Obsidian Wings

Where is he going with this?

by Ugh

One would think with a 15+ month Presidential campaign we should know Where They Stand on the Issues^TM, especially the winner.  But alas, it seems heartfelt policy positions are not really part of GOP President-Elect Trump's id nor were they of much interest to the MSM in the lead up to November 8th.  What does he really believe?  Is he a blank slate?  Will he sign any bill that comes across his desk?  Does he even know he can veto a bill?  Who knows!  He's just going to MAGA through winning, so don't worry your pretty little head.

I don't think Trump even knows.  It's clear he never expected to win even the GOP Primary, much less the Presidency, and now here he is - a resentful narcissistic know-nothing blowhard who both craves approval but will lash out at anyone who disrespects him (at least in the moment).*  The GOP congress looks at him and has decided that they can now pass their dream agenda that involves massive corporate and The 1% (or really the 0.1%) tax cuts while destroying Medicare and the Affordable Care Act (insert Dr. Evil laugh here, or maybe Vincent Price in Thriller).  Plus SCOTUS!

OTOH, to the extent the GOP cares about the U.S. government and democracy beyond their access to power within that framework (and I have my doubts about how much there is there), they are playing a dangerous game with Trump, the justice system, his political advisers/cabinet appointments (a significant % of whom seem to be paranoid and/or believe in conspiracy theories), foreign policy, rampant corruption, and the national security state.  Sadly, they are not likely to be the losers in this game.  

And he's not even President yet....

*Official diagnosis in the DSM-IV. Really!  Look it up!

Scott Eric Kaufmann

by liberal japonicus

Today's a holiday here in Japan (Kinroukansha no hi or Labor day) and have just gotten around to visiting a bunch of blogs that work and writing have kept me from, and saw this post at LGM saying that Scott Eric Kaufmann had died.

I often assume that I'm reading what everyone else is reading and vice versa, and I've made that assumption with Lawyers, Guns and Money, where he blogged. You may have also seen his writings at Salon or the AV Club Unfortunately, there is no tag for his writings at AV Club, a lot of which were about visual rhetoric. (edit: those posts are here. highly recommended) If you are lucky, you've read his blog. Maybe everyone is familiar with them, but on the off chance you aren't, take a look.

There is a gofundme page to help his family pay the medical bills that have accrued.

somalis in america

by russell

McK has, in a couple of different posts, offered the idea that Syrian Muslims might not be good candidates for immigration to the US.  Their religion and culture, the idea is, are too different from ours to allow them to assimilate.

I find this questionable, because our history is full to the brim of stories of different ethnic, national, and religious groups that were initially assumed to be too foreign, and yet somehow found a place for themselves here. 

I thought I would look at the experience of the Somalis.  They are Muslim Arabs, from the middle-east-ish part of the world.  Their country has been basically a failed state for quite a while, although things seem to be stabilizing.  And they have been the locus for an active Al-Qaeda related organization, Al Shabaab.

So, if the Somalis can make it here, why can't the Syrians?

What I found is that there are about 85K Somalis here, with some estimates ranging higher.  Most came since their civil war broke out in the 90's.  Most were born in Somalia.  The largest population is in the Twin Cities in MN, but there are also significant populations in a number of other parts of the US.

What do they do here?  A lot of normal stuff.  They take crap sometimes from some of the natives.  Sometimes violent crap.

They are targets for attempts to radicalize them.  Sometimes the attempts are successful - a few dozen young Somalis have left the US to fight either with Al Shabaab or, more recently, with ISIS.  Most of those, virtually all with one possible exception, were young men.

One young man stabbed nine people in a mall.  Fortunately no-one was killed. 

Mostly, they seem to work hard to find a place for themselves.  Even if they wear funny clothes and hats and seem kind of weird.  They seem to like it here.  They are finding their way into our social and political institutions.

What do I see?  A handful of cohesive communities of hard-working, family oriented people, trying to make a life for themselves in a new country.  Small-e entrepreneurs, starting small local businesses and building a stake.  A non-trivial but small number of young men who can't find their way and resort to violent or criminal actions.

The conservative party line on the Somalis is do not want.

What do I think?  I think the Somalis seem to bring a sense of community, a lively entrepreneurial energy and spirit, and a desire to find a place for themselves here.  Some will go back home as things settle down there, many will not.  

Some of them will not thrive, and among the young men in particular, some will end up living anti-social and destructive lives.  Some will engage in violence, perhaps violence against us.

I recognize the risks associated with letting people from a truly different culture come here.  I recognize that assimilation is often difficult, and that it can create discomfort and even hardship both for the immigrant and for the community they are trying to enter.  In the case of immigrants from the Islamic middle east, I recognize the constant attempt to enlist recent immigrants into violent and anti-social behavior.

I recognize all of that, and I think it is outweighed by what the immigrants - in this case Somalis - bring.  I see their energy, and the enthusiasm that they have for being here.  I see the opportunity they offer us to understand people who are not exactly the same as us.  I see the role they play in making the US seem like a welcoming and fair-minded nation to the folks they leave behind in Somalia, or wherever.  

And I personally think all of that is worth the risks involved.

There is no perfect safety.  Even banning immigration from unstable and dangerous parts of the world does not bring perfect safety, because it isolates us from the people who live there, and leaves them to draw their own conclusions about who we are.

One part of our heritage has always been to welcome the stranger, the person in need.  Another part, of course, has been to keep those sneaky foreigners out.  Both of those approaches to immigration are based on an understanding of who we, as a nation, are, and what we are about.  Why we are here, and what we are here for.

They are two different stories that we tell ourselves, about ourselves.  They're both true, and neither is complete.  We get to pick how the next chapter gets written.

What diversity needs (because we need diversity)

liberal japonicus
In some ways, this might be a lesser companion to Sebastian's recent post. Unfortunately, as I've been working on it, lots of interesting comments and observations have come in the thread which have me thinking, but I'm not able to address them by acknowledging the people who said them. Apologies for that.

This post started with a recent exchange in the comments about the value of diversity that had McKinneyTexas ask me

when/where/how do differences in thinking that are a result of ethnicity make a "huge difference"?

I replied that it is not ethnicity that makes a difference, it is a byproduct and I cited this link
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-diversity-makes-us-smarter/

which gives several studies, but I was expecting the argument that if diversity is so good, why doesn't everyone jump on board? Someone could also point out that the country I live in (Japan) has made homogeneity a virtue, and there are ways to make homogeneity work. So, a few more links.

This article suggests that:

“The more homogeneous offices have higher levels of social capital,” the authors say. “But the interesting twist is that … higher levels of social capital are not important enough to cause those offices to perform better. The employees might be happier, they might be more comfortable, and these might be cooperative places, but they seem to perform less well.”

and cites this research that underlines that "whilst a diverse workforce had strong performance benefits, it tended to result in an unhappier workforce."

This reminds me of the debate about trigger warnings and whether universities should make students feel uncomfortable. I think there is a subtle difference between what a trigger warning is meant to prevent and what discomfort is, but if you feel that people should never be pushed out of their comfort zone, then I suppose you could argue that diversity is bad.

But diversity is not the killer app, so one has to ask why isn't it?

This article argues that there are three kinds of diversity, informational diversity, demographic diversity and diversity resulting from goals and values. Informational diversity tends to aid in constructive debate, but demographic diversity "can sometimes whip up interpersonal conflict. This is the kind of conflict people should fear. "People think, 'I have a different opinion than you. I don't like what you do or how you do it. I don't like you,'" says Neale. "This is what basically can destroy a group."

The final type of diversity, diversity of values and goals, can produce both, but if there is no agreement on values and goals, diversity becomes a net negative.

This article, discusses "2-D Diversity", which is the idea that there are two types of diversity, inherent and acquired. This is why simply populating a work group with a bunch of different ethnicities isn't really the best way to go about it. It also observes that

When minorities form a critical mass and leaders value differences, all employees can find senior people to go to bat for compelling ideas and can persuade those in charge of budgets to deploy resources to develop those ideas.

Without diverse leadership, women are 20% less likely than straight white men to win endorsement for their ideas; people of color are 24% less likely; and LGBTs are 21% less likely.

This helps explain why affirmative action is only a part of the solution. If these different ethnicities are always kept at a lower rank, there is little chance for others of the same group to be able to prove their worth.

I'd suggest that there is a link to the situation we find ourselves in now. The election was won by a candidate who successfully whipped up prejudice and bigotry. By getting people to believe that somehow, foreign cultures have totally different values and goals from us, it becomes easy to claim that their entry into our country is going to break something. 'Taco trucks on every corner' is invoked. Yet, as Russell pointed out, things change and the world has changed. Do any of those Trump voters wants to go back to when their small rural town had no Walmart, no fast food and no internet?

The sad thing is that it worked so well. And it worked so well because people don't have an opportunity to mix and that lack of contact results in a lack of empathy. Does anyone think that Trump or his supporters actually knew any of the non-citizen workforce (with the exception of Melania, I suppose). While this is part of globalism, it is not a necessary part. Globalism isn't the reason that we don't know who picks our vegetables, it isn't the reason why African-Americans were systematically discriminated against in Ferguson and other places, with their fines providing the economic rationale for increased policing. It's the way that globalism has played out, but it doesn't mean it had to or has to be that way. Globalism may be the reason our manufacturing base was simply replaced with white resentment but dealing with globalism so we don't have so much white resentment really only gets us a little bit of the way there. The solution is not simply dealing with white resentment, which has been whipped up in the context of the fight between the left and the right, the solution is to either go all in on diversity or prepare to create our enclave. The latter is, in my estimation, impossible, so somehow, some way, we are going to have to create opportunities to bring people into contact with each other. We also need to recognize that particular policies, like a refusal to deal with immigrant labor, or civil forfeiture, have as one of their effects the reduction of contact. We should also recognize that an environment where expressions of prejudice become normalized also serves to reduce contact, insofar as people tend to keep their head down (with very good reason) when these situations come about. It seems to me that the relative speed that same sex marriage came about is because it suddenly became apparent that people had a lot of contact with gays. On the other hand, Islamophobia is a lot tougher because the majority of Americans have probably never met someone who is Muslim that they were aware of.

A lot of commentary seems to revolve around the idea that we should be either take into account the feelings of a minority of people who have not considered the logical outcome of their beliefs. That is dealing with a symptom rather than a cause. The bottom line is that, as Sebastian suggests, we need more contact. To me, that means the paradoxical challenge of protecting the people that are at risk and letting everyone know that they are there. Cause if things get really bad, the way you generally protect people is to make sure that bigots don't know they are there.

For most of our country's history, we've had no problem with informational diversity. We've also had a lot of demographic diversity that we've dealt with more or less ok, with notable exceptions and screwups. HOwever, diversity of values and goals, not so much and when it has raised its head, (cf gun control and abortion), it generally kicks us in the ass. We'll have to see if it is winding up to deliver another boot.

Contact Increases Empathy: A Coming Out Story

--by Sebastian

Tobias Rose-Stockwell has an interesting piece on polarization.  The main takeaway for me was "Contact increases empathy.  Insulation Kills it".  Though the insight that the brain sees "thousands of people believe something" and "millions of people believe something" as essentially the same thing is also important.  Tobias talks about the dynamic which reinforces our dislike for one another.  

I've seen quite a few reactions to the election which seem to amount to: 'I can't deal with racists' or 'I can't be friends with Trump voters [because they are racists].  

A national culture is the dynamic product of millions of interactions between its citizens.  We probably can't survive as a nation if we ridgidly divide ourselves into two camps that refuse to interact.  

I grew up as a Republican voter, and with most of the sociological markers that would have led me to be a Trump voter.  I grew up middle class, in a family that voted enthusiastically for Reagan, was stridently conservative, and very religiously evangelical.

That last one requires a bit of emphasis.  I don't mean "church going".  I don't mean "religious".  I mean that I grew up in one of the early mega-churches, non-denominationally Baptist style, went to 3-4 services each Sunday, bible study at least twice during the week, choir practice and separate orchestral practice on 2 separate nights (2-3 hours each).  I had done more church by the time I was 18 than most of you who think of yourselves as church going will do in your whole life.  My father worked for a defense contractor AND taught seminary on the side AND was an elder in the church.  As an aside this has made me hyper-concious of in-group political infighting which I can see from miles away.  There is nothing in inter-office politics that even approaches the smiling faces of people who want things in a 3,000 person church.  

Now it is possible to grow up in that kind of community and come out politically liberal.  But it damn sure isn't likely.  For the most part I did not.  Luckily the church was not overtly racist (we had a fair number of Latino and Asian members) and I had a complicating relationship with my Grandma Kimi which meant that I didn't understand that races looked different until I was about 15 or 16.  So I dodged the uglier side of the racism bullet.  But other than that I came out a very typical conservative.  

This meant that by the time I was in university I was definitely in the political minority.  I went through a large number of transitions between now and then to become the temperamentally conservative (I think change should be slow, experimented with in small doses, and carefully dealt with) politically liberal (I believe that in most cases the question "does it promote freedom" is strong evidence regarding whether or not a policy is wise, that people ought to be allowed to do what they want so long as they don't harm others, and that concentrations of wealth and power can be dangerous).  

I believed a lot of silly things 10 years ago.  Even more silly things 20 years ago.  The fact that I have often been wrong has made me a big believer in procedural fairness--the system shouldn't be designed to be unchangeable, it shouldn't be designed to systemically favor one tribe, and we should be very careful about ramming things down people's throats.

I also became very aware of how tribal we all are.  We like to think we are so rational, but a huge part of how we justify things is "how would my friends react to this?"

I became the imperfect, but hopefully good, person that I am only by contact with people who disagreed with me.  Left in the cocoon of my upbringing, I'm certain that I would have turned out much more like a Trump voter.  But my upbringing wasn't wrong about everything.  No tribe has a monopoly on the truth, certainly not for any long period of time.  No tribe is free of deeply stupid or deeply wrong ideas, they just can't easily identify them without outside contact because they are so ingrained.  

It is fine to say that you are too hurt at this moment to deal with Trump voters.  But it is foolish to say you just won't deal with them at all, and don't want them in your circle.

I'm the Trump voter who didn't vote for Trump because of 20 years of interactions with other tribes.  I wouldn't want to cast aside the younger me and cut off the hope of becoming the me I am now.  I'm glad lots of other people didn't do that to me.  

 

e tu, mose..?

by russell

leonard cohen, then leon russell...

and now mose allison?

all since election day?  are these guys trying to tell us it's time to get off the freaking planet?

I'm gonna miss Mose, he was the hippest of the hip.  Not in a "you'll never be as hip as me, so don't even try" way like Miles.  Not in a "I'm hiding behind these shades and hat" way like Monk.  

Not even in an "I'm not even from this planet" way like Sun Ra.

He was just hip, in his very bones.  If Mose did it, it was hip by definition.  It was not how he was, it was who he was.  It was his essence.

In memoriam, a timely message from our skinny white brother from Mississippi.

If I gotta cry in my beer, at least I'm gonna have a laugh while I'm at it.

Thanks for all the music Mose.

Collective Action Problems

It is generally received wisdom that a large part of Trump's success in the Republican primaries was a result of a collection action problem from there being too large of a field.  Each individual candidate realized that whomever moved against Trump first was likely to get burned badly.  Each of the candidates believed that if someone else moved first, they would be the ones to step in to the gap caused by a Trump flameout destroying his attacker.  

I wonder if a similar dynamic didn't play out on the Democratic Party side, but in the pre-primary stage.  Hillary Clinton has long been known to be an especially vindictive player of intra-party politics.  Her influence with the Clinton Foundation, the DNC, and the State Department reinforced this.  Many of her weaknesses as a candidate were well understood two or more years ago.  Yet almost no important player in the Democratic Party even vaguely contested her.  That was left to Sanders, someone who had been well outside the margins of Democratic Party power by virtue of being an independent for most of his career.  

I suspect a similar situation gripped both parties.  Being the first to move against Clinton--especially early in season where she would have years to punish you even before 2016 was too dangerous.  Unlikely many unsuccessful primary contestants (say Bush I v Reagan), you could expect seriously going against Clinton to be an extinction event if she won.  It didn't seem worth being the first to move.  

Either that, or the Democratic Party has a horribly weak bench, such that Sanders really was the best alternative.  That seems almost worse to contemplate.  

how is this gonna work...?

by russell

I'm trying to get my head around the transition to a Trump presidency.

Apparently he doesn't want to live full time at the White House.  How is that going to work out?  Isn't the POTUS sort of expected to be available 24/7 if needed?  NYC is not that far from DC, but it is also not around the corner.

What is going to happen with the various lawsuits Trump is currently engaged in?  He can't claim executive immunity, because they're already underway.  The RICO suit is, if I'm not mistaken, a criminal charge.  What if he's found guilty?  Can someone take office as POTUS if they have been found guilty of criminal charges?

Is there any precedent for either of these things?

Thoughts On Working Class Racism

--by Sebastian

By far the biggest thing about voting is that it is very tribal. The easiest predictor of how anyone will vote is to identify the tribe they voted for last time. For most people that changes at most ONE time in their entire lifetime. Now of course it is a feedback loop–the parties try somewhat to cater to their regular voters. Though they only do so insofar as the party perceives that their votes might have a chance to go to the other side.

When things change, they typically change on the margin of that. MOST people still vote for whomever they voted for last time. But JUST ENOUGH people change that behavior to swing the election.

So when it comes to the working class, it is easy to predict that on a general basis Democrats will have won more of the working class. They did so last election, two elections ago, and three.

Clinton appears to have lost because of two things–getting MANY fewer of traditional Democratic voters to vote for her at all nationwide (including in Democratic stronghold states where voter suppression can’t be a serious enough issue to explain the drop), and showing a very large swing (in the context of the fact that people almost never change sides) against her regarding the working class in the Rust Belt States.

The current meme explaining that among Democrats appears to be ‘racism’. That is a highly problematic claim in general because it doesn’t appear to show the change in voting patterns. (Most evidence for this takes the form of “the Republicans harbor racists”. But the actual racists have been voting for Republicans for at least 4-6 presidential cycles so that doesn’t explain the CHANGE).

The Rust Belt States especially show the problem with this explanation: they went for Obama (an actual black man) twice by relatively comfortable margins. For the most part, we fully expect that they will stick with whomever they voted for before–because almost everyone does that. But quite a few of them went from twice voting for a black man who was running as a Democrat for President, to voting for a Republican.

You have to thread the racism needle pretty tight to allow for a big swing of people who were willing to vote for Democrats most of their adult lives, who were willing to vote for a Democratic black candidate for president, and then who suddenly went racist enough to vote for a Republican.

It seems much more intuitive that they changed their minds about something other than race.

Now a much more valid analysis might be that they weren’t put off by Trump’s racism nearly as much as we wish they would have been. They let their personal concerns about job stagnation and job insecurity swamp concerns about Trump’s signaled racism. But that is a VERY different argument from the “they are just racists and I won’t compromise on racism” argument. 

POSTSCRIPT: We still need to do whatever we can to fight the actual racists who have been emboldened by the way they their association with Trump is validated by his election.  We just don't need to overreact by writing off the huge segment of people who are normally open to us. 

what a trump administration looks like

by russell

the mystery is revealed.  here ya go.

McConnell's response is interesting.

we're off and running.  buckle up, it's gonna be a bumpy ride.