David Brooks, the “establishment,” and “social mingling”

The New Neo Posted on by

From David Brooks’ recent NY Times column:

Trump voters are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else.

Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.

Ace is not impressed:

The current trajectory we’re on — taking a shot at the Establishment princelimgs with Trump, then getting blown out in the general and thereby confirming the alleged wisdom of the Capital Class — would be a case of assassin’s aiming at the king, but then all of their guns exploding in their own faces.

* BTW, a******, you don’t have to “socially mingle” with anybody. People do not need to “socially mingle” with other people to know what the news is. They just have to buy a newspaper…

What you a******* need to do is let your intellects occasionally wander off the well-worn paths you’ve been treading down for 60 years. You just need to read someone who disagrees with you occasionally.

These fools live in a bubble completely insulated from popular thought but then presume to tell the nation what it really thinks.

I don’t “socially mingle” with a lot of people myself—not in the flesh, anyway. And the great bulk of what social mingling I do is with liberals. The small number of people on the right I do mingle with are mostly changers like me. Most happen to not be Trump supporters; I know a few Trump supporters personally, but very few.

Nevertheless there’s a very very simple way to have learned about the anger of the right’s base at the GOP. Very simple, and it wouldn’t have required any pressing of flesh at all. I know, because I’ve done this sort of “social mingling” aplenty with the angry GOP base over a period of many many years, on this blog and others. In fact, I think it would have taken a concerted effort for me to have avoided encountering the rage of the GOP voters. If a person has spent any time at all in the right blogosphere, it would be in his/her face and undeniable.

Years ago it was suggested that the blogosphere would replace the MSM. It certainly hasn’t, but it has had a huge influence (not all of it good, by the way) on political discourse and opinion. However, the few people in the MSM I know (perhaps “know” is way too strong a word; “personally encountered” might be more appropriate) seem unaware of a lot that goes on in the blogophere and among what used to be quaintly known as “the people.” To have ignored all of this for the last few years, and especially since 2010, would have been to exist not just in a bubble, but in a hermetically sealed chamber.

I keep going back to my prediction post-election 2012 that the GOP would tear itself apart if Romney lost. I don’t keep pointing it out to show some sort of brilliant and esoteric insight on my part. I go back to it because it has come true, sure; but at the time I said it, I thought it was a gimme, something obvious to even the most casual observer of the scene. I don’t think David Brooks and company were bothering to even casually observe that scene.

The “xenophobia” of “Islamophobia”

The New Neo Posted on by

Like “Islamophobia,” the word “xenophobia” is a way to pathologize a logical reaction to a phenomenon and give it a label that makes it appear to be irrational and emotion-based.

This whole really loooong article manages to do it in a condescending, distant tone that never once tries to deal with the question of whether the phenomenon it tries to label xenophobia is based on anything that would make it a valid response, or anything other than the vague term “phobia.”

Phobias are by definition irrational and overblown:

A phobia is a type of anxiety disorder, usually defined as a persistent fear of an object or situation in which the sufferer commits to great lengths in avoiding, typically disproportional to the actual danger posed, often being recognized as irrational.

Xenophobia indicates a general fear of what is foreign or strange, but it’s really being used here to describe a specific kind of fear of a particular kind of stranger—the kind who has vowed to either kill us or convert us and take over our culture and replace it with theirs. The culture the same people are trying, in a sort of reverse colonialism, to impose on us is not only opposed to many of our deeply-held beliefs and values, but it is intolerant of tolerance itself—except for the tolerance that is extended by the west towards it.

This “xenophobia” is not a turning away from all the practitioners of the religion as a whole. It’s merely a recognition of several things at once: (a) a significant proportion of Muslims are intolerant of the West and its values, its religions, and its tolerance (b) that group is not necessarily the majority, but it is nevertheless a very large group (3) that group is especially activist and willing to use violence as well as to lie (4) much of that group has vowed to infiltrate us through the process of immigration in order to ultimately dominate and convert us, and (5) our leaders don’t seem to be able to either see this or stop it.

That’s no phobia. That’s the reality Europe and America in the Obama years (and even before) has been facing. Calling it a phobia purposely denies that reality.

Trump: losing their religion

The New Neo Posted on by

I can’t remember any campaign in my lifetime in which any candidate has questioned another candidate’s religious sincerity.

I’m old enough to remember that JFK’s Catholicism was an issue for some people, but Nixon certainly never mentioned it. Same of Romney in 2012; some weren’t comfortable voting for a Mormon, but I don’t recall a candidate talking about it. And no one questioned JFK’s or Romney’s sincerity about their faiths; they questioned whether someone of that religion ought be president.

But in this campaign it’s been different, as have so many things.

Initially, though, it was Ben Carson who wondered about Trump’s faith and whether Trump’s adherence to it was bona fide, based on Trump’s lack of humility:

“By humility and the fear of the Lord are riches and honor and life and that’s a very big part of who I am. I don’t get that impression with him,” Carson said of Trump. “Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t get that.”

Trump said this in reply:

I never heard faith was a big thing ”¦ until [Carson] started running, I don’t know about Ben Carson’s faith, all of a sudden he becomes this great religious figure, I don’t think he’s a great religious figure. You look at his faith and I think you’re not going to find so much ”¦ who is he to question my faith when I am, he doesn’t even know me.

And then Carson quickly apologized for what he’d said:

“I think I did slip, and that’s why I apologized,” Carson said on Fox News’ “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren.” “There is no reason ever to question anybody’s faith. That’s something between them and God.”

However, about a month later, Trump said this about Carson’s Seventh Day Adventist faith:

I’m Presbyterian. Boy, that’s down the middle of the road, folks, in all fairness. I mean, Seventh-day Adventist, I don’t know about. I just don’t know about.

This time it was a criticism more akin to the traditional doubts that someone of a certain faith should be president (although those doubts were never expressed directly by a previous candidate, as far as I know), rather than questioning the person’s sincerity within the faith. Here Trump is insinuating that Seventh Day Adventists are a bit wacky and out of the mainstream, as opposed to Trump’s own Presbyterian affiliation (sincere or insincere). Trump never apologized, claiming he hadn’t said anything bad about Carson’s faith, just that he didn’t know about it.

Carson only did this faith-questioning business once. Since the Carson/Trump exchange on the subject, Trump has made a regular habit of it, despite his “who is Carson to question my faith?” statement about Carson. For example, back in December Trump questioned Ted Cruz’s faith
:

With Ted Cruz surging in Iowa and some national polls, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump took a jab at the Texas Senator’s faith, saying, “not a lot of Evangelicals come out of Cuba.”

That seems to be a dig about Cruz’s sincerity within his faith—although, as with many Trump statements, it’s hard to tell because it’s obscure and odd enough that he can issue a disclaimer about what he meant. It’s also a twofer, because Trump seems to be combining that criticism with some of his usual birther stuff about Cruz—who did not actually “come out of Cuba,” because Cruz has a Cuban-born (evangelical) father and an American mother, and Cruz was born in Canada. (“Cruz” means “cross” in Spanish, by the way, for what that’s worth, and Cruz’s paternal grandfather was from Spain.)

In February, Trump questioned Ted Cruz’s faith again (as well as his veracity) even more directly and clearly:

“How can Ted Cruz be an Evangelical Christian when he lies so much and is so dishonest?” he tweeted.

Then yesterday, when Mitt Romney said that he would be supporting Ted Cruz in Utah, Trump turned to one of his favorite accusative ploys:

“Do I love the Mormons? I have many friends that live in Salt Lake City — and by the way, Mitt Romney is not one of them,” Trump said to applause. “Are you sure he’s a Mormon? Are we sure?”

So, some of his best friends are Mormons. Love those Mormons. Hate Mitt. He’s not a Mormon, maybe.

Trump supporters ordinarily shrug this sort of thing off (“Trump just being Trump”). Or they praise it: so clever, so strategic, so smart and ballsy and funny to diss Romney’s religious commitment when Trump’s making a speech in Salt Lake City, of all places.

It matters not that Romney’s membership in the Mormon church and his activity and service as a Mormon elder is beyond question (see also this). This is one of Trump’s accusations/jokes/insinuations that has no substance at all—purely strategic, purely imaginary. It is Orwellian, the opposite of the truth.

But if Trump thinks it will work against someone who criticizes him and backs a rival, he does it, and his supporters applaud no matter how low the blow. How low can he go? I think there’s no bottom.

Crows perceive death

The New Neo Posted on by

Crows are very smart birds, although they’ve long been thought to be harbingers of bad news:

A crow’s brain is the size of a human thumb, huge relative to its body, putting their intelligence on par with primates and allowing them to solve complex problems. The PBS series “Nature” showed an experiment where a crow figured out how to use a small stick to retrieve a larger stick and then use that to retrieve a piece of food that was well out of reach.

Marzluff and his team conduct research with masks, wearing them on campus and recording what kind of sounds the crows make. They discovered crows recognize and remember individual faces. By sedating the birds and putting them through a PET scan, they found different areas of a crow’s brain light up when they see a person they perceive as friendly or threatening.

“They recognize individual people that are important to them and when somebody does something dangerous, they mark that person, remember that person, as far as I can tell, for their life,” Marzluff said.

Now researchers have learned something else about the brains of crows:

Using masks that look creepily human, researchers showed up at Seattle parks carrying a stuffed crow.

They recorded the reactions. It takes one crow to signal an alarm, and then dozens show up. They all surround the dead crow, looking at it as they perch on trees or fly above it, a behavior called mobbing.

‘Crows have evolved to have these complex social relationships, and they have a big brain,’ said Kaeli Swift, a University of Washington graduate student who led the study.

How big of a brain? Crows are on par with smart mammals, like dolphins and primates, in brain-to-body proportion…

In another part of the experiment, using slightly radioactive tracers, researchers measured the brain activity of crows after they were shown a dead bird.

The scans showed the section of the hippocampus ”” the part involved in memory formation ”” light up at the sight of death.

‘In that particular situation at least, that crow was learning about a place, or a face, or a situation and associated it with that dead crow,’ said John Marzluff, the lead researcher.

It’s not at all clear that crows have any concept of death even remotely akin to that of humans. But they certainly seem to notice and remember something about death—as they notice and remember a tremendous number of other things.

Does this change your attitude towards crows?

Why it made sense for the GOP Senate NOT to change the filibuster rule

The New Neo Posted on by

The GOP won control of the Senate in the 2014 election. This meant that the party controlled both houses of Congress for the first time since the earlier years of the Bush administration, when they also had the presidency. But in neither case did they control the Senate with a majority large enough (over 60) to be able to stop the minority party from blocking legislation by voting against cloture. And of course in 2014 the Republican Senate also had to deal with a left-leaning Democratic president determined to thwart them.

One of the many things that hamstrung the effectiveness of the majority-GOP Senate since January of 2015, despite their gaining control in the 2014 election, was the filibuster/cloture rule. Some people who are angry at the GOP for not doing more don’t even take into account the problem of filibuster/cloture, or the veto. But others are well aware of the rule and are very angry at the GOP establishment because of their reluctance to change that rule. They could do it; they chose not to.

I also have been very frustrated by this state of affairs. But although I go back and forth on the issue, I’m not at all sure that ending the filibuster/cloture rule would have been a good move, and I certainly can see why a Republican senator might decide in good faith not to go that route. As long as the GOP didn’t have the presidency, all that ending the filibuster/cloture rule would mean would have been sending a lot of bills to Obama’s desk that he would then veto.

The argument, however, is that this would have been worth it, just to show good intent by the GOP and to show how determined Obama was to block anything the GOP did. It seems to me, however, that most voters wouldn’t have been paying all that much attention, and Obama’s supporters (and the MSM) would have spun it as GOP refusal to compromise. In addition, even those who advocate doing it anyway often seem to ignore the fact that it would have meant that if the Republicans were to lose the Senate in the next election, and to lose the presidency as well (two things that could easily happen), then the filibuster would be gone and it would have been the Republicans who had taken it away from themselves. Of course, the Democrats could do it themselves, but in this case the Republicans couldn’t even blame the Democrats for their own loss of power to block the Democrats in the Senate from doing whatever a simple majority wanted to do.

What a laugh that situation would be for the Democrats! And no doubt if that were to happen, the “trash the GOP establishment” crowd would criticize the GOP members of the Senate for it, too, without thinking it through. And all to gain what? A bunch of bills from January 2015 to January 2017 that Obama would have immediately vetoed, saying (with the support of the MSM) that Republicans were just wasting his time rather than doing something productive?

Let me reiterate that I’m not even a Republican, and have no particular interest in kneejerk defense of the Republican Party in the Senate or anywhere else. And sometimes I think they should have done away with the filibuster/cloture rule anyway. But certainly one needn’t posit horrible motives on the part of the more moderate GOP members of the Senate in order to understand why they might have acted as they did. There are very reasonable arguments for it.

Trump’s been running for president for a long long time

The New Neo Posted on by

I’d like to take up the following comment from “junior”:

Obama’s rise to power was already predicted in at least some circles well before he announced his candidacy. Supposedly, even as early as his assumption of his US Senate seat, some people were already introducing him as a future president of the US…

Trump, for all we know, might very well have flipped a coin when he decided to run (it’s doubtful, but possible). There was little to indicate that he was planning on running. No one expected him to run prior to the start of the primary season. And the result was that he almost overnight went from “uninvolved” to “party front-runner”.

It occurs to me that a lot of people may be unaware that Trump’s been circling and circling around a presidential run for a very long time. In fact, in that regard he’s practically a second Harold Stassen, and with about as much success as Stassen—till this year’s race, that is. His success at the moment is rather easy to explain, I think: he is the person who this year expresses perfectly the rage of a large percentage of GOP voters who feel angry at the party and at Obama, and he also happens to be the beneficiary of one of the largest and deepest fields in recent GOP history. If that last part sounds paradoxical, so be it. But just imagine if Trump had only had one strong opponent from the start. We’ll never know, but he might not have done this well—or rather, his 30-40 or so percent could have been matched by that other person’s 60-70 percent in such a case. But with the field divided into many small segments it helped him to capture the lion’s share of the anti-GOP protest vote compared to the others.

Trump’s success also rests to a huge extent on his being able to seize on a single issue—illegal immigration—and speak about it in a way that an angry electorate felt was channeling their own outrage and concern (I have discussed the evolution of how this came to seem to be his biggest issue). And the previous success of his reality show had made him more of a celebrity than ever, a person people are used to seeing in the role of the take-charge boss.

So it’s not hard to explain his success. But what about this statement by junior?: “There was little to indicate that [Trump] was planning on running. No one expected him to run prior to the start of the primary season.”

In fact, there was everything to indicate it, and everyone should have expected it. What they didn’t expect was that he’d do so well. But run? He’s been doing that for decades, or at least talking about it. The timeline begins in the late 80s with serious talk by Trump of a presidential run, then an actual albeit short-lived run in the year 2000 as a third-party candidate, and a discussion about a possible run in 2004, and another attempt in 2011 for the 2012 election.

If you’re interested in learning more about Trump’s 2000 run—where he was allied with party of Jesse Ventura and Ross Perot, see this:

Trump’s entrance into the Reform Party race coincided with that of paleoconservative commentator Pat Buchanan, whom Trump attacked throughout the campaign as a “Hitler-lover.”

Trump focused his campaign on the issues of fair trade, eliminating the national debt, and achieving universal healthcare as outlined in the campaign companion piece The America We Deserve, released in January 2000. He named media proprietor Oprah Winfrey as his ideal running mate and said he would instantly marry his girlfriend Melania Knauss to make her First Lady.

In 2011 Trump’s talk of running for president became serious again:

March 2011: A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows Trump leading all presidential contenders, including Mitt Romney.

April 2011: Amid more research polls indicating that he would be the preferred Republican presidential candidate among voters, Trump repeatedly calls for President Obama to release his long-form birth certificate, questioning whether Obama was actually born in the United States. (Obama eventually complies and releases the birth certificate.)

May 2011: Trump officially announces that he will not run for president.

In addition to all of that history, Trump had also been talking about running in the 2016 presidential election for quite some time:

2013: Trump forms a presidential exploratory committee and, despite a strong backing from Republican voters, announces that he has no interest in running for governor of New York in 2014.

February 2015: Trump decides not to renew his Apprentice contract, fueling speculation that he’s mulling a run for president.

His formal announcement came in June.

It may have seemed as though this came out of the blue, but it most assuredly did not.

Terrorist behind Paris attacks is captured alive

The New Neo Posted on by

In Belgium, naturally, in the Brussels district known as Molenbeek:

Salah Abdeslam was shot in the leg by police commandos following a four-month international manhunt and has been arrested in the district of Molenbeek in the Belgian capital.

The country’s minister for asylum and migration, Theo Francken, confirmed the capture this afternoon announcing: ‘We got him’…

Abdeslam was wounded, and then retreated into a house in Molenbeek with two men. At least one of the other men is wounded, and one may be dead, said the source.

It is thought that Abdeslam suffered a ‘flesh wound’ after escaping Tuesday’s raid before retreating to Molenbeek, where he was born and brought up.

[NOTE: Here’s a previous piece of mine about Molenbeek.]

How’s the blog speed for you?

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s pretty good for me right now.

Of course, I don’t want to jinx the blog by saying that. But it’s pretty much back to normal for me—for now.

Let me know if things get bad again. I don’t really know what happened to cause the slowdown or to reverse it, but the problem seemed to coincide with a massive spam influx, to the tune of at least a thousand a day and probably more.

However, one longtime commenter is reporting the new comments are not showing up for him, no matter what browser he uses. He says that the post indicates the number of comments, but when he tries to look at them they don’t appear. Anyone else having that problem?

Lindsay Graham and Rubio speak up for Cruz

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s rather a “pigs fly” moment:

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham has thrown his support to Ted Cruz, calling him “the best alternative” to Donald Trump.

According to an invitation obtained by POLITICO, Graham will headline a fundraiser for Cruz on Monday.

This marks the second senator to publicly support Cruz, and is a significant development: Graham, a more centrist South Carolina senator, until recently openly detested his colleague from Texas. But in recent weeks he has suggested that Cruz stands the best chance of beating Donald Trump.

Now I realize a number of things. The first is that Trump supporters will almost certainly say that this proves that Cruz is some sort of RINO and “establishment” guy, because Graham is a RINO and an establishment guy. Well, Cruz is definitely no RINO and the establishment (and Graham) has until recently detested him. Until recently, they also had an alternative candidate more in line with their point of view, who had a chance of winning (Rubio). But now that only Kasich is left and Kasich has no chance of the nomination, it makes perfect sense for someone like Graham to throw his support to the conservative anti-Trump left standing, the formerly hated and maligned Ted Cruz Who Is Not a RINO.

Previously, anti-Cruz pundits and commenters have been pleased to point out that Cruz has little overt support from his fellow-senators. Now that he’s getting at least a little support, no doubt they’ll say that it means he’s in too tight with them and will be their puppet.

As far as hypocrisy goes—yes, politics makes strange bedfellows. But I see this Graham endorsement as qualitatively different than Carson’s of Trump. Carson had various alternatives from which to choose: Trump, Cruz, Kasich, or Rubio. He chose Trump from that entire field despite the fact that Trump had questioned his religion and called him pathological and something like a child molester in the recalcitrance of his pathology. Cruz would have been the natural alternative for Carson, and Cruz is still very much in the game, but Carson seems to hold the behavior of Cruz’s people in Iowa against Cruz more than he holds the behavior of Trump himself against him (plus Trump seems to have promised Carson something).

Marco Rubio hasn’t made a formal endorsement of Cruz, but has pretty much come out with an informal one:

Former presidential candidate Marco Rubio told a group of Minnesota supporters Wednesday he is hoping one of the remaining candidates for president will stop Donald Trump from winning the Republican nomination ”” and that Texas Sen. Ted Cruz could be the best option for conservatives…

He said he saw no real path forward for his campaign after losing Florida and its 99 winner-take-all delegates. He acknowledged he could have stayed in the race with the intention of seeking the nomination at the convention, but said he would have had to run a shoestring campaign with no money to defend himself on the airwaves. Even if he had won the nomination against the odds, Rubio said, the victory could prove pyrrhic.

“Winning a general election with a nominee that a significant percentage of the base thinks stole it, even though you did it through the rules of the RNC, would be pretty much fatal for the party,” Rubio said, though he added that many Republicans will not vote for Trump, either.

As I’ve said many times before, Rubio should have dropped out after March 1. I believe I understand why he didn’t, but I am firmly of the opinion that it was the wrong, wrong, wrong decision. I also wonder whether Cruz has promised Rubio something. I don’t think so, but it’s certainly possible.

Will any of this matter? We’ve got Arizona and Utah coming up, then Wisconsin, New York, Connecticut, Delaware…well, see for yourself. It will be especially interesting to see what happens in the first couple of states that vote post-Rubio-dropout. I make no predictions on that.

But I do have a caveat. I find it extremely annoying when people take the results of a GOP primary and extrapolate them to the general election in a state that doesn’t ordinarily vote GOP. For example, Kasich winning Ohio in the GOP primary does not tell you how Kasich would fare in the state in a general against Hillary Clinton, although it certainly tells you something about the strength of his support among people who voted in the Republican primary (for example, although he won he didn’t even get a majority of them). Likewise, whoever wins the GOP primary in a state like NY, which tends to go strongly blue in the general, doesn’t indicate that that person will win New York, whoever it may be.

This is true for all the states unless there’s a situation as in Wyoming, a Republican state where Cruz won the primary with a huge majority. I think we can safely say that Wyoming would go for Cruz in a general. But Wyoming would probably go for any Republican in a general.

The world is shifting to the right—or what’s called the right

The New Neo Posted on by

Since this is from Vox, take it with a grain of salt and ignore the message about the “xenophobia” of the right. It nevertheless says something I’ve noticed, which is that candidates of the so-called “right” or even so-called “far right” are gaining support all over Europe. The rise of Donald Trump (who I happen to think is more on the left than the right, except for his anti-illegal-immigrant position) is part of this movement—just as there was a movement to a very different and actual conservatism in the 80s with Reagan and Thatcher in charge, or for that matter to fascism during the 1930s.

Movements that transcend a single nation usually occur because the same or at least similar forces are working on all the countries involved. In this case we don’t have to look at all far for the answer: the dreadful record of so many Western and especially Western European countries in recognizing the cultural and demographic threat that too much immigration (illegal or even at times legal) can pose, and the unwillingness of recent leaders to defend or even listen to those who are alarmed by it.

Instead, those people crying out against illegal immigration and for the defense of their own borders and cultural traditions have been demonized. So they have become angry both at the authorities’ policies and at the nature of the criticism those authorities and the MSM have directed their way.

Here’s what Vox says about the situation in Europe:

Far-right parties like AfD are growing throughout Europe.

Der Spiegel has a nice map on this, showing the countries where far-right parties have a presence in parliament (yellow dots) or are actually part of the government (red dots). It turns out the xenophobic far right has surged in countries as diverse as Sweden, the UK, the Netherlands, and Hungary:

rightparties

These parties have, in most cases, ridden the European refugee and migrant crisis to power. While Europeans have for some time been skeptical of migration, the huge surge in migrants last year has dramatically inflamed these sentiments ”” leading to a rise in the far right’s poll numbers. Italy’s Northern League, for example, is polling at four times what it was in 2013.

I predict that if those in charge remain largely unresponsive, this movement will grow and become more angry and more willing and even eager to use violence and/or tyranny to get its way.

[NOTE: I’m not for Trump at all, but that’s not because I disagree with most of his immigration stance. In fact, I agree with most of it and I have from the start (and long before Trump), and I think the candidate I prefer (Cruz) agrees with the gist of it too.]

Obama nominates Merrick Garland to SCOTUS

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s William Jacobson on the subject of Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland. It’s a canny move by Obama, and an expected one—to nominate a “moderate” and to dare the GOP to oppose him.

How the GOP reacts depends on their bet about the 2016 election: will it be Trump vs. Hillary or Cruz vs. Hillary, and who is likely to win in the general? If Clinton is the most likely 2016 president, she would no doubt appoint someone worse than Garland, probably much worse. And yet if GOP approves Garland and a Republican wins the election, they will be hated even more than they are now, if such a thing be possible.

What’s more, if they wait till after the 2016 election and try to squeeze in a Garland approval before the inauguration if Clinton wins the election, the Democrats will filibuster the approval.

Remember, also, the general rule that most moderate justices seem to become more liberal in office over time. So even a moderate often ends up not so moderate after a while, sometimes rather a short while.

Talk about dilemmas. And an awful lot is riding on this.

Do I blog to persuade?

The New Neo Posted on by

Earlier today on a thread about Trump, a commenter asked me how many people I thought I had persuaded to change their minds.

Now, that’s an interesting question, whether the commenter meant it as a taunt or not. Maybe the assumption is that for a person to spend all this time and effort writing posts on a blog that person must be assuming some ability to change people’s minds in the direction of supporting the blogger’s own opinions.

To have that ability and to exercise it would be very very nice indeed. But remember that this blog was started as a discussion about political change and how very very difficult it is to change one’s mind about anything, particularly politics. Although it happens, it’s unusual and ordinarily the result of a complex set of circumstances with multiple and sometimes very personal determinants.

So although an “Aha!” moment for my disagreeing readers as a result of reading one of my incredible post would be great, I think of it as exceedingly rare if it happens at all. That doesn’t mean I’m not trying to be persuasive when I write. I am (trying, that is), but whether I succeed or not I expect that very very few people who initially disagree with me will actually be persuaded to agree with me.

So, why on earth do I blog? Well, I gave some answers here. My response then was pretty much the same as my response would be now:

…[I had wanted] to get a bunch of interested people together regularly for some scintillating conversation, a sort of salon…

The moment I read my very first [blog] I realized I was onto something. Not all blogs, of course; maybe not even most of them. But here, here were my peeps! Here were a bunch of weirdos (sorry folks; I include myself) who liked to jaw-jaw at length about the very sorts of topics I had long been yearning to talk about. What fun!

Right now it’s not as much fun as it would be if I were foreseeing the prospect of a conservative victory in 2016. Right now it’s not as much fun as it is when I’m not dealing with a huge technical glitch that’s causing slow loading, a lot of wasted time, and much blog-posting frustration. But it’s still fun, and those same things still drive me: to talk at length with other interested people about things I find fascinating and worth talking about.