Doctor, my eyes tell me what is wrong.
Was I unwise to leave them open for so long?
This week's featured post is "More Questions than Answers", a collection of opinions I'm holding tentatively. The opening quote above is in honor of all the people who just don't feel like they can watch the news any more. I feel your pain.
This week everybody was talking about Gaza
The war is back on, and no one seems to have any idea how it ends. Friday, the US vetoed a resolution in the UN Security Council calling for a cease fire.
and Trump's dictator remark
As I've been chronicling the last few weeks, major media outlets are beginning to call attention to the alarming authoritarian rhetoric of the Trump campaign and its plans for a second Trump presidency. This week, The Atlantic devoted a whole issue to "If Trump Wins". David Frum writes:
In his first term, Trump’s corruption and brutality were mitigated by his ignorance and laziness. In a second, Trump would arrive with a much better understanding of the system’s vulnerabilities, more willing enablers in tow, and a much more focused agenda of retaliation against his adversaries and impunity for himself. When people wonder what another Trump term might hold, their minds underestimate the chaos that would lie ahead.
Apparently Sean Hannity thought it would be a good idea to calm down such talk, so in his town-hall interview with Trump, he laid a red carpet down an off-ramp: "They want to call you a dictator. To be clear, do you in any way have any plans whatsoever, if reelected president, to abuse power, to break the law, to use the government to go after people?"
At first Trump gave a whatabout answer: "You mean like they’re using right now." But Hannity circled back: "Under no circumstances — you are promising America tonight. You would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?"
"Except day one. ... I love this guy, he says, ‘You’re not going to be a dictator are you?’ I said no, no, no, other than day one. We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator."
As we all know from history, leaders who achieve dictatorial power for even a day almost never lay it down voluntarily. So like an alcoholic's "I'll quit after one drink", Trump's "no, no, no" isn't a credible denial. He gave this answer as if it were a joke, but that's how bullies always talk: It's a joke until it isn't.
So what does that answer mean?
Hannity was clearly hoping for Trump to say something reassuring, like: "This dictator talk is silly, and is just evidence of how desperate the Deep State and its media allies have gotten. They'll say anything."
But Trump steadfastly refused to reassure anybody. What should we make of that?
Mainly this: Trump likes the dictator talk and doesn't want to shut it down. His cultists love the idea that he'll be dictator, so he wants to feed that fantasy. Conversely, his enemies and potential rivals are frightened, and he wants them to stay frightened. Don't fight back too hard against Trump, because what if he becomes dictator?
and Taylor Swift
Time named Taylor as 2023's Person of the Year, which surprised a lot of people, but in retrospect makes a certain amount of sense. Remember how Time defines the PotY: "the individual who most shaped the headlines over the previous 12 months, for better or for worse". The PotY list includes "fourteen U.S. Presidents, five leaders of Russia or the Soviet Union, and three Popes"
Swift is none of that, but Time's explanation portrays her as a ray of light in a year that was otherwise full of darkness. If not Swift, then the news focus of the year is either people arguing about whether Trump belongs in jail, or Israel and Hamas killing each other's civilians. Or maybe it's all the weather disasters as climate change really started to take hold. Taylor Swift may not be the Person of the Year we deserve, but she's definitely the one we need.
Personally, I'm not a Swifty -- not because I dislike her or her music, but because I mainly hear current music when I'm in a shopping mall. I intend to sit down and listen to a few of her biggest hits someday, and I'm sure I'll recognize some when I do. But at the moment nothing is labeled in my mind as a Taylor Swift song.
Anyway, the Time article makes a good case for her: her fame, her wealth, her larger-scale cultural and economic impact, and so on. One thing that surprised and impressed me is her regimen:
In the past, Swift jokes, she toured “like a frat guy.” This time, she began training six months ahead of the first show. “Every day I would run on the treadmill, singing the entire set list out loud,” she said. “Fast for fast songs, and a jog or a fast walk for slow songs.” Her gym, Dogpound, created a program for her, incorporating strength, conditioning, and weights. “Then I had three months of dance training, because I wanted to get it in my bones,” she says. “I wanted to be so over-rehearsed that I could be silly with the fans, and not lose my train of thought.”
I'm reminded of the professionalism of athletes like Tom Brady or LeBron James. There was a time when athletes were just guys blessed with talent, who would gain weight in the off-season and get back in shape during training camp. After 30, they'd develop a Babe-Ruth-style paunch, and then they were old-timers by 35. But in this era, being an athlete is a full-time job. Apparently, being a pop star is too.
I feel like Time made too little of her political impact, which USA Today described like this:
Sept. 19 was National Voter Registration Day. With one Instagram post, Swift helped the nonprofit group Vote.org register more than 35,000 new voters, a nearly 25% increase over the same day last year. The group also saw a 115% jump in 18-year-olds registering to vote. One day. One Instagram post.
Conservatives are seeing some vast liberal conspiracy in the Taylor/Time team-up. Stephen Miller tweets:
What’s happening with Taylor Swift is not organic.
Here's what cracks me up most: The party likely to make a reality-TV star its presidential nominee for the third straight time is now horrified that media celebrities have political influence. Trump co-conspirator Jeff Clarke tweets:
If we reach the point where Dwayne The Rock Johnson and Taylor Swift run for office together we will have truly reached full-on Idiocracy
I've got some bad news for you, Jeff. Your party has been there since 2016.
but we need to talk a little about crime
Crime as a political issue operates in a weird way: Obviously, if you feel less safe in your neighborhood -- or worse, if you've been the victim of a crime -- that's a huge issue to you, as it should be. But a great deal of the political impact of the crime issue consists of people's impressions about crime in general, or even crime in places totally unlike the places they live.
Media plays a huge role in creating those impressions. In particular, if you live in rural or small-town America, but you watch Fox News, you've seen countless stories about how crime is spiking in those big Democrat-run cities. Joe Biden's America, you may think, is a lawless place that needs a new sheriff. And if you believe that visiting any big city means taking your life in your hands, of course you won't do it. So you won't have the experience of walking down Michigan Avenue in Chicago -- as I did a few weeks ago -- and feeling perfectly safe.
Friday, the NYT debunked a big piece of that panic: the supposed "shoplifting epidemic" that allegedly was lowering retail profits and causing companies like Walgreens to close some high-crime stores. The National Retail Federation got a lot of coverage for its claim that "organized retail crime" was responsible for half of all the "shrink" in the industry. ("Shrink" is the industry term that covers all forms of lost inventory, including stuff that gets misplaced or stolen by employees.) Heads of big retail chains testified before Congress, demanding action.
The claims have been fueled by widely shared videos of a few instances of brazen shoplifters, including images of masked groups smashing windows and grabbing high-end purses and cellphones. But the data show this impression of rampant criminality was a mirage.
In fact, shrink has been fairly flat over the last eight years, bouncing between 1.3% and 1.6% of sales. External theft of all sorts is only about 1/3 of that number. And organized retail theft, it turns out, is a tiny fraction of that: around .07% of sales.
The NTF has since backed off its claim, and so has Walgreens. The NYT continues:
In fact, retail theft has been lower this year in most of the country than it was a few years ago, according to police data. Some exceptions, including New York City, exist. But in most major cities, shoplifting incidents have fallen 7 percent since 2019.
So do you think Fox will retract its stories, or that your uncle out in the farm country will notice if they do? Probably not.
and you also might be interested in ...
Senator Tuberville's blockade on military promotions has ended. In terms of policy, he got exactly nothing for dropping his opposition. But he did get a lot of attention and raised a lot of money, so maybe he feels good about the whole episode.
New Republic has an article on a topic I hadn't seen before: The Red State Brain Drain.
Republican-dominated states are pushing out young professionals by enacting extremist conservative policies. Abortion restrictions are the most sweeping example, but state laws restricting everything from academic tenure to transgender health care to the teaching of “divisive concepts” about race are making these states uncongenial to knowledge workers.
The precise effect of all this on the brain drain is hard to tease out from migration statistics because the Dobbs decision is still fairly new, and because red states were bleeding college graduates even before the culture war heated up. The only red state that brings in more college graduates than it sends elsewhere is Texas. But the evidence is everywhere that hard-right social policies in red states are making this dynamic worse.
A big piece of the current sustainable-future vision is electric vehicles, which is why people are debating the significance of the latest EV sales figures: They're up 25% from 2022, so 2023 is the first year when a million EVs will be sold. Sounds good, right?
Well, maybe not. EV sales doubled from 2020 to 2021, and doubled again from 2021 to 2022. So up 25% looks like a loss of momentum. Maybe it's a glitch, caused by Elon Musk's image problems bleeding into Tesla, or people waiting for the new models promised for 2024, or some other passing problem. Or maybe there's a more serious problem.
BTW: It doesn't look like the industry can count on Tesla's new cybertruck to turn things around.
With anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish hate speech rising online, you might expect to find it's a tit-for-tat situation: Jews abuse Muslims because they're sick of Muslims abusing Jews, and round and round forever.
But no. Actually a better explanation is "Haters gonna hate". Right-wing extremists abuse either group, depending on what the current headlines are. The rise in hate speech of all kinds actually tracks the rise in right-wing extremism, rather than any escalation of Muslim/Jew conflicts.
Contemporary discourse often pits Muslims and Jews against one another. But our research demonstrates that a large amount of seemingly disconnected hateful rhetoric about both—at least in 2017—originated from the same far-right extremist communities.
Speaking of far-right extremist communities, Alex Jones is back on X/Twitter.
Norman Lear died Tuesday at the age of 101. If you weren't alive during the run of the hits he created, especially All in the Family (1971-1979), it's hard to grasp his impact.
Before All in the Family, TV sitcoms were escapist entertainment, centering on either absurd characters (like the Clampetts from Beverly Hillbillies) or ideal families dealing with a series of homespun problems that were easily solved. Children (like Opie Taylor of The Andy Griffith Show, the role that made Ron Howard famous) never ran into a problem that was too big for their parents to sort out by the end of an episode. Authority figures were good, systems worked, and adults always had children's best interests at heart.
Lear's shows changed all that. AitF centered on a young liberal couple forced by economic stress to live with the wife's conservative parents. Episodes dealt with racism, war, and even rape.
That much you can understand by streaming AitF now (if you can find it). What you can't grasp is the influence AitF had on the national conversation. At the time there were three major networks, no streaming, and no way to record a show: You either watched a show at the same time everybody else did or you missed it.
Picture what that meant: If you watched some popular show, you could go to work or school the next morning expecting that maybe a third to a half of the people you met had seen it too. So whatever argument Archie Bunker and his son-in-law had been having might well continue among your friends or coworkers.
Nothing fills that role today.
and let's close with something to pass the time
Roadtrips -- I've been on a couple lately -- are a chance to try out new podcasts. I've recently found two you might want to try.
How God Works by David DeSteno examines the intersection of science and spirituality. A meditation teacher, for example, might tell you to focus on your breath, or breathe in a different pattern. Physiologically, what does that do? Or what do various spiritual traditions from around the world tell us about gender diversity?
If you're looking more for entertainment than information, check out "Welcome to Night Vale". Night Vale is a small desert town that either has an exceptional level of weirdness, or is being covered by a very weird local radio reporter.
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