ANGER IS ROOTED IN FEAR

 

By Christina Pierce

https://www.hubcityspokes.com/anger-rooted-fear#sthash.vCFpwDrx.MxqJ8rty.dpbs

I’ve always been very slow to anger. I used to joke that you would have to hit me upside the head with a two-by-four to make me mad. I’ve had the experience of realizing, days and weeks after the fact, that someone was nasty to me. And it always surprises me because I just don’t see it when it happens.

Earlier this week I found myself angry twice in the space of an hour. The first time was courtesy of the guy in the red Silverado who did his best to run me off Highway 11. Hope he got where he was going without loss of life or limb. The second time was shortly after as I was walking my German Shepard. Riley usually minds, but the lure of the rabbit running at full speed directly towards Highway 589 was too strong to resist. My screams finally got his attention, and he stopped short of the highway.

I dealt with the first incident by blowing my horn at the Silverado for a full 10 seconds, no doubt disturbing innocent bystanders trying to enjoy their steaks at Sully’s. The second I dealt with by yelling at my poor dog all the way back to the house, where I remembered that I love him and made amends with an extra treat.

I realized later that, in both cases, my anger was born of fear: fear of having a wreck and fear of losing my precious pet. And I realized that it is no wonder that we are all, or at least many of us are, angry. We’re scared. We’re scared of COVID-19, which didn’t even exist this time last year. We’re scared of the polarization between our political parties and what that might lead to. We’re scared of looters and rioters, and the looters and rioters are scared of the police. 

All of this fear leads to a whole lot of anger. Anger doesn’t feel good, but it beats the heck out of fear. There is a helpless aspect to fear, and anger at least lets us feel like we are in charge. Anger feels like we can take action, and fear feels like we are cowering.

I’m trying to remember this as I find myself leaning towards feeling angry with people who don’t share my worldview. It can be scary when the things you believe are true are challenged, but anger is counterproductive.

The imminently wise Yoda said it best, “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”

The next time I feel angry, I am going to take a minute to ask myself what I’m afraid of, and if there isn’t a better way to confront my fear than anger. I probably won’t ask an angry person, “What are you afraid of?” because that most likely would not end well. But I can meet anger with compassion, understanding that it is most likely based in fear.

Trump’s Plan: There Will be no Transition of Power, Only a Continuation

Trump refusing to lose the election even if he loses -- 

“get rid of the ballots” 

In recent days, the president has blandly stated that there will be no transition of power, only a continuation of his rule. He plans to go straight to republican state legislatures to have them ignore the popular vote in their states. He calls the upcoming vote a rigged hoax. As usual, the president's false allegation is not supported by any evidence. Instead of going with the popular vote, republican legislatures will pick republican electors for the electoral college vote. That will negate any popular vote loss in battleground states with republican legislatures.

Unfortunately, doing what the president proposes appears to be legal. The constitution states that legislatures have the power to pick electoral college electors. It says nothing about paying any attention to how people in the state actually vote. This is another of those norms that used to help hold the states and the American people together. It is another toothless democratic tradition that the president wants to do away with.  

The New York Times reports on the president’s comments at a news conference. In response to a question about whether there would be a peaceful transfer of power if the loses the election, the president said: “We’re going to have to see what happens. You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots, and the ballots are a disaster. .... Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.” 

The NYT also reports that on Wednesday, the president said that “he needed to swiftly confirm a successor for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg because he expected disputes over the election result to be resolved by the Supreme Court, which could split 4-to-4 if a ninth justice is not seated.”

That is how the president plans to win the 2020 election. And that is apparently at least partly why the president and the GOP senate are in a rush to put another radical conservative judge on the supreme court. What the majority of the American people want is of no concern to the president and maybe also GOP politicians. This is what the continuing fall of American democracy looks like. This may be what the president’s supporters are willing to accept to stay in power.

This is what the tyranny of the minority looks like. It isn't clear to me how likely this scheme will come to pass and throw the election to Trump. Increasingly, one has to look to the president’s supporters and ask what are they thinking and how much more damage to democracy and the rule of law they are willing to accept in their desperate efforts to hold back natural social and demographic changes. 

Are most Trump supporters really willing to trash democracy and the rule of law to stop the future from happening? Maybe the election and its immediate aftermath will tell. They have shown that they are open to the idea of trashing facts, truths, sound reasoning, respect for political opposition and a free press. How much farther down the road to an incompetent, kleptocratic tyranny are they willing to go?

The GOP Wants to Help the Green Party

The GOP is a principled, high road party

Bipolar for president

In its burning desire to keep the White House in GOP hands, the party is working hard to help the Green Party get on the ballot in battleground states. The idea is to drain democratic votes away from Biden. Maybe the democrats should be helping the libertarians get on the ballot in battleground states. It is not clear who should be helping Kanye West get on the ballot anywhere. The New York Times writes:

“Four years ago, the Green Party candidate played a significant role in several crucial battleground states, drawing a vote total in three of them — Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — that exceeded the margin between Donald J. Trump and Hillary Clinton.

This year, the Republican Party has been trying to use the Green Party to its advantage again, if not always successfully.

In Wisconsin, a G.O.P. elections commissioner and lawyers with ties to Republicans tried to aid attempts by Howie Hawkins, the current Green Party presidential candidate, to get on the ballot there, which were ultimately unsuccessful. In Montana, state regulators found that the Republican Party violated campaign finance laws as part of an effort to boost the Greens in five down-ballot races, including for senator and governor. 

And in Western Pennsylvania, petitioners from Florida and California were brought in to gather signatures for Mr. Hawkins by an outside firm whose actions Mr. Hawkins and the party said they could not account for. Mr. Hawkins also did not make the ballot there. 

Supporters of the president have also been trying to advance the candidacy of Kanye West, the billionaire hip-hop artist, confident that he can cut into Mr. Biden’s vote total. Democrats have portrayed the effort as a “dirty trick” and exploitative of Mr. West, who has bipolar disorder.”

It is good to see the GOP finally showing some concern for the environment. Their support, legal or not, for the Green Party is encouraging. 

A part of the environment

Speaking of the environment, the NYT writes separately:

“America is now under siege by climate change in ways that scientists have warned about for years. But there is a second part to their admonition: Decades of growing crisis are already locked into the global ecosystem and cannot be reversed.

This means the kinds of cascading disasters occurring today — drought in the West fueling historic wildfires that send smoke all the way to the East Coast, or parades of tropical storms lining up across the Atlantic to march destructively toward North America — are no longer features of some dystopian future. They are the here and now, worsening for the next generation and perhaps longer, depending on humanity’s willingness to take action. 

‘I’ve been labeled an alarmist,’ said Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist in Los Angeles, where he and millions of others have inhaled dangerously high levels of smoke for weeks. ‘And I think it’s a lot harder for people to say that I’m being alarmist now.’”

I’m not dead yet!

That poor lost soul Dr. Kalmus. There, there, doctor, here’s a nice cup of hot tea. We heated the water up by putting it outside in the sun for a couple of minutes.

Obviously, climate science deniers and crackpots will still call him, and anyone who warns about climate change, an alarmist or something(s) worse. That would be the case even if all the ice melts, sea level rises 220 feet and the gulf coast migrates to about 20 miles south of Philadelphia. We need to alert the border patrol about this possible intrusion to insure that the Gulf of Mexico migrates into Pennsylvania legally. Its papers need to be in order. Darned illegal oceans sneaking around the coasts.

On the bright side, one climate scientist was quite hopeful. The NYT quoted Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University as saying: “It’s as if we’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for decades [and the world is now feeling the effects]. But we’re not dead yet.”

I’m happeeee!!

ANTI MASKERS MOUNTAIN LIONS AND TODDLERS

 

General Update & Some Uplifting Thoughts

Do you need a cup of coffee and a pat on the back? 

Attaboy! . . . pat, pat . . . Keep it up! ☕☕

Out in the heartland: The news about American politics is so consistently bad now that it's not clear what to say or do. Many folks at pro-Trump sites are vicious, rigidly but enthusiastically incoherent and reality-untethered most of the time. That makes trying to reach out to them pointless and unpleasant. If there was at least some evidence of some open minds quietly lurking about, it would be useful to stay engaged. Since there is not much evidence if that, I'll give that outreach effort a rest for a while. It was no fun, that's for sure.

Hypocrites on parade: In general, GOP cynicism and hypocrisy are off the charts. For example, the Ginsberg replacement process will take place, regardless of what GOP senators have said in the past.[1] Empty GOP words are just plain empty. And, hypocrisy is hypocrisy. That is a reminder that neither lies nor hypocrisy are illegal. It all just dark free speech -- fun, legal and effective. At one time lies and hypocrisy came with at least a little blowback, but those principled halcyon days are behind us, for at least the next decade or two.

We break it, we remove it: The president continues to break and politicize government functions. At the moment, he is finishing NOAA and the CDC[2] off by crushing their competence into non-existence with his crackpot political hack replacements. This is part of a long-held GOP dream to get rid of the federal government. First they break government functions, then they complain that the government functions are broken, and finally they dismantle most of what they broke and drown the remnants in a bathtub full of GOP lies, corruption and radical conservative hypocrisy. That process is finally proceeding nicely from their point of view. For the most part, or completely, the GOP base apparently loves it.

Eroding democracy: For me, the most disturbing recent finding has been that WaPo article a couple of days ago showing that American democracy is succumbing to a rising authoritarianism and we may have passed a point of no return (my discussion on that is here). That was a real bummer. Well, at least now when I assert that America is seriously moving toward some sort of a corrupt demagogic-Christian theocratic dictatorship, I can now respond to people who tell me I'm full of baloney (or something worse) with some data. That data supports what I believed I had been seeing since shortly after the president took power in January of 2017. What I saw included erosion of nice things like democracy, the rule of law and at least some trust in professional news reporting. Faux News & Cruel Entertainment is now the accepted information source for most conservatives and the GOP.

Hm. Did I overlook anything? Think . . . . think . . . . oh, yeah!

Hey gang, I've got an idea -- let's divert some more money to the pentagon!: There's this uplifting blurb in the WaPo this morning: "Pentagon used taxpayer money meant for masks and swabs to make jet engine parts and body armor  Shortly after Congress passed the Cares Act, the Pentagon began directing pandemic-related money to defense contractors."

No wonder America's federal COVID-19 response has been so amazingly awful. There never was any serious attempt to respond. This news about diverting SARS-CoV-2 money to the pentagon for jet engine parts and whatnot ought to increase the president's approval rating a point or two. 

Footnotes: 

1. For example, there's this gem in the NYT today: "Senator Lindsey Graham said he would refuse to confirm a Republican’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year. Now he is rushing to deliver President Trump’s third justice." 

2. WaPo writes this today: "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday removed language from its website that said the novel coronavirus spreads via airborne transmission, the latest example of the agency backtracking from its own guidance. The agency said the guidance, which went up on Friday and largely went without notice until late Sunday, should not have been posted because it was an early draft." 

Yeah right, early draft. What a lie. Trump just doesn't want that information to reach the public because he thinks it makes him look like the cruel, grossly incompetent president that he actually is.

The State of American Democracy: Very Bad, Maybe Irreparably Damaged

Mapping the death of American democracy

An article in the Washington Post describes indicators of the state of democracy in the US. The data indicates that the US is accelerating its move into a corrupt authoritarianism. The extent of erosion of democracy may now have passed a point of reversibility. The WaPo writes:

“Three years into the Trump administration, American democracy has eroded to a point that more often than not leads to full-blown autocracy, according to a project that tracks the health of representative government in nations around the world.

The project, called V-Dem, or Varieties of Democracy, is an effort to precisely quantify global democracy at the country level based on hundreds indicators assessed annually by thousands of individual experts. It’s one of several ongoing projects by political scientists that have registered a weakening of democratic values in the United States in recent years.

V-Dem’s findings are bracing: The United States is undergoing “substantial autocratization” — defined as the loss of democratic traits — that has accelerated precipitously under President Trump. This is particularly alarming in light of what the group’s historic data show: Only 1 in 5 democracies that start down this path are able to reverse the damage before succumbing to full-blown autocracy.

“The United States is not unique” in its decline, said Staffan I. Lindberg, a political scientist at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg and a founding director of the project. “Everything we see in terms of decline on these indicators is exactly the pattern of decline” seen in other autocratizing nations, like Turkey and Hungary, both of which ceased to be classified as democracies in recent years.

Each year, the V-Dem project asks its experts to rate their respective nations on hundreds of measures of democracy, such as the presence of legislative checks on executive power, freedom of personal expression, the civility of political discourse, free and open elections, and executive branch corruption, among others.

The United States is backsliding on all of those measures. ‘Executive respect for the Constitution is now at the lowest level since 1865,’ said Michael Coppedge, a Notre Dame political scientist and one of the project’s chief investigators. ‘Corruption in the executive branch is basically the worst since Harding.’

Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, said that “experts rate U.S. democracy as getting worse on average,” but there are considerable differences in “how they characterize the severity of the decline we’ve experienced and what they expect in the future.”

Nyhan says he is most concerned about Trump’s repeated attacks on the integrity of U.S. elections. Trump recently said that “the only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged,” for instance, and habitually casts vote-by-mail efforts as inherently fraudulent. Both beliefs are false.”

 

“Dictator drift” -- dictators attack foundations of democracy

such as the integrity of elections