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 don't know 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" inhis 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 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 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. 

Using UK Civilians as Human Shields

One big story from the weekend seems to be slithering away quietly, despite Administration attempts to goose it back.

Five British men in their twenties were arrested outside the RAF airbase at Fairford, which has been used by the US as a base for attacks on Iran.  A farmer reported suspicious activity in the middle of the night, and the police moved in.  A bomb-hunting robot was brought to search the suspects' vans.  The reports I've heard do not mention that no bomb was found, perhaps out of embarrassment, only that the five suspects were released on bond.  This police official confirmed to UK news that no bombs were found, only an "accelerant."  That could mean anything from lighter fluid to cans of gasoline.  According to that clip's description, it was "a quantity of petrol."  A quantity?  How much, exactly?

The Only President We've Got was not pleased.  NPR's Morning Edition reported that Trump complained:

FRAYER: Well, President Trump initially said about the suspects, quote, "we had them under investigation," and, "we know everything about them," suggesting some sort of transatlantic intelligence collaboration.

INSKEEP: Yeah.

FRAYER: Then in the Oval Office last night, he expressed surprise when asked by reporters about the suspects' release.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Over there, I'm surprised that they released them. I wouldn't have done that. Look; they've been very good. They worked with us very closely. We know everything about them. We would not have released them.

FRAYER: Trump was also asked whether Iran is linked to these suspects. He said it might be, but he'd rather not say.

I suppose it's too much to ask of NPR to mention that Trump has established a pattern as a liar, but some skepticism is in order.  It might conceivably turn out that the US knew the suspects and had been following them, but this is the sort of thing he says routinely and then forgets, and is eventually confirmed to be fantasy if anyone bothers to follow up on it.

Correspondent Lauren Frayer continued:

Secretary of State Marco Rubio was also asked about this. He told Fox News it, quote, "clearly involves the hands of a foreign actor" but did not name a specific country. Iran, for its part, denies any involvement. The embassy here in London calls that malicious speculation.

Rubio also has a long history of lying, even when he supplies more details.  Maybe this time he wasn't, but I wouldn't count on it.  Given the events of the past seven or eight months, I'm more inclined to believe Iran over Trump or Rubio or any other US official.

What those five guys with their quantities of petrol were up to, I don't know.  I expect more facts will emerge in time, but for now the British police's comparatively (and uncharacteristically) cautious actions make it plausible that the whole thing is overblown.

I've previously expressed my opposition to free-lance guerillas taking up arms against the Machine.  Accept for the moment that these men did intend to attack the Fairford air force base.  It would not have been an act of terrorism, because military targets are legitimate targets for attack.  I've upset liberal friends by saying this in the past, and I'll say it again.  We live in a time when this is forgotten, and governments claim that the civilians they slaughter are actually not civilians at all, because they live within five hundred miles of a "terrorist" target.  If the Fairford RAF suspects turn out to have had violence on their minds, they should suffer the consequences, just as if they were regular military who were captured or killed in action.  But terrorists?  No, not from what we know now.

The Best Banned in the Land

The big story this week has been the Trump White House's retraction of press credentials to reporters from MS NOW, CNN, and Politico.  A judge issued a temporary restraining order last night, and the crews have been reinstated for now, but as one observer remarked hopefully on MS NOW today, it isn't over yet.  The order will expire in two weeks, Trump can kick out the reporters again, and the cycle will continue.

I really intended to write about this last week, but things have been hectic around here.  My first reaction to the news was to remember the independent journalist I. F. Stone's quip that being kicked out of the White House press corps during the Truman administration was the best thing that ever happened to him. He continued to work as an investigative journalist, started his own newsletter long before the Internet, blogs, and Substack, and broke numerous important stories simply by doing research.  He also said that having access to government officials was hazardous at best to journalistic integrity: you hang around with these guys, you get friendly with them, and eventually you begin to understand why it's in the interest of the public to be lied to. 

In Trump's case, he has (as some of his defenders pointed out) been much more accessible to the press than Biden or Obama.  He spars with reporters face-to-face constantly, though that produces nothing but soundbytes as far as I can see, sometimes a shocking! shocking! insult directed at a (usually female) reporter, but he has the power and can dance around, play, and simply lie at his pleasure.

Trump is certainly in the wrong.  It was funny when he slipped and declared, "I don't have to let them into my — into the people's house," but it didn't change anything.  The invocation of "national security" is transparently bogus, but the courts have generally declined to push back on that sacred value, no matter how unjustified it is, since the Nixon administration at least. 

NPR admitted: "As Trump noted, there is no constitutional or legal right that requires the president to let any particular journalist — or anyone at all — to report on federal matters from the White House grounds. The administration has argued in public statements that reporting from White House grounds is a privilege not a right."  But that works both ways: US presidents have come to take for granted that, like Jesus in the gospel of Mark, they can simply summon the multitude at whim, and a crowd will magically appear to drink up their words. Presidential access to the press is also a privilege not a right.  A clutch of news organizations - even Fox News! - banded together to withhold their microphones from Trump, with entertaining results.  The same networks ran the same video clip of Trump at a ribbon-cutting ceremony with no microphones to catch his babble, and the anchors giggled nervously at how much he must be suffering.  But the suffering was obviously mutual.  Trump still found some microphones elsewhere to speak to, and the networks ran the video.

I'm old enough to remember when the news media were wailing that Obama's disinclination to hold press conferences often enough threatened the First Amendment.  That was a nothingburger too.  I think it was on NPR earlier this week, but can't find it now, that some champion of the press fumed that journalists are professionals! who've studied for years! ... This can't be taken seriously.  Reporting is something you can learn on the job; journalism school isn't necessary.  And I don't see much payoff from those years of studies in the Washington press corps, especially those who fence with the Presidents or their proxies in front of cameras.  (Some of them do good work -- but in print, not on TV or radio. I think I've mentioned before that I listen to my NPR affiliate for its very good local news coverage, and secondarily to the national reporters only to infuriate myself out of bed in the morning.)  

The press secretaries, regardless of their party, are professional liars, and they give away very little, often nothing. There's little to choose between, say, Karine Jean-Pierre rolling her eyes like a bored teenager and Carolyn Leavitt singing the praises of her Supreme Leader; not to mention the other press handlers like Matt Miller, who couldn't help smirking as he defended killing Gazan children. At best, press secretaries are butts for comedy.  (Remember Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders?)  And I don't think that's enough to justify the time and expense of press interaction with them.