . .
“You’ve got to run where the game is played and fight where the fight is, which is these 15 electoral college swing states, and those states are not as woke and liberal as other parts of the country. . . .”
Asked which Democrat is best suited for the fight, Wilson admits to being impressed by Warren’s willingness to work hard and how she champions the little guy. But he still goes for Joe Biden.
“I think it will be Biden because name ID is very powerful,” he says of the former senator and vice-president. “He is the one candidate who has shown the most ability to contrast with Trump in terms of a broader, bigger picture that isn’t just locked into what’s the hot flavor of Democratic messaging this year. . . .
“[T]he way to win is sometimes to not tell people who you really are.”
And if the young stay home / write in? . . .
I wish I could ask him that question. He seems to think the rest of the blue states are safe even without a huge youth turnout.
What do you think?
ADDED: An excerpt from Rick Wilson’s Running Against the Devil:
A second term guarantees the rise of the Imperial Trumps, a family cult built on the remains of the moldering corpse of the GOP, featuring all the warmth of North Korea’s Kim dynasty and a kind of Hapsburg-jawed je ne sais dumbfuck rien. . . .
The Trump family—including the creepy automaton Jared Kushner—will continue to view the American government not as a sacred trust but as an ATM for their crapulous enterprises and nation-state-level grifting.
Ambiance 