Tigre

A little trip to Hispaniola courtesy of Jarina de Marco:

And while we're at it, Happy October:

The Mice and the Bubble

Two things about a recent Real Time with Bill Maher got my cylinders clicking.  The most astonishing was the New Rules piece using the story of the City Mouse and the Country Mouse as a way of explaining away any contradictions in Trump's recent collusion with 'city mice' Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi at the expense of 'country mice' Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan.

And this is the existential crisis of our president: He's an asshole, but he's not a hick.  He represents one group but belongs to another.  I hate to break it to you real Americans, but what Trump likes about Chuck and Nancy is that they're not you.  And he's not one of you. Trust me when Trump watches the Beverly Hillbillies he roots for Mr. Drysdale. And when he tells a crowd, as he often does, "I love you" what he means is that in middle America he found something he had long ago run out of in New York: suckers. Trump voters were played for rubes by the ultimate fast talking city slicker who saw vulnerable people nervous about jobs and the melting pot getting too melty and he told them he'd build a great wall and get their jobs back at the mine and they said, "where do I sign?"  Folks, you didn't make America great again.  You enrolled in Trump University.

Trenchant commentary, reminding us once again that the core agenda of this administration is to con the rubes, and at that it continues to succeed, literally wildly, the way con jobs tend to play out.  Not enough to convince all observers but plenty enough to keep everyone off balance.

The other was more in line with my usual feelings about Bill Maher lately, and gives me an opening to discuss something I've been wanting to write about for a while.   The topic was political correctness and free speech, and specifically an atmosphere increasingly charged with the former ("on both sides" to borrow a phrase) making the latter increasingly difficult to stand up for.   I don't have a quote since it was mostly in conversation, but it could be summarized by these snippets:

Martin Short: ...lack of reading, breakdown of reading
Maher: ... That is all of us when you don't read or you read just what's on your phone, or what's on your computer, what is just fed to you, what you already believe comes back to you.
Rick Phillips: The interet bubble where they self-select what they're going to follow.
Maher: We live in this echo chamber now where you can tune out anything.

Valid kernels of points certainly, although I increasingly find that Bill Maher, omnivorous though he takes pains to be -- he's made a career out of it-- is on the subjects he cares most about as calcified as any of us.  But what about the self-selected internet bubble?  I won't say that I never search for answers that I already know, but while it may not yet be formally proven, the anecdotal evidence is convincing to me that what Eli Pariser has called the filter bubble is real.   It's just that the selection may not be an entirely conscious thing.  Facebook news; Amazon, YouTube and Netflix recommendations; Google searches filtered according to your behavior.  Search results tailored not only to your zip code but to your habits and whims.  We shouldn't completely excuse anyone for stacking the deck of their reading material in favor of their prejudices and preconceived notions.  That's not informing yourself, that's self-medication.  But when search engine algorithms do it for you, for everyone, without their knowledge or consent, you can lose sense of where the boundaries of your knowledge are.

We should be suspicious of solutions to the filter bubble that rely on gatekeeping and tweaking of the algorithms, although both are to some extent in order.  Rather we should cultivate a sense of vigilance and awareness in ourselves.  We should learn ways around the limitations, and use them.

Smart search algorithms that keep us ignorant are just one example of how often and how unwittingly we yield control over the choice of possibilities to Commerce.  Companies take away what you want - subway cars getting smaller and less comfortable while fares go up, iTunes removing features and degrading the "user experience" and air travel. Air travel!  Let's just forget I mentioned it-- and then tell you it's what  "you asked for!"-- unsolicited ads "tailored to your interests", required intelligence-gathering cookies that "enhance your user experience", videos playing automatically when you load articles.

I don't ascribe the tyranny of corporate hegemony over every aspect of our lives to evil.  Certain personalities may be more inclined to take advantage of loopholes that have been widening everywhere for corporations since the dam was burst on corporate participation in governance-- think Citizens United as the crowning achievement of that project.  But evil does not explain the choices actual people make when doors open in turn to greater and greater power, when one's choices of what to do with that power promise greater and greater freedom for oneself and one's own and fewer and fewer obstacles, no matter the price for everyone else.  That response to an irresistible stimulus is an algorithm.

Metriology

Metriology (from Greek: μέτριος - middling, mediocre, unremarkable + λόγος - cause) is the notion that the introduction of a perfect being into explanations for the universe we find ourselves in is not just a pleasing fiction but a leap that is contrary to experience.  Every advancement in our understanding of the universe seems to support the notion that nothing is truly exceptional, so why would god be?  If the cosmos originated in a realm beyond our understanding and experience, is it not as likely to be filled with even more inconceivable challenges to excellence for the artisan than that everything for the creator is a snap?  This is not to suggest that there necessarily is an actual mediocre author behind the universe, merely that introducing an author into the explanation at all adds complications that, given the unsettlability of the matter, require desperate credulity to overcome.  Requiring the author to be not merely adequate but perfect makes the story less likely, not more.

Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury's Ontological proof for the existence of god is approaching the end of its first millenium, and it is still regularly proffered as a show-stopper in theological arguments. The proof runs like this:

1. By definition, God is a being than which none greater can be imagined.

2. A being that necessarily exists in reality is greater than a being that does not necessarily exist.

3. Thus, by definition, if God exists as an idea in the mind but does not necessarily exist in reality, then we can imagine something that is greater than God.

4. But we cannot imagine something that is greater than God.

5. Thus, if God exists in the mind as an idea, then God necessarily exists in reality.

6. God exists in the mind as an idea.

7. Therefore, God necessarily exists in reality.

Painfully clever though this argument is, it is the textbook illustration of "Begging the Question." Kant, for one, took issue with the concept that Existence is a given as a quality of Perfection.  I would argue that a merely existing God is inferior to a God whose Existence is Incontrovertibly Manifest to All of that God's Creatures.  Speaking for myself, that greater imagined god does not exist.  Substitute for "God" in the above, as Anselm's contemporary Gaunilo of Marmoutier did, the made up concept of "Piland" - the island than which none greater can be imagined - or, I don't know,  "Giscuit" - the biscuit than which none greater can be imagined - and you experience very vividly the ho-hum quality of Anselm's pleading.

1. By definition, Giscuit is a biscuit than which none greater can be imagined.

2. A biscuit that necessarily exists in reality is greater than a biscuit that does not necessarily exist.

3. Thus, by definition, if Giscuit exists as an idea in the mind but does not necessarily exist in reality, then we can imagine some biscuit that is greater than Giscuit.

4. But we cannot imagine some biscuit that is greater than Giscuit.

5. Thus, if Giscuit exists in the mind as an idea, then Giscuit necessarily exists in reality.

6. Giscuit exists in the mind as an idea.

7. Therefore, Giscuit necessarily exists in reality.

As awesome as Giscuit would be right now, I'm not convinced it exists.

If there is a creator, why would we assume that it is perfect?  If a single entity were powerful beyond what any of us could achieve, but we are the achievement, where does it follow that that being is unique and flawless?  I mean look at us.  Isn't it far more likely given everything we know about life, the universe and everything in it that if there is an entity responsible for everything we see that it is pretty average as responsible entities go?  It's not good enough to say the bible tells us that god is perfect.  It would say that, wouldn't it?

Make no mistake, my issue is not with the universe, of which I'm generally a fan, and of which I am moreover at certain profound moments in awe.  My problem is with the impulse to ascribe to a conceived of being sole authorship to it, and not just responsibility for it, but perfection in the execution of it.  Is it to god's glory that we exalt god? Or is it to make us feel better about ourselves, who were reported (suspiciously by us) to be created in the epic author's image?  My money is on the second option.  How typical of us would that be if I'm right!

A More Orange Shade of Pale

Sarah Paulson's character getting the election night news on American Horror Story: Cult

If you're hearing this for the first time from Unspeakable (as heck) you might just need to expand your internet horizons a tad, but almost a year later, journalist and author (and comic book writer) Ta-Nehisi Coates has written at The Atlantic perhaps the definitive piece on the source of Donald Trump's support in the last election and beyond.

Some very choice quotes summarize the argument:

[Trump's] political career began in advocacy of birtherism, that modern recasting of the old American precept that black people are not fit to be citizens of the country they built. But long before birtherism, Trump had made his worldview clear. He fought to keep blacks out of his buildings, according to the U.S. government; called for the death penalty for the eventually exonerated Central Park Five; and railed against “lazy” black employees. “Black guys counting my money! I hate it,” Trump was once quoted as saying. “The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” After his cabal of conspiracy theorists forced Barack Obama to present his birth certificate, Trump demanded the president’s college grades (offering $5 million in exchange for them), insisting that Obama was not intelligent enough to have gone to an Ivy League school, and that his acclaimed memoir, Dreams From My Father, had been ghostwritten by a white man, Bill Ayers.

 Coates provides a catalog of statistics to bookmark for future discussions:

Trump’s dominance among whites across class lines is of a piece with his larger dominance across nearly every white demographic. Trump won white women (+9) and white men (+31). He won white people with college degrees (+3) and white people without them (+37). He won whites ages 18–29 (+4), 30–44 (+17), 45–64 (+28), and 65 and older (+19). Trump won whites in midwestern Illinois (+11), whites in mid-Atlantic New Jersey (+12), and whites in the Sun Belt’s New Mexico (+5). In no state that Edison polled did Trump’s white support dip below 40 percent. Hillary Clinton’s did, in states as disparate as Florida, Utah, Indiana, and Kentucky. From the beer track to the wine track, from soccer moms to nascar dads, Trump’s performance among whites was dominant. According to Mother Jones, based on preelection polling data, if you tallied the popular vote of only white America to derive 2016 electoral votes, Trump would have defeated Clinton 389 to 81, with the remaining 68 votes either a toss-up or unknown.

The payoff:

And so the most powerful country in the world has handed over all its affairs—the prosperity of its entire economy; the security of its 300 million citizens; the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food; the future of its vast system of education; the soundness of its national highways, airways, and railways; the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal—to a carnival barker who introduced the phrase grab ’em by the pussy into the national lexicon. It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.” And in that perverse way, the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled.

I have only a minor quibble with Coates' presentation.  The article rather boldly misses the point in my view of Bernie Sanders' stance with respect to the "white working class".  As I see it, Sanders emphasis is appropriately on the second and third words in the phrase.  He consistently chose to combat the very real problem of racial polarization within the working class as a whole by frankly confronting the problem makers directly on their terms and admirably without judgment (something I find very hard to do myself).  Given widespread identification with whiteness among the white working class as Coates's own numbers attest, Sanders was carving a niche in appealing directly to their better angels-- and was to a great extent successful at it. Nothing inconsistent with basic socialism.  Will it work in the long run in bringing white workers back into the fold of labor from their seduction away from it by racialist manipulations in the other direction?  I don't know but at least Sanders is entitled to try.

But Coates' main point is well taken that for every demographic of age, gender, income and education, the white contingent across the board preferred the most openly racist and misogynist, anti-other reactionary, and in spite of the tan from a can, the whitest candidate perhaps in history.

Screen Capture from opening credits of American Horror Story: Cult

I know a lot of white people, and few who (openly at least) voted for Trump.  But this was a political year for contrariness in all quarters.  For me, the essay articulates what had been inchoate feelings about the election, especially in conversation with those who, unlike me, felt the luxury of voting their conscience, perhaps to the point of attacking what struck me as the only realistic option for anyone hoping to prevent the horrifying outcome we're now living with-- i.e., voting for the lesser "evil".  Given the admittedly unappealing major party alternative in November (that is, the popular vote winner), it was to be expected that a certain segment of white progressive voters would feel emboldened to choose anyone else, casting (in some states decisive) numbers of votes for the distantly fourth place Green party instead.  Maybe as was frequently suggested to me in the weeks leading up to the election, and even for some time after, the mood and condition of the country demanded that we vote for progress and for change.  Wasn't that why both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, two candidates as outside the mold of either of the two major parties as could be imagined, had exceeded anyone's expectations?   Could that explain the sudden overlap of vocabulary for what to react against -- status quo, neoliberalism, deep state-- from both sides advertising freedom from voting for the "inevitable" candidate?  Sure Trump was a lying, perverted conman, but what would be the worst that could happen if the "most qualified candidate for president ever" was denied the crown?   Only one outcome would "heighten the contradictions" and thereby bring about conditions for revolution.  But maybe, given the likely consequences of a white progressive defection from voting Democratic, this wasn't the right time for antifascists to be principled.  Maybe change and progress did not necessarily go hand in hand.  Maybe the prevailing mood among the largest bloc in the country was regressive.  That certainly turned out to be the case.

Throw into the mix of influences on the last election Russia, which I will use as an abbreviation for what should more specifically be termed the Russian counterpart to the American oligarchy.   Evidence of their activities may not yet include outright tampering with votes and polling outcomes, but it does include propaganda in the form of tampering with messages consumed by voters."Hacking" may be a ridiculous way to characterize what we know so far to be Russia's part in the culpability for our current predicament.  How about "dicking"?

Russia has a problem with nationalism, a problem which it shares with a number of other nations with regressive elites making a resurgence in power -- Turkey, Hungary, Poland come to mind, and Britain, France and Germany have active factions making sometimes successful stabs at it as well.  Nationalism, which made our modern world a few centuries back, is traditionally the notion that a people deserve dominion over a territory, and that the natural order demands a kind of ethnic purity in the makeup and outlook of local society.  Nationalism in its contemporary form is a romantic ambition to make your province great again by attempting to rewind to when it went off the rails due to imperialist overreaching.  The resurgence of nationalism is an oligarchic response to what had been a more socialist track for the planet's future. In nearly all of the countries in which Nationalism is making a foothold, including Russia, a dominant ethnicity actually exists.  America is unique in that is the only country experiencing a resurgence of nationalism in which there is rather explicitly no dominant official ethnicity (setting aside the Anglo-Saxon faction whose mouths are watering for a return to 1863).  But there are Russians here who have observed that whiteness confers on them a claim to the American national character.   And with a long history of propaganda and agitprop at their disposal, I have no trouble believing messages originating in Russia that were crafted for Trump and against Hillary hit their marks across the American political spectrum.  I see Russia's participation as a symptom of an American inspired, global "white ethnic delusional" virus.  And if Russia was not the primary force behind the November success of white Nationalism in America --and perhaps at injecting successful anti-Democratic propaganda into the discussion and helping to set a progressive agenda non-injurious to Trump for malcontents on the left end of the spectrum-- at least emblematic of how uniquely vulnerable from inside and outside white Americans are to messages evoking perceived threats to their non-existent ethnicity.

Whiteness, like blackness, is merely a skin tone shared by people who have nothing else automatically in common.  Whiteness is taking credit for things we had nothing to do with.  It is unearned status.  Whiteness as a construct exists only to contrast the racially privileged with the racially oppressed, but we know who we are, based on which box we tick on the census. And the numbers do not lie: we took a pass this time on our responsibility to our planet and our fellow humans to take one for the skin tone, or if we're honest to "restore" the continued privilege it bestows on us.