Debasing the concept of anti-Semitism

Can you debase the concept of anti-Semitism? Israel's Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked proved you can:

“In the past, we saw European leaders speaking against the Jews. Now, we see them speaking against Israel. It is the same anti-Semitism of blood libels, spreading lies, distorting reality and brainwashing people into hating Israel and the Jews,” Shaked told the Washington Post. “Today, it is not politically correct to be anti-Semitic but being anti-Israeli is acceptable. People who have such anti-Semitic views should not be allowed to hold central leadership positions.”

You brazenly equate criticism of Israeli policy with anti-Semitism, Minister Shaked. That's despicable.

(I was tempted to add, "You are despicable", but that would have been the same mistake Minister Shaked made, turning a legitimate criticism of a person's action and speech into an ad hominem attack on the person.)

Minister Shaked, you have the crust to call legitimate criticism of Israel's heavyhanded and violent policies anti-Semitic? Your attitude removes the possibility of separating the nation, its leaders and its citizens: you conflate them all. That encourages genuine anti-Semitism! That's so asinine, so fatuously shortsighted, I wonder if your thinking is impaired. Are you high?

Minister, you should be ashamed of yourself for debasing the concept of anti-Semitism.

Have we hit electoral bottom?

By 1984, I was convinced Ronald Reagan was taking this country in as wrong a direction as was possible. I was appalled by Reagan's relentlessly sunny refusal to come to grips with the environmental problems that had made Jimmy Carter, a man who took his responsibility for steering the nation toward a sustainable future very seriously, so concerned for the future. Reagan's cabinet was a slap in the face to thoughtful stewardship of the nation's natural resources. His foreign policy was a series of provocations, what we might today call micro-aggressions, against unfriendly nations. Reagan was the first president I was old enough to feel was a genuine danger to the nation. I didn't file the paperwork to vote in time so I could only look on as Reagan swamped Walter Mondale.

In the 1988 and 1992 elections I wasn't any more thrilled by George H. W. Bush, but even at the time I conceded that he seemed to have more on the ball than Reagan. In the years since, Bush 41 has looked better and better not just as a president (compared to his predecessor and his son, admittedly a very low bar), but as a candidate, too. Bill Clinton had already earned his "Slick Willie" moniker in my mind so my vote was about as much against Bush 41 as for Clinton. In 1996 Bob Dole was such a reactionary and Ross Perot such a loon that Clinton would have to have assaulted a nun to lose my vote.

During Clinton's presidency the far right's authoritarian tendencies broke into the open with the election to the House of Newt Gingrich and his allies. Gingrich's unwillingness to make Congress work if it redounded, even to the smallest degree, to the Democrats' credit was unprecedented in modern times. This is when our modern Congressional atherosclerosis set in.

The year 2000 marked what I assumed would be an all-time low in candidates, the barely coherent George W. Bush and the robotic stuffed-shirt Al Gore. Gore, in addition to coming off as an extraterrestrial inartfully masquerading as a human being, promised to prolong the bad feelings and unending partisan conflict that marked Clinton's last years in office. Yet Dubya was avowedly a religious zealot and self-evidently a moron. It was the first election in which I truly felt I had to hold my nose and vote for the lesser of two evils, Gore (setting aside the hopeless idealist, Ralph Nader).

By 2004 it seemed impossible that Dubya's mismanagement of the economy (his ruinous tax cuts in the face of a military conflict) and his insane swerve away from Afghanistan toward Iraq would permit him a second term. The Democrats, though, managed to find in John Kerry a candidate even less charismatic (if infinitely more cogent) than Dubya. Again, I held my nose and voted for the lesser of two evils in Kerry.

2008 was a relief in that neither major-party presidential candidate was a lost cause. Sarah Palin, though, was a different story. There had been Congressional sideshow freaks for years, but none had come within smelling distance of higher office. Palin was the first genuinely nutty, self-oblivious yet self-absorbed moron on a major-party ticket in my lifetime. (Dan Quayle was an ignoramus but he wasn't exceptionally arrogant. George W. Bush at least sensed he wasn't the brightest bulb.)

By 2008 rank-and-file Republicans had long since demonstrated they would not tolerate any presidential candidate (much less President) who didn't toe the stringent party line. Reagan's emphasis on party unity had fused with Gingrich's uncompromising insistence on doctrinal purity. John McCain's otherwise inexplicable choice of Palin as his running mate made a certain amount of sense when you consider that the party's base didn't trust him. He had to find some way of appealing to it, and he knew he couldn't convincingly make the pitch for himself.

Mitt Romney, who I suspect is personally moderate on some issues, could never have expressed or acted on those moderate beliefs if he had won. No one could. Romney wasn't intrinsically a terrible candidate to my mind, but by 2012 it was obvious that the Republican presidential candidate would not be a truly independent mind and spirit: he would merely be the vessel through which the party would exert its will, and that will was entirely the product of the far right. Romney wasn't selling himself to the electorate, he was selling the damaged GOP brand.

And now, 2016.

Oy, 2016.

That Hillary Clinton is the Democratic frontrunner in spite of the deeply negative feelings many people have toward her is something of a miracle. It's just not as big a miracle as Donald Trump being the presumptive Republican presidential nominee in spite of an even more negative reputation than HRC's.

HRC is unlikable, gives off whiffs of corruption, has showed terrible judgment (the vote on the Iraq War, using a personal email server while Secretary of State), is entirely too ready to seek military solutions rather than diplomatic ones (in spite of, again, being Secretary of State) and seems to many inauthentic. Yet this deeply flawed person is a cornucopia of virtues compared to Trump. In addition to being a bully, a misogynist and an anti-Muslim and anti-Latino bigot, Trump's either a pathological liar or too deluded to comprehend reality. What issues forth from his mouth is all but entirely wrong. Indeed, the nation might chart a beneficial course for itself by listening to Trump on any issue and then doing precisely the opposite.

These two, Clinton and Trump, barring unimaginably disruptive accidents, will be our major-party choices come November. That should scare the living crap out of you.

In a different year — or in a different universe — Hillary Clinton would by now have been rendered leprous by her opponents. This year? This year, I'm investing in a gas mask because it will not suffice to hold my nose come polling time. The only thing that stinks worse than voting for Hillary is the possibility that Trump will be elected.

Have we hit rock bottom with our candidates? I thought we'd affirmatively answered this question in 2000. Now I see how much further we could have fallen, and actually have fallen. Now the question is, is there a bottom?

"I feel like" as argument

Prof. Molly Worthen asked that we stop saying "I feel like".

“I feel like” masquerades as a humble conversational offering, an invitation to share your feelings, too — but the phrase is an absolutist trump card. It halts argument in its tracks.

When people cite feelings or personal experience, “you can’t really refute them with logic, because that would imply they didn’t have that experience, or their experience is less valid,” Ms. Chai told me.

Worthen blames "growing diversity and political polarization. No one could blame [college students] from wanting to back away from confrontation". True enough, but I think it's just as important that with diversity has come an erosion of recognized authority. "Authority" isn't intrinsically bad. If it arises from expertise and experience, we honor it. When a plumber tells you not to dump grease down your sink, you recognize his authority.

Somewhere along the road to greater diversity, though, we decided that our diverse opinions deserved their own facts, too. Some of those "facts" are genuine facts, and some of them are just opinions we cite with increasing ferocity when challenged. We self-segregated into tribes that talk among themselves and don't know how to talk to others who disagree. Worse, when we do talk to them, we can't figure out whose "facts" are genuine. Today, no matter your opinion, you can find an "authority" to back you up, one whose putative expertise and experience seem unassailable. Whose authority — whose expertise and experience — do we accept?

The obvious answer is, the one whose pronouncements agree with the facts on the ground. Yeah, well, there's the rub. You'd think we could all agree on what the facts on the ground are, but we can't. There's simply too much information flooding us from all directions, and unless we ourselves are experts in a subject we can't tell what, of all that information, is garbage and what's valid. It doesn't help that we now accept that "authorities" are not above lying to us.

So if we can't reason our way to a common opinion using a common base of facts as determined by commonly-accepted authorities, how are we supposed to argue civilly with one another? You can't have a civil argument with someone you think is deluded about reality.

Worthen also observes:

In her 2001 book “Race Experts,” Dr. Lasch-Quinn (who is Christopher Lasch’s daughter) argued that the vogue for therapeutic self-help has steered the American left off course, encouraging well-meaning activists to push for sensitivity training seminars instead of real gains in racial and economic equality. The phrase “I feel like” is a mundane extension of this pattern, a means of avoiding rigorous debate over structures of society that are hard to change.

You don't need to subscribe to (so-called) conservativism to agree. Some on the left have learned the wrong lesson from the civil rights movement. Not every statement that hurts someone's feelings was intended that way. Sometimes the speaker just didn't know what he was talking about. Not allowing for that possibility leads us to respond with anger and contempt, giving up the possibility of successfully opening someone else's eyes to his or her ignorance. The propensity to find insult everywhere raises people's hackles, leading to the fraught atmosphere on college campuses that in turn has given rise to "I feel like ..." as a preemptive disarming move.

I get Worthen's point, but getting out of the habit of saying "I feel like" isn't going to address the reasons we're saying it. Our problems are bigger than that.

Okay, 2016, enough already

First you take Bowie. Now you take Prince?

You take anybody else, it had damned well better be someone who has no more to give.

Ted Cruz's revealing non-answer

"What would you as President do to protect me and my husband from that institutionalized discrimination?" Todd Calogne, a New York Republican, asked Cruz during a town hall hosted by ABC's "Good Morning America."

A reasonable question to Ted Cruz, who, like every other Republican presidential candidate, has not been all that thrilled with same-sex marriage's legalization. By "that institutionalized discrimination", the questioner presumably was referring to recent "religious liberty" laws passed in North Carolina and Mississippi, laws whose effects are tailored, curiously enough, to make certain Christian sects' views on same-sex relationships the official attitude of the state.

Cruz responded thusly:

"When it comes to religious liberty, religious liberty is something that protects everyone," he said. "It is our very first amendment, very first phrase that is protected in the Bill of Rights."

"It applies to Christians, it applies to Muslims, it applies to Jews, it applies to atheists," he added. "We want to be able to live in a world where we don't have the government dictating our beliefs and how we live. We have a right to live according to our faith and according to our conscience."

Huh. Funny thing, Senator, but Mr. Calogne asked you how you would protect people like him. We already know how the laws protect Christians and Muslims and Jews. (I disagree that those laws do anything to protect the rights of atheists: the promoters of those laws explicitly don't recognize that atheists have "religious" rights. But I digress.) So, do you want to answer the question this time?

Oh, that's right, you already did.

For the benefit of those who have trouble reading between the lines, let me tease out your real message, Senator:

Ted Cruz doesn't give a shit about same-sex marriage.

In the United States of Ted Cruz, your right to live your life free from government interference is sacred and inviolable — as long as you're Christian and heterosexual. Otherwise? Sorry!

But don't worry, Mr. Calogne, because like his ideological soulmate, the late Antonin Scalia, Cruz will leave you to the tender mercies of the majority. Leaving a minority group's civil rights up to the majority has always worked out, right? I mean, as long as you mean "worked out for the majority".

I'm not clear what gay Republicans see in a party whose frontrunners are Trump and Cruz (although I suppose Trump has yet to call gays rapists or to demand they be forbidden to immigrate to this country). However, if you are gay and Republican, and you were genuinely unsure where Ted Cruz stands on same-sex marriage, you have your answer.

Erdogan the thin-skinned

German chancellor Angela Merkel is allowing the prosecution of a comedian for insulting Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan asked that the comedian be prosecuted under a hitherto-obscure German law originally crafted when Germany was still a monarchy and insults to royal leaders could get one executed.

All the noise in this case has been about Merkel's sacrifice of free-speech principles in favor of mollifying Turkey's strongman, who derives leverage from his reluctant cooperation with Europe to deal with the refugee crisis.

Aren't we kind of missing the point, though? Germany and the rest of Europe need Turkey's cooperation so Erdogan, like it or not, finds himself in a good position to exact concessions like this one. The real point is that Erdogan has showed himself, unsurprisingly, to be a thin-skinned goon.

People who aren't two-bit bullies aren't afraid of a little laughter, Mr. President of Turkey. But I guess you wouldn't know anything about not being a two-bit bully.

The Avatar sequels

There will be four sequels to James Cameron's Avatar.

It's entirely futile to object to sequel-itis: that boat sailed with The Godfather. Still, I do object. I've seldom if ever seen such a grand and expensive spectacle without real heart as Avatar. Must we endure four follow-ups?

I don't have to watch them, of course, and absent unexpectedly fantastic reviews I won't. But I think of all the money Cameron's going to tie up producing these things and I wonder, how many better original movies would that buy?