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Monday, October 23, 2017

Trump and condolences

Trump said something insensitive to the widow of a soldier recently killed in Niger. She also said Trump struggled to remember her husband's name. And Trump has been in a name-calling spat with a Congressional Democrat, Frederica S. Wilson, over not just his initial remarks to the widow but also his subsequent efforts to deny that he said what he said. Even White House chief of staff John Kelly has gotten into the fray, backing his boss and belittling Wilson.

This is a big deal to the family, of course, and I can't blame them (including the soldier's mother, who has also weighed in) for being upset.

However, why the hell are the rest of us following this story?

Trump didn't commit gross malfeasance here. He was simply Trump, a man who doesn't feel empathy — who, by the evidence of a lifetime's worth of stories, doesn't even comprehend it on an intellectual level. And be honest: most of us are not good at consoling even those we know well, and the most skilled and empathetic can drop the ball now and then.

So at a human level, however much you may hate Trump, cut him some slack about the call. You might have stuck your foot in your mouth, too, if you were simultaneously contending with the other demands of the presidency.

His subsequent denial and fight-picking with Wilson are a different matter, of course: he was a whiny idiot for getting into it with her, and Kelly lost a lot of his own patina by joining his boss in the pile-on. Whether you think Wilson behaved appropriately by calling Trump out in the first place, Trump and Kelly have made things worse for the White House.

But again, this is business as usual for Trump the troglodyte. It's a classic distraction from his other woes, a distraction that takes advantage of the halo the country has built up around the military since Reagan's days. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders even had the gall to say to a reporter, "If you want to go after General Kelly that's up to you but I think that if you want to get into a debate with a four-star Marine general, I think that's something highly inappropriate".

It's important to know that the White House press secretary has the same contempt for the First Amendment and the role of the press in our republic that her boss does. Nevertheless, again, this is something we already knew: any Trump loyalist is going to parrot his undemocratic sentiments and probably shares his authoritarian instincts at some level.

So, whether or not you believe Rachel Maddow's hypothesis (which some might call a conspiracy theory) that Trump picked this fight to distract from diplomatic missteps in Chad and adjoining West African nations, the fact is that the Trump administration's inflaming of the controversy surrounding this condolence call is a deliberate distraction from bigger issues.

Stop rewarding the media for keeping this story alive.

And media, stop falling for the oldest trick in Trump's playbook. Get your heads out of your asses. Tell us what he doesn't want us to know — what we need to know.

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Enough is never enough

I heard a Congressional representative — a Democrat, of course — say "enough is enough", referring to the slaughter in Las Vegas.

Fifty-nine dead and some five hundred injured as of this moment. The worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Well, that's what most are saying. I think the Newtown (Sandy Hook) massacre was the worst. More have died in Vegas but the Newtown victims were children.

At any rate: dozens dead, hundreds injured. But is enough, enough?

Well ...

No. It should be but ... no, it isn't. It won't be.

To my mild surprise it was Bill O'Reilly who put his finger on the problem, though it's not so much a problem for him as the whole point. He wrote:

This is the price of freedom. Violent nuts are allowed to roam free until they do damage, no matter how threatening they are.
That precisely sums up the effect of the laissez-faire attitude toward gun ownership espoused by the most zealous gun-rights advocates, including but not limited to the National Rifle Association and its supporters. They will never come right out and say that mass murder is "the price of freedom" (specifically, the freedom to own guns), but it's the logical conclusion of their unrelenting drive to make even the merest discussion of gun control politically impossible.

(Why did BillO blow the secret? Because he has adopted the NRA's fatalistic stance that gun control is futile: "[H]aving covered scores of gun-related crimes over the years, I can tell you that government restrictions will not stop psychopaths from harming people." What he does not say is that those psychopaths would have to work a hell of a lot harder to harm the same number of people if they didn't have access to firearms that can be modified to shoot a lot of bullets in a very short time.)

But back to the salient point: this nation will never say "enough is enough" as long as enough gun owners and gun rights advocates hold fast to the principle that mass killings are an acceptable price for unfettered access to guns.

Gun rights advocates demand that every possible contributing factor to mass shootings be investigated and addressed by legislation — except for gun ownership itself. Gun ownership is not only axiomatically sacrosanct (i.e., you can't ask why gun ownership is an untouchable right), but isn't the root cause of the shootings, gun-rights advocates claim.

That position is no longer credible.

Whenever a mass shooting occurs, the NRA and its allies unfailingly denounce criminals and/or the mentally ill and/or unjust local laws that prevented "good guys" from carrying weapons that could have redressed the balance with the shooter.

Let's see how feasible addressing each of these (putative) alternative factors is.

  • Criminals should not have guns, we're told by the NRA. Well of course not. The trouble is that many of the mass shooters of the 21st century weren't criminals until they committed their mass shooting. The Las Vegas shooter, Stephen Paddock, for instance, had no criminal history.
  • Mental illness of a sufficient degree should disqualify one from possessing a firearm. However, we are nowhere near understanding the mind well enough to make such judgments infallibly. If you argue that the answer to mass shootings is a test that can tell whether a person will ever commit mass murder with a gun, you aren't being serious. You're trying to postpone the discussion indefinitely.
  • Now, about those good guys with guns whom some claim are the solution to mass shootings: how exactly would these good guys, with their presumably street-legal weapons, have stopped Paddock? He was around a thousand feet from his victims, thirty-two stories above them. He had the element of surprise and his victims (and would-be counteraggressors in the crowd) had no shelter. To analyze the situation well enough to figure out the shooter's location would require a person with rare presence of mind and coolness under fire.

    Yet assume that in a crowd as large as the one in Las Vegas, a few such people would have been present. They would have to have brought their weapons with them, the concert's organizers would have to have assented and it would have to be publicly known that audience members could be carrying.

    • Would you feel comfortable attending an event where an unknown number of your fellow eventgoers were armed?
    • What if they were drinking or imbibing other controlled substances? Could the organizers require total sobriety as a condition of carrying within paid areas?
    • Would you be comfortable assuming, as you would have to, that all those armed attendees were genuine good guys, rather than bad guys taking advantage of the permission to carry?
    • If shooting broke out, could law enforcement figure out who were the good guys and who the bad guys?
    (There's also the question of how common weapons that can shoot accurately over 1000 feet are among the civilian population. I have no idea.)
Talking about criminals, the mentally ill and "good guys with guns" is all smoke and mirrors. It's an attempt to distract us from the reality that while we all agree that the wrong people shouldn't have guns, we cannot discern with certitude who the wrong people are. Absent mind-reading, which would (or at least should) raise privacy objections that make gun-ownership arguments look trivial, we will not be able to keep guns out of the wrong hands — as long as the nation's default position is that gun ownership is a right that outweighs virtually all others.

If we want to address the plague of mass shootings, we have got to stop treating gun control as taboo. Greater restrictions on firearms and ammunition are presently our only practical options.

Until gun-rights advocates acknowledge that reality, enough will never be enough.

Monday, October 2, 2017

Manage your outrage

I'm not the best person to be recommending restraint vis-a-vis Dear Leader. Even calling him "Dear Leader" displays my disdain and thorough dislike of the current president, yet I can't stop myself.

Yet.

For as Robert Wright reminds all of us in his piece "Mindful resistance" is the key to defeating Trump", indulging our outrage at Dea— er, him, just plays into his strategy of fomenting hyperpolarization to bind his followers ever more closely to him.

Instead, we have to stop playing his game. We have to stop reinforcing the narrative that "they" are out to get "us" — that non-Trump supporters have nothing but contempt not just for Trump, but also for his supporters. To this end, Wright suggests cultivating "mindfulness", which is not hair-trigger reactiveness but a centered, objective and sensibly distanced perspective when Trump tries to push our buttons.

Mindfulness is connected rather closely to meditation and that might make it a non-starter for you, as it does for me. However, you can figure out a path that works for you as long as you dedicate yourself to the goal: stop reacting viscerally to Trump.

What does that goal entail? What must you do or not do as part of getting to that goal?

  • Don't type until you've had a chance to think (and to cool off).
  • Stay focused on the issue, whatever issue it is, not what Trump says about it. If there's a reasoned argument to be made against Trump's point, make that argument, and leave it at that. Don't make ad hominem attacks on Trump as part of your argument.
  • Don't make ad hominem attacks on Trump, period. It makes you feel good but does nothing to lower the temperature of our political debate.
  • Don't dump on Trump's followers. You may think you're pissed at them, and you might have good reason to be pissed at some of them, but whatever happens to Trump, we all have to share this country after he's gone, however that happens. After he's gone Trump's followers will still be our neighbors, our coworkers, our friends, our family members. We won't be close to all of them, of course, but we'll know enough of them to make painting all of them as an undifferentiated group a hazardous exercise unless you're willing to write off people you want in your life.

    Not convinced? Then consider this: cutting Trump supporters out of your life — or from the other side, cutting Trump opponents out of your life — gives Trump way more influence over your life than he deserves. Even if you think Trump's doing a great job, you shouldn't let him cut you off from people who were part of your life before he came on the political scene. You shouldn't let any public figure do that.

Now, I certainly haven't followed Wright's advice in my blog posts here: only seven of my 54 posts since the election didn't have to do with Trump or didn't mention him. However, I used to post much more frequently. I've been tempted many times to comment on something he said or did. However, I've said more than once that not only should journalists stop paying so much attention to his statements, but so should the rest of us. I've fallen off the wagon a lot since Trump's election, but, however fitfully, I was trying to follow Wright's admonitions even before I read his piece.

I'm trying to be more mindful. Are you?