My Purity Tests Are Killing You!

I posted this on Facebook last week after the midterms, and a gay Facebook friend replied.  I've never met him in person, and hadn't known his politics before; our connection is that we're both gay literati.  He commented:

If he [Jeffries, that is] doesn't look for common ground, he gets nothing accomplished. That's what happens when you don't have at least 60 votes in the Senate and/or the presidency. I think a lot of fellow liberals don't actually know how government works.

I restrained myself, not wanting to go overboard, not wanting to alienate him needlessly, and didn't reply to his comment until this morning.  We'd already clashed mildly under a post of his, in which he cautioned against premature excitement after the undeniably exciting midterm outcome.  I commented that I agreed with him, but another reason for caution is that Congressional Democrats aren't monolithic, and a significant number of them will vote with Republicans on many issues, such as Israel.  Even if the Democrats had won a technically veto-proof majority last week, in practice it would depend on non-existent Democratic unanimity.  To my surprise, he replied sharply, in the same terms he lectured me under my post, even though I thought I was agreeing with him. Liberal Democrats, go figger.

This morning I replied:

Well. I'm not a Democrat or a liberal. I don't herd well, and of course I don't speak for anyone but myself. The point here was that Jeffries was a bit premature, and that he doesn't speak for a sizable chunk of incoming Democratic representatives. He's not Speaker yet, and in order to achieve that he's going to have look for common ground with them. A lot of liberal Democrats don't actually know how government works. We'll see how it plays out.

From what I see, it's likely that Jeffries will become Speaker.  He claims he already has the votes he needs, and maybe that's true, though I wouldn't assume it's true just because he says so.  He and my liberal Democratic friend seem to be forgetting that the Democratic successes were the result of voting against Trump, not for Democrats.  The party remains unpopular among voters, and Jeffries himself is approved by 26 percent, disapproved by 47 percent.  He's less popular than Mike Johnson, the present Speaker.  Chuck Schumer is in the same basement, 24 percent approval versus 54 percent approval.

Their advocates have been pointing out that they presided over last week's Blue Tsunami.  They also presided over the disastrous 2024 rout of Democrats.  It might just be that they weren't the deciding factor this time.  The candidates Schumer endorsed lost their primaries, and one of them famously defected to the Republicans just before the general. (Schumer was furious that she broke party discipline, not that she embraced bigotrty.)  Schumer's fans are saying things like this:

 

This isn't far from Donald Trump's avidity for shiny fake-gold-plated trophies.  (More than half-seriously I've suggested that Congressional Democrats could work with Trump by presenting him with a fake gold trophy every time they send him a bill to sign. It might just tip the scale, he can't resist those baubles.)  But what it definitely isn't, is an argument for making Schumer the Majority Leader unless you think, as Carlson clearly does, that the position is a participation trophy.  Is this a historic tipping point, a struggle for democracy against MAGA authoritarianism as I've been hearing, or are we stroking the egos of elderly gerontocrats?  

Notice that this isn't a matter of ideological purity (an accusation my friend made in another comment under his cautionary post), it's about practical politics.  Can Schumer and Jeffries do the job?  "It's their turn" isn't an answer to that question. But it's what their advocates have to offer.  The question is whether they are interested in finding common ground with other Democrats.  I'm used to liberal Democrats throwing tantrums when they don't get their way.  They'll happily sabotage progress rather than give up their prerogatives. As I told my friend, we'll see how it plays out.

The Pot Calling the Kettle Tan

I'm usually slow on the uptake, but I still feel foolish for not noticing this right away.  With his usual media savvy, President-for-Life-in-My-Heart Obama recently electrified the nation with his joke about Trump making the White House look like a Cheesecake Factory decorated by Saddam Hussein.  I wasn't impressed by it, but liberals squeed with joy and MAGA pretended to care about what ordinary Americans could afford, so it did its job.

But no one, including me, seems to have noticed the irony of Trump's pimp taste being mocked by the man who built this pharaonic monstrosity, this love child of Brutalism and Albert Speer, on the south side of Chicago.  

 

Gay Christians Still Say the Darnedest Things!

 

This reel turned up on my Facebook timeline today, complaining because the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty [!] Committee ruled against acceptance of gay or trans Baptists in the SBC. 

 

My answer is: Nobody does. Everybody has an opinion, of course, but luckily in this country their opinions have no legal weight. The SBC gets to draw the line on doctrine as it likes, but no sensible person should take them seriously. You do know that the SBC was founded to protect slavery (a perfectly biblical and Christian position, then and now), and when that became untenable threw its weight behind Jim Crow until, as I recall, the 1990s? I'm critical of gay or trans Baptists who want to belong to such a sect in the first place. They can work within it to try to change its position, and in a century or two they might succeed. But there is no reason why non-Baptists should give a damn.

 

I should add: the SBC isn't deciding who is Christian. It's still the largest single Christian denomination in the US, but there are plenty of other denominations that welcome gay and trans believers, so it's not like they have no alternative. The SBC doesn't even decide who is a Baptist. When the schism took place in the 1800s, the SBC broke with other Baptists who were anti-slavery. There were alternatives even then! I don't know the position of other Baptist denominations on gay and trans believers, but I doubt they're all as hardline as the SBC. So this person is just being dishonest.  Color me surprised.

The Cruelty Is the Point

I just read Bertrand Russell's Essays in Skepticism, a short 1962 collection of philosophical pieces.  I hadn't read much by him in quite a few years, and was pleasantly surprised by some I things I found here.  In particular this, on the first page of the first essay, "Man's Record of Beliefs":

I think that the evils that men inflict on each other, and by reflection upon themselves, have their main source in evil passions rather than in ideas or beliefs. But ideas and principles that do harm are, as a rule, though not always, cloaks for evil passions. In Lisbon when heretics were publicly burnt, it sometimes happened that one of them, by a particularly edifying recantation, would be granted the boon of being strangled before being put into the flames. This would make the spectators so furious that the authorities had great difficulty in preventing them from lynching the penitent and burning him on their own account. The spectacle of the writhing torments of the victims was, in fact, one of the principal pleasures to which the populace looked forward to enliven a somewhat drab existence. I cannot doubt that this pleasure greatly contributed to the general belief that the burning of heretics was a righteous act.

I think this is exactly right.  The atheist discussions I've been reading lately assume that religious beliefs cause people to be intolerant and cruel.  I keep pointing out that atheists presumably believe that religious beliefs were invented by human beings to justify doing what they wanted to do for more primal reasons.  If Leviticus says that men who lie with each other must be executed, that tells me that some people were offended by men who lie with each other and put their offense into their god's mouth.  My fellow atheists think the reverse, that Leviticus somehow made people object to male-on-male copulation.

I can't prove it, of course, but neither can my opponents prove their case, which I think obviously goes against their own belief.  Many of them talk as if they really believe that buttsex offends the god they supposedly don't believe exists.  Since extreme cruelty is a feature of most if not all human societies, it seems to me that it can't be blamed on religion in general or on any religion in particular.  Listening to some atheist commentators, you'd think that Christianity invented crucifixion, though it was a Roman punishment that the Romans apparently got from Persia, and who knows where the Persians got it? The high civilizations of Eastern Asia also invented baroque punishments, with no help from the Abrahamic religions; and so on.  Why people have this fondness for hurting each other, I don't know; there have been many attempts to explain it, none convincing.

Russell would have done better, though, to put this observation at the end of his essay.  Instead he pivoted, saying that

although passions have had more to do than beliefs with what is amiss in human life, yet beliefs, especially where they are ancient and systematic, and embodied in organizations, have a great power of delaying desirable changes of opinion and of influencing in the wrong direction people who otherwise would have no strong feelings either way. Since my subject is “Ideas That Have Harmed Mankind,” it is especially harmful systems of beliefs that I shall consider.

He then discussed well-known systems of harmful beliefs for fifty pages or so, the bulk of the book.  Atheists and other skeptics have been doing that for centuries now, and it's become a rote exercise.  His real insight, I think, was the primacy of cruelty.  If people were merely brainwashed sheep, as we like to say, they would have accepted letting a heretic get off with a quick death when their masters decreed it.  Instead, as Russell says, they demanded the advertised spectacle of a human being burned alive. I'd go a step further and say that bad beliefs would be less harmful if not for the passion of cruelty that they justify.  Otherwise we might sneer at the foolishness of others but leave them alone without feeling a need to torture or kill them.

I've quoted before the political philosopher Michael Neumann, who wrote twenty years ago:

Respect is not a duty; it is not even desirable in many cases. Where ‘respect’ means not beating people or putting them in jail or driving them from their homes, it is a fine idea. But you shouldn’t do those things even to people you hold in contempt.

But where's the fun in that?  About a year ago I quoted an atheist writer who lamented that "I can't comfort myself with the belief that every single person with even a remote connection to this despicable organization is going to hell."  Oh, sure you can, if it would give you comfort.  It's in your genes, evolution wants you to comfort yourself with that belief, and you cannot go against the word of evolution.  Some of the early Christians even said that the blessed would get to witness the torment of the damned as part of their heavenly reward!

I'm not pretending that I don't harbor similar vengeful thoughts myself, but I know they're fantasies and I don't indulge them (much).  Other atheists indulge them even less self-consciously, while supposing that they're morally superior to the dumb-damentalist Bible thumpers.  The harm comes from acting on the fantasies, and atheists too are prone to look for reasons to do that.  I've seen numerous fans of the late Christopher Hitchens posting clips of his anti-religious tirades on Facebook.  When I ask them how an enthusiastic supporter of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq is a moral exemplar, I haven't gotten any replies.  But that's the question, isn't it?

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.