Sometimes I just get overbooked. I’ve got my piece on that viral Flight 93 essay half written, but there are other things I need to do right now.
Including a few frivolous ones.
I plan to post it tomorrow. Right now it’s in my voluminous drafts folder, where much of my greatest wisdom resides 🙂 :
It turns out that I’m a hoarder of post drafts. I didn’t see this coming””it developed slowly, over many years. Although blogging is not up there with digging ditches in terms of labor, churning out several blog posts a day is nevertheless work. It can be a challenge, but for most bloggers””who usually suffer from or are blessed with a hefty dose of ideophoria””getting ideas for enough posts is not a problem. More often, the problem is getting too many ideas and becoming scattered, or in my case researching posts and writing half of them but then putting them on hold because they become too unwieldy. I assume I’ll go back and finish them later on, but then new events happen, new thoughts come, new articles beckon, and the old ones pile up in a drafts folder that grows and grows and grows.
The upshot is that my old blog has about 150 old drafts still on it, some long and almost finished, and some short and mere sketches of an idea. The other day I noticed that the number of drafts on this blog (which I still think of as my “new blog,” although I’ve been here since 2007) was approaching 600.
I wrote that post about two and a half years ago, and I did succeed in weeding out quite a few, enough to cut the number in half. It’s crept up again, though, to around 420. My file cabinets and closets do the same thing—creep, creep, creep, necessitating the periodic and much-needed weeding.
Neither Gary Johnson nor Jill Stein has met the threshold for the first debate and therefore will not be allowed to particpate:
One of the criteria was that all candidates needed to be polling at 15 percent in these five polls as of Thursday.
Among those polls Hillary Clinton was at 43 percent, Donald Trump was at 40.4 percent, Johnson had 8.4 percent and Stein averaged 3.2 percent.
I realize that some sort of limits must be set if we don’t want to have a bunch of extraneous candidates on the stage. But 15% seems too high a bar for a third-party candidate. Gary Johnson is drawing a very significant number of votes, and barring him from debates means that he has little chance of drawing any more, because a debate would give him a tremendous amount of publicity and visibility.
By the way, the consensus is that Johnson probably draws votes more or less equally from Hillary and Trump. Stein draws them more from Hillary.
I just noticed that a commenter here has used the word “literally” incorrectly in a recent thread. I won’t call attention to who it was; the error is so common that it pretty much could have been anyone.
But why is this particular error so very common? Why do otherwise erudite and grammatically correct people sometimes slip up on its correct use?
One reason is that the word has a somewhat counter-intuitive meaning, or at least a counter-intuitive penumbra. “Literally” is the opposite of “metaphorically”—“literally” means actually, in cold hard literal fact. However (and this is the point), the word “literally” also somewhat sounds as though it might mean something like “in literature; in the literary sense.” In other words, metaphorically. I think that is the first confusion that might throw people off.
The second confusion arises from people’s desire to add emphasis to a point they are making (see, I did it just then with italics, a device I tend to overuse). How to emphasize something? You can use a word such as “really,” but that sounds sort of weak. Literally somehow manages to sound like an even stronger version of “really.” Only trouble, is, that’s not what it means at all.
…it occurs to me that Democrats are now experiencing what a lot of people on the right experienced during the primary season: the sense that they don’t know how to stop him, that he just might keep coming and coming like some sort of strangely-coiffed Energizer bunny or Terminator (depending on the pop reference you prefer).
As Trump’s poll numbers go up, the fear rises. Here’s another interesting piece on a way that Trump might have a path to victory, but there are plenty of such pieces lately. The shock is palpable, and it’s a shock those of us who preferred a different GOP candidate (and our numbers are legion) have already been through, including some of the stages of grief.
Some have reached acceptance. Some have not. I sometimes think I still may be in the “bargaining” phase. I’ve said many times I’m not a NeverTrumper, but I’m not sure how to characterize myself except to say this has been a rough year politically, and that both prospects (Hillary or Trump) fill me with despair and arouse anxiety for the future. In order to vote, I will have to quantify that despair and anxiety and decide which is a greater burden: voting for Trump and being responsible in part for what he does, or abstaining (or voting third party) and thus helping to enable the election of Hillary (I will not vote for her).
Many Democrats are now probably wishing they had a Hillary replacement. The problem was always that none seemed to surface. It’s no accident that the field was so small; there just wasn’t much new blood there. In the GOP there was plenty of new blood, but Donald Trump managed to beat it with his brand of Geritol.
A lot of people consider that nearly any time a person brings up any sort of Hitler comparison, it invalidates the argument.
Just as an example, we had a series of comments on this blog the other day that occurred in the “basket of deplorables” thread. There was a discussion of the nature of the far fringes of the alt-right (the racist, white supremacist, neo-Nazi segment) and its intentions. Commenter Matt_SE wrote:
FOAF Says:
“Is there anyone in the “alt-right” with anywhere near the prominence and stature of Al Sharpton?”
Hitler was nobody before he wasn’t.
As a relatively new movement (wiki dates the term “alt-right” to 2008), it hasn’t had time to develop infamous leaders yet. I’m not sure if Trump is deep enough in the movement to count as one of its leaders.
Then FOAF (who had made the original remark about the alt-right and Sharpton) replied with this reaction to Matt_SE’s comment:
“Hitler was nobody before he wasn’t.”
*Yawn* I was expecting that.
This appears to be sarcasm; note the “yawn.” Hitler comparisons are so cliched and overdone, right?
I’ve noticed this type of thing many times online in many venues. But if people can’t make comparison to the Nazis, or to some aspect of the Nazis (in this case, how well and how early their rise foretold their final goals), then we may as well throw history away and learn nothing from it. There’s a famous saying of George Santayana’s that those who can’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it. That’s often true (alas), as far as it goes. But I would expand the saying to add that those who can remember the past and who refuse to engage substantively with arguments that offer analogies of the past to the present may be inadvertantly condemning themselves and others to repeat it.
Note that I’m not saying Matt_SE is correct in his analogy, nor am I saying he’s incorrect. I’m not even getting into the substantive argument in this post, except to say that I think he made a possibly valid and definitely interesting point that would benefit from debate.
And FOAF, please don’t think I’m picking on you, although it may seem that way. But that yawn stands for the way many many arguments I’ve seen online and in person often go, and it’s an approach that has become accepted and common and threatens to scotch discussion of an important part of human history: how can we recognize evil when it occurs, separate out the important from the unimportant, and know how and when to respond to it? This is the opposite of a trivial question; it’s a vital one. It’s not really about Hitler, and to have the discussion it is not required that a person or a group be exactly like Hitler or even mostly like Hitler, the comparison is usually about some aspect of Hitler or the Nazis. In this case, it’s about our ability to recognize dangerousness.
I wrote a post some years ago that gets into that issue:
Our wish for the mark of Cain, or cloven hooves, or some other clear sign of evil originates in the fact that it is only by their works that we know them, and by then it can be too late…
But one of the most fundamental errors people make when judging evil is to think we understand it, when we don’t. The fact that Hitler was most definitely a human being leads us to think that if we knew enough facts about him, we could explain the etiology of his evil.
But Hitler’s evil seems to have been much more than the sum of his parts””the illegitimacy, the lousy childhood, the failed art career, the anger at Germany’s WWI defeat. Try as one might””and many have tried””Hitler’s evil can be described and detailed but never understood nor, ultimately, explained…
The other fundamental error people make when judging evil is thinking it is less evil than it actually is, and more amenable to persuasion, argument, or kindness. Because those who do evil are human, we think they are subject to the same fears and doubts, loves and anxieties, concerns and scruples, as the rest of us. Perhaps when they were children they were, although in the cases of sociopaths and psychopaths the notion is that they were born lacking something we tend to call a conscience. At any rate, by the time we know about them, something quite unusual seems to be going on in their psyches.
I think of the example of Stalin who said, on hearing that his son had tried to commit suicide but had only managed to shoot himself in the stomach and live, “He can’t even shoot straight.”
People such as Stalin or Hitler or Ahmadinejad or Saddam Hussein are about power. That is the coin of their realm, and power is their mother tongue, even though they can learn to speak secondary languages in order to give the appearance of reasonableness. Do not forget that it is a facade, and do not believe that you know them…
Shakespeare, who may have understood human nature as well as anyone on earth and could speak about it better than anyone on earth, had something to say about all of this, of course. And so I’ll close with his words:
One can smile and smile and be a villain.
[NOTE: Binging up Godwin’s law is another way in which people try to stop or to ridicule discussions that bring up Hitler or the Nazis. But Godwin’s law is widely misunderstood. It actually states, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazism or Hitler approaches 1.” The Wiki article on Godwin’s law goes on to add:
…[T]here is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress. This principle is itself frequently referred to as Godwin’s law.
Godwin’s law itself can be abused as a distraction, diversion or even as censorship, fallaciously miscasting an opponent’s argument as hyperbole when the comparisons made by the argument are actually appropriate.
That’s pretty much in line with what I’m saying in this post.]
Here’s a poignant piece about what it’s like to have a handicapped parking sticker and a bona fide disability and yet look rather normal:
Just as I closed my car door and stuck my key in the ignition, a loud thud made me jump and look at my side-view window, which now appeared to have coffee streaming down it.
“What the hell?” I muttered to myself. But before I could even begin to process what had just happened, the woman who threw the coffee cup made the situation very clear.
“Get the f*ck out of the handicapped spot, you loser!” she screamed at me. “You have legs, so use them! I watched you walk in and out of that building and you are a lazy excuse for a human being!…
The author is 32 years old, looks fine, and has an invisible illness:
You can’t see my strength wasting away from a genetic disorder (it resembles Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome), which ravages my joints and steals my muscle tone. You can’t see that there are times when my lung function hovers around 70 percent. You don’t know I’m recovering from a cardiac condition.
You also don’t know that I go to physical therapy for two hours a day, four times a week, in an effort to retain the muscle mass I have, and you can’t possibly understand what it feels like to not be able to push a shopping cart with more than a few items in it before your shoulders begin to scream in pain and beg for mercy.
From the time I was in my very early forties and for about twelve years after that I suffered from several chronic pain syndromes as a result of back and arm injuries that caused neuropathy. I’ve chronicled on this blog some of what I went through (for example, see this). It involved near-constant moderate to severe pain twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and drugs hardly touched it—although I never went the methadone route that the doctors would have prescribed for me. I was absolutely terrified of that, although at the time the drug supposedly offered the best chance of making a dent in neuropathic pain.
I moved rather stiffly and rigidly but looked basically normal, although strained and tired beyond my years, and most of the time I could walk. So you couldn’t see my problem, which was pain and some weakness. In particular I could hardly carry anything for very long. It didn’t even have to be something heavy to give me problems; carrying a piece of paper for a block could be difficult because of the way I had to position my hand and fingers. At the worst of it, brushing my teeth or lifting a cup was extremely difficult, too.
I easily could have gotten a handicapped sticker for my car. My doctors were willing to do it. But I desisted. I’m not saying that to portray myself as some sort of hero or even especially brave. I probably should have gotten one; it would have made my life and that of my family much easier. One of the reasons I didn’t get one was fear of the sort of abuse from strangers that this woman describes in her piece. But the other reason was something else—something more difficult to describe because I’m not really certain of its components, but let’s call it stubborn mulishness.
I just didn’t want to admit I needed that sticker. And anyway, I didn’t need it, because I could walk. That I was sometimes walking with tears in my eyes didn’t matter all that much because in those days I had tears in my eyes a lot. My lack of a parking sticker was a sort of game I played with myself to tell myself things weren’t all that bad, a game of denial.
I would never criticize anyone who decides differently. And the woman who wrote that article sounds as though she’s a lot worse off than I was. But I am stunned at how many people seem to think it’s a great idea to shout epithets and insults at people whose disabilities are not immediately apparent, and to call them malingerers. It’s part of a general arrogance I find to be all too common in the general population about the entire phenomenon of chronic pain.
Yes, there are fakers and frauds. I’ve even known some people I’d consider to be in those categories. But not all that many. And don’t assume for a moment than you can tell them apart from those who suffer but look relatively normal. Just be happy if you’re not in their shoes.
Here’s Nate Silver on where it stands at the moment:
Donald Trump has a 33 percent chance of winning the election according to our polls-only forecast and a 34 percent chance according to polls-plus. These roughly 1 in 3 odds are close to Trump’s highs since the party conventions.
Still not what you’d call great. He’s been there once before and fallen again, so it’s hard to say what will happen this time.
However, this time just feels different. I’m not sure why. I’ve never been the least bit sanguine about his chances of winning, but I’ve always conceded they are far from zero and will depend on a set of unpredictable circumstances. Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” remark and her health problems last weekend are two things that I think have great potential to hurt her as long as Trump doesn’t do anything too awful before November—as long as he keeps being at least semi-presidential; and in particular, as long as he can acquit himself decently during the debates.
It’s hard to imagine these debates, except to say they are likely to be very atypical, and that the candidates are likely to showcase very different approaches from each other. We can expect Trump to be free-wheeling, non-detail-focused, and insulting. We can expect Hillary to be wonky and more subdued but strident nonetheless. But will they stay true to form, or will they mix it up? Will Trump suddenly talk about the minutiae of his plans? Will Hillary come out swinging? No one knows; all bets are off.
My best guess on the effect of the weekend’s news, based on what the model shows so far, is that the race is continuing to trend moderately toward Trump, when the momentum toward him might have stalled out if not for the events of the weekend. But we can’t rule out a more acute shift toward Trump or that the “Hillary’s bad weekend” meme is a false alarm ”” there isn’t quite enough data yet.
Whether or not the race will continue to tighten is a guessing game, in other words. But my impression is that the commentariat has been slow to recognize how much the race has tightened already. It’s never a good idea to freak out over any one poll. But the trend toward Trump has been clear for a few weeks now, and it’s been just as clear in state polls as national polls. Yes, the data is noisy. Polls are all over the place in Ohio, for instance. But over the course of all of this, Trump has whittled down an 8-point lead for Clinton into about a 3-point lead instead ”” about a 5-point swing. With there having been several shifts of that magnitude since the primaries ended, with there being a large number of undecided voters, and with the debates still ahead, neither Clinton nor Trump should feel all that secure.
I have generally respected Silver’s poll analyses, with the obvious caveat that polls are polls and always imperfect. But he—unlike many other poll analysts—looks at the trends over time with a relatively clear eye. I also happen to agree with him here; what he says is that same as my gut impression.
I can’t imagine that Hillary Clinton is feeling good right now. I also can’t imagine that Donald Trump has ever felt all that bad about any of the results in the entire race, and he certainly has reason to feel especially good right now with some momentum going in his direction. Trump’s boundless self-confidence and faith in himself (also his narcissism) seem to have immunized him against that sort of doubt and anxiety, at least so far as we can tell.
This campaign season continues in the “interesting—perhaps too interesting” vein.
Each of the candidates is lucky that his/her opponent is the other one. Each is shifty and untrustworthy, although in somewhat different ways. They both have sky-high unfavorables. And they both are—shall we say—of a certain age.
Both also have running mates who could take over if necessary without so very many voters batting an eye.
That said, it is my distinct impression that whatever Trump’s actual health and Hillary’s actual health, Trump gives much more of an appearance of being hale and hearty. He has a certain vigor to his person that she lacks, even without the symptoms she’s shown now and then (her chronic cough being a good example). When Hillary is talking she certainly does have some energy, but it seems forced and strained, although that could be an emotional rather than a physical thing.
[NOTE: For the record, I’m well aware of the “Hillary has Parkinson’s” rumors and I don’t think Clinton has a serious neurological disease such as Parkinson’s. I probably will write a post on that sometime soon, explaining why I say it.]
As part of his enormous purge of the opposition in Turkey, Erdogan has now formally requested that the US turn over the man Erdogan alleges is behind the supposed coup attempt, Fethullah Gulen:
Justice Ministry officials told Anadolu the written request sent to counterparts in Washington alleged the Pennsylvania-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen “gave the orders and commanded” the violent coup that killed over 270 people. Gulen denies any involvement.
Turkish officials have been informally demanding the cleric’s arrest and extradition for weeks.
I will be very curious to see how Obama handles this one. He has mouthed some cooperative words, but so far has protected Gulen. If I had to guess, I think he won’t turn him over, and if so, it would be one of the relatively rare times Obama made the right move:
But while U.S. agency spokesmen are trying to be cautious in what they say, skepticism about Turkey’s claims that Gulen directed the plot are widespread in Washington. Last week, in comments that likely burned a few ears in Ankara, U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told The Washington Post that he did not believe Turkey had yet offered enough proof to implicate Gulen, who has lived in Pennsylvania’s Poconos region for years.
At this stage, “the rhetoric has been ratcheted so high it’s almost impossible to find a suitable compromise,” said Joshua Walker, a former State Department official now with the German Marshall Fund. “Turkey is too strategically important to lose over Gulen … However, at the same time, the U.S. can’t be seen to be short-circuiting its own legal and due process.”…
Gulen, who says his movement is moderate and dedicated to public service, has large numbers of followers in Turkey. It’s possible some of his followers were involved in the coup attempt, although it appeared to have been led by factions in Turkey’s military, which is not known as a bastion for Gulenists. But finding evidence that directly ties the putsch to the imam in Pennsylvania could be tough for the Turks. The U.S. may also consider whether Gulen will be treated fairly in the Turkish legal system, where reports are emerging of torture against alleged coup plotters. (One possibility, Schanzer noted, is that the U.S. could pressure Gulen to move to a third country.)…
Since the July 15 coup attempt, which left around 300 people dead, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been busy cracking down on alleged coup plotters and Gulen sympathizers. Tens of thousands of people, including soldiers, judges, journalists and teachers, have been arrested or pushed out of their jobs. Erdogan also declared a three-month state of emergency and suspended Turkey’s adherence to parts of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The moves have alarmed U.S. officials, including Obama, who have long been worried about Erdogan’s authoritarian tendencies.
Here’s some background (see this post in particular, as well as this and this) to where I’m at in this controversy: the summary version is that Erdogan is using the coup to solidify his own ill-gotten power. And no, he wasn’t the duly elected leader of the country (you’ll have to read the links if you don’t remember the story).
I can’t say I ever expected to be writing a post in 2016 defending Paul Tsongas. But here it is.
Tsongas was one of the very few politicians I’ve ever really liked. Here’s a post I wrote about him in 2011 that included a video I’m going to reproduce here because it displays both his unusual personality (for a politician, that is) and his politics:
No, he wasn’t perfect. And yes, as many have pointed out recently, had he won the Democratic nomination in 1992 instead of Bill Clinton and been elected president, he would not have served out his term because unfortunately he died a few days before the term would have been over, and was quite ill during it.
The context in which Tsongas’ name has come up in recent days is Hillary’s coverup of her health status, which has been compared to his. Jim Geraghty wrote a National Review article yesterday making such a comparison:
In 1992, Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas was one of the leading candidates for the Democratic nomination. He had been treated for a form of lymph-node cancer, or lymphoma, from 1983 to 1986, but when he ran in 1992, he declared himself “cured.” Tak Takvorian, Tsongas’s doctor at Harvard’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, told reporters, “I’m very confident that he’s fine.”…
In December 1992, he announced that a new growth in his abdomen was cancerous, and he underwent chemotherapy and radiation treatment. He spent a good portion of the next four years in hospitals, dealing with complications from the treatment. Had Tsongas been elected in 1992, he would not have lived to the end of his first term: He died on January 18, 1997, two days before Clinton’s second inauguration.
It’s scary to contemplate an alternative history where Tsongas won the White House, aided by doctors who misled the public about his condition.
I have to correct the record, because although Geraghty ends his piece by saying that Tsongas has been forgotten, he’s not been forgotten by me nor by many others who supported him in 1992. Nor has the story of his health problems been forgotten.
There is no question that in retrospect his health problems would have made a Tsongas presidency very difficult or perhaps impossible. However, here are the details, which indicate the complexity of what happened [emphasis mine]:
In September 1983, while serving as a freshman senator, Tsongas was diagnosed with lymphoma, a form of cancer that affects the lymph system. Citing his desire to be with his family, the young Democrat chose not to seek re-election to a second term in 1984.
Instead, he returned to Boston and underwent a then-experimental form of treatment known as “autologous bone marrow transplant.” Under the care of Drs. George Canellos and Tak Takvorian, Tsongas had marrow removed from his hip and purified. With his marrow out, he was treated with whole-body radiation in an effort to kill all the cancerous cells in his body.
Later, the marrow was reinjected, and Tsongas made an impressive recovery. As a presidential candidate, he made a point of demonstrating his good health by walking and swimming. Tsongas also he spoke at length about his illness and treatment and asked his doctors to do the same.
In an interview with The Washington Post in November 1991, Tsongas said he considered himself “cured,” because he had been cancer-free for more than five years. In separate interviews, his doctors declined to use the term “cured,” but they said Tsongas had been disease-free since he was discharged in October 1986 and that they could find no medical problems.
In the 1991 Post interview, Tsongas noted that in 1987 “they found a node in my armpit, and to this day they disagree on what it was but they pulled me in for a mass of radiation.” Some Boston news media described the node as a recurrence of cancer.
In April, 12 days after Tsongas suspended his Democratic presidential campaign, The New York Times depicted the 1987 node as a “recurrence” of Tsongas’ cancer and suggested that the candidate and his doctors had been less than fully candid.
Tsongas’ doctors said in April that it was unclear whether the node, which was treated with radiation, was a recurrence or a batch of residual malignant cells from the original case that had escaped treatment. In any case, they said he remained healthy.
Tsongas had used the word “cured,” which usually isn’t quite appropriate for cancer patients but was often used at that time if a person had survived for five years and seemed cancer-free. He explained that, his doctors explained it, and even the 1987 node was explained by Tsongas in 1991 as ambiguous (which it apparently was). People can nitpick over every detail in an arena of medicine that is not crystal clear anyway, but I would not call what Tsongas and his doctors said a coverup—in fact, there was quite a bit of disclosure.
However, Tsongas had a recurrence that was first diagnosed in August of 1992 months after he had dropped out of the race (he had dropped out in March), and it was successfully treated. There is some disagreement about how sick Tsongas was for the next few years; this article indicates he was sick enough that he probably would have had to resign the presidency had he won it, while this article indicates he continued to be active and involved:
Mr. Tsongas practiced law and, with former Senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, a Republican, helped start the Concord Coalition, a nonprofit group that focused attention on the budget deficit and other economic problems.
He also remained active in public affairs in his home state.
But all of that is irrelevant to the question of whether he was too secretive or even deceptive during the 1992 campaign about his health history. Neither he nor his doctors could not see the future, and he really had been healthy and active for many years at the time. Neither he nor they had reason to think that would not continue, and my strong recollection is that everyone knew he was more at risk of a recurrence than someone who had never had lymphoma.
In retrospect, it’s probably best that he wasn’t elected because I think he could not have withstood the rigors of the presidency. But that’s hindsight.
Geraghty’s article doesn’t mention exactly what Tsongas died from, but it was not cancer; it was a complication of treatment:
Mr. Tsongas, who was hospitalized on Jan. 3 [1997] with a liver problem related to his treatments for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a slow-growing cancer of the lymph system, and later developed pneumonia, died at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
Mr. Tsongas made his survival from cancer an issue in his Presidential campaign when he and two of his doctors, Dr. Tak Takvorian and Dr. George P. Canellos, said he had been cancer-free since a bone-marrow transplant in 1986.
In May 1996, he underwent another transplant, getting bone marrow from his twin sister, Thaleia Schlesinger, to correct myelodysplasia, a bone-marrow disorder that can occur in people who have recovered from lymph cancer.
You may think I’m nit-picking over this, but I still have enough respect for Tsongas that I don’t like to see him portrayed as a Hillary-esque liar. It is impossible to see the future, and my sense is that he and his doctors truly thought he would be healthy, and disclosed quite a bit about his illness without giving a worst-case scenario. Unfortunately, that worst-case scenario played out.
