A Majority, If You Can Keep It

When I went to bed Tuesday night, I was feeling cautiously optimistic about the midterm elections, because some Democrats I approved of had already won their races.  When I woke up Wednesday morning, I felt a lot better: not ecstatic exactly, but relieved.  So many Democrats had won, so many ballot issues had been resolved in directions I approved, and predictions of a blue wave had been fulfilled beyond the expectations of those who'd made them.  Numerous commentators admitted that they had been wary of too much optimism and had trimmed back their predictions accordingly.  Better that outcome than the reverse, though.

I had to explain to various people I knew, especially my Latin friends, that these victories wouldn't change much right away, and that even after the newly elected politicians take office there are limits to how much they can change the situation for immigrants and asylum seekers.  Many of Trump's actions have been made on executive authority, not Congress, and he's felt free to push back, even ignore the other branches much of the time.  Also, while the violence, overreaching, and outright incompetence of his goons have alienated even many of those who voted for him, most voters still support his policies on immigration.  People have told me that they agreed violent criminals should be deported (and I largely agree about that), but they were shocked and repulsed by the attacks on people with no criminal records, on those who were in the US legally, and especially the killing of US citizens. The lower profile of ICE activity under Markwayne Mullin has, I think, led many such people to think that the violence and incompetence have gone away, though they haven't.

Aside from that, there's the normal tendency of many people to forget that the new Senators and Representatives won't take office until January, leaving Trump and his minions to do a lot of damage in the meantime.  There's also a lot of wild speculation, as if we haven't had enough of that throughout the campaign.  Will Justice Alito retire, for example, giving Trump the opportunity to appoint a successor?  What will happen to Pete Hegseth?  Will JD Vance be the GOP presidential candidate in 2028? No one knows, but that doesn't keep them from filing copy about it.  Even a progressive outlet ran a headline like "Marco Rubio Reportedly Considers Resigning as Secretary of State Ahead of Presidential Run" - what, they didn't write "potentially" there?  What can we expect, Democracy Now? America desperately needs to know.

Even here in deep red Indiana, nepo-baby Beau Evans Bayh IV will be Secretary of State.  Bayh ran some repugnantly militarist campaign ads, and I don't expect much from him.  But it's an indication of how much damage Trump and MAGA have done to themselves and their party that he won. 

The range of Democratic victories, not just in high-profile races such as the US Congress, but all over the place, is the most hopeful sign.  It's ironic that late-night comedians like Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers provide some of the best summaries of political news nowadays.  This video from Meyers's show is a good example, worth watching all the way through.  At one point he includes a clip of MS NOW pundits' surprise at all the new officials-elect they've never heard of.  I don't blame them for that, it's not like a certain commentator who complained that she didn't know who Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was when she beat an entrenched incumbent in a congressional primary that had gotten a lot of national coverage.  I do think the success of some progressive and left candidates so obscure that Big Tech and AIPAC didn't bother to go after them is good news and makes me cautiously optimistic for the years to come.

I also think it's possible that those winners will be able to resist pressure from right-wing Democrats to "moderate," to "move to the center."  For one thing, they're less beholden to rich donors than most of their predecessors.  For another, they know they're not alone, they can point to the nationwide rejection of mainstream-party corruption to give themselves backbone.  It won't hurt that higher-profile candidates like Abdul El-Sayed won against the kind of bigotry and lies that worked in the past, not just from Republicans but from their own party; that too will encourage people who won without getting as much publicity.

So, for example, after the election a liberal Facebook friend posted some sensible cautions about premature exultation, which I agreed with.  I commented to add something that had been on my mind: that even if Democrats had won a supermajority in the Senate, Senate Democrats aren't a monolithic group, and some will defect to vote with the Republicans, as they already have during both Trump terms.  (At this point, it may be easier for some Republicans to break with Trump on some votes, so the situation isn't hopeless, but the point is that they'll have to balance Democrats who break with their party.  At the moment, the GOP is in disarray, and Democrats should take advantage of that.)  To my surprise, my friend replied that already many on "both sides" are "demonizing" Democrats, and they shouldn't do that.  He didn't name any names, and I don't think my comment constituted demonizing, but hell, make the most of it.  "Demonizing" had happened aplenty during the campaigns, with prominent Democrats making absurd accusations against DSA and other leftish candidates.

I asked for a bit more specificity.  If he meant social media, overheated rhetoric is only to be expected and doesn't count; if the party leadership can't stand up to it, they should get out of the kitchen. The corporate media are already going after the leftish winners, hoping to get them to moderate their positions, but that's also business as usual and from what I see isn't working very well.  I suspect he just didn't want people like Jeffries and Schumer to be made uncomfortable; if so, I disagree.  That's not necessarily demonization, it's politics.  

I remembered similar queasiness after Barack Obama was elected in 2008: his fan club protested that it was too soon to pressure him, we should hold his feet to the fire later, the election was over, there's supposed to be a honeymoon!  As I said then, the big donors weren't going to wait, and anyone who remembers the terrible cabinet Obama appointed knows how it turned out.  But then Obama ran as a corporate centrist and governed as one.  He lost his Congressional majorities in the midterms as a result.  The new blue wave has other priorities.

One commentator I read regularly on Twitter but don't always agree with wrote yesterday, "It’s pretty much impossible for the left to kick out Jeffries and Schumer now. The majorities in both houses of Congress are so massive that both Schumer and Jeffries can price in a bunch of vote refusals in a leadership election. There isn’t any leverage at all".  The newbies may not be able to deny Schumer the leadership, Sami pointed out that 29 Senators would have to vote against him, but they won't be docile. I'm afraid he's right, but I'm also seeing enough hostility among the new people to think that Schumer and Jeffries will be in for a very bumpy ride.

One other point: some of the people who demonized Zohran Mamdani have calmed down a little, contrasting him with that awful Abdulrahman Muhammad El-Sayed.  I don't think this is necessarily a conscious move, these people are too stupid for that, but it's funny to watch how mushy and malleable their hatred is.

THAT'S NOT FUNNY!!!

As the late great Ellen Willis wrote in the late 1970s: 

Humorless is what you are if you do not find the following subjects funny: rape, big breasts, sex with little girls. It carries no imputation of humorlessness if you do not find the following subjects funny: castration, impotence, vaginas with teeth.

 Jon Schwarz posted the other day:

 

This is a recurring theme for him, as I've pointed out before.  It's not that I think the Right is good at being funny, though as Willis's joke indicates, a lot of humor depends on whether you're the target.

There's not much to add to my previous disagreement with Jon.  I reminded him that it was thanks to him that I learned about Barack Obama's "joke" about killing the Jonas Brothers with predator drones, so I know he knows how unfunny liberals can be.  And he's no fan of liberals or Democrats in general.  (For what it's worth, Obama's latest forays into humor as he campaigned for Abdul El-Sayed are not an improvement over his past performances.)  

But the line "hate & fear inherently can't be the basis for good comedy" irked me.  It reminded me of Mel Brooks's posturing about comedy as a sort of holy vocation. I think hate, at least, definitely can be the basis of good comedy, but there probably can't be any consensus about good comedy.  It's legitimate to object that you don't find a particular bit or joke amusing, just as everyone has the right to be offended by whatever offends them.  

What annoys me about the Babylon Bee is its own brand of piety, which is the same as Brooks's: the Bee also decries political correctness as the death of comedy, and boldly proclaims its readiness to offend even liberals.  Fine, but offending liberals is like offending the right.  It's very easy to do, but it's not enough in itself to make good comedy.

What Happens When You Send a Boy to Do a Man's Job

A couple of weeks ago a right-wing activist tried to heckle the Democratic candidate for Senator from Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, at a rally.  It's fair to say that it didn't go as he expected.  He asked El-Sayed to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood.  El-Sayed did so without missing a beat, and asked the guy, Thomas "Tommy" Teepell, why he'd asked the question.  Teepell replied that he hadn't heard him disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, and El-Sayed did so again, then pressed him on why he'd asked the question - had he asked everyone in his own life if they disavow the Muslim Brotherhood?  Teepell simply repeated that he hadn't heard El-Sayed disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, and El-Sayed rolled right over him (rhetorically) as he stood there with no more to say for himself.  

El-Sayed draped himself in the Constitution, in freedom of and from religion (I give him credit for the latter, for rejecting an evergreen right-wing shibboleth), invoked John F. Kennedy, who'd also been interrogated on potential dual loyalty because of his Papist faith.  Kennedy's answer, El-Sayed declared, was that he wasn't running to be a Catholic president, but to be a president who happened to be Catholic.  El-Sayed then asked Teepell if he was religious, and Teepell declared that he is a Christian. "So I'm going to ask you," El-Sayed continued: "Do you disavow any attempt to read any religious doctrine into the laws of our country?"  "I do not," Teepell replied.  "So I think it's you who needs to understand the Constitution, not me." The audience cheered, and Teepell skulked out of the room.  El-Sayed's team posted a video of the exchange online, and it got millions of views - ten million on his X acccount alone.

I thought El-Sayed handled himself well, declining to indulge in the usual liberal oh-how-can-you-say-such-awful things approach or flailing around helplessly as though no one could ever have imagined that someone would be so mean to him. As he says in the video, this wasn't the first time he'd had to answer such a question, so of course he was prepared.  He might also have pointed to the Constitution's prohibition (Article 6, Clause 3) of religious tests for public office, though that's exactly the kind of thing right-wing Christians want to get rid of. 

El-Sayed has also replied cleverly to Donald Trump's pretending not to be able to pronounce his name: "He says the name just fine when he’s begging the Qataris for a personal jet or the Saudis for funding for his son-in-law’s private equity firm. Wonder what’s changed?"

 

I was a bit put off by El-Sayed's paraphrase of John F. Kennedy's 1960 response to accusations of dual loyalty: "I happen to believe I can serve my nation as President - and I also happen to have been born a Catholic."  It's not that important, but there's a difference between "happen to have been born a Catholic" and "happened to be Catholic."  Religious affiliation is not a trivial accident, it's a lifestyle choice, and when I think of the hushed awe religious belief enjoys in this country it seems disrespectful to religion to speak of it as if it were the result of a roll of the dice of no more importance than, say, skin color.  El-Sayed reduces it to how he prays.  I wonder how he'd react if someone said that his "faith" is just a skin-deep affectation.  I know that his wife wears a headscarf, so I suspect that religion is taken just a bit more seriously than "happens to be" in his household. I don't feel threatened by his religious affiliation, since he's just adopting -- assimilating, if you will -- American liberal discourse on religion, which treats religious affiliation both as a profound and secret personal mystery and as a skin-deep consumer brand choice.

Then I saw this post from El-Sayed's campaign account:

 

This is a rhetorical move I'm all too familiar with from my fellow-boomer right-wing Facebook friends.  If Americans would spend more time on their knees, we'd be so much better off and we wouldn't have all this division and crime and twerking!  I pointed out to one such person that America is and has always been a religion-crazed country, more than most nations outside of Iran or Saudi Arabia, and that this was even more true when we were slaughtering Indians and selling slaves south to hellholes. The Confederacy was an explicitly Christian nation.  But leave ancient history out of it.  Right now the people who talk most about turning America back to God are pushing all kinds of hateful agendas.  Her response: the people in the past were thinking as men think, not as God thinks.  And if more people were on their knees today, "we wouldn't be having this conversation."  Oh, I think we would, though if she were on her knees she wouldn't be posting theocratic bullshit on Facebook, would she?

I think El-Sayed is equally full of shit.  If there's one thing that Washington DC doesn't lack, it's faith in the corridors of power.  I suppose that he would reply that what Washington has isn't real faith, not the right kind of faith -- just like my racist boomer friend thought. It's also what many liberal Democratic Christians say, like this person responding to another El-Sayed performance: "This is the way. Just as James Talarico is taking back Christianity and refusing to let the religious right define it, we need to take back capitalism and refuse to let corporatists define it."  It's not up to the government or government officials to define Christianity, but even a lot of my fellow atheists think they know what Jesus really taught and what Christianity really is, and that our government should reflect that. This is why I distrust Talarico and other liberal Christians who are waving around their religiouis beliefs on the campaign trail. Even if they happen to be right about what Jesus really taught, his teachings aren't the law in this country, thanks to the Constitution El-Sayed invoked to Thomas Teepell. I don't live in Michigan or Talarico's Texas; if I did, I would vote for them, but they're not making me feel very good about that decision.

The Training Schools of Socialism

  

I enjoy Ari's snottiness and general good sense (most of the time), and appreciate the irony of a Libertarian endorsing socialist "public" libraries, but I feel compelled to point out that "the consolidated publishing industry" is people. 

Not Everybody Agrees with Him? Really?

For some reason Morning Edition decided to interview the controversial Turkish-American streamer Hasan Piker today.  I haven't paid much attention to Piker, except to notice that the Right (in both parties) has been trying to use him to discredit the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed.  The Republicans got some unexpected publicity, however, when they showed a picture of Piker in his underwear to the attendees at their midterm convention in September, "during a video montage aimed at depicting the left as radical."

Reporter Leila Fadel didn't seem to know what to do with Piker, which is normal for NPR when it tries to deal with left-wing subjects.  In particular she tried to pick at him for being, you know, extreme, comparing him to the right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson.

PIKER: ... And, you know, I'm still very critical of Tucker Carlson because I find his worldview to be not dissimilar to the ideology that he criticizes in Israel, Zionism being an ethno-supremacist, religious supremacist ideology that...

FADEL: That's how you see it.

PIKER: ...Accepts the extermination - yes, that's how I see it. And that...

FADEL: Not everybody sees it that way.

PIKER: No, I understand. ...

I think you have to listen to the audio of this part, because Fadel whispers her responses to Piker's characterization of Israel. She's almost inaudible. Why?

Of course that's how he sees it. Of course not everybody sees it the way he sees it.  This is a surprise?  I'm reminded of antigay bigots on social media who tell gay people that we should be aware that not everybody agrees with our lifestyle - as if we didn't know that, as if it weren't what we're yelling about.  NPR, like American news media, has real trouble dealing with controversy, though with a lot more tolerance for right-wing figures.

The comparison / contrast with Carlson is one more example of centrist media's inability to deal with complexity.  They don't know what to make of Carlson's recent about-face on Israel, for example, though it's not new or surprising that people at widely different places on the political map sometimes agree on hot issues if you frame them like poll questions and don't go into their rationales.  The pseudo-philosopher Ayn Rand opposed the US war in Vietnam, for example, based on a typically incorrect explanation of US reasons -- that we invaded Southeast Asia and killed millions of people out of "altruism."  She still opposed US withdrawal, and "although Rand was a staunch opponent of the draft, for those draft dodgers who avoided military service simply because they did not want to fight communists, she stated that “not only do they not deserve amnesty, but they deserve to be sent to Russia at public expense, or North Vietnam, and stay there."  A superficial agreement on one or another political issue doesn't mean equality of opinion.

Based on this sample, I'm not interesting in giving Piker more of my attention, not even in the extended interview available on the NPR app, YouTube and elsewhere.  But to each his or her own.

The South Has Risen Again!

Jamelle Bouie posted a video about Marco Rubio's recent performance in Athens, which was another example of Jake Bacharach's dictum about the defenders of Western civilization. Other commentators have detailed Rubio's many historical inaccuracies, but Bouie latched onto this bit:

And so we tore down our monuments; we condemned our own history. 

The monuments that were torn down weren't "ours," unless you identify with the Confederacy.  Maybe Rubio does; many Americans do, as shown by the popularity of the Stars and Bars even in formerly Union states today.  Rubio's complaint reminded me of what someone posted on Facebook when Confederate monuments were being removed during Trump's first term:

Yes American should remember the history off our great nation when people fought to make are country a better place to live for all of are people do think people of our older generations would put up with the bullshit that's going on in our country?? I think not!!

As with Rubio, I wish I could believe that this person didn't confuse the Confederate rebels who tried to make slavery the law of the land with those who really did fight "to make are [sic] country a better place to live for all of are [sic] people", but I know better.  Rubio went on, by the way: "And in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit."  "Countries" might be a typo - after all, that's how it appears in the official State Department transcript - but it's all too plausible to me that he meant the countries, plural, that our oligarchs and their children will inherit to their enrichment: Venezuela and other Latin American countries, Gaza, Greenland, etc.

This is an unwelcome reminder of how many people saw, and still remember, the demolition or removal of monuments to Confederate criminals.  It was an attack on their America. They are vaguely aware that the Civil War happened, but only vaguely.  I suspect that doublethink, the maintaining of two opposed ideas at the same time, is involved.  Maybe they think that any statue of a guy in uniform on a horse must represent a good guy who fought for "are country," regardless of which side he fought on.

Besides, it's so hard to tell which team somebody is playing for.  For example, 

in the 1990s historian H. Bruce Franklin found that most college students recognized the famous image of a prisoner being executed by a man firing a pistol inches away from the victim’s temple. But most of the students believed the shooter was a communist officer, rather than General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of the South Vietnamese national police, an American ally.

The historian Sam Wineburg showed people a 1970 news photo of US "hardhats" (construction workers) rallying in support of President Nixon and the US war against Vietnam. 

Sixty percent of students turned the picture of flag-waving hardhats into a protest against the war.*

As Wineburg commented, "Vietnam, as remembered by these youths, was a war waged without supporters."  But that may not be fair.  These youths didn't live through that period, they lived a generation later, and as Wineburg found, many Americans learned what they knew about the Sixties by watching the movie Forrest Gump.  When Ken Burns' TV series on Vietnam aired a couple of years ago, even people my own age, who were old enough to remember the war, found how little they knew about it.

Most people don't think historically, they think mythically, and "myth" doesn't necessarily mean stories with supernatural or magical content: it means stories which are structured to give meaning to the world we live in, to teach simple lessons about right and wrong.  Even when a story is more complex than that, people tend to boil it down to good guys vs. bad guys, as I realized when I read Homer's Iliad last winter  It's much more ambivalent than I thought it would be.  Before I read it, I saw some online arguments about whether it's pro-war or anti-war, with people arguing passionately on both sides of the question. I suppose both sides were partially, arguably right.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  

Wineburg, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts, Temple University Press, 2001.

 

Who Knows Where the Sun Goes?

I've been spending far too much time in a Theists vs. Atheists Facebook group.  In many ways it's depressing, but it also has encouraged me to sort out my thoughts in new ways.

One cliche catching on among atheists, to judge from the comments on posts in that group, is "Why should I take moral guidance from people who didn't know where the sun goes at night?"  Morality isn't based on astronomy, oddly enough, but more to the point, the sun doesn't go anywhere at night.  Maybe the problem is that clashing with religious nuts can be distracting and may nudge people to foolish positions.

To repeat, morality isn't based on astronomy or other sciences.  If knowing that the earth goes around the sun rather than vice versa makes someone more moral, why was the Nobel winner James D. Watson a lifelong racist and male supremacist?  Why did the atheist journalist Christopher Hitchen enthusiastically support Dubya's criminal invasion of Iraq?  Why are evolutionary biologists so often morally clueless?  I don't mean that they're wrong (though they are) as much as that they don't understand morality to begin with.

Theists like to point to the ubiquity of belief in gods in most human cultures as something that shows theism to be plausible.  It's not, of course, any more than the commonsense plausibility of geocentric astronomy proves that the sun really does go around the earth.  But I can imagine evolutionary psychologists conjecturing that belief in gods, being so common, might have a genetic basis. Actually I don't have to imagine it, because at least one geneticist, Dean Hamer has done it, and published a book with the title The God Gene. I haven't read it, mainly because the promotional material indicated that Hamer's as confused about religion as he is about sexuality and scientific ethics. Among the many objections I have is that religion isn't a thing that can be explained scientifically.  Anthropologists and sociologists have found that they can't define religion in a way that covers all the social phenomena that modern European Protestants call religious, or that excludes social phenomena that aren't considered religious.  (This is why it doesn't bother me when theist apologists claim that atheism is a religion too.  Yeah, so?)  It's highly unlikely, then, that a biological explanation for "religion" can be found.

Suppose, nevertheless, that some scientist did find and prove a biological cause for religion.  Biological determinists, given their record, would then want to argue that everybody should join a religion - it's in our genes!  Evolution made us, and She doesn't make trash!  You can't go against Science!  It wouldn't prove any such thing, of course, but then I could point out that atheism is a religion and I'm already religious.

Actually, I thought first of the ubiquity of women covering their hair in cultures around the world.  Like religion, it's not universal but it's common enough to make me wonder why so many cultures agree that women's nekkid heads are a problem.  As the feminist Christine Stansell wrote some years ago (quoted here):

Around the world past and present, women cover their heads before God and man. That is, they veil. A dispassionate list of veils would include nuns' cowls, saris, lace mantillas for Mass, peasant babushkas, brides' veils, church ladies' Sunday hats, the wigs and headscarves of Orthodox Jews, and the headscarf my mother (middle class, Midwestern, Protestant) threw on in the 1950s when she ran across the street to the corner store. All these forms of veiling refer, religiously or secularly, to the old idea that women have something that should be hidden. Call it modesty, or propriety; but at heart it is about the sexual shame that women incur if they reveal themselves in public. In this regard, culture and tradition may be more decisive than religious belief: my mother wore a scarf because "ladies" didn't go bareheaded in public, not because the Apostle Paul told women in the early Church to cover.

Notice that Stansell doesn't probe beneath the surface: where does this "old idea" of "sexual shame" come from?  I began wondering what fiercely anti-Muslim male atheists would say if it were proved that women veil themselves because their genes tell them to, and if a woman doesn't listen to her genes, let her be anathema!  The Apostle was, albeit unconsciously, a proto-biologist!  Since most of them aren't distinguished for their deep feminist consciousness, I'm sure they'd adjust.

I think it's worth thinking about this question because so many atheists take for granted that Science is authoritative on social and moral questions in a way that Religion no longer is. A common trope is that religion is all about control, replete with paranoid suspicions of a mysterious They who brainwash and control us.  Scientists have been all too happy to move in and take Religion's place in that area. My concern is that no one is qualified to occupy that space as Authority.  Skeptics should be readier to deploy their critical faculties against Science too.