Cosmopolitan bias

Hedgehog in vampire costume, via wideopenpets.

Can't stop thinking about that exchange between White House political advisor Stephen Miller (or "David Duke's favorite Jew" as The Forward has called him) and CNN's Jim Acosta, with reference to the awful immigrattion bill submitted by Senators Cotton and Perdue aiming at cutting legal immigration to the US by 50% and restructuring the rules to bring fewer unskilled workers and relatives of citizens and more "high-value" entrepreneurs and professionals to our shores:

Q.... Yes, people who immigrate to this country can eventually -- people who immigrate to this country not through Ellis Island, as your family may have, but in other ways, do obtain a Green Card at some point. They do it through a lot of hard work. And, yes, they may learn English as a second language later on in life. But this whole notion of “well, they have to learn English before they get to the United States,” are we just going to bring in people from Great Britain and Australia?

MR. MILLER: Jim, it’s actually -- I have to honestly say I am shocked at your statement that you think that only people from Great Britain and Australia would know English. It’s actually -- it reveals your cosmopolitan bias to a shocking degree that in your mind --

Q Sir, it’s not a cosmopolitan --

Acosta, who is of Cuban origin—his father came to the US as a refugee in September 1962, weeks before the Cuban missile crisis erupted—obviously isn't thinking about the many Caribbeans and upper-middle–class Africans and South and Southeast Asians who could find access to green cards through the Cotton-Perdue immigration proposals, but about the many people who could be shut out by this system. especially from Latin America, including, let's say, qualified engineers and doctors and the like. But he puts it very artlessly, giving Miller his opportunity to start browbeating.

Tough Enough

National Review's Kevin D. Williamson, continuing his discussion of the David Mamet fake toughness of Donald J. Trump, works himself into a funny rhetorical pickle on the subject of the genuinely tough, where he nominates the military heroes, Senator McCain and former president George H.W. Bush:

The fact that McCain has been something of a disappointment as a senator and a presidential candidate invites reflection upon the actual political value of personal toughness. George H. W. Bush finished flying a World War II combat mission while bleeding from a head wound in an airplane that was on fire before parachuting into the Pacific, where he evaded vengeful Japanese soldiers who were just then engaged in torturing and eating their prisoners. He was somehow lampooned as a “wimp” by the same media that had earlier accused him of being a bloodthirsty killer (it was alleged that he had strafed a Japanese lifeboat), and some conservatives joined in that, Pat Buchanan among them. The wimp flew 58 combat missions, whereas tough-guy Trump might play 58 holes of golf in an unusually active fortnight. But George H. W. Bush’s genuine toughness and courage was nearly irrelevant to his performance in office.

Given that Trump has visited a golf course 43 times in the first 14 fortnights/28 weeks of his presidency, or almost exactly 3 times per fortnight, I'd suggest he plays at least 54 holes in a normal fortnight. (Reporters aren't generally allowed to know when he's playing, and he's known to have claimed he was doing a meeting when he was actually on the course; more details and possibly different calculations here.) The 58 holes of an unusually active fortnight would be when he's interrupted on the fifth hole of a fourth round because he's required to do something presidential. That would indeed be unusual. He's so lazy he's been known to drive his cart across a putting green, something even an ignoramus like me can recognize as disgusting. Perhaps that is one reason he is reluctant to play on courses he doesn't own.

A Wank Supreme

Thanks for the shoutout, Professor Liberman!

The strongest Supreme.

Brooks ("Can People Change After Middle Age?") sounds as if he's wondering about himself again, or maybe Trump:

I sometimes read that people don’t change much after middle age.

He doesn't tell us where he reads it (is it always in the same place or does it pop up in different contexts?), so I'm not sure how seriously I want to take this. According to old William James, as I learn from the blog of Melissa Dahl, it was worse than that; personalities stop changing around 30, well before traditional middle age begins, according to his 1890 Principles of Psychology:

“In most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.”

On the other hand, that picture has itself begun to soften in the nearly 130 years since it was formed. Many psychologists feel there's a genetic component to one's Big Five personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) that leaves you with a kind of fixed endowment that really won't change much beyond softening us around the edges, but a large study at UC Berkeley conducted by Sanjay Srivastava and published in 2003 found reasons to question that and, pleasantly enough, that we all tend to get better. We get more conscientious through our 20s, and more agreeable starting in the 30s; and although younger women are more neurotic and extraverted than younger men, that difference begins to erase itself with time. So isn't that nice! Was there anything else you wanted to know?

But everyday experience contradicts this on a weekly basis.

I mean of course everyday experience actually takes place seven times as much as weekly experience does. Are you suggesting that people change after middle age just 14% of the time? It's probably too stressful to do more of it.

Acts of Defiance

Colombian Amazon, via Lugares Colombianos.

Funny detail about the extent to which General Kelly is moving to take control over the president:

Aides fold they must stop "dropping off articles on the president’s desk – and then waiting for him to react, with a screaming phone call." https://t.co/yiJNLh4KVO

— Steve Inskeep (@NPRinskeep) August 3, 2017

(Should have been "told".)

The official explanation is that Kelly wants to control the quality of the information the president gets—less Breitbart and more Daily Briefing, which sounds like an absolutely good enough idea in its own right, but it also seems like a serious power play in more ways than one. First, it's an effort to stop Trump from making screaming phone calls, or presumably at least some of the tweets—an effort to control him, in respect to behaviors other minders haven't been able to temper. Then, it's a way of limiting the influence of certain staffers, like Bannon, who have long gotten attention from Trump in this way, with the inflammatory clipping (I took a detailed look at one case, the time Trump "found out" that Obama had had his "wires tapped" in Trump Tower, in March). And lastly it's a way of taking charge of the president's own inclinations, like putting him on a diet, infantilizing him, or treating him as an invalid (as Mrs. Wilson did to Woodrow after his 1919 stroke—he really was an invalid, of course, but Trump really is infantile in important respects).

Scout's Dishonor

Image from Outside Online, and an article by Wes Siler on the ways Donald Trump violated the Scout Law in his jamboree speech (all of 'em, Katie). 

TPM:

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, President Donald Trump said the Boy Scouts called him after his highly criticized speech at the National Jamboree and told him it was “the greatest speech that was ever made to them.”...

During The Wall Street Journal interview, the President claimed the Scouts called him after the speech thanking him for his address. He said the crowd “loved” his speech and there was a “standing ovation” from the time he walked on the stage to the time he left, according to the interview transcript which Politico obtained and released Tuesday.

But it didn't happen, according to the Boy Scouts. The organization's only response was Chief Scout Executive Michael Surbaugh apologizing to the attending Scouts for the “political rhetoric that was inserted into the jamboree.”

“...There was no mix,” Trump said, responding to the reporter’s assertions that there were mixed reactions to his speech. He also claimed it was the “biggest crowd they’ve ever had” at a National Jamboree.

The Boy Scouts told BuzzFeed that the largest crowd ever at a National Jamboree was in 1960, when 56,000 attended and there was an address by President Eisenhower. Eisenhower also did not boast about his Electoral College margin over Adlai Stevenson, retail stories of meeting elderly real estate developers at cocktail parties, or promise Scouts that "You'll be saying 'Merry Christmas' again when you go shopping." There were altogether 40,000 at last week's jamboree (not 45,000, as Trump claimed).

And then on Monday Trump was introducing his new chief of staff, General Kelly, to his cabinet, with an enthusiastic review of Kelly's performance as secretary of homeland security, as reported by CBS News:

Sessions of sweet silent thought

Image via.

Some small encouragement in the story on the Sessions Justice Department push to get rid of affirmative action in college admissions once for all, in Charlie Savage's report:

The announcement suggests that the project will be run out of the division’s front office, where the Trump administration’s political appointees work, rather than its Educational Opportunities Section, which is run by career civil servants and normally handles work involving schools and universities.

In the first place, the obvious suggestion, that Sessions can't trust the career personnel to do what he wants; not necessarily because they're left, but just because they're professional; Sessions hasn't managed to bleed all the honesty out of DOJ, the way Tillerson seems to have blown the expertise out of State.

Smoking hot headline

The Opinion Pages | OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Trump Can’t Save American Christianity

By ROD DREHERAUG. 2, 2017

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Ya think?

Totila, King of the Goths, pays his respects to St. Benedict. Painting by Spinello Aretino at San Miniato del Monte, Florence, dated 1400, via Wikipedia.

More Danes than Antique Romans

Thumb on pretzel, from AOL Lifestyle.

Former New York Times columnist David Brooks ("Before Manliness Lost its Virtue") has noticed that a lot of figures in the Trump administration have a thing about being manly in one way or another:

There is the slovenly “I don’t care what you think” manliness of Steve Bannon. There’s the look-at-me-I-can-curse manliness that Anthony Scaramucci learned from “Glengarry Glen Ross.” There is the affirmation-hungry “I long to be the man my father was” parody of manliness performed by Donald Trump. There are all those authentically manly Marine generals Trump hires to supplement his own.

The David Mamet reference is stolen from Kevin D. Williamson's admired National Review piece on the unlamented jerk Scaramucci (it really was pretty well done, though of course the subtext was that the White House's vulgarity proves that it's really a leftwing operation, because conservatives never say "fuck" when ladies are within hearing). I don't know why Brooks uses the hyphen construction in the second sentence instead of the quotation marks of the first and third.

As far as I know Trump only has one two authentically manly Marine generals to work with, John Kelly, who had to vacate Homeland Security so he could be Marine-in-charge in the West Wing (Flynn and McMaster, and Keith Kellogg of the National Security Council are all Army, and it's Admiral Mike Rogers who runs the NSA). The idea of "generals Trump hires to supplement his own" suggests that he also has some secret private generals as well, which is very weird, although it would explain that bizarre episode last week when he claimed that "his" generals had advised him to ban transsexual people from military service, though none of the generals in the administration knew anything about it:

Does Ross Douthat read this page?

Used in publicity for a performance ("An Evening of S.I. Witkiewicz") by the Theatre of the Two-Headed Calf, New York City, November 2004.

Just wondering, after noticing an odd metaphor creeping into today's column ("The Empty Majority"):

It has the tics of an opposition party, the raw wounds of a beaten coalition, the dated ideas of a bankrupt force. Its attempts to pass a health care bill aren’t just painful to watch; they have the same unheimlich quality as a calf born with two heads, the feeling of watching something that the laws of politics or nature should not permit to exist.

Not quite English yet, Monsignor: "they" (the attempts to pass a health care bill) do not have the feeling of watching anything. Attempts don't have any feelings at all. You're the one with the feelings. But anyway, I wrote, two days ago,

McCain's vote should be regarded as a kind of mercy killing of a freakish creature that just was not viable, a two-headed calf with a blocked intestine.

What are the odds he got that calf from me?

Of course I take the pro-choice position that it's kinder to put the monster out of its misery than force it to live, helpless and in pain, for another few weeks, and Ross takes the anti-choice position that nothing is to be done. He sees the whole episode, with some justice, as a synecdoche for the current state of the Republican party as misbegotten and impotent, elected but unable to govern, but not his problem. He seems to wish the Democrats would come and kill the GOP for him (the way Thailand has Muslim butchers who absorb the karma of killing lambs and cows and chickens so that Buddhists can eat meat without feeling very sinful):

For the record: Arguing with Tomi Lahren

The young woman who denounces the Affordable Care Act while enjoying the fact that it gets her free coverage on her parents' policy was weighing in on the topic of transgender troops.

SMBC-Comics, via Language Log.

Do you have an argument why Italian-American men should be allowed to serve? People over 6'5"? Natve speakers of Chinese?

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) July 30, 2017

The American way is everyone who passes the physical can serve. Burden of proof for making an exception is on you.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) July 30, 2017

And the military already studied all the arguments you can come up with, and they're worthless. https://t.co/2bJUuwVdPn

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) July 30, 2017

That's why, sweetcakes. There's no good reason to create this category of persons who must not serve.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) July 30, 2017

For the record: Cons and Fusion

Firm behind anti-Trump dossier also worked for Russia, Senate witness says

— FOX & Friends (@foxandfriends) July 28, 2017

In other words, Russia was against Trump in the 2016 Election - and why not, I want strong military & low oil prices. Witch Hunt! https://t.co/mMSxj4Su5z

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 28, 2017

Well, no, not exactly. Or at all, come to think of it. Bill Browder's testimony to the Senate provided no information we didn't already have, and had no bearing one way or another on who Russia supported in the 2016 election, probably, but Trump might do better to avoid the question (which is one of those things the press can't talk straight about, because it involves some unreported speculation, but I can).

Congratulations, America

TrumpCare is dead!

Goldwater would never vilify ethnic minorities. unless, you know, in order to get votes.

With all respect—well, some respect, I'm only human—to Senator McCain for his agonizing decision to vote for once the way he thinks instead of the way Mitch McConnell wants him to (Steve M thinks only the specter of possibly approaching death could have gotten him to do the ethical thing—funny to imagine the old reprobate is the only actual Christian, fearing God and Judgment, in the whole GOP), and some more respect to Senators Murkowski and Collins for doing it on a more regular basis as if they really believe that's what Senators are supposed to do, I think the momentousness of McConnell's defeat on Skinny Trumpcare is getting a little exaggerated.

I mean, because it really was inevitable that Trumpcare would be defeated, as I'd been hoping. As has been widely pointed out, the floor managers could only get as many votes for it as they did by promising the Senators that it would never become law, and billing the vote as merely a necessary first step to convening a conference committee to effectively write yet another new bill, but by now we've seen the full range of what they can come up with in the way of repealing the Affordable Care Act (which precludes doing it with any Democratic votes and thus requires 50 Republican ones). There just aren't any approaches that can get enough Republicans to vote for it, because the party doesn't have a coherent position on health care, and can't, really, as long as it seeks to bring together the wealthy libertarian and the poor nativist. Whatever came out of the conference wasn't going to be any different.

McCain's vote should be regarded as a kind of mercy killing of a freakish creature that just was not viable, a two-headed calf with a blocked intestine.

Phoning it in

Limited WiFi for a few days, will be posting as and when.

Brooks Gets Woke

Pre-woke David Brooks contemplated unpatriotic Colin Kaepernick back in the old days, last September. Image credit Getty/Thearon W. Henderson/Bryan Bedder/Salon.

Verbatim David Brooks, "How Cool Works in America Today", July 25 2017:

The modern concept of woke began, as far as anybody can tell, with a 2008 song by Erykah Badu. The woke mentality became prominent in 2012 and 2013 with the Trayvon Martin case and the rise of Black Lives Matter. Embrace it or not, B.L.M. is the most complete social movement in America today, as a communal, intellectual, moral and political force.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Is it true that, as far as anybody can tell, the modern concept of woke began with a 2008 song by Erykah Badu?

Answer: In principle, yes. But first of all, when Badu uses the phrase "I stay woke" throughout the 2008 song "The Master Teachers", according to Wikipedia, it "does not yet have any connection to justice issues", which does not sound precisely like the modern concept (as opposed to 2012, when she began using it along with others in connection with social and racial justice as well as to demand freedom for the then jailed Russian singing group Pussy Riot); second of all, also according to Wikipedia,

Scaramouche the Douche. I

Stewart Granger as Rafael Sabatini's Scaramouche in the 1952 film by George Sidney.

Full transparency: I'm deleting old tweets. Past views evolved & shouldn't be a distraction. I serve @POTUS agenda & that's all that matters

— Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) July 22, 2017

Full transparency: I'm going to turn myself into cellophane, so you can look through me and see the real whatever there is back there. https://t.co/dcYTklWJuf

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) July 23, 2017

So this is about the Twitter evidence that Trump's new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, used to hold some un-Trumpish views, like favoring marriage equality or opposing global warming, or thinking Trump lacks judgment, and

“Walls don’t work,” the Wall Streeter tweeted in late 2015. “Never have never will. The Berlin Wall 1961-1989 don’t fall for it.”

Where he showed the same peculiar misunderstanding as Fox's Monica Crowley, of thinking the Mauer was somehow analogous to Trump's wall, as if the East Germans had built it to keep out job-stealing West Berliner migrants. Walls do work if the object is to keep people in, see under "Prison", and he's even wronger than Crowley, in that the Berlin one worked pretty effectively, for 28 years.

I'd like to say, on the other hand, people are really being unfair to Scaramucci with all this accusing him of having "beliefs". They should be considered more along the lines of fashion accessories.

For the Record: Out of His Own Mouth

Looking for something else, bumped into this 2012 story from Politico about the Trump response to Willard Mitt Romney's defeat in the presidential election, in another case of his seeming ability to prophesy the future without realizing he's doing it:

The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2012

Our country is now in serious and unprecedented trouble...like never before.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2012

This election is a total sham and a travesty. We are not a democracy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2012

We can't let this happen. We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 7, 2012

And most interestingly these, apparently deleted the same day (after it became clear even to Trump that Obama had a solid majority of the popular vote, and perhaps noticing the spelling issues in the second one, or second "won"):

It's National Review time!

Scandalized National Review writer hears about young people thinking Harry Potter could have spiritual significance https://t.co/KysOFB2HNB pic.twitter.com/0oGtEc8IRS

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) July 22, 2017

With a capital t and that rhymes with p and that stands for poetic imagination pic.twitter.com/ncaHdwIbmL

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) July 22, 2017

From an intern called Jeff Cimmino kvetching about a podcast by a couple of Harvard Divinity School graduates and their "weekly church-like service for the secular focusing on on a Potter text's meaning" who is worried about the Death of God and links to Nietzsche to make it clear how upset he is. (Little imagining, I suppose, how much of the books is devoted to a serious and ultimately consoling meditation on death, the deaths of those we love and then our own. But missing Jesus, of course, so WTAF, amirite?)

Drawing by David Hughes for Esquire, October 2007.

And then from the other, libertine side of the Movement, this:

Flavors of Freedom

What David Brooks meant to say ("Republicans Can't Pass Bills"):

Freedom is like ice cream: it comes in many different flavors. For example, you can have freedom in the future or you can have it right now.

Freedom in the future is what philosophers whose names escape me refer to as "freedom as capacity". Thus you should encourage your friend to practice the piano hard, which will increase his piano-playing capacity. In the same way you should feed your kid nutritious meals, make her do her homework, and see that she plays sports and performs volunteer work, so that she will have the capacity of getting into the college she likes. 

I have no idea how philosophers refer to freedom in the present, so I'll call it "freedom as detachment", which sounds kind of Buddhist but is not. This is when you let people alone to do what they want, based on the belief that people are freer when they are unimpeded. It is defined as a kind of absence—the absence of obstacles, stumbling blocks, speed bumps, and things that get in the way.

Back in the day, when the Republican Party used to be interested in running the government, it embraced both flavors of freedom, but its congressional priorities were all about freedom of capacity. When you consider the party's major legislative accomplishments since 1988, you can see it working to provide people with more capacities.

Nothing Changes, by Donald J. Trump

Giorgio de Chirico, "Le Muse Inquietanti" (The Disturbing Muses), 1945. Via.

NOTHING CHANGES

by

Donald J. Trump

I. Song of the Pre-Existing Condition

Nothing changes.
Nothing changes.
Once you get something
for pre-existing conditions, etc., etc.

Once you get something, it’s awfully tough
to take it away. But what it does, Maggie,
it means it gets tougher and tougher.
As they get something, it gets tougher.
Because politically, you can’t give it away.

So pre-existing conditions are a tough deal.
Because you are basically saying
from the moment the insurance,
you’re 21 years old, you start working
and you’re paying $12 a year for insurance,
and by the time you’re 70, you get a nice plan.
Here’s something where you walk up
and say, “I want my insurance.”

It’s a very tough deal, but it is something
that we’re doing a good job of.

Pierre Bourdieu, bitchez

Pierre Bourdieu could. Or at least he could explain it.

Shorter David Brooks, "Getting Radical About Inequality", New York Times, July 18 2017:

Recently I took a friend with no more than a high school diploma to her name to listen to some music. Insensitively, I brought her to a well-known conservatory, where one of the faculty members was presenting all of the first book of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier on the harpsichord. Suddenly I saw her face go dark and panicky as she looked at the program and its unfamiliar words like "prelude", "fugue", and "C major". Quickly, I asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and with a fearful gesture she assented and we went to the Pops, where they played Strauss's Beautiful Blue Danube. 

Well, not really. He doesn't refer directly to last week's "How We Are Ruining America With Our Filthy Elitist Capicollo Sandwiches" at all, in fact; but it's carrying on the same argument, about how people like him use a set of cultural signifiers to shut out the mob from their councils and amusements and he feels bad about it, I guess, but at least that proves there's no need to redistribute the money, we just have to redistribute the Italian delis.

Only in a different key, you see, appealing to the late, (sort of) cultural-Marxian sociologist Pierre Bourdieu ("I’m not in the habit of recommending left-wing French intellectuals, but..."), who, believe it or not, kids, turns out to think exactly like Brooks! I mean, except for the Marxian part: