Tag: Trump

Ungovernable? The Curse of a Ruling Faction

Factional Fury

In the July 29 Guardian, Michael Goldfarb laments the debacle of the Trump presidency to date: Goldfarb on Ungovernability

However, the recitation of one Trumpian travesty after another is not the core of Goldfarb’s message.  It’s just to get your attention and whip up a little outrage.  What he’s really getting at is deeper and more troubling. It’s the danger of factionalism, in particular that “the Republicans are no longer a political party but a faction, a much more dangerous thing.”

He goes on to quote James Madison’s definition of “faction” and summarizes Madison’s concerns as expressed in the Federalist Number 10

Madison’s paper itself makes for fascinating if laborious reading—the man had a knack for prolixity in the service of exhausting every possible angle of a subject (research topic: how did the other Constitutional Conventioneers restrain Madison from making the Constitution as long as the Sunday edition of The New York Times?). Nonetheless, if you read the whole thing you get the sense Madison was more concerned about a ruling majority faction rather than the minority faction (in terms of numbers of voters) that the current Republican Party has turned out to be. Nevertheless, Goldfarb’s argument applies, since the Continue reading “Ungovernable? The Curse of a Ruling Faction”

How Cheating Starts, and the Path to Oligarchy

Breathing an Atmosphere of Lies

Unless you have been living under a rock for the last two years, you can probably guess why lying and other forms of spreading untruths fester with new virulence in the minds of the public (that is, that portion of the public who is paying attention to public life).

Communicating untruths, whether deliberate lies or “alternative facts” mistaken for truths through ignorance, is a very broad topic.  There are polite lies, “white lies,” or lying to protect a loved one, all of which are in a different moral universe from evil lies. The latter are the kind that constitute Fake News as well as other kinds of dishonest villainy.

If a lie inflicts harm on somebody’s Bad Guys, then justifying it may depend on whose side you’re on.

Subverting the system with lies is OK if you win.  That’s where we stand in the days of rank partisanship.

Continue reading “How Cheating Starts, and the Path to Oligarchy”

Just When You Thought It Couldn’t Get Worse. . .

Science Takes Another Hit from Trump Administration

In case you didn’t catch this, Trump has appointed, for assistant secretary for public affairs at HHS  a woman who believes that abortion can cause breast cancer.  When challenged by the New York Times, instead of citing studies, Charmaine Yoest argued that scientists are “under the control of the abortion lobby.”

There may be more than one reason for opposing abortion, but making claims about a connection unknown to scientists at the CDC is a long leap into the Alternative Facts Universe (AFU).  Forgive me for playing another of my hunches as to the AFU mindset, but I imagine that Yoest’s claim is based on the fact that some women who have had abortions later get breast cancer.  Undoubtedly. I’m sure Charmaine Yoest has heard of more than one. The question then to ask is, how many women who never had an abortion also get breast cancer? That is, does the rate of women getting breast cancer after an abortion exceed the background breast cancer rate?

Continue reading “Just When You Thought It Couldn’t Get Worse. . .”

THEY did it! The Signature Theme of the Trump Presidency

It Was the Other Guys Who Screwed Up – the Guiding Principle of Trump Governance

Confronted by a reporter with actual indisputable facts contravening Donald Trump’s boast about his massive electoral college victory, Trump replied “I was given this information.” Sure, and two months after the election he still had not bothered to confirm that which he had been “given“—which was no more complicated than comparing three or four numbers.

Whether this kind of prevarication is a deliberate lie, or evidence of Trump’s lack of curiosity as to facts, is not exactly clear. But whichever it is, the man’s instinct is immediately to shrug off responsibility. Something goes wrong, it is someone else’s fault.

Likewise, concerning the death of Ryan Owens in the botched raid in Yemen, he assigned the responsibility for Owens’s death to the  generals: “They lost Ryan.”  Moreover, he made a point that the operation had been planned during the “totally disastrous”  Obama presidency—no matter that Obama had rejected carrying it out, it had to be something Trump was not responsible for. Two times over.

Of course, his attribution of the loss of the popular vote in the election to fraud on an unprecedented scale—for which not a shred of proof has been adduced—belongs to the same pattern.

Continue reading “THEY did it! The Signature Theme of the Trump Presidency”

“I Was Given This Information” (So I’m Not Responsible)

Will It Ever Stop?!?

Sorry for yet another political post, but it’s hard not to comment on the totally extraordinary. Trump’s press conference on Feb. 16 veered from paranoia to grandiosity in a way not unfamiliar to Trump watchers for the last 20 months except for a new, unsurpassed level of narcissism—a level that gets ratcheted up higher and higher the greater the pressure he is under. (I’ll note here that many of his followers were thrilled by his performance; they believe he speaks for them. We’ll see if they believe this in 2019.)

There are so many bolts of craziness shooting from the mouth of the Complainer in Chief, that most of us feel incapable of even enumerating them, much less think of a larger context beyond “I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS IS HAPPENING!”

Continue reading ““I Was Given This Information” (So I’m Not Responsible)”

The Calculus of Fear

As of this writing the  infamous Presidential executive order banning entry into the U.S. from seven predominantly Muslim countries has yet to get a final judicial ruling. But whether it succeeds or fails, its main purpose will have been achieved: to instill fear in those deemed undesirable by Trump, Bannon, & Co.

From that perspective, it’s all the worse if the ban is eventually determined to be constitutional. You can do more than just scare helpless undesirables, you can lawfully inflict pain on them. The undesirables could be any group—Muslims, Mexicans, Arabs, etc.—for which you can find some pretext to justify barring them from entry, throwing them out, or jailing them.

Much was made by Republicans that it was only a “temporary” ban. But of course once you have a “temporary” ban, what’s to keep it from being extended in the name of national security? The point is not about temporariness or permanence, the point is about power and intimidation.

Continue reading “The Calculus of Fear”

Guess Who’s Attacking J.K. Rowlings

J.K. Rowlings is now under Twitter siege by, guess who, Trump fans who were fans of hers, now angry ex-fans stirred to invective on account of Rowlings’s criticism of Their Royal Highness, Donald Trump.

Yes! Some of them are now burning her books! (Where have we heard of this kind of thing before?)

Rowlings War

(Note the Post has a paywall, and they will block you if you’re not a subscriber and have gone over your monthly limit.)

Continue reading “Guess Who’s Attacking J.K. Rowlings”

Coping in the Data Ocean

Our Oceanic Data Environment and the Paradox of Choice

What is it like to be a bat? is the  title of a paper by Thomas Nagel in the Philosophical Review in October 1974 that is widely quoted and discussed among philosophers.  But you don’t have to be a philosopher to see that the question goes straight to the mystery of consciousness. Is the consciousness of a bat anything like ours? What about a wolverine, a gecko, a sea urchin?

How does an  animal’s environment shape its consciousness? You’d expect that the consciousness of a wandering albatross, who spends months at a time on the wing without ever touching land, has to be wildly different from that of a mole who spends most of its time underground in the space of half an acre.

For more on wandering albatross flight, see this will blow your mind

It’s all very well to imagine yourself a wandering albatross. It sounds like a glorious life, untethered by our bonds to mere stationary places and to people who do not soar thousands of miles at a stretch.

But, what is it like to be a fish?

Continue reading “Coping in the Data Ocean”

Trump Speaks, Many Cringe

This country is rubble and needs to be rebuilt

During Trump’s inauguration address, I was reminded of his observation, many months ago, that “the generals are rubble.” Essentially, our whole country is rubble needing to be rebuilt, was the message he sent today, with a litany of bad stuff and the newly minted term “American Carnage.”

The strangest part of the speech was when he said that the education system has caused our children to be “deprived of all knowledge.” Education Secretary nominee Betsy DeVos is set to reverse this situation by informing us that public education is a fraud, which is the one piece of knowledge that will get driven into our empty heads.

So, from rubble and absence of knowledge, shall we rise?

That’s not such a good bet, considering how he just excoriated a lot of the people who will be working for him.