“Oh the Humanity…”

According to Axios news, "politics are driving Democrats mad."  Yep, I’m one of them.  I’m also one of the 83% who discusses politics every day.  I’m haunted by it.  It’s unnatural to be so obsessed, and I know it.  Oh, I have bouts of sanity, where I think “Que sera sera.  Out of your hands, so don’t worry about it.  Get thee to the mall©, with everyone else.”  But like some kind of vortex, I get dragged right back in by the latest news flash popping up on my phone, as the madness creeps its way back in like some sadistic grim reaper, getting his jollies at MY mental expense.  It’s sick I tell you!  Sick!!

Case in point: I was thinking this morning about how Donald J. Trump is a lot like those troubled kids, usually teenage boys, who go into a school or a movie theater and shoot up the joint as some kind of “revenge” for perceived harm done against him.  Oh, we, the family (Democrats and Republicans) see all the warning signs: his nasty, name-calling tweets; his hate-fomenting rallies; his skewed vision of reality, and aversion to actual truth/facts; his daring to push the envelope against all odds and get away with it... yet again.  All that’s left to do is make one of those videos telling us, with crazed eyes, of his future destructive plans before he acts on them.

Still, aside from those suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), we as a society seemingly stand powerless, at least for the moment, to do anything about Trump’s dysfunction.  We report it to the police (the Republicans) and they brush it off.  “Not enough evidence yet.”  Yeah, but when does the evidence, enough evidence, finally come?  When it’s too late and he’s shot up the joint?  When a nuclear war ensues?  Why do we continue to play with "Trump fire" (a deranged man)?  IReallyDGI.

Anyway, I think in my “madness,” this OP is just my way of venting today.  Venting helps.  Do you want to vent a little today too?  Go ahead.  Get it off your chest.

Tell me, how do you see the Trump legacy playing out?  Prognosticate that Trump future for us.

Thanks for recommending.

So I Married a Communist

No, I didn't marry a liberal, nor a progressive. I married a card carrying communist.


I am not a communist but I've known him since we were teenagers. In that time, he has been a missionary, a bible translator, a mixtec outreach coordinator (unpaid, he was basically drafted by the larger community), a medical interpreter, and pretty soon, a nurse. His goal is to get shipped to some godawful location via Doctors Without Borders. I'm staying as far away from that last bit as I can. I don't like mosquitos and I like malaria even less.


The upsides of marrying a communist are many. Among other things, he's a whiz with bureaucracy, he's not afraid of hard labor, and he really likes to share. It's enough to help me look past his fondness for Trotsky and his penchant for literature written by men with ridiculous beards. It's also nice not having to worry about a cloaked cultural Marxist plot to engineer society like I would if I married a progressive. Nope, his Marxism is front and center. I don't like hidden agendas. I prefer my communist infiltrations right out in the open, where I can keep an eye on them.

On the other hand, I've had to set some ground rules, like no turning the basement into a gulag, or painting over in-laws in our wedding photos with potted plants. I've also had to insist on forgoing busts and murals of Stalin. He's a brutalist architecture enthusiast but I keep telling him concrete isn't everything. For all that, at least he realizes the importance of boundaries in a relationship, but razor wire and cement aren't what i had in mind.

Our first car buying experience together was a bit trying. He's a stickler for classics, and wanted an old Soviet T-50, while I insisted on a Toyota Camry. I don't think Pemco covers infantry vehicles, or really anything without turn signals. We compromised and got the Toyota, but in true Soviet style it's held together with string and the promise of a better tomorrow.

Between the tedious intellectualizing about Bakunin and field stripping the bedside AK we still manage to share quality time, even if it's spent reminiscing about Kronstadt - I'll take what I can get. He may be a commie but he's my commie and I love him.

Down with capital! And stuff.

WHEN VOTERS CHOOSE CANDIDATES, POLITICS BEATS POLICY

Voters are more likely to vote for candidates of their own party even when they run on policies that come from the opposing party or are outright anti-democratic, according to new research.
https://www.futurity.org/politics-candidates-partisanship-1949202/

Imagine you are a fairly mainstream Republican voter and are considering Republican candidate Luis Vasquez. He says he wants to raise taxes on the wealthy and believes government should do more to prevent discrimination against racial minorities. Would you still vote for him?

What if you are a lifelong Democrat? Would you vote for Democratic candidate Hannah Phillips, who wants to lower taxes on everyone, including the wealthy? What if Phillips also espouses views that run counter to established democratic norms and rules, declaring, for instance, that “elected officials should not be bound by court decisions they regard as politicized.”

Hannah Phillips and Luis Vasquez are fictional candidates in an experiment conducted by Bright Line Watch, a group of political scientists, including Gretchen Helmke, professor of political science at the University of Rochester, and Mitchell Sanders of Meliora Research, who monitor US democratic practices and potential threats.

 

DEVOTED TO DEMOCRACY?

Bright Line Watch based its selection of policy questions for the experiment on a recent paper by Vanderbilt University’s Larry Bartels, who studies American voters and public opinion, and who found that questions about taxation policy and racial discrimination generate the biggest partisan divides among the US electorate.

The Bright Line Watch team sampled nearly 1,000 online participants, weighted to approximate a representative sample of the US population: 35 percent of respondents identified as Republicans or Republican-leaning, 43 percent as Democrats or Democratic-leaning, and 17 percent as independents who did not lean toward either party.

Researchers asked each respondent to choose between a pair of hypothetical candidates in an upcoming election. Each candidate was described using eight characteristics: name, party preference, positions on policies toward taxation and racial discrimination, and four positions on democratic values and norms. All characteristics were randomly generated, and at times at direct odds with what most voters would expect from a mainstream Democratic or Republican candidate. Some of the fictional candidates’ views and positions were undemocratic.

Why? Building on the pioneering work done by Yale University political scientists Matthew Graham and Milan Svolik, the Bright Line Watch team wanted to test how committed the American public really is to its democracy. Are there universal democratic principles that, if violated by politicians, would generate resistance from the public, and would citizens of all political stripes be equally willing to punish candidates for such violations?

The team’s finding is striking: partisanship outweighs all other factors for both Republicans and Democrats. In other words, a die-hard Democrat is still more likely to vote for the fictional Democratic candidate although she espouses policies and views that are either typically Republican (lowering taxes) or outright undemocratic (elected officials should supervise law enforcement investigations of politicians and their associates). The same holds true for Republican-leaning voters.

Bright Line Watch also found that all participants value democratic norms related to judicial independence, neutral investigations, and political compromise, but Democrats and Republicans strongly disagree when it comes to questions of voting rights and equal access. The team focused their survey on the attitudes of ordinary US voters.

PARTISAN DIVISION

Bernard Avishai, a visiting professor of government at Dartmouth (and an adjunct professor of business at Hebrew University in Israel), is a colleague of Carey and Clayton’s. He wrote about the Bright Line Watch study in depth in a recent piece for the New Yorker.

As Avishai put it: “The good news for the Republic is that voters of all party affiliations care about judicial independence. The bad news is that Democrats and Republicans diverge dramatically on the question of access to the polls.”

“Our results on voter ID laws particularly underscore the partisan divide among voters,” Helmke confirms.

“The polarized response to these policies illustrates how partisans can become deeply split over which democratic priorities are worth protecting,” the team writes.

The team’s key findings include:

• Partisanship outweighs all else for both Democrats and Republicans. Both groups are approximately 19 percentage points more likely to select a candidate from their own party than one from the other party—an effect that exceeds those observed for candidate policy positions and support or opposition to democratic principles.
• Democrats, Republicans, and independents all punish candidates who violate democratic principles related to political control over investigations, judicial independence, and cross-party compromise. These effects are consistently negative across all partisan groups and range from 4 to 13 percentage points.
• Americans diverge most dramatically along party lines on the democratic principle of equal voting rights and access. Democrats are less likely to back candidates who endorse legislation requiring voters to show ID at the polls, whereas support for these candidates increases by 8 percentage points among independents, and 17 percentage points among Republicans.

The Bright Line team also includes political scientists from Dartmouth College, the University of Michigan, and the University of Chicago.

Stephen Hawking's Final Book Says There's 'No Possibility' of God in Our Universe

From his desk at Cambridge University and beyond, Stephen Hawking sent his mind spiraling into the deepest depths of black holes, radiating across the endless cosmos and swirling back billions of years to witness time's first breath. He viewed creation as a scientist, and when he was called to discuss creation's biggest puzzles — Where do we come from? What is our purpose? Are we alone? — he answered as a scientist, often to the chagrin of religious critics.

In Stephen Hawking's final book "Brief Answers to Big Questions," published Tuesday (Oct. 16, 2018) by Bantam Books, the  professor begins a series of 10 intergalactic essays by addressing life's oldest and most religiously fraught question of all: Is there a God? [Big Bang to Civilization: 10 Amazing Origin Events]

Hawking's answer — compiled from decades of prior interviews, essays and speeches with the help of his family, colleagues and the Steven Hawking Estate — should come as no surprise to readers who have followed his work, er, religiously.

"I think the universe was spontaneously created out of nothing, according to the laws of science," Hawking, who died in March, wrote. "If you accept, as I do, that the laws of nature are fixed, then it doesn't take long to ask: What role is there for God?"

In life, Hawking was a vocal champion of the Big Bang theory — the idea that the universe began by exploding suddenly out of an ultradense singularity smaller than an atom. From this speck emerged all the matter, energy and empty space that the universe would ever contain, and all that raw material evolved into the cosmos we perceive today by following a strict set of scientific laws. To Hawking and many like-minded scientists, the combined laws of gravity, relativity, quantum physics and a few other rules could explain everything that ever happened or ever will happen in our known universe.

"If you like, you can say the laws are the work of God, but that is more a definition of God than a proof of his existence," Hawking wrote.

With the universe running on a scientifically guided autopilot, the only role for an all-powerful deity might be setting the initial conditions of the universe so that those laws could take shape — a divine creator who caused the Big Bang to bang, then stepped back to behold His work.

"Did God create the quantum laws that allowed the Big Bang to occur?" Hawking wrote. "I have no desire to offend anyone of faith, but I think science has a more compelling explanation than a divine creator."

Hawking's explanation begins with quantum mechanics, which explains how subatomic particles behave. In quantum studies, it's common to see subatomic particles like protons and electrons seemingly appear out of nowhere, stick around for a while and then disappear again to a completely different location. Because the universe was once the size of a subatomic particle itself, it's plausible that it behaved similarly during the Big Bang, Hawking wrote.

"The universe itself, in all its mind-boggling vastness and complexity, could simply have popped into existence without violating the known laws of nature," he wrote.

That still doesn't explain away the possibility that God created that proton-size singularity, then flipped the quantum- mechanical switch that allowed it to pop. But Hawking says science has an explanation here, too. To illustrate, he points to the physics of black holes — collapsed stars that are so dense, nothing, including light, can escape their pull.

Black holes, like the universe before the Big Bang, condense into a singularity. In this ultra-packed point of mass, gravity is so strong that it distorts time as well as light and space. Simply put, in the depths of a black hole, time does not exist.

Because the universe also began as a singularity, time itself could not have existed before the Big Bang. Hawking's answer, then, to what happened before the Big Bang is, "there was no time before the Big Bang."

"We have finally found something that doesn’t have a cause, because there was no time for a cause to exist in," Hawking wrote. "For me this means that there is no possibility of a creator, because there is no time for a creator to have existed in."

This argument will do little to persuade theistic believers, but that was never Hawking's intent. As a scientist with a near-religious devotion to understanding the cosmos, Hawking sought to "know the mind of God" by learning everything he could about the self-sufficient universe around us. While his view of the universe might render a divine creator and the laws of nature incompatible, it still leaves ample space for faith, hope, wonder and, especially, gratitude.

"We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe," Hawking concludes the first chapter of his final book, "and for that I am extremely grateful."

https://www.livescience.com/63854-stephen-hawking-says-no-god.html

Maybe Stephen Hawkings was wrong:

Facts, Reason and Fairness in Politics

In the last few weeks, some of the engagements among commenters here, including myself, were sharp. Some got close to overheated. Emotional overheating is something to be avoided because it tends to be a fact and reason killer and a mind closer. It also is a distrust, hate, intolerance and irrationality generator. Those negative emotions are bad for civil discourse, democracy and society generally. Bad people, e.g., the Russians and Chinese, very much want us to be overheated and they do their ruthless best to foment it. The temptation to slip into it can be very hard to resist.

For people who engage in politics, common arguments the two sides adduce are quite familiar by now. On the matter of vaccines, they either cause disease or they don't, e.g. autism, autoimmune diseases, etc. Regarding the president, he is either an incompetent lying crook or someone doing a good job under very difficult and unfair conditions. On climate change, one side firmly asserts that climate scientists are liars, corrupt, the science is too uncertain to be taken seriously, there is no major consensus among experts and/or the evidence that climate change is not real or man-made is convincing. Arguments for the other side firmly asserts, more or less, the opposite on every point.

Minds do not change. Different perceptions of facts and the reason applied to them differ on the two sides. Incompatible facts and/or reason or logic is where most of these intractable differences of opinion seem to mostly or completely come from. Minds cannot change when facts and logic are at odds.

Is it unfair or counterproductive to call the president a chronic liar?

Name calling in politics tends to elicit overheating in response. Lying requires (i) belief that what what is said is false, (ii) with an intent to deceive. Fact checkers make clear that the president routinely makes false and misleading statements to the public. By now they number in the thousands, a record arguably unmatched by any other president for which enough data is available for a reasonably fair comparison. Because the president repeats some of his false or misleading statements multiple times, there is a logical reason to believe the president is lying, not just making mistakes. That is a rational basis on which to consider the president to be a chronic liar.[1] Based on repeated false assertions, at least one fact checker concludes that the president is engaged in a deliberate disinformation campaign.

Most supporters of the president reject claims that the president routinely makes false or misleading statements or that he lies much or more than other politicians. Many or most supporters dismiss the evidence of false and misleading statements and lies as opposition lies and propaganda. The evidence is usually rejected as fake news generated by ‘the enemy of the people’ press and media and/or by democrats or liberals.

Minds on this rarely change and nothing that is said here will change the intractable disagreement on this point.

In the name of civil, rational discourse, is it a mistake to call the president a chronic liar? Does it matter that some of lies the president tells are, or at least appear to be, intended to foment overheated emotional responses, as some of the president's supporters have claimed?

Is it unfair or counterproductive to call the president corrupt?

The president's conflicts of interest are abundant and undeniable. Nonetheless, most of his supporters reject that as false, arguing no real or apparent conflicts exist. Most claim that any conflicts are trivial at worst or fake news made up by democrats and/or the enemy of the people. A promise to fully insulate himself from his conflicts is not verifiable. Some ethics experts consider that the president is significantly conflicted. The GOP’s 2017 tax cut law included breaks for owners of golf courses, an undeniable conflict that the GOP could easily have closed for the president, but chose not to do.

In the name of civil, rational discourse, is it a mistake to call the president corrupt for refusal to be transparent about fully insulating himself from his business conflicts of interest? Does it matter that (1) the president strongly criticized Hillary Clinton for alleged corruption arising from conflicts from her involvement with her family charity, (2) the president's charity has been found to be a fraud he blatantly used for his personal and political gain, or (3) despite the court finding his foundation was a fraud, the president publicly asserts that the investigation into his foundation “has been 4 years of politically motivated harassment,” and instead of investigating his foundation, investigators should have spent their time investigating the Clinton Foundation.

Footnote:
1. A used here, chronic liar is intended only to refer to a sufficiently high frequency or number of public statements reasonably believed to be lies that constitutes ‘chronic lying’. It is not intended to refer to or imply any clinically diagnosable mental or physical disease or condition.

One source comments on pathological lying: “A pathological liar is someone who lies compulsively. While there appears to be many possible causes for pathological lying, it’s not yet entirely understood why someone would lie this way. .... A 2016 study of what happens in the brain when you lie found that the more untruths a person tells, the easier and more frequent lying becomes. The results also indicated that self-interest seems to fuel dishonesty.”

The Politics of Distraction

The two major parties in the US are not the same. There are stark differences on immigration and domestic policy. However, there are fewer differences between them when it comes to foreign policy and long term economic policy.

I'm not going to be focusing on conservatives in this post, as most of the audience here can already enumerate the many sins of the Republican party. At the same time, it's easy while bashing the opposition to forget your own party's track record, so let's recap.

The Democrats, typically with bipartisan support:

• Let Alan Greenspan run loose at the fed for 8 long years
• Overrode Glass-Steagall, by way of Gramm-Leach-Bliley
• Starved Mexico with NAFTA
• Screwed the poor, especially single moms with Clinton's "welfare reform"

And that's just under Clinton. Before any liberals chime in his defense, Clinton apologized for the welfare reform, and called NAFTA a mistake after the fact, when it was too late to undo the damage. Meanwhile Greenspan himself admitted to his shenanigans after the fact, again after all the damage had been done. His tenure is a matter of record. For more on Greenspan's many sins, read Griftopia by Matt Taibbi.

Moving on to Democrats under Obama:

• Bailed out wall street, implored the DOJ to "look forward, not backward" instead of chasing prosecutions for bad actors that sold out homeowners and crippled the economy.
• Reneged on the public option, and laughed at single payer instead of negotiating from a position of single payer hoping for a public option. Never pursued bad actor HMOs.
• Overall, workers, especially those without college degrees were hit hard under the Obama economy and the Bush economy that preceded it. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/10/democrats-working-class-americans-us-election

Taken it its totality, wealth under all administrations since the 1970s has been stagnant for workers while the top earners have enjoyed a steadily increasing windfall on the backs of everyone else.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/02/income-inequality-in-america-chart-graph/

The people and entities that hold real political power - have the ear of congress - in the US do so because they're the holders of the debt - for example, those people and entities that buy t-bills.

Those debt holders are the ones that effectively, albeit indirectly set economic policy in the US, as it filters down through business interests and politicians into our austere material reality.

There's a reason that support of working people has eroded across the political spectrum for decades, and the above is a big part of why - perhaps even a bigger cause than the hollowing out of our manufacturing sector.

The bottom line is that working people don't have many friends in the halls of power.

The Republicans distract from this using white racial resentment and fear of "the other."

The Democrats distract from this using identity politics and fear of Republican power.

It's a shell game designed to prop up a country whose economics are less and less tenable to a majority of people. It's a distraction designed to keep your eye off the fact that this democracy barely represents the people at large anymore.

It's the economics. It's always economics of the situation - not just the economy, but who is benefiting from it. The stock market figures can't speak to that.

I'm not going to sit here and pretend to have any solutions, but if nothing else it's cathartic to at least name the problem.