The Argument from Design

A friend linked to this story today, gushing:

When I think of Love and Compassion... this is what i imagine. These are the good folks and the Christians who SHOULD be getting media time.

I'm not going to let Christians claim the copyright on helpfulness and compassion. They're universal human traits and practices.

In fact, now that I've read the story, I don't see a notable amount of "love and compassion" in it. The kid, a sixteen-year-old in Memphis, Tennessee, offered to help out in exchange for some food -- which is a perfectly legitimate thing for him to do. The man he offered to work for bought Chauncy a bunch of groceries and drove him home, where he got a look at the conditions he and his disabled mother were living in; that's a good thing, and fits "love and compassion."  He then started a crowdfund for them, which was nice, but it wasn't a gift: the idea was to buy him a lawnmower so he could mow lawns and earn money.  Again, perfectly legit, but not a shining example of love and compassion. I just looked at the GoFundMe page, which is up to more than $74,000 now. And that's very encouraging, and I wish Chauncy well.

Still, a loving and compassionate (not to mention cranky and tired) person might ask: why should any kid be living in poverty? Why should a sixteen-year-old have to support his family? (Yes, that often happens, but is it an ideal to strive and work for?) Does focusing on a story like this to make oneself feel good distract from all the other children and families and single adults who are living in poverty, thanks to an economic and political system that is meant to create large numbers of people at the bottom?  Or does it just make you feel different from all those Christians you disapprove of?

Just before I saw this post I was reading Richard Seymour's blog, and he had this to say about the mindset of those who believe in competition:

If competition is to be the law of all social life, if there are to be winners and losers, if we are to scorn and diminish losers, if we need an 'underclass', a lower-down onto whom to pile the humiliations that are visited on us - well, then, at least let Britain come first. And if we are going to be punished for all our minor transgressions during the boom, for having a little bit of debt, for not saving enough, for not buying enough, for not having a better job, for not working harder, then at least punish them more.

Remember, as a young, poor, black male, Chauncy is just an eye-blink away from being demonized as a superpredator by our respectable leaders and many of the nice older white people I know on Facebook.  It's easy to celebrate an exemplary, hard-working, straight-A student like Chauncy, but you shouldn't have to be a paragon to have a roof over your head or enough to eat.

Even worse, on the GoFundMe page the guy who started the page writes: "last week, by God's beautiful design, he met me." So, all the other kids in poverty who didn't luck out are going hungry "by God's beautiful design." (Remember, Jesus said we will always have the poor with us, so slather on that ointment, baby, for great is your reward in heaven.)

He goes on: "I've never felt so overwhelmed with compassion and faith and joy. I've never felt so good as this moment... What followed was perhaps one of the most cherished experiences of my life." See, it's all about him. And God. Chauncy is just a pawn in the game. Love and compassion? Not by my standards, but I'm an atheist. That's why I get all pissy when people talk about "karma" and "you're in my prayers and thoughts."  If Chauncy and his mother were poor and hungry, that was their karma; who are we mere mortals to judge the Universe?
 
I really should consider taking a sabbatical from Facebook; it's not good for me.  And it's all about me.

Fair and Balanced

I was surprised to see a link on Facebook to a review of a new book by Noam Chomsky in the New York Review of Books.  Chomsky used to write regularly for the NYRB in the Sixties and early Seventies, but at some point he faded from their pages, and even his most serious political writings are rarely reviewed there, so this review is a nice gesture. It's not even the kind of transparent hatchet job that's typical of liberal media like the Guardian, the New York Times, or the Nation (which, I admit, has improved somewhat). The reviewer catches Chomsky in a minor error or two but on the whole concedes the validity of his "case against America." Still, I had to chuckle at this passage:

Yet Who Rules the World? is also an infuriating book because it is so partisan that it leaves the reader convinced not of his insights but of the need to hear the other side.

I know, right? Where could most American readers possibly "hear the other side"? If only a newspaper, or perhaps a TV network, or a politician or two would take up the defense of America's supreme goodness, so citizens could get get a fair and balanced view!

Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Brain

One benefit, if that's the right word, of using social media is that they bring me into fairly direct interaction with people who are ignorant, misinformed, and don't think very well.  Over the years I've been rather spoiled by reading the work of people who work hard to inform themselves, do their best to think critically, and do a pretty good job of it, at least within the pages of their published writing.  I've also exposed myself to media from a variety of positions, so while I'd hardly claim to be the most informed person on the planet, I'm better informed than most people I talk to.

So it's not surprising that when I've had a discussion with people who not only haven't read much or thought much or ranged beyond the corporate media for news, but who have actively sought to shut out of their awareness anything but Fox News or Breitbart.com or WorldNewsDaily (or Occupy Democrats or Daily Kos), I've been baffled.  I've been asking myself just how much thinking it's fair to demand from people.  As much as I demand of myself, I suppose, but that seems to set the bar much higher than I realized for a long time.

I remind myself that I've arranged my life so as to leave plenty of room for reading and thinking and learning.  People who chose to raise families, who've had demanding jobs that took time away even from spending time with their families, have a legitimate excuse for not pasturing their souls.  Still, I don't think I (or anyone else) is obligated to respect or take seriously the opinions of people who haven't bothered to inform themselves or consider alternatives.

It's a popular notion that people aren't equally gifted intellectually, and I try to bear that in mind.  The doctrine "All men are created equal" is dismissed lightly, mostly it seems by people who assume themselves to be in the superior ranks; again, they don't seem to have reached that conclusion by examining evidence, they just take it for granted.  Yet I find that if I dismiss such people's misinformed, irrational opinions, they indignantly appeal to egalitarianism: Everybody's entitled to their opinion!  My opinion is as good as yours! You're just a smart-aleck know-it-all, you think you're better than everybody else!  It's not really elitism. however, to say that some opinions are worth less than others, and indeed many aren't worth a damn.  (This is where I part company with someone like Noam Chomsky when he says "It is not possible to respond to opinions," especially when he then proceeds to discuss how you can respond to opinions.  Yes, debating opinions is messy and difficult, but so is debating arguments, which Chomsky thinks is possible.)  I think it's significant that people who insist that every opinion is as good or another don't extend that dogma to other people's opinions (mine, for example). 

Politics and religion are probably the most vexed areas for this.  I've come to realize that partisans, whether of Obama or Clinton or Trump, don't care about reasons or factual accuracy where their heroes are concerned.  It's probably not a complete waste of time to show why Donald Trump is a liar, a racist, or a corrupt thug, but it won't have much effect on his supporters, who mostly like his lies, racism, and corruption.  The same is true of Hillary Clinton's supporters.  (And of Obama, but he's old news now.)  On one hand they prefer to be uninformed about her record, but when it gets right down to it they mostly agree with her destructive, warmongering foreign policy history, her corporatist economic policy, and her support for structural racism in the drug war and the private prison system.  Dishonesty and irrationality go with electoral politics like a horse and carriage.  Besides, half of the population is below average, so we must have a meritocracy: our elites have never led us wrong before.

There are other takes on the problem, and all this is preamble to one of them.  Someone I know shared this meme on Facebook yesterday.

He remarked, "... sorry about my many deeply bigoted friends. i suppose they're doing the best they can to get by in a deeply crazy time and place."

I commented, "I can love my neighbor while disapproving strongly of her religion or other beliefs. I disapprove of all religions. This meme reeks of 'Some of my best friends are,' which is one of the Seven Warning Signals of Bigotry."

He responded, "on disapproving of religions. i hate their hierarchies... not their believers (the sin, not the sinner, as one tires of hearing). the believers generally seem to be honestly trying to tell me something about their lives with what they think will be the most effective tools-at-hand. when all they have to say is some stuff i've known about since grade-school, it can... it does... become tiresome very quickly. but, with some good faith on both sides, sometimes i can get something out of such a discussion (namely, a chance to tell them something about my life; nothing in social life with one's clothes on can match the feeling of being listened to with attention)."

I replied:

"Hierarchies" are only part of religion, and they are not limited to religion anyway. My objection to religions is that they are false, hierarchies or no. And I didn't say anything about "hate," which is a meaningless buzzword and a sign of bad faith.

"the believers generally seem to be honestly trying to tell me something about their lives with what they think will be the most effective tools-at-hand." Sometimes yes, sometimes no, but once it becomes clear that they are not interested in discussing in good faith, I tune them out. There's nothing wrong with that; life is short. Bad faith and dishonesty are part of human nature, but I'm not obligated to pretend that they're anything but spinach, and I say the hell with it.

The same is true of science cultists and conspiracy theory mongers. They too are trying to tell me something about their lives with what they think will be the most effective tools-at-hand, but I'm not obligated to pretend that they're either right or honest. We're not children anymore, and there's no obligation to pretend that the crayon scrawl that's supposed to be a superhero looks like anything but random lines. For a five year old, of course; for a thirty-year-old and up, no.

I hadn't really thought about the condescension in his remarks about his "deeply bigoted friends," but it's definitely there.  For whatever reasons, he sees them with a patronizing contempt.  I added that he should extend the same indulgence to the shadowy overlords who control our thoughts with their media machine (my allusion to "conspiracy theory mongers" was directed at him).  Of course the same accusation might be directed at my analogy to children's drawings, but I don't think it's just.  It's my friend who was infantilizing his "deeply bigoted friends."  I -- we all -- expect adults to do better than random crayon scrawls.  There's certainly no reason I can see to pretend that their misinformed, wildly irrational opinions are as good as anyone else's.

One point that I consider revealing is his bit about "their hierarchies... not their believers (the sin, not the sinner, as one tires of hearing)".  The believers are beside the point for me: it's their beliefs.  In practice it's not so easy to distinguish between them, since people are apt to identify themselves with their beliefs, and contrary to "generally seem to be honestly trying to tell me something about their lives with what they think will be the most effective tools-at-hand," many believers revel in their bad faith.  I'm not talking only about your schlub in the street, but about educated and sophisticated thinkers.

I can see that my acquaintances, both far-right wing and center-right plus not a few of the lefties, have no idea how to proceed when someone disagrees with them.  From both positions I've been attacked for criticizing what they post.  For them to post something racist, inflammatory, or generally dishonest is exercising their sacred First Amendment rights; for me to disagree with them is to violate their freedom.  I've also been accused semi-teasingly (presumably a "microaggression"), usually by liberals, of "stirring the pot," of just saying what I say to "stir things up."  This is flagrantly patronizing, and I've slapped those people down without compunction.

Are my acquaintances, most of whom are in their fifties at least, too old and set in their ways to learn to think critically?  I don't know how to answer that question.  I don't believe one is ever too old to learn; age is not an excuse.  Be that as it may, I'm old and set in my ways too.  But at least aged bigots, having apparently led sheltered lives, need to be confronted with opposition when they blurt out their bigotry.  Their families may have to let their poisonous views pass, but I don't have to.

I've long suspected that many people love social media because they can jeer at people they think they hate from a safe distance; that their targets might talk back is unthinkable to them.  (Has anyone else noticed how many people will respond to material about a celebrity by stating their love and devotion to the celebrity directly in comments, though the material wasn't posted by the celebrity or her spokespeople?  It's like yelling at your TV in the belief that Dumpf or Hitlery will hear you.)  When one of their targets does talk back, they're flummoxed.  Like most people, they have no idea how to proceed from the point of disagreement.  Come to think of it, since they're not interested in questioning their loyalties and beliefs anyway, I guess there is no way to proceed.  And where would they have learned to think critically in the first place?  The Right has always treated the teaching of critical thinking in school as a threat to civilization, along with the Jews and gay marriage.

The question of 'media brainwashing' is important too.  The media would like to think they can affect opinion, even to manufacture and control it, but this is false advertising much of the time.  Sometimes they pander to opinions already held (jingoism, religion, partisanship, racism) and can intensify them somewhat, but rarely for long; giving them credit for the opinions seems like giving them credit for the rising of the sun because they printed the time of sunrise in advance.  It's a less persuasive claim now of all times, when Trump and Sanders have confounded our wise rulers in politics and the media.  Despite a relentless flood of apocalyptic propaganda, it appears that English voters mostly favor leaving the European Economic Community.  And so on.  Nothing inspires panic in an elite like the realization that the proles are disobeying orders, and they often do, for better and worse.  I often ask those who talk about media brainwashing how they managed to resist it; I've yet to get an answer.

In the end, shadowy overlords or no shadowy overlords (I don't think they're shadowy at all, if you bother to pay attention, but it's comforting to think of yourself as one of the few who can see what the Sheeple can't), we are responsible for what we take from the media, the pronouncements of our politicians.  No one can know everything, of course, but it's possible to apply the basics of critical thinking (summaries by Deborah Meier and Walter Kaufmann quoted in this post) and start asking sensible, relevant questions.  Then it's necessary to recognize that one might be wrong, and to pay attention to differing views until you've evaluated them.  (Whining that someone is making a career out of picking on your beliefs, that they're just a smart-aleck trying to stir things up, is not an acceptable substitute.  I don't believe I've ever done that myself, at least not since the age of six; when someone corrects me, I check the correction, and admit my error if I have made one.  Most of my friends do not.)  What to do from there is another problem, harder to answer, but the same critical tools can help.

My Latest Failure in Critical Thinking

Just as I wondered, as a child, whom my mother went to when she was frightened or had bad dreams, I sometimes wonder how someone like Noam Chomsky deals with feelings of discouragement and hopelessness after half a century of apparently indefatigable contending with the depressing state of the world.  Like Chomsky, I try to remember the good things that happen, the independence and resistance of ordinary people in their day to day lives.  So, in the wake of the Orlando massacre and the tremendous brabble it inspired, I was totally ready to be moved by this story posted to Facebook.  So was Glenn Greenwald, whose retweet led me to it.  I shared the link to my page too.

Just now, on my way to work, a man got on my train yelling as he came onto an incredibly packed train for the "two terrorist foreigners to go back to where they came from." These two "terrorist foreigners" were two (understandably terrified) hijabi Muslim women. Before I could say anything, the entire train erupted in anger. A black man, a Romanian, a gay man, a bunch of Asians, and a score of others came to their defense demanding that this man leave these women alone and get off this train. The man insisted that the two women go back home and take their bombs with them.

After some back and forth, one man said, "This is New York City. The most diverse place in the world. And in New York, we protect our own and we don't give a fuck what anyone looks like or who they love, or any of those things. It's time for you to leave these women alone, Sir."

I couldn't have said it better. Sure enough, our train was stopped. This royal douche got off the train to the sound of cheering.

I say all this to say that in light of all the bad happening around us, remember that there's so much good and so much love.

I'm late to work, but it was for the best reason.

Several of my friends liked it too.  But one commented:

Duncan..... why do I have an uneasy feeling that this story was made up? A ...."Romanian, a gay man..." - did they wear labels? And who stops the train over a brawl in one of the cars? Sure, it's a feel-good story, and we need more of those, but maybe without details that make them appear suspect. Because if people are making up good stories, it means there are not enough of them in real life.

Abashed, I replied:

You have a good point. I should have thought about that. You may well be right. You're definitely right about the lack of good stories in real life. In real life, as we see on Facebook and elsewhere, it's more likely that anyone who spoke up about a racist incident on the subway would be shouted down: "Why do you want ISIS to destroy us? Take your political correctness somewhere else! I don't want to get involved, it's their problem. There's so much evil in the world, we can't do anything about it except vote for Donald Trump. (The more evil, the better!) And pray -- it's always fixed things before."

I don't mean to dismiss the story completely.  Something of the kind may well have happened.  I believe that my friend was right, however, about suspicious details in the story.  I've been in some "packed," even "incredibly packed" subway cars, and I wonder how everyone could become aware of something that was going on one spot, let alone react as one ("the entire train" - I presume she meant "the entire car," which strains credulity enough, not every car in the train).  Compare the stories in the gospels in which large crowds, even "multitudes," speak to Jesus like a Greek chorus, in apparent unison.

As my friend (also a city dweller with experience of crowded subways) noted, the narrator's ability to identify the ethnicity and sexual orientation of every individual involved is also suspect.  I don't know whether a train would be "stopped" to remove a "douche" (!), as "cheers" sound in the background.  I feel sure that the narrator at least embellished her tale in the telling, in ways that will be familiar to anyone who's encountered folklore before. Which -- to repeat -- doesn't prove the whole story a fabrication, though that's also possible; I hope not.  As my friend said, we need good stories, and it's important that they be true as well; maybe that's too much to ask.  The Internet is clogged with feel-good and feel-bad stories, and those who debunk them are dismissed lightly: Well, I don't care if it's true, I liked it.

(For comparison, see this story, which attempts to shoehorn a [gay? Muslim?] ex-Marine bouncer's escape from Pulse during the massacre as a heroic rescue of an unknown number of patrons, despite his insistence that it was nothing of the kind.  I don't mean to demonize him; he behaved totally reasonably, and his actions did allow others to escape with him.  If anything I want to honor him for his determined honesty.  I only want to point out the way that stories are shaped by people's, and organizations' in this case, desire for heroes and happy endings.)

The crowning irony, for me, is that I'm constantly being reproved for being, allegedly, too cynical and skeptical.  Once again I find I'm not cynical enough.

But Enough About You

The advice columnist Miss Manners made a curious and, I think, revealing misstep in answering a question on Sunday.  The questioner asked what to say on "learning that a friend has stage 4 cancer," if not "You will be in my prayers."  What if you're dealing with a selfish, unfeeling cancer patient who is "not of the same religious beliefs or is an atheist"?

Miss Manners suggested a good alternative -- "I am terribly sorry.  I'll be hoping for the best.  I hope you know how much I care for you" -- but framed it oddly.

There is the religious angle that you raise, though Miss Manners would think that a nonreligious person could appreciate a religious person's seeking the solace in which he or she believes.

I've read this and its context several times to try to be sure I understand it.  So, when a religious person's friend is terminally ill and the religious person promises to pray, it is for his or her own solace, not for the solace or benefit of the sick person?  I wouldn't be surprised, but I thought that there was usually at least a pretense that the prayer is offered on behalf of the other, not for oneself.  You learn something new every day!

Another of my Facebook friends and I have been disputing something related.  She's about my age, we went to the same high school, she's nominally liberal politically, she hates Trump and likes Hillary.  She likes to post feel-good memes, and last Saturday night she posted one that said "Do good and good will come to you."

We've had some exchanges about karma and related doctrines before.  I commented that I disagree. There are no payoffs, there is no karma. If you do good hoping to receive good in return, you'll soon be embittered. If you don't expect it, you'll often be pleasantly surprised. (And this leaves aside the very difficult question of what "good" is.)

My friend initially replied, "Oh, there IS karma, but you shouldnt liken karma with a fairy godmother.....it doesnt work that way, but there are times when there is such karma with others that its a delight to know about."  This was odd, because the whole point of the meme she'd posted is that karma (or whatever) is like a fairy godmother: do good, and you'll receive good.

We went back and forth a bit on whether "there IS karma," and a mutual FB friend admonished us that no one knows with 100% certainty what happens to us after death.  First, we weren't talking about what happens after death: the meme promises reward in this life.  Second, and more important, we do know with close to 100% certainty that bad things happen to good people and vice versa, because we can see it in the world around us.  That's what's known in philosophy as the Problem of Evil.  People have been grappling with it for thousands of years. To promise blandly "Do good and good will come to you" is to lie.  Even my friend recognizes this on some level, since she tried to backtrack a bit with the "fairy godmother" move.  But she continued to insist that karma is real, and that it works.  Maybe I should press her more to explain how karma works, if it's not a "fairy godmother," but I don't think she could articulate it; her idea of reasoned discussion is to report what a distinguished psychic told her.  Maybe I should press her on it anyway.  

After all, the Buddha is reported to have told a professional soldier who consulted him "that if the latter were to die on the battlefield he could expect to be 'reborn in a hell or as an animal' for his transgressions" (Brian Victoria, Zen War Stories, Routledge, 2003).  The Buddha took the safe path by threatening post-mortem punishment; Jesus of Nazareth, less cautiously, warned that "All who take the sword will perish by the sword" (Matthew 26:52), which is as transparently false as "Do good and good will come to you."  Many professional soldiers have died in bed, and many if not most people who've been killed in war were non-combatants.  But both of these teachers presented karmic justice as a "fairy godmother," if a highly punitive one.

That good people do sometimes flourish and bad ones sometimes suffer isn't evidence for the meme's truth.  The distribution of good and bad fortune could just as easily be random.  I think it probably is, once you look beyond face-to-face personal relations, and even in that very restricted realm, there are no guarantees.  What this means is that pointing to "karma" or "You reap what you sow" (to which I'll return presently) or similar doctrines is not a fact about the world, but a person's interpretation and judgment about the world.  This is of course true of everything we say about the world, but I'm stressing it here because my friend, like so many people who share her attitude, loves to invoke karma when she's feeling Schadenfreude because someone she dislikes has taken a pratfall.

A few months ago while I was among a small group of people waiting for a bus, a young woman began talking to no one in particular about a former boss who'd treated her badly (I don't remember the details). After she left that job she saw in the newspaper that her former boss had been physically attacked for being Muslim. "I guess it was her karma," said the young woman complacently.  No one said anything.  I considered suggesting that working for that woman was her karma, but I chickened out.

Since then I've begun commenting when people on Facebook invoke karma in connection with other people's misfortunes.  None of them have done a good job of justifying their highly selective use of the concept; as with Christian belief in Hell, they don't seem to like to think about the possibility that bad karma might catch up with them, or with people they like, and they consider it very bad form to remind them of it.  Like Hell, karma is for other people, bad people, for Donald Trump -- not for good, nice people like them.

But if "there IS karma," it is no respecter of persons.  But as I've said before, it would be highly offensive to apply it to the drowned Syrian toddler who washed up on a Turkish beach last year.  Or to the victims of the massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, the morning after my friend posted her meme.  Which wouldn't mean that bad karma wasn't involved, only that people are often unwilling to follow their own logic to its unpleasant conclusion.  And there's nothing unusual about that.  I think that people talk about karma or "You reap what you sow" (and Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick did just that when he quoted Galatians 6:7 on his Twitter account on Sunday morning after the massacre) or other similar proverbial bullshit, less because they mean it than as a warding-off of the evil eye, to try to distract karma from their own doorsteps.  It's often women who sniff "What was she doing out alone at that hour anyway?" when a woman is raped, for example.  (The Stanford rape victim must have had bad karma too.  But then so did her rapist, whose apologists whine that his life is ruined by the notoriety he received and the judicial slap he was given on his lily-white wrist.)  My mother used to harumph, "Where are their parents?" when juvenile delinquency was reported on the evening news; if my brothers and I misbehaved, though, it wasn't her fault, she'd done her best with us, etc.

Magical thinking is something we fall back on in situations we can't control or make sense of, as Bronislaw Malinoswki found of Trobriand Islanders who had rigorous, practical, rational lore for sailing in the relatively safe inner lagoons, and magic for sailing on the more dangerous open sea.  But I think we must challenge magical thinking when it takes inhumane forms like belief in karma and "You reap what you sow."  I don't think that the Problem of Evil, insoluble though it is, is too complex for most people to understand.  Sometimes I feel a bit guilty for expecting my less-intellectual friends to inform themselves and learn to think about these matters.  Critical thinking is not just for academic elites; I once disputed with a nice liberal fellow who said that ordinary people don't need to learn to think critically.  Excuse me, I replied, but ordinary people are expected to vote, which requires critical thinking if it's to be done responsibly; just shopping at the supermarket, let alone for a car or a house, involves considering and weighing alternatives.  Ordinary citizens cultivate thinking skills in dealing with spectator sports; as Noam Chomsky has observed, they are often very well-informed and won't defer to the authority of coaches and team owners.  This is permitted because such knowledge and skill has no real social consequences, while thinking about politics and morality might lead to restiveness and rebellion against the legitimate rulers of society.  I don't know how well most people can learn to think critically, but I don't trust the elites who prefer that the proles leave the thinking to them.  After all, the elites have shown consistently that they aren't smart or rational either.

If the Associated Press Says It, It Must Be True; I Will Work Harder

Yesterday, as you will no doubt have heard, the Associated Press ran a story on the eve of the California primary, announcing that Hillary Rodham Clinton already had all the delegates and superdelegates she needed to win the nomination for the Democratic Party's candidate for President.  That was great news, of course, because leaving behind that trivial but painful question will let the media concentrate on really important issues.  

This morning the lefty/progressive news outlet Democracy Now! ran a story announcing that many voters had essentially surrendered.  According to"Rose Aguilar, host of 'Your Call,' a daily public affairs radio show on NPR-affiliate KALW in San Francisco":

So 250,000 people have turned in their ballots, and this organization did an exit poll and asked these people, "All right, how many of you turned in a ballot without voting for a president?" It was 42 percent. They wanted to vote for president, and they didn’t. [Bold type mine -- DM.]  And they wanted to vote for a Democrat. So that’s almost half. That’s about 125,000 people in the state of California—

AMY GOODMAN: Why didn’t they vote?

ROSE AGUILAR: —have already voted without voting for a president. And 57 percent of those voters said they wanted to vote for Bernie Sanders. So people are turning in ballots without voting for a president. So you have to ask for a crossover ballot.

I suggest you read the entire interview, because as what I've quoted indicates, the situation is complicated.  The California primary balloting system is evidently set up to make it difficult for voters to vote as they wish.

It's funny: many Democrats are still blaming Ralph Nader for costing Al Gore the Presidency in 2000, though it's not at all clear he did so. (I lost most of the respect I had for Stephen Colbert when he parroted that line to discourage Sanders voters last month.)  Will those same Democrats attack the DNC and the AP for taking the nomination away from Sanders today?

But there's something else: I think it's a safe bet that Sanders supporters are more cynical about the corporate media than most voters. If I'm right, it's also strange that so many (125,000!?) evidently believed the AP story/propaganda, despite all the recent examples of media distortion about the primaries. (That's why I say "cynical," not "skeptical.") Instead of casting a vote for Sanders anyway, they let themselves be fooled. "They wanted to vote for president, and they didn’t." No one made them give up, they chose to do it. When people believe such falsehoods, I always suspect that it's because they wanted an excuse to believe them, on some level. If they really wanted to vote for a presidential candidate (not for president) they could have. They chose not to. What will they do in November if the media lie again? None of this excuses the AP, you understand, but they didn't make anyone do anything.

But I may be wrong.  From Aguilar's full remarks, it's not clear how much the AP story really had to do with the failure of many California voters to cast a vote for a presidential nominee in this primary.  (That's another sore point with me: many people in both parties talk about the primaries as if they chose the President, not the respective parties' candidates for President.  The Republicans I know consistently cited Trump's poll numbers among Republicans as if they represented his popularity among all voters,  Some Democrats I know scolded Clinton's or Sanders's critics as if they undermining the outcome of the November elections, which are still several months away.  The best was probably the Clintonbot who wrote in a blog comment a month ago], "Just remember that all the pessimism you express in comment sections on the internet helps Donald Trump."

Aguilar also told Amy Goodman:

Now, to make matters even more confusing, the Los Angeles Times had a really good report about a month ago and found that 500,000 Californians checked off the American Independent Party box, thinking, well, that’s the independent party, right? Seems logical. That is an ultra, ultra-right party in California, the American Independent Party. And the L.A. Times found that 75 percent of those voters had no idea it was an ultra-right party. So, it’s really shameful that the rules are so confusing.

I don't see, from what Aguilar says, what this has to do with "the rules."  It seems to be about a reasonable confusion due to the name of an "ultra, ultra-right party," which chose its name for propaganda purposes, in order to sound attractive to voters.  (You know, like "Democratic" and "Republican."  The names do not describe the actual principles or platforms of the parties.)

We will never have a government of by and for the people if the people don't think critically. But even highly trained professionals complain when the terms of a controversy aren't set out clearly and impartially in advance, predigested as it were, even though their training is ostensibly designed to teach them how to see through the extraneous elements to the core of a problem.  A good society will never be handed to us on a platter.  The rich and powerful don't even need to use coercion, just a well-timed lie in the news media.  That can be countered fairly bloodlessly, but you have counter it.

Surely, Comrades, You Do Not Want Bush Back?

I probably picked a bad time to visit California: I got in yesterday, and will be here until Wednesday morning, the day after the primary election.  Not that it matters, really -- this circus is everywhere in the media, impossible to get away from without simply unplugging altogether, and I'm not ready to do that.  Yet.

I've been noticing that Democrats are flip-flopping between treating Donald Trump as a stupid, bigoted clown, with whom either of the Democratic front runners will easily mop up the floor; and as a dangerous neo-Hitler who will win in November if we don't dig deep into our pockets to donate to the Democrats, and generally devoting all our energy to Stopping Trump.  Sanders's supporters are already being blamed in advance for Clinton's defeat in December, with sober Democrats warning of the dreadful consequences of their refusing to vote for our only hope against the Trump juggernaut.  If Trump does win in November -- and one of the most annoying things about the way the campaign is covered and discussed is this tendency to issue predictions about the outcome of such a complex process over many months, when so much can and will change in ways that can't be predicted -- the last thing establishment Democrats will do is blame themselves for supporting an unpopular candidate, when the polls they take so seriously have indicated that at present her opponent has a better chance of beating Trump.

Similarly, Clinton and her supporters flipflop between distancing her from her husband and invoking his wonderfulness.  On the first move, Clinton's critics are attacked for assuming that she supported Bill's policies and actions while he was president, because she was just his wife, okay?  She wasn't in power.  On the second, I think I only need to point to her promise -- or more accurately her threat -- to put Bill ("my husband") in charge of "revitalizing the economy, because you know he knows how to do it."  As CNN Money (not exactly a radical-left organ) commented:

Giving Clinton's policies full credit for boosting the economy isn't entirely fair. The rapid growth of the Internet during his eight years in office greatly increased business productivity and profits and helped to fuel the hiring boom. There was also a bubble in Internet stocks, which poured money into the tech sector and helped spurred hiring.

But government policies did help also. The federal government actually ran surpluses rather than deficits durin Clinton's final three years in office, and that reduced the need for government borrowing and helped to keep interest rates relatively low. 

Still, CNN Money's account is partial at best.  The bubbles were nurtured by the Clinton administration, and it was certainly convenient that they popped when they did, not just for Clinton but for Gore, who'd have had to cope with a recession if he'd become president in 2009.  The surpluses were due, at least in part, to Clinton's austerity measures, especially in welfare "reform."  The "hiring boom," like Reagan's a decade earlier, was concentrated in low-wage, low- or no-benefit, often part-time jobs.  Wages stagnated for most American workers until Clinton's second term, and they never rose much compared to stock prices, corporate profits, and the salaries of the top echelons.

The first defense, of course, is absurd: Bill and Hillary had marketed themselves as a team ("Billary"), and when he ran for President Bill made it clear that Hillary wouldn't be a merely ceremonial First Lady but a working member of his administration.  While the responsibility for his actions does finally rest with him, she was no bystander, and as her claim about his economic record shows, she's perfectly happy to stand by him when it's expedient.  It's typical campaign sleight-of-hand, of course: dodge inconvenient questions by throwing up verbal dust in the critic's face; by the time the dust clears, the candidate has moved on to the next state.

The Clintons are despicable, but Bernie Sanders looks good mainly by comparison.  It's important to remember, for example, his foreign policy record, which is marginally better than Clinton's but nothing to brag about.  I had an interesting exchange with one Sanders fan, who protested that "Sanders voted against Iraq and Afghanistan didn't he?" and added "I'm genuinely asking." Yes, Sanders did vote against Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq, but he voted for appropriations once the invasion and occupation were under way.  (Here he resembles Barack Obama.)  But if he voted "against Afghanistan," I haven't been able to find any evidence of that.  Only Barbara Lee, in the Senate, voted against the 2001 resolution authorizing Bush's attack on Afghanistan.  I also told the partisan that you'd think Iraq and Afghanistan were the only wars.  Sanders supported Bill Clinton's attack on Kosovo, which took many innocent lives, and voted for the bill that authorized the 1998 terror-bombing of Iraq.  He supported the Israeli attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, which were given material and political support by the US, and he has progressively moderated his stance on the Israel-Palestine until there's little daylight between him and Clinton on that issue.  Though he often talks vaguely about putting pressure on Israel, this doesn't translate into votes, let alone any other action:

Sanders’ defense was that he did not cosponsor the legislation before Congress that praised Israel’s war on Gaza. But his failure to do anything to block it (it passed by unanimous consent) reinforces the idea that while Sanders does hold somewhat dissident views on Palestine, he fails to vote his beliefs.

Of course most of Sanders's fans, and not just the young ones, are ignorant not only about their guy's record but about the historical context in which he worked.  Kosovo was almost 20 years ago, which no American can be expected to remember, and so was the bombing of Baghdad.   It is a little bit odd that Clinton's fans have trouble remembering her support for Bush's invasion of Iraq, let alone Obama's bombing of Libya, but that was the past, and we must look forward to the future.

Vanity Fair just ran an article on the disarray and incompetence of Trump's campaign organization.  It may well be accurate, but if so it only raises the question of how much better he'd have done if his organization were competent and well-organized.  (Clinton's continued unpopularity shows how little a competent, well-organized organization is actually worth.  If she hadn't had a decade's head start and a lot more money, she probably would not have done as well against Bernie Sanders as she has; and despite her tactical and material advantages, she hasn't won the nomination yet.)  The writer, Tina Nguyen, wonders:

Yet it is unclear how much longer the billionaire real estate mogul can continue to count on new troubles to effectively bail him out of older ones. Trump can dismiss some of the criticism of his campaign as media bias, but there’s a growing sense that his improprieties are catching up to him.

Maybe so, but this refrain has been sung regularly ever since Trump announced his candidacy.  Like the Second Coming, the Trump Implosion is constantly just around the corner, a few Friedman Units away -- yet it never quite arrives.  I agree with Nguyen about "what Trump’s inability to run a competent campaign portends for his ability to manage the White House, let alone the country. As Nobel-winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz recently wrote for Vanity Fair, there is no larger organization in the United States than the federal government, and Trump has demonstrated little talent for delegation."  Trump's fans aren't worried about that, because they don't realize how hard it is to run a national government any more than he does.  I don't believe they care about his "improprieties" either, because judging by everything I've seen from them, they like his improprieties.  They're not bothered by his flipflopping any more than Clinton's (or Obama's) fans care about hers.  By the time they start paying attention, we'll probably be well into Trump's first term, or maybe even his second.  It took that long for many Republicans to figure out that George W. Bush wasn't what they thought he was, and many Obama fans haven't figured it about him yet.