Beloved, I Am Writing to You...

 

If only they hadn't bought those new iPhones, or the Air Jordans!  But no - they started listening to that hip hop, were seduced by the bling, the cars, the fast women, the blow.  And now they're broke.

Slightly more seriously, I've been getting mixed messages on this.  On one hand, their crew are saying that they have to ask for money because Trump is denying them that government money that should pay for the transition.  I could believe that.  But I'm also hearing that it's totally normal, all incoming administrations raise money for the transition, so shut up shut up shut up.  This latter explanation simply justifies the anger of some critics who point to the number of Americans who can't pay their bills, who are lining up for food banks, who know that if they get sick they won't be able to afford treatment.  Some apologists point to the words "if you're able", but that doesn't help either; of course people with no income aren't going to be able to donate, but who will help them?

It Ain't Over Till It's Over

It's just after 4:30 p.m. Friday afternoon, and so far the Presidential votes have not been completely counted.  Joe Biden seems to be have a good chance of eking out a victory despite his best efforts, but it isn't settled yet.  So I'm seeing stuff like this, responding to a report that "the FBI is assisting local police in Los Angeles who are investigating a man who allegedly posted a threat on social media to commit a mass shooting if Joe Biden wins."

Call the fucking race!!! This is only going to get worse until the networks have some backbone.

When it gets down to it, liberals and leftists are every bit as irrational as the right.  Calling the race prematurely wouldn't tranquilize Trump's base -- probably the opposite -- and I think the same motive that has Trumpian mobs outside vote-counting locations motivated this person: Stop everything right now and give me what I want, I don't care about facts.  This person is just as ready as they are to stop counting votes.

Then there was this:

BREAKING 

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins is reporting that White House aides are trying to determine the best way to stage an “intervention” to tell President Trump he has no hope of remaining in the Oval Office for a second term.

... followed by some liberal clucking, such as "Incredible. Like they're trying to avoid a three year old's temper tantrum. This is supposed to be a grown man. The fact alone that this seems necessary is reason enough to never give him that kind of power in the first place."  Or "good lord. We don't placate our two-year-old with that level of mollycoddling."  These reactions are understandable, but not what I consider examples of rational, reality-based thought.  Again, the votes have not all been counted yet.

It was pointed out earlier today that concession speeches and the like are norms, not a practice mandated by the Constitution or statute.  That much abused-word "performativity" is pertinent: an election is not over when one candidate concedes, but when the votes are counted and certified.  Nor is it over when the Associated Press declares a winner, for the same reason.  (And lest we forget, Clinton cultists threw similar tantrums in November 2016 and for four years afterward.  "Not my President!  Not my President!")

The best news, for some version of "best," looks like this at the moment:

The whole thread and comments are interesting, if only to watch some centrist commentators trying to explain the trend away.  This one was perhaps the funniest: "Spin it all you want. Defund the Police was a winner for the GOP."  As someone replied, "It clearly wasn't, when the main proponents won and the main opponents lost. Go be a Republican with that much brain rot."  I've seen a number of people at varying levels trying to deny the results in other threads.  What cannot be must not be.

I'm going to risk a forecast of my own, just because it has always been true before: America's mainstream journalistic pundits, scenting a likely Biden victory, are already drafting op-eds and columns urging Biden to move to the center, the sacred center.   

Well, I'm going to wrap this up now, before the remaining vote counts are announced.  I'll be glad when this is over, but I can wait a few more hours, even a day or two, for all the votes to be counted.  Better a slight delay than a rushed and incomplete announcement that has to be retracted: that, I think, would drive people even crazier than they are already.  We've seen a taste of that with states that have been called prematurely in the past few days.  I can't help thinking that no matter what the outcome, we're in for at least four more years of caterwauling, from Republicans and Democrats alike.

Are We There Yet?

This image, from the main page on Twitter, is a good example of why I did my best to avoid news media today.  Though it ostensibly wants to reassure you, it reinforces the belief that in normal times, you could expect to know the results of this election by midnight tonight (which is, by coincidence, when I'm writing this post).  But because of numerous factors, "results might be delayed."  "Delay" would be correct if they weren't available before the respective states' deadlines for certification, and in the case of the presidential competition, before the Electoral College meets to urinate solemnly on the Will of the People.  But those deadlines are still weeks away, so delay is not yet an issue, however much some people want it to be.

This morning, two NPR anchorthings in rapid succession interviewed election officials, beginning with "Now, we know that we're not going to have final results right away...." and segueing immediately into "But really, come on, now, when are we going to know the final results?"  The officials answered like adults, to their credit, explaining to six-year-olds why we are not there yet, and wouldn't be for a few days at least.  It could be argued that the anchors were just playing the parts of the dumb Average Voter, but I don't believe so.  My suspicions were borne out by further "news" reports throughout the day, in the same pattern.

I glanced at Youtube and Twitter at intervals, not for speculation about the outcomes, but to make sure there hadn't been any violence at polling places around the country.  I don't have ready access to network or cable news anyway, but local news turns up on those sites before the big names get to it, if they do at all.  So far, as of 8 p.m. (the last time I looked), I haven't seen any reports, and that's a relief.  But it isn't over yet.

My small midwestern town has been quieter than usual for a weekday, and I wonder if that has something to do with people's nervousness about the election.  The polling places are on the outskirts of town, and I couldn't find the nearest one.  But I haven't heard honking horns, and I only saw one MAGA pickup, flying large Trump and US flags, downtown at lunchtime.  At about 8 p.m., on my usual after-dinner walk, I heard fireworks; they seemed to be coming from the high school.  Traffic was lighter, fewer people were out, the parking lot at Kroger had fewer cars than usual at that time of day. 

Several people on Twitter noticed, as I did, that many were unable to resist the temptation to try to read the entrails of the exit polls and speculate about the outcome.  That let me know it was time to log out and return to reading Albert O. Hirschman's The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility (Harvard, 1991), which I bought over the weekend after Corey Robin praised it.  It's good, still timely, and points to a possible way out of our predicament.  I just finished it, sat down to write this, and so good night.

To Amplify the Previous Point:

Hey guys, please ignore this type of garbage. The truth is that elections are never decided on election night. In Utah (and most states) it takes 2 weeks to finalize counting and certify results. It really doesn’t matter who is ahead on election night, it only matters when every eligible vote is counted and each county canvasses and certifies the vote totals. Yes it’s true that when a race isn’t close the media may “call” the race, and candidates may concede or declare custody, but such actions are technically meaningless.

On some level I know this, but I keep forgetting it. So why do we have nonstop TV coverage on election night? One reason: ratings. Another reason: ratings. Also, it seems that a lot of people confuse elections with sports or the Oscars and think they have to follow every detail of the game. Myself, I have not watched election night since the 60s. I watched the World Series once or twice in the same era; as you can see, I was very young at the time, and knew no better.  And the main reason I stopped was that I realized that watching it was a waste of my time, and that I could find out what mattered in the morning.  Or the morning after that.

I should backpedal here, slightly: If you're a person to whom sports contests matter, it makes sense to watch them, because you care about how the teams get to the ending.  It's the journey, not the destination, etc.  That's fair, and it makes it all the clearer why watching election returns come in is a waste of time, because the coverage isn't about how you get there.  If there are problems such as election fraud, they're not important to the networks, and they're not likely to turn up on election night.  I realize that for many people, getting together and watching the returns come in is an enjoyable social event.  I don't think this election in particular is going to fall into the category of enjoyable events, no matter how it turns out.  But watching it play out is part of the larger misconception of politics that got us to this point.  If you want to have a party on election night, watch a movie with your friends instead.

If I had dictatorial power, there would be no election night coverage at all. If the media cared about the importance of informing the public, there would be no election night coverage at all - except maybe for anchorpersons repeating over and over again that you don't need to hear reports of incoming returns, because the election won't be settled for a week or two. In the digital age, the announcements could be looped to save the anchorpersons' voices. But on the other hand, to hell with that; they deserve to exhaust themselves after years of horserace coverage and fake predictions.

Please Don't Steal Our Dolphins!

Pay no attention to me, what do I know after all, but I'm increasingly bothered by the way corporate media are speculating obsessively about the prospects of civil unrest and violence on and after Election Day, and the way they're addressing the possibility that the outcome of the election won't be known by midnight on November 3.  The only reason anyone -- except maybe Trump -- believes that the results of the national election must be known right away is that the media cover it that way.  That goes with the obsessive, day-by-day, minute-by-minute, poll-crazed horse race narrative they impose on the campaign.  But with reporters and anchors asking rhetorically with smug condescension, Will we know the results at midnight Tuesday, it's a safe bet that many of their audiences will suppose that the answer is Yes.  Never mind that they promptly explain that the answer is No, because they clearly assume that knowing the results as soon as the polls close is a Constitutional requirement, instead of the result of the rise of mass media.

That assumption feeds the belief that there will be violence in the streets if either candidate wins or loses.  The result of all the talk about it is that people now expect it, and gun sales are up, and Walmart has removed guns from their shelves, which will make consumers worry and go to gun stores instead.  I think I've mentioned before that the local news media, including the student newspaper, used to implore IU sports fans not to steal the bronze dolphins from the fountain near the center of campus when IU wins a championship or some other significant victory.  Of course somebody would do just that, and when they were caught they'd explain that they thought they were supposed to steal the dolphins, like isn't it a tradition or something?  With an endless media drumbeat of fear about the danger in the media, people are already expecting riots on November 4 if not sooner.  Voter intimidation has already begun in numerous places, sometimes by vigilantes and sometimes by police, who know it's what Trump wants.  Today in Texas a bunch of Trump goons in pickup trucks with Trump flags tried to run a Biden campaign bus off the road; a Biden event was canceled there as a result.  The police are chuckling.  Most of the fault belongs to Trump, and to the fascist strata of Americans he taps into, but the liberal media have their share. 

Shame Me Once, Shame on You; Shame Me Twice, Shame on Me!

2020 is turning out to be a replay of 2016, campaign-wise.  Specifically, the Democrats are running another superannuated party hack whose main selling point is that he isn't Donald Trump, and they're furious that voters aren't as enthusiastic about him as they think we ought to be.  Even more than last time, though, they're on the attack against anyone who declares his or her lack of enthusiasm and criticizes the candidate or the party for running a lackluster campaign.  They accuse the dissenters of wanting Trump to win, and their venomous attacks again lack factual truth, rationality, and even good political sense.  Among their targets are Susan Sarandon, Bernie Sanders, former Sanders staffers such Brianna Joy Gray, the journalist David Sirota, and the podcaster and organizer Ryan Knight.  I've been spending more time than I should on Twitter, just for the pleasure of attacking the attackers in turn.  

One thing that has begun to bother me is the term commonly used for the attacks: "voter shaming."  I suppose it fairly captures what they're trying to do, but I don't think it's an effective epithet if, as I've been seeing, they see it as a valid strategy:

Calling it "vote-shaming" lets them know they've scored a hit, and that you don't know how to fight back.  It's another version of the liberal standby, "Oh, how can you say such an awful thing, you're an awful person!"  This never works, and one would think liberals would have figured that out by now, if one didn't know better.

I think that if you want to get the "vote-shamers" to back off, if you want to defeat them, you need to find ways to put them on the defensive.  And I feel a bit uneasy about telling people to grow a spine, but I really think they need to grow a spine.  Why should you be ashamed of doing what you believe to be right?  If you are ashamed of not liking Biden and Harris more, if you are ashamed of wanting substantive policies rather than platitudes, if you're ashamed of being angry at the Democratic Party establishment for waging an inadequate campaign against the most dangerous President of the past century and possibly ever, then maybe you need to pause and take stock.

My preferred term for what these people are doing is "voter suppression."  They clearly are less interested in winning over undecided, let alone opposed, voters than in getting their licks in against people they blame for Hillary Clinton's defeat in 2016: Sarandon, Sanders, and the like.  If you really want to persuade people to vote for your candidate, hurling abuse at them is exactly what you shouldn't be doing.  It's not as if this is some extreme-left, avant-garde, postmodern idea: it's the basic principle of canvassing and organizing.  Yet I'm seeing a lot of (admittedly anecdotal) reports of people telling Biden phonebankers that they're undecided, and being blown off, no attempt made to find out why they're undecided and persuade them to vote Biden/Harris.

I have to remember that people feel isolated and so find it hard to stand up to attacks from any direction, and I don't want to attack them myself.  I must have felt much the same way fifty years ago when I was just coming out and forming a left political stance, but although I did get attacked, from the left as well as from the right at times, I somehow kept bouncing back.  I know that within a year or two of coming out I was enjoying attempts by homophobes to try to shame me for being queer, even though there was in those days precious little solidarity from other gay people.  Somehow I felt that I was part of something larger than myself, a network of people who rejected bigotry and bit back at it, even if I knew few of them in my own locale.  I later learned that some of the writers and thinkers I felt connected to didn't live out their own rhetoric very well.  No matter: they gave me the courage to do it. The same was true of politics, though that took me longer to develop.

It just occurred to me that when I tried to get involved in local politics, the local party organization had nothing for me to do.  I left my name and phone number at the local Democratic Party office, but no one called me.  Maybe I should have tried harder, but why?  (Part of the problem was that I had an odd, irregular work schedule, and the local party was oriented to people who worked 9 to 5, Monday through Friday.)  The same happened in the 1990s when I volunteered for a new LGBT organization in town: I signed up, no one got back to me.  That organization, as I recall, didn't last very long anyway -- I wonder why!  One of the ongoing problems with left organizing is that it is more oriented to getting media attention, which the groups don't know how to exploit even if they get it, than to welcoming new members.

Then too, even if I'm not a joiner I'm still enmeshed in a network of left media that keeps me informed.  I don't sit around surrounded by hordes of the conventionally political, the inhabitants and devotees of the two-party system, without any sources of information to buttress me against corporate media propaganda.  I tend to forget that most people don't know about alternative media, which is why so many people are flocking to follow Ryan Knight's Twitter account.  But we've been there before: I'm seeing echoes of the exaltation many people expressed to Michael Moore, or Noam Chomsky: At last somebody dares to tell the truth!  They're looking for someone to follow, a hero or heroine who'll tell them what to think; and when they find out that their hero has feet of clay or, worse, doesn't want to tell them what to think, he or she would rather they think for themselves, they'll fall resentfully away, looking for the next hero.  I went through something like this myself when I was younger, though I didn't usually reject those who'd taught me: I honored and cherished what I'd learned from them, and added on more teachers.

What to do, then?  I don't know, and I'm not optimistic.  But for now, I'd like people to stop using the term "vote-shaming."  They have nothing to be ashamed of, only the vote-suppressors do.  They also need to remember that you don't learn to do politics, winning politics at any rate, while standing on one foot.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the more inspiring success stories of late, didn't just stand on a street corner, give a speech, win a primary, and then win an election and go to Congress.  She got involved with Justice Democrats, who welcomed her (along with others), trained her, and supported her.  And then she defeated an entrenched, complacent incumbent and won the general and went to Congress.  Ignore the vote-suppressors, don't let them get to you; you aren't alone.  Look at how others are answering them, and work out your own response.

Is Your Hate Pure?

Samuel Moyn was referring, I thought, to Democratic loyalists' obsession with Trump and their evident belief that all criticism of Democratic politicians comes from the Right, and is therefore motivated by love of Donald Trump.  People on the left who vote Democratic but still criticize Democratic candidates must therefore love Trump and want him to win in November.

On reflection, though, I had to admit that I don't hate Trump all that much.  I want him out of office, I want him in prison, and he seems to be a completely loathsome person.  Is there anyone who likes him as a human being, let alone loves him?  He seems to have plenty of toadies, hangers-on, people who cling to him in hopes of scoring some money, prestige, or power: but asking whether they like him is like asking whether remora fish like sharks.  That's what a powerful man is supposed to be like, isn't it?

Perhaps since I'm at a safe distance from Trump, I don't feel a personal hatred or loathing for him.  I'd feel a profound satisfaction if he was convicted for his many crimes and spent the rest of his life in prison.  If he caught COVID-19 and died strangling in mucus, I'd feel a detached sympathy for him, but I would still say "Good riddance," and I wouldn't indulge in the eulogies that most people can't seem to resist about the worst human beings on the planet: Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, John McCain, etc.  I figure there's a good chance I'll outlive him, and after the terrible damage he's done to this country and the world, I'm curious to see if the usual suspects try to paint him as a good man despite everything.  How low will they sink? ... But the point is, I don't hate him the way so many of liberals do, he's not an itch I have to scratch 24/7 until I bleed.  As my mother always said, if you pick at it, it won't get well.

I used to feel the same way about Barack Obama, as evil as he is.  I admit, when I learned he'd been lying about the Affordable Care Act, claiming falsely that "if you like the policy you have, you can keep it," I felt great anger and disgust; but that was about me, because I'd been defending the ACA based on that claim.  In the end I was even angrier at liberal ACA apologists who defended Obama's lies.  But I didn't hate him; to me that would be as absurd as loving him, thinking he's my father and and that he loves and cares for me. 

Until lately, that is.  His interventions and comments on the political scene this past year have been progressively more obnoxious, and last week he gave us this:

Quite a few people quoted Obama's by-now notorious boast:

“You wouldn’t always know it, but it went up every year I was president. That whole, suddenly America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas that was me, people.”

This is funny, really: I thought that Obama couldn't do anything, he was totally helpless because the wicked Republicans obstructed him at every turn?  So apparently he could do some things: subsidize fossil fuel companies, open the Arctic to drilling, waffle on the Dakota Access PipeLine, okay other oil pipelines.  Ironically, though, according to the AP article which quotes Obama's boast, many don't agree that he can take the credit for America's increased oil production.

People threw Obama's terrible environmental record back in his face.  One of the pleasant things about Twitter is that you often can get up in a politician's face, or at least his account, and tell him or her off.  You'll almost never get a reply, but it's better than shaking your fist and yelling at the TV. 

I've said before that Obama unknowingly did serious damage to the claim that voting can bring about change.  That ultimately helped to give us Donald Trump, as large numbers of people lost faith in the promises candidates make.  It didn't help that Obama was openly contemptuous of the voters, especially poor black voters, once he was in office, and just as contemptuous of activists who organized to pressure him outside the electoral process.  His wife, friend to war criminals, seconded that contempt this year. 

So now Obama claims that "Protecting our planet is on the ballot."  Is it?  Biden's website (recently and miraculously updated after the actress and activist Susan Sarandon pointed out it had been neglected) promises lofty goals, even alludes glancingly to the Green New Deal.  Will he deliver, assuming he wins the election?  Who knows?  Given his past, I sure don't.  One would have thought protecting the planet was on the ballot in 2008 and 2012, but it didn't quite work out that way.  Like it or not, you're not voting for issues, you're voting for a candidate, and then you're expected to shut up and get out of the way -- until your candidate needs more money.

Now, though, when I see that Obama has tweeted something, I feel a twinge of hatred.  Hatred isn't something I give lightly.  Like a vote, it has to be earned.  And I'm finally recognizing that Obama has earned it.  Which, I admit, with a dollar, will get him on the bus.  But it's a milestone for me.

Without the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Top Is Nowhere

This may be obvious; I think it ought to be.  But I haven't seen anyone stressing it, so here goes.

The outcome of the Presidential election in November is important.  But the downticket races are more important.

If Biden wins but the Republicans keep the Senate and, worse, retake the House, we can't expect much to improve during his administration.  Biden's famous (or notorious - take your pick) for his ability to work with Republicans, but that doesn't bode well for the country.  And I expect that the Republicans consider it one thing to work with a right-wing Democratic Senator, but quite another to work with even a right-wing Democratic President.  Biden has already said he's good with fracking and fossil fuels, he will veto a universal healthcare bill even if it reaches his desk, and his foreign policy is even worse.  A Democratic Congress, especially if more progressive and left members are elected, might even be able to push Biden in a better direction.

If Trump wins but the Democrats take Congress, they will be able to block him.  They might be willing to impeach him again, and possibly remove him.  They might be able to pass halfway good legislation over his veto, refuse to confirm the judges and others he wants to appoint, and so on.

The same goes for all the downticket races around the country: governors, state legislatures, judiciary, city and county governments.  The national Democratic establishment neglected them for decades, with results that everyone can see.  Even this year, that establishment has tried to block progressive and left candidates and officials, by backing corporatist challengers to such figures as Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.  That they failed is a very hopeful sign, it seems to me.

I mention all this because, though some candidates and races have gotten coverage, at least in my part of the Internet, I don't see many commentators looking at the larger picture - the necessity of booting out the Republicans who've taken over most of the country, with dire effects.  Dangerous as Trump is, and feckless as Biden is, there is more to our government than the Executive branch.

Do You Believe in Science in a Young Boy's Heart?

A friend of mine posted this meme on Facebook recently, and I'm afraid it annoyed me more than perhaps it should have.  That's partly because "believing in science" has become a mantra in our culture wars and especially in electoral politics.  Biden supporters, like Obama and Clinton supporters, say that they want a President who believes in Science, just as Trump supporters want a President who honors God.  Of course Trump, like his Republican predecessors, puts God after his donors (just as Democrats do), and Obama put his donors before the science about climate change.  Biden has made it clear he'll do the same. Obama also put his religious beliefs ahead of Constitutional principles about equality in order to block same-sex marriage during his first term; how can you honor God more than that?  But then his deeply held beliefs threatened to get in the way of his re-election, so he ditched them.

On its face I can't disagree with most of what this meme says, though it's disingenuous and ultimately dishonest.  Its account of how scientists work is incomplete: scientists do collect data and are supposed to revise their conclusions in the light of new information.  But scientists also work out hypotheses without working in the laboratory at all.  Einstein and other physicists are the most famous examples of this aspect of science; Einstein did math, published papers, and waited for others to do the experiments that would confirm or disconfirm his theory.  When the first tests failed to confirm his predictions, Einstein didn't go back to the drawing board.  As the physics-trained philosopher Paul Feyerabend tells it, "Einstein's theory of special relativity clashed with evidence produced only one year after its publication. Lorentz, Poincare, and Ehrenfest withdrew to a more classical position. Einstein persisted: his theory, he said, had a wonderful symmetry and should be retained. He gently mocked the widespread urge for a 'verification by little effects.'"  This isn't a bad thing: If scientists threw out promising theories when they encounter obstacles, no theory would last for long.

It's also been argued - I'm not sure how accurately - that many scientists never adopt newer, better theories such as Relativity.  They do their best to cling to what they learned in their youth, and bitterly attack the crazy new ideas that students are wild about.  This suggests that the young scientists aren't necessarily wiser, they just go with the flow, to get jobs and teaching posts and grants - and in their time, become a drag on the field, refusing to adopt whatever comes next.  But again, some conservatism is necessary.  Every theory has holes in it, anomalies it can't explain, and its adherents simply have to have faith that eventually those holes will be patched over.

And you know that joke that compares scientists to a drunk looking for his lost keys under a lamppost instead of looking in the dark where he actually lost them, because the light is better around the lamppost?  Scientists tell that joke on themselves.  There's a similar one that compares scientists to a besieging army that encircles a walled town, and if the walls hold out, the army moves on to the next town, hoping for easier prey.  It's okay for scientists to joke about such things, just as clergy and other professionals do about their respective domains, but the laity had better not.

Scientists are also, let's say, inconsistent about the self-scrutiny they brag about.  Consider this example, from Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (William Morrow, 2016, p. 178). It refers to engineering research, but you'll find similar descriptions of the peer review to which scientific journals subject submissions.

Building an airplane was nothing compared to shepherding research through Langley’s grueling review process. “Present your case, build it, sell it so they believe it”—that was the Langley way. The author of a NACA document—a technical report was the most comprehensive and exacting, a technical memorandum slightly less formal—faced a firing squad of four or five people, chosen for their expertise in the topic. After a presentation of findings, the committee, which had read and analyzed the report in advance, let loose a barrage of questions and comments. The committee was brusque, thorough, and relentless in rooting out inaccuracies, inconsistencies, incomprehensible statements, and illogical conclusions obscured by technical gibberish. And that was before subjecting the report to the style, clarity, grammar, and presentation standards that were Pearl Young’s legacy, before the addition of the charts and fancy graphics that reduced the data sheet to a coherent, visually persuasive point. A final report might be months, even years, in the making.

Even after publication, we're told, scientists, are ruthless in tearing apart each other's work in their dedicated pursuit of truth.  And that's good.

Except when it isn't.  When the entomologist Edward O. Wilson published Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975, the book inspired controversy and searching criticism from other scientists.  Scientists who were attracted by Wilson's doctrines protested that this wasn't fair, as if a scientific publication wasn't supposed to be scrutinized by colleagues in the field.  In Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behavior (Oxford, 2002), evolutionary biologist Kevin N. Laland and psychologist Gillian R. Brown complained that even colleagues in Wilson's own department picked on him.

[They] vehemently attacked the book in the popular press as simple-minded and reductionist. Yet most biologists could see the potential of the sociobiological viewpoint, which had paid great dividends in understanding other animals, and many were drawn into using these new tools to interpret humanity. The debate became polarized and highly political, with the sociobiologists accused of bolstering right-wing conservative values and the critics associated with Marxist ideology [5].

Laland and Brown concede that there were a lot of scientific problems with Wilson's book, but they try to explain away the criticisms as politically motivated.  Wilson's highly speculative application of his ideas to human beings in the final chapter, with no real scientific support, were somehow exempt from suspicion of ideology.  Laland and Brown lament what they represent as emotional, "knee-jerk reactions" to Sociobiology, which not only confuses moderation of tone with moderation of substance, it erases the scientific objections that were made.

It's doubtful, though, that pronouncements about human beings and the societies we live in can ever be free of politics.  Consider BiDil, a blood-pressure drug that the FDA approved for use by "patients who identify as black".*  NitroMed, the company that owned BiDil, "funded the Congressional Black Caucus, the National Medical Association, the Association of Black Cardiologists, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, all of whom encouraged the FDA to approve the drug."  Critics "described BiDil as a cynical effort to exploit race and loopholes in patent law and FDA policy to extend patent protection on an old drug ... Defenders of the drug went so far as to accuse social scientists of trying to kill black people by sowing controversy about BiDil and misrepresenting it as a racial drug, even though it was Cohn [the cardiologist who had patented the drug] and NitroMed who had pursued the race-specific approvals in the first place" (164).

However:

BiDil did not turn out as expected. Despite projections of a billion-dollar bonanza, the drug proved to be a commercial failure. NitroMed lost $108 million in the first year after FDA approval. It is not clear which of several factors contributed most to its demise. NitroMed priced the drug high—$1.80 per pill, or $10.60 per day for a common dose. Since BiDil was simply a fixed-dose combination of two existing drugs, each of which was available as a cheaper generic, many insurers simply substituted the generics whenever physicians did prescribe BiDil. Moreover, the controversy over the “black drug” was read in many ways by patients and doctors. While some saw it as something valuable, others saw the “special treatment” as uncomfortably reminiscent of Tuskegee. Whatever the causes of its failure, NitroMed laid off most of its workforce and stopped marketing BiDil in January 2008 [165].

After discussing some other examples of "racial differences in drug response, Jones notes that "in every study, however, the amount of variation within each racial group was far larger than the differences between the between the groups ... As a result, 80 to 95 percent of all black and white patients will likely have indistinguishable responses to each medication.  Although racial differences might exist, they are irrelevant for the majority of patients" (167).

Several years after NitroMed stopped marketing BiDil, however, I heard it touted on an NPR science program as a casualty of 'politically correct' hostility to race as a scientific concept.  The popular complaint that the Left has politicized the science of racial difference and made it professionally dangerous to study it, reverses the facts.  Despite the ongoing and consistent failure to find meaningful racial differences, scientists still pursue that Holy Grail, and have no evident difficulty getting funding to do so.  Even if science weren't political, funding for science always will be.  The same thing goes for sexual differences, which male scientists continue to assert while claiming to be not only Scientists but Feminists.  Is this Science to believe in?

Scientists and their apologists do admit their fallibility - but usually only after they've been caught in some egregious error.  Before that happens, they demand that you respect their authoritah, else you are (gasp) Anti-Science.  The more loudly they demand it, the more skeptical I become.  (I lost a lot of respect for the philosopher John Searle when he referred to the historians Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend as "anti-science," and hinted darkly that the difference between them and the "pro-science" Karl Popper wasn't "as great as many philosophers and scientists think.") **  It's a lot like religious authorities admitting their human fallibility when they're confronted with some issue on which they have proven embarrassingly wrong - race, for example.  Or the question of wearing masks in this pandemic: early on, Scientists brushed aside their value for protection.  This was primarily because they wanted them to be reserved for front-line healthcare workers, but if they weren't effective, why would the doctors and nurses need them?  The severe shortages of PPE made it reasonable to give priority to health care workers, but Anthony Fauci and others waffled and confused the issue.  "Waffled" is too kind, since they knew very well that masks are effective.  I think it's fair to suspect that they are so used to asserting authority, instead of treating the public as adults who can understand what's at stake if it's explained seriously rather than condescendingly, that they simply saw no reason to bother.  Is that Science to believe in?

(Some will probably reply that all the idiots and morons out there have no Faith in Science and are too stupid to understand it anyway.  They should remember that Fauci was addressing them, the wise sheep with true Faith, no less than the morons.  Maybe they do consider themselves stupid, and want to be lied to for their own good if Science is doing it.  The concept of the Holy Lie is familiar in religion, too.  But such people are in no position to cast the first stone.)

As an atheist, I insist on remembering human fallibility in science, religion, politics, and any other area.  I also insist that dissent must be informed and rational.  But then, so should assent, and I find that most people who wave around their faith in Science don't know much about the Science they believe in.  Think of the LGBT people and allies who continued to talk about the Gay Gene long after the scientists they relied on had abandoned the concept for vague talk of "epigenetic factors" and "genetic predisposition."  Trans people have taken up the claim that trans identity is genetic, totally without evidence.  Home DNA testing has become popular among African-Americans, although it doesn't really reveal the Roots they're hoping to find -- just as racially-specific drugs were pushed by prominent African-Americans who, it's safe to say, had no idea whether the Science was valid or not.

Faith in Science can't be reconciled with recognizing its limits.  If you recognize that scientists can be wrong, then you won't and shouldn't have faith in them.  You should take their claims seriously, but skeptically, and skepticism is the opposite of faith.  As the examples I've given show (and they can be multiplied), scientists don't welcome skepticism, especially from outsiders no matter how well informed.  It's my position that science is not something anyone should have faith in, and those who say we should have faith in it don't understand science.

----------------------
* David Jones, "The Prospects of Personalized Medicine," in Genetic Explanations: Sense and Nonsense, ed. Sheldon Krimsky & Jeremy Gruber (Harvard, 2013), p. 163.  Future page numbers refer to this article.

** "Twenty-One Years in the Chinese Room."  In Views into the Chinese Room: New Essays on Searle and Artificial Intelligence, ed. John Preston & Mark Bishop (Oxford UP, 2002), Kindle edition loc 914.

O Fickle Democrats!

This just in: George W. Bush has endorsed Susan Collins, a Republican Senator from Maine, for re-election.  Collins has been a frequent target for Democratic ire, because despite the occasional lapse she has been a reliable supporter of Donald Trump's agenda.  This is, The Hill reports, Bush's "first endorsement of the 2020 cycle."  I presume this means there are more to come, and for the first time I'm genuinely curious to see what will happen next.

I'm also looking forward to reactions from the Democrats who've rehabilitated Dubya these past few years.  Already on Twitter there's been some consternation.  The word "disappointment" recurs.  So do versions of "I was just praising Ol' W. this morning. Well.... so much for that." Why were they praising a war criminal who killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people, made refugees of millions more, crashed the world economy, and fiddled while New Orleans drowned?  You might well ask.  Of course, it's because he gave Michelle Obama a cough drop, she declared him her "partner in crime" who shares her values, and Ellen DeGeneres is his good friend and you don't have to agree with someone on every little thing to be their friend.  (They may have more in common than some of us thought.)  But never mind all that, they'll throw him under the bus now.  Cancel culture is real.

Another person remarked that Bush is "only reminding us what a disaster his presidency was."  Funny how many Democrats have forgotten.  But as I suggested recently, Democrats seem to have cheesecloth memories, and if you don't keep reminding them, they forget things.  I therefore have to hope that Bush will come up with more disappointing endorsements to keep their memories refreshed.

Is Your Hate Pure?

There's an article at The Hill from yesterday about how Bernie Sanders is being "urged" to hand over his donor list to Joe Biden's campaign.  It isn't the Biden organization that is doing the urging, however: so far they're being diplomatic according to the article, praising Sanders for his cooperation and help.  They're "been pleased with how Sanders committed from an early point to rallying his supporters behind the presumptive nominee."

The complaints in the article come from not one but two unnamed pissy Democratic "strategists," too cowardly to speak on the record under their own names.  The article gives adequate space to a couple of named progressives, who

noted that the pro-Sanders super PAC Our Revolution was given access to Sanders’s 2016 email list and was only able to raise a fraction of what the campaign raised because it didn’t resonate the same way coming from a different source.

“That email list only works for Bernie Sanders and we’ve proven it,” Rocha said. “The strength of the list isn’t the list itself. It’s Bernie Sanders. If Joe Biden had four Bernie lists, he couldn’t raise much money off of it. That’s not a critique of Joe Biden. It’s just that Bernie is the reason that the list works.”

And scoffed:

“The idea that all Bernie Sanders has to do here is turn over his email list so they can pillage it and batter it until it spits out gold coins is absolutely ridiculous,” [Democracy for America strategist Neil] Sroka said.

This is true.  I'm still making donations through Sanders's list to progressive candidates for downticket races.  (I doubt that Biden, whose billionaire boosters evidently aren't coming through for him, would do as much.  He prefers to take money to support Republican candidates.)  If I started getting pleas the from the Biden campaign through Sanders's list, though, I would unsubscribe immediately, probably after sending an abusive email condemning the move.  Comments on Twitter indicate that other Sanders voters feel the same way.

I noticed, however, that a number of avowed Sanders supporters misread "urged" as "already has given Biden the list, and is cackling and rubbing his hands together gleefully."  They accused Sanders of selling out, and while one could make a case for that more generally, he evidently hasn't gone as far as they want to think.  (They must want to think it, since they chose to fantasize a falsehood.)  Malignant stupidity is not, alas, confined to Trump supporters and Democratic Party loyalists.

I would be upset, even angry, if Sanders shares his donor list to the Biden campaign, but not all that concerned.  As Sroka and Chuck Rocha, the other named Sanders associate, say, it would not do Biden much good, and might hurt him even more.  It would also hurt Sanders, who has already angered many of his supporters by declaring Biden to be a "decent" man.  Of necessity, as Nietzsche wrote, the party man becomes a liar.

But contrary to centrist delusion, most Sanders supporters are not personality cultists.  We support him because the principles and policies he stands for, and if he abandons them, we will abandon him.  He's not, contrary to the fantasies of some of his fans, the One without whom there is no hope.  And I must say, I was not pleased that he chose not to show up to vote against the new bill giving more surveillance power to the executive branch.  That's not as bad as voting for it, as ten Democrats did, but it's bad enough if you believe, as Sanders has said he does, that Trump is the most dangerous president in history.

Someone tried to counter criticism of Sanders on this matter by posting at least twice that Sanders "is over 65 and there's a pandemic going on."  I replied that he'd just described most of the Senate, so that doesn't give Sanders a pass.  I confess I hadn't fact-checked myself.  Today I did, and I found that 48 Senators are over 65 years old (as against 147 Representatives).  I am abashed, but if 47 other elderly Senators were able to brave the pandemic to vote, so could Sanders - especially since the bill only passed by one vote.

I'm not all that surprised, though.  I regard Sanders as a lesser evil.  He's good on some issues, terrible on others, especially in foreign policy.  I'll cast my vote for him in the primary next month, make the occasional donation, and continue to criticize him as seems appropriate.

My Decree

(Source)

I want every Biden Bro, from Obama, Sanders, Warren, and Chomsky on down, to say that they will vote for a senile rapist whose only selling point is that he isn't Trump, and they want everyone else to do it too.  That is all, at least for now.

The Moral Arc of the Universe Bends Towards Chaos

Like most of us, I imagine, I've thought of cutting back drastically on social media, or getting out of them altogether. But if I did, I wouldn't have seen this meme this morning:

Now, this is really, really, really stupid. If Sanders truly were the last vestige of decency, then no one would be working in his campaign, no one would have endorsed him, no one would vote for him.  Certainly no one younger would.  He's a very important figure, but he's not unique, there are plenty of other good people with the same principles out there working for them.  Sanders is not a unique genius who invented all those good policies by himself: he stands on the shoulders of generations of activists and politicians and writers and speakers who invented them or kept them alive during the Dark Age of the Reagan years and his successors.  Sanders deserves tremendous credit for sticking with his principles despite years of pressure and derision, but so do the people he represents, not just in Vermont but around the country and around the world.  This meme is (unintentionally perhaps, which doesn't make it less insulting) essentially, effectively, a slap in the face of all those people, because it erases them and says that they don't exist.

I was always nervous about the premature triumphalism I saw among Sanders fans -- not all of them, but not just the very young ones either.  I wondered how it would hold up under a loss or two.  I don't think whoever made this meme is representative of the campaign overall, but I do think it marks a weakness of the whole rah-rah circus party tone it allows and cultivates.  I've never liked pep rallies, and I don't remember the last time I ever went to one for a political candidate.  Probably I never did.  For whatever reason -- my introversion, my early reading of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, who knows? -- I don't trust cheering crowds.  They can't be relied on.

What part of "Not Me, Us," is so hard for even Sanders's adherents to understand?  This cult-of-personality stuff, this Great Man myth, is why we're in trouble now.  It isn't how we got the improvements we've seen in the past century and more.  FDR didn't haul himself from his wheelchair and give the US the New Deal, he had numerous movements supporting him and pushing him.  Neither Rosa Parks nor Martin Luther King created the Civil Rights Movement, it predated both of them, and King didn't elevate his people, they elevated him.  King was a great orator, and in an important sense a great politician, but the spotlight allowed too many people to overlook the equally courageous people behind the scenes, those who did the actual organizing, who registered voters, who risked being beaten (and often were), risked having their homes burned down (and sometimes did), risked being jailed and killed (and often were).  There were so many of them that it's not practical for anyone to remember all their names, but they were the heroes and King was their figurehead.

Some might argue that King represents the unknown heroes of the movement: we can't remember them all by name, but we can remember him.  If it worked that way, I'd be more tolerant of the tendency, but it doesn't.  Look at the way King's legacy has been distorted, and Rosa Parks's as well.  Every year we have to point out again that Parks wasn't a lone wolf who got tired one day and defied a white bus driver, she was an activist and part of a movement.  It's harder to teach the history of a movement than to teach the history of One Man or Woman, but so be it: it has to be done.

Of course I get it, we've suffered reverses and this person is feeling bad. If they want to give up, they may do so. But others won't. I'm with them. This brings to mind a story, which may even be true, about Harriet Tubman: she carried a gun with her to fight off slavehunters, but she also used it to threaten the fellow runaways she guided to freedom if they quailed and tried to turn back.  Who can blame them for being afraid, but she wasn't going to let them give information to the slavers when they were captured.  Even if they tried not to, they'd be tortured, and brutally punished in any case.  She wasn't concerned with sparing their feelings, however, rather with protecting the others she was guiding, and herself as well.  It's one thing to be frightened and disheartened, like the author of that meme: it's another to broadcast doom on Facebook, and it's not tolerable.

The Stupid Burns in a Screaming Conflagration

I'm opposed to capital punishment, but this made me reconsider.

First, of course, the prattle about "superpower."  People keep using this word, I do not think it means what they think it means.  If you could only have "an innate sense of right and wrong" by being born on Krypton or exposed to Z-rays, then humanity would be doomed.  I'm not even sure what a sense of right and wrong is, to be honest, but it appears to be a normal part of the human endowment.  But the reference is basically empty blather, because people disagree widely about what is right and wrong, and even when they agree they don't always act on it.  Acting on what one believes to be right is not universal, but it's not a superpower either, any more than athletic ability, artistic ability, or (redundantly) singing or dancing superbly.  These are all human abilities, and they are distributed on something like a continuum: individuals have more or less of them, it's rarely if ever either/or.

Second, Sanders has not been right about everything.  To give just one example, he parrots the lies of US propaganda against the legally elected, legitimate government of Venezuela, though he stops short of endorsing military action to bring the regime change about.  There are actually quite a few people who've been better on such matters than Sanders has been, and even they are not perfect.

Now, I agree with Sanders on most issues.  I voted for Sanders in the 2016 primaries, defend him against centrist Dems' false accusations, and will vote for him in the 2020 primaries.  I've made some small donations to his campaign this year.  If he wins the nomination, I will vote for him in the general election as well.  It is possible to support and vote for a politician without indulging in ridiculous fantasies about him or her.  On the contrary, uncritical and delusional support and adulation for politicians or other public figures have a lot to do with the problems we have now.

I'm So Excited!

This is something I want to remember as the Endless Campaign continues, and I think you should too.

In case you don't know, Neera Tanden is "the President of the Center for American Progress, a public policy research and advocacy organization in Washington, DC" and "a member of Hillary Clinton's 'inner circle' of advisors" during the 2016 leg of the Endless Campaign.  Since Trump's election, she has been fighting the good fight, which includes taking gratuitous swipes at Susan Sarandon for having supported Jill Stein against Clinton. 

But her call for Democrats to "excite the Democratic base" is odd, because for at least the past twenty years Democratic loyalists have been sneering at voters, berating them harshly for not being inspired by Democratic candidates. I thought that Democratic voters who want to be excited and inspired by their candidate are just a bunch of whiny entitled Bernie-bro Jill-Stein-loving whores of Sarandon? It's all tangled, because at the same time they insist that candidates like Walter Mondale, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden are totally inspiring if we would only look at them with the eyes of Faith.  Tanden thinks of voter excitement, I suspect, as something like popping corn: you immerse the voters in oil, apply heat, and presto! they get excited and go bouncing all over the place.  If they don't, it's because they're faulty kernels, not because the Party did anything wrong.

Given the outcome in 2016, I'm a bit surprised to see Tanden interrupting the Two Years' Hate by calling on the party to excite its voters.  Depending on who wins the nomination, and our shadowy Democratic National Committee Overlords are throwing their considerable weight behind Joe Biden, she and her ilk will switch back to voter discouragement in 2020.  I suppose she thought it was time for some cheerleading.  Or maybe, as someone commented, by "base" Tanden meant the donors.

The Man of Destiny

So I've been trying to find the context of Pete Buttigieg's remarks, delivered in Nashua, New Hampshire last week, which have been interpreted as a comparison, if not an equation, of Donald Trump voters and Bernie Sanders voters. It's not an entirely unfair reading, but what Buttigieg said appears to be worse than that.

As I say, it's been hard to find the context.  What I first saw was a 20-second video clip that obviously needed filling out.  The most I've found is this New York Post article, drawing on reporting by the Washington Examiner, which quotes Buttigieg at greater length.

“I think the sense of anger and disaffection that comes from seeing that the numbers are fine, like unemployment’s low, like all that, like you said GDP is growing and yet a lot of neighborhoods and families are living like this recovery never even happened. They’re stuck,” Buttigieg told high school students in in Nashua, N.H.

“It just kind of turns you against the system in general and then you’re more likely to want to vote to blow up the system, which could lead you to somebody like Bernie and it could lead you to somebody like Trump. That’s how we got where we are.”

Buttigieg has just about everything wrong here, which is a minor achievement in itself but not a reason to vote for him.

First, while some of his younger and more excitable fans might have mistaken his "Revolution" slogan for a promise to "blow up the system," Bernie Sanders is a thoroughgoing reformist in the mainstream New Deal tradition.  Far from blowing up the system, he has worked for decades within the system, in elected office, and seeks to bring about his goals through legislation, not revolution.  Medicare For All, student debt forgiveness, tuition-free education through college, raising the Federal minimum wage to $15/hr., extending Social Security, raising taxes on the richest, even withdrawing support for the US-Saudi war in Yemen, all are either extensions or returns to established American practices associated with the post-WWII period viewed by many people as the fulfillment of the American dream.  They are also very popular with voters as far as we can tell, and I don't believe Buttigieg is unaware of that.  As with so many centrist hacks, I wonder if he is unaware, in which case he's incompetent, or trying to persuade voters that they don't want what they do want, in which case he's trying to mislead them.  Trump and his fans were more likely by all accounts to really want to blow up the system, which is typical of American conservatives of the Goldwater-Buckley-Reagan stripe.

Second, if you're going to compare Trump to anyone, Pete Buttigieg himself is a better choice.  He has only slightly more political experience (mayor of a small midwestern city) than Trump, and part of his appeal, like Trump's, is the image of outsiderness.  (The same was true of Barack Obama.)  Buttigieg wants to be the (white) man on a white horse, riding into town from nowhere to fix everything.  Bernie Sanders, by contrast, has worked for decades in political institutions, and he's been fairly consistent in his positions and policies.  The attempt to cast him as a long-shot dark-horse outsider makes more sense about his 2016 run, and indicates that someone is still stuck refighting a lost battle.  Trump also had a long, well-documented history, and his actions as President haven't been very surprising to anyone who knew anything about his career.  For what it's worth, though, the more time Buttigieg spends in the glare of national publicity, the worse he looks.  He's also ready and eager to work within the system that brought us to "where we are", as shown by his participation in a private meeting of Democratic insiders seeking to block Sanders from getting the nomination.  He's not in the elites yet, but that's clearly how he sees himself and what he wants to be.  To paraphrase Huckleberry Finn, we been there before.  Even if Buttigieg were to win the nomination, and against all likelihood the election, we'd be back in 2016, only worse off.

I rather think that Buttigieg is projecting.  He himself has said he favors expanding the Supreme Court, abolishing the Electoral College, and over the weekend he endorsed impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump.  These may be worthy goals, but they're more of an attack on the system than Medicare for All.

Third, the rhetorical strategy in Buttigieg's remarks is reprehensible.  My first response was to substitute some other terms for "Trump" and "Sanders."  People are upset about racism.  Their anger could lead them to support the White Citizens Councils, or it could lead them to support Martin Luther King.  This is not an unfair analogy, I think, because Martin Luther King was demonized by white self-styled moderates as an extremist from the beginning of his public career, a label he ambivalently embraced in his letter from Birmingham Jail.  Perhaps I'm unfair to the White Citizens Councils, who no doubt presented themselves as the middle road between the extremes of the Klan on one side, and Martin Luther King on the other; if so, I can live with it.  On a strictly literal level, Buttigieg didn't actually say that Trump and Sanders, or their fans, were alike, but he certainly wants to be viewed as a reasonable voice of civility and unity in our troubled times compared to those emotional, misguided souls who want to blow up the system.

Buttigieg isn't alone in working this line; most establishment Democrats have used it against Sanders (and now Elizabeth Warren, who as Doug Henwood says is a liberal but has good ideas and is making the right enemies), and will again in the coming year.  By using it, though, he shows where he stands.  He sees himself as entitled not only to prominence but to the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination, despite his lack of qualification and experience.  I hate to be so negative about anyone, but these are perilous times, so I wish a decisive and humiliating defeat for Mayor Pete.