Steve King’s crime, Steve King’s punishment, Steve King’s explanation

The New Neo Posted on by

You may have already heard about the punishment meted out yesterday by Republicans to Representative Steve King of Iowa:

House GOP leaders moved Monday to remove Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) from all of his committee assignments following a firestorm over remarks considered racist.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told reporters after a meeting of the Republican Steering Committee that King would not receive any committee assignments for the new Congress.

The move by GOP leaders severely hamstrings King’s ability to wield influence as a member of Congress.

And you may have also heard about the alleged crime, occurring in an interview King gave with the NY Times. Here’s the quote from Steve King that the paper reported (and note the punctuation, in particular the placement of the dash):

“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”

Your reaction to that quote depends, of course, on whether you think that’s a permissible question to ask. In this day and age, it apparently isn’t. Your reaction also depends on whether you think the terms “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” are beyond the pale, so obviously racist and so obviously offensive that the question becomes an inherently offensive one.

Let’s just stipulate that “white nationalists” and “white supremacists” are in fact racists, and that asking the question—if that is what King was actually doing—implies that the questioner is insufficiently aware of the racist nature of such people.

However, is that actually what King was saying? Here is King’s explanation:

Mr. King remained defiant after losing his committee seats, releasing a long statement insisting that his comments in the Times article had been misunderstood. He said he had been referring only to “western civilization” when he asked “how did that language become offensive,” not “white nationalist” or “white supremacist.”

That’s a big difference, isn’t it? It all depends on the pause, and what the word “that” (in “how did that language…”) was meant to refer to.

And what of that “long statement” of King’s that the Times references? I can’t find anywhere they published the text, although perhaps I missed it. But here it is, and it’s not really all that long, either:

I have no way of knowing what King really meant by the controversial words. But I find his explanation quite plausible.

I’ll say one thing, though—if I were a Republican politician, I would make exceedingly sure I didn’t use any ambiguous words. No third-person pronouns if I could help it, for example; I’d repeat the name of the person I was talking about rather than say “he” or “she.” No words such as “that”—words that can mean any number of things. For example, if I were to utter King’s question, I’d be repeating the phrase “Western civilization,” as in “How and when did the term Western civilization become offensive?”

I’d make everything crystal clear, in other words (literally, in other words). Which is of course impossible, arduous, and not required of those on the left; only of those on the right. You can be sure that the Times is looking for slipups on the right, and hoping and trusting they will get them or can create them.

The Times chooses the punctuation, after all, in a spoken statement. What if the paper had quoted King as having said this, with the dash in a different place, and a bit more context (from King’s letter)?:

“White nationalist,” “white supremacist,”—“Western civilization,” how did that language become offensive? Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?…just to watch Western Civilization become a derogatory term in political discourse today.

The Times wouldn’t have done it that way, of course; what the paper did was no accident. But even if it had been published this alternate way, it probably still would have caused a brouhaha, too, since lately it seems that we’re not allowed to even suggest that Western civilization is a thing of which to be proud.

But at least it would have been better than sounding as though King was questioning what was offensive about white supremacy. Would this second version have ignited the same firestorm as the first? Perhaps, but perhaps not as intensely.

Understandably, the GOP wants to distance itself from even the hint of approving of white supremacy. Unfortunately, the left’s campaign to label the GOP as giving that approval has gotten very far in recent years, and I think the GOP is losing the battle and actions such as the ostracism of King won’t change things.

I can understand why the GOP is running from King, but I also believe the entire thing is a NY Times setup. King was foolish to have give an interview to the Times at all.

I’m not really familiar with King and his previous record, but a great many newspapers and pundits are alleging that this is really just the latest in a long line of racist comments he’s made. My guess is that the GOP has long considered him an embarrassing albatross who can’t keep his mouth shut.

Let’s take a look at some of King’s previous comments. But first we have this:

While defending his remarks in the past, the Iowa Republican has claimed he is regularly misquoted and that he doesn’t trust most media outlets.

That’s what I mean—then why, oh why, is he giving interviews to the NY Times?

Back to those previous remarks of King’s. I’m not going to go through them one by one, but on reading them I can see why, in this PC age, the GOP has been eager to wash its hands of him. A few of the listed remarks do seem to border on the racist, such as this tweet of his:

Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.

There are two thoughts there. The first is about culture and Western civilization, which King has defended in the past (and which he also defends in the remarks that got him into trouble yesterday). I agree that Western Civilization—which has indeed become a dirty word—is something well worth defending and preserving. It has flaws, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a remarkable achievement. The left disagrees, and has been teaching children quite the opposite for some time, to the point that most people probably consider this a verboten topic.

However, King doesn’t stop there in that tweet. He adds “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” This suggests that there is something genetic in culture, and that non-white and/or non-Western people who come to Western cultures cannot be assimilated into Western values. I submit that King is wrong. They can indeed be assimilated, and we used to realize that this was the most important activity of all in preserving Western culture: to defend it and teach it properly. We used to do that, for the most part.

That’s what we’ve failed to do in recent years. Au contraire—we not only fail to defend and teach it to newcomers of other races, but we regularly teach all of our children—white, black, whatever color or national origin, or the children of people who came here hundreds of years ago—to despise it and be ashamed of it and to distance themselves from it.

That is the problem. It’s been going on for much of my lifetime, which is a long time, and it’s reached new heights (or depths) in the last couple of decades.

[NOTE: It’s also the case, of course, that the more people who come here at once from cultures that are antithetical to Western culture, the more difficult is the task of assimilation. But if we were still committed to assimilation as a goal, and to the preservation and defense of Western culture and its very positive values such as liberty, assimilation could be accomplished. Education is the key, but education has been taken over by the anti-Western left.]

Something’s going on in Europe

The New Neo Posted on by

Actually, a great many things are going on in Europe, but I’m referring to one particular thing that I’m going to call Trump-envy.

Brexit was part of it. I think that the yellow vests of France are at least somewhat connected with it:

Back in 2014, geographer Christopher Guilluy’s study of la France périphérique (peripheral France) caused a media sensation. It drew attention to the economic, cultural and political exclusion of the working classes, most of whom now live outside the major cities. It highlighted the conditions that would later give rise to the yellow-vest phenomenon…

[Guilluy]: Technically, our globalised economic model performs well. It produces a lot of wealth. But it doesn’t need the majority of the population to function. It has no real need for the manual workers, labourers and even small-business owners outside of the big cities. Paris creates enough wealth for the whole of France, and London does the same in Britain. But you cannot build a society around this. The gilets jaunes is a revolt of the working classes who live in these places…

What they all have in common is that they live in areas where there is hardly any work left. They know that even if they have a job today, they could lose it tomorrow and they won’t find anything else…

The cities themselves have become very unequal, too. The Parisian economy needs executives and qualified professionals. It also needs workers, predominantly immigrants, for the construction industry and catering et cetera. Business relies on this very specific demographic mix. The problem is that ‘the people’ outside of this still exist. In fact, ‘Peripheral France’ actually encompasses the majority of French people.

That urban combination of executives, professionals, and immigrants or others in the construction or service industries (plus the urban non-working poor) constitutes much of the liberal vote in the US. The second (peripheral) group contains many of the people who in this country voted for Trump. That’s an immense simplification and not entirely accurate, but it’s a summary that I think contains some general truth.

Here’s a related article about what’s going on in Europe:

…[W]hile the Western European political class and its allies love to sneer at Donald Trump, millions of ordinary citizens across the continent wish dearly that they had a Trump of their own.

Only last week, for example, a caller to Nigel Farage’s radio show in Britain expressed the desire that Trump, and not Theresa May, had negotiated Britain’s exit deal with the EU. Farage shared her sentiments. Then there’s the up-and-coming Dutch political leader Lennard van Mil, known in his country as a “gayservative” (short for “gay conservative”), who can be seen in many photographs online wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap.

Trump’s allure is potent even in Scandinavia. In November 2016, on the day before the election in the U.S., the Norwegian alternative-news website Document.no ran a piece by Magne Reigstad headlined “Why We Need a Trump.” Reigstad spelled out the reasons. America isn’t the only Western country in which too much power accrues to self-seeking bureaucrats and lobbyists who don’t give a damn what ordinary citizens think or want or need. America’s not alone in being run by politicians who, preoccupied with short-term personal gains and political prospects at the expense of the long-term national interest, pursue disastrous policies that threaten to bring down Western civilization. And America isn’t the only country whose mainstream news media spread “fake news” about all the above, whitewashing dangerous alien cultures while showing insufficient concern for our own.

How far this will go in Europe, and what the ultimate result will be, I do not know.

The real problem with voting funds for the Wall

The New Neo Posted on by

Good point here:

The conservative consensus is that Democrats don’t want to fund President Trump’s wall because they hate him. Well, yes, Democrats do indeed hate President Trump, and yes, it’s a deep-seated hatred, a visceral, soul-rotting hatred, but that’s not the real reason they won’t fund the wall.

The biggest reason Democrats won’t even partially fund the wall is their absolute certainty that given the money, the president will actually build the thing.

President Trump’s not some out-of-the-loop politician who can be outmaneuvered by a Deep State whose embedded bureaucrats will tell him everything’s going swimmingly while they sabotage the project with cost overruns and endless delays. No, the president will know how much it should and will cost, how long it should and will take, and how to overcome government roadblocks. This is his wheelhouse. He’s done it his whole adult life.

And, since the wall is his signature issue, his personal passion, President Trump’s going to be all over the construction.

I think this is definitely the case.

Some more good points from a different article:

This would also be a good time for the administration to get its communications act together and correct several fallacies the opposition media have ingrained into the public’s consciousness – fallacies like that the wall is an exorbitant expense, when in reality it will save far more through reduced costs associated with illegal immigration, which currently costs the nation well over $150B each and every year. Heck, it will save money on the reduced need for border patrol personnel alone. Then there is the fallacy that a 2,000-mile border barrier is some major engineering challenge, when the U.S. has built over 46,000 miles of interstate highways, each mile of which required more complex engineering than setting a steel-bollard wall. And there is the self-obvious fallacy that agenda-driven politicians, open-borders advocates, and opposition media pundits know more about how to secure the border than border patrol agents who overwhelmingly are calling for a physical barrier.

Trump’s language, Trump’s thought

The New Neo Posted on by

John McWhorter has written an article for the Atlantic entitled: “Trump’s Typos Reveal His Lack of Fitness for the Presidency: They suggest not just inadequate manners or polish, but inadequate thought.”

Oh, really?

The conviction that grammar and/or spelling errors reflect deficits in thinking is something I’ve read before, usually stated by people who are in the business of writing and proud of it. McWhorter himself is full of expertise on that subject, and has much about which to be proud:

[He] is an American academic and linguist who is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he teaches linguistics, American studies, philosophy, and music history. He is the author of a number of books on language and on race relations. His research specializes on how creole languages form, and how language grammars change as the result of sociohistorical phenomena.

McWhorter writes:

The president of the United States has many faults, but let’s not ignore this one: He cannot write sentences. If a tree falls in a forrest and no one is there to hear it … wait: Pretty much all of you noticed that mistake, right? Yet Wednesday morning, the president did not; he released a tweet referring to “forrest fires” twice, as if these fires were set by Mr. Gump.

But that example McWhorter gives of Trump’s inability to write sentences is nothing of the sort. It’s a spelling error. And, not to get too nitpicky about it (oh, let’s), but someone who actually wanted to express the thought that forest fires were set by Forrest Gump would be capitalizing the word, as in “Forrest fires.”

McWhorter continues:

Trump’s serial misuse of public language is one of many shortcomings that betray his lack of fitness for the presidency.

McWhorter goes on to cite examples of Trump’s supposed “misuse” (whatever that means in this context) of “public language,” a misuse that goes beyond spelling errors into other areas of written and verbal expression. McWhorter contends these are examples of lack of fitness for the presidency. They typically seem to be instances in which Trump uses simple words and/or repetitive phrases to express thoughts that McWhorter would prefer were explained in more complex ways. Here’s an example [emphasis mine]:

For example, Trump is given to talking about “doing” things when most would choose a more specific verb. Last summer, Trump bragged of having told Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May “how to do Brexit.” “Do” it? Like “doing” Cats, or shots? Mere do does rather gracelessly drag the statement down to the cold, hard pavement. Trump also hopes he can “do” a wall in Mexico: “That’s 13,000 miles,” he said. “Here, we actually need 1,000 because we have natural barriers. So we need 1,000. We can do a wall. We’re going to have a big, fat, beautiful door right in the middle of the wall.”

Trump’s love of “doing” might indicate his professed expertise in deal making. One does—colloquially, at least—“do” a deal, and Trump supposes that Brexit and the border wall will result from “dealing.” But this very assumption reflects an inability to grapple with the complexities of state matters. He simply cannot accept—cannot grasp—that international diplomacy could possibly require more subtlety than a real-estate transaction. His phrasing suggests someone taking in nothing from the urgent happenings around him, someone refusing to read his briefs or anything else.

In that passage, how does McWhorter comes to the conclusion I bolded? It’s quite a leap, and a completely unproven—and IMHO unjustified—one. All from the use of the word “do”? I would guess that McWhorter, for all his word-expertise, knows very little about both large real estate deals and “the complexities of state matters,” as well as the mind of Donald Trump. Let’s put it this way: I’d rather Trump were “doing” such deals than any professor of linguistics at Columbia or elsewhere.

McWhorter does concede that:

One must not automatically equate sloppy spelling with sloppy thinking. Quite a few admired writers are not great spellers before editing.

Not just writers, either. Actually, quite a few thinkers (see this), founders, and statesmen couldn’t spell. McWhorter tries to backtrack and say that well, it’s not so much Trump’s inability to spell as his refusal to correct his spelling before publishing to the world: “Such negligence is of a piece with Trump’s general disregard of norms, details, and accuracy.” McWhorter has made his own error there, because if he acknowledges that spelling errors themselves are not evidence of lack of thought, then why did he spend several previous paragraphs at least appearing to suggest that?

So, why does Trump put out so many tweets with misspellings and capitalizations and the like? My hunch is that he is actively trying to annoy academics and others who care about such niceties, and that this is a product of thought on Trump’s part. There is no question in my mind that he is quite aware of things such as spell check, and that he could use aides to proofread his work if he choose. But I don’t think he omits that step through carelessness; I think it’s a way for him to infuriate those he wishes to anger, and to say to the rest of the people hey, I’m a deplorable too.

Trump can speak quite differently, and not just in his prepared speeches. Anyone who listens to his press conferences or interviews can see him shifting back and forth between more simple and more complex speech. No, he never sounds eloquent (except in a Yogi Berra sort of way) or professorial, but why would that be a drawback? I don’t ask those things of a president (although I rather like them), nor do I value those things if what that president is saying so smoothly is either doubletalk or something with which I disagree.

Trump somehow manages to get his message across, loud and clear. McWhorter may not like the message; fine. Then criticize the message. Don’t draw unwarranted and unproven conclusions from the form the message takes.

[NOTE: Denver Dyslexia Awareness has a list of US presidents purported to have been dyslexic, and adds: “Although dyslexics may struggle with reading, writing, and/or spelling and even math, many dyslexics excel in their outside the box thinking, vision, leadership, and oral skills and ability to lead and inspire.”

Hmmm.]

The young-old—or is it the old-young?

The New Neo Posted on by

Did you ever notice that young people sometimes write and/or perform as though they’re old?

Some do it very successfully; the best example that comes to mind is T. S. Eliot—who perhaps was born old—who began writing his masterpiece “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with its aura of disillusionment and ennui, a life not-quite-lived and all played out, at the ripe young age of 22.

It was published when he was about 27, and it was his first professionally published poem:

Prufrock laments his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in his life and lack of spiritual progress, and he is haunted by reminders of unattained carnal love. With visceral feelings of weariness, regret, embarrassment, longing, emasculation, sexual frustration, a sense of decay, and an awareness of mortality, “Prufrock” has become one of the most recognised voices in modern literature.

Turning to a very different artist in a very different time with a very different message, I was shocked many years ago when I learned that singer Tom Waits had been all of 24 years old when the song “Ol’ 55,” one of my favorites, came out. He may have written it even earlier than that, but I don’t know if it was significantly earlier. At any rate, in this case it’s the sound that’s so old; Waits’ musical growl sounds like that of a grizzled old-timer (and it got even deeper as he got only a bit older):

The 2020 Democratic presidential field widens…and widens…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and widens.

I wouldn’t rule any of them out, however obscure, however extreme. We’ve seen too many surprises in the past.

I remember how optimistic I was about the GOP field in 2016. And then the debates began, and the sheer numbers were part of the problem. The debates had about as much content as a Twitter war, and each person got about as much time to answer each question as a tweet.

My guess is that the Democratic field will be similar in that respect, and that it will yield a similar number of surprises—or more.

[NOTE: I just added a new category: “Election 2020.” Arghhhh!]

Politicians and lies

The New Neo Posted on by

The title of this article by Holman Jenkins intrigued me: “Politicians Never Lied Before Trump,” and so I clicked on it. I was almost certain that the title was sarcastic—of course politicians lie often, and have done so since time immemorial—and sure enough, the title was indeed meant as sarcasm.

But that discussion was just the lead-in; the rest of the piece was about the wall. But I want to talk about the lies right now, not the wall.

It seems completely obvious to me that one of the most common activities of politicians is to lie. To some extent, politics almost demands it, depending on how one defines “lie.” Is a bragging exaggeration a lie? Is an optimistic promise a lie? How exaggerated does it have to be before it becomes one, rather than mere hyperbole?

Opinions are not lies, as long as the speaker really believes what he or she says (which is not always the case in politics or in life). Opinions can be incorrect, they can be based on faulty reasoning or faulty information, but as long as they are sincere you can’t call them lies. And yet so-called “fact checkers” do so on a daily basis.

Facts are facts, but sometimes competing information (Kellyanne Conway’s much-maligned “alternative facts”) is out there and it can be very difficult to ascertain what’s correct and what’s incorrect. So politicians constantly argue by citing one fact or another, or one statistic or another, that bolsters their own point of view. That’s only a lie if the facts are obviously wrong or made up.

Some politicians lie to brag—that’s one of Trump’s favorite types of lie. Some lie to fool the American people about policy, its motives or its effects—that’s Obama’s favorite kind of lie, and he did it very smoothly. I consider the latter type of lie far more pernicious for a politician to tell than the former type.

And some politicians lie about themselves—not just to brag, but about something much deeper: their aims and their plans for the country. Obama again.

One of the most famous supposed lies in recent years was the “Bush lied about WMDs” accusation. But there has never been any convincing evidence that he actually lied, although there is very convincing evidence that he was mistaken and/or misled. But that doesn’t stop the meme that he lied, which is in itself a lie if and only if the person who is espousing it thinks it’s actually highly unlikely to be true.

I often hear that Trump lies far more than any other president. That’s not my perception, unless you count as lies a lot of things that aren’t, and/or a lot of things that are minor and inconsequential. The people who keep telling me that Trump lies so much are astounded and offended if I try to say that Obama lied as well; they just don’t see it that way. One can go to charts listing the lies of either or both to prove a point, but of course the charts almost always (maybe even always) represent partisan efforts to make one or the other look worse (for example, see this critique of one of the Times’ efforts). And I’m not interested in sheer numbers—it’s the subject matter and import of the lie that matters, not the quantity.

Which leads me to the conclusion that Obama’s lies were far worse than Trump’s.

What we know and don’t know about pot use

The New Neo Posted on by

We don’t know all that much about pot, but much of what we do know is that it appears to be bad for some people:

Over the past couple of decades, studies around the globe have found that THC—the active compound in cannabis—is strongly linked to psychosis, schizophrenia, and violence. Berenson interviewed far-flung researchers who have quietly but methodically documented the effects of THC on serious mental illness, and he makes a convincing case that a recreational drug marketed as an all-around health product may, in fact, be really dangerous—especially for people with a family history of mental illness and for adolescents with developing brains.

A 2002 study in BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) found that people who used cannabis at age 15 were more than four times as likely to develop schizophrenia or a related syndrome as those who’d never used. Even when the researchers excluded kids who had shown signs of psychosis by age 11, they found that the adolescent users had a threefold higher risk of developing schizophrenia later on. One Dutch marijuana researcher that Berenson spoke with estimated, based on his own work, that marijuana could be responsible for as much as 10 percent of psychosis in places where heavy use is common.

I haven’t read the studies, but my guess is that they contain the caveat that there may be something about cannabis users in adolescence (or other ages) that’s already somewhat different, and that it might be this other variable that predisposes users to schizophrenia or to any of the other negative effects. But I don’t know; the statistics are certainly troubling.

A lot of pot proponents point out that alcohol is as bad or worse. Agreed. However, we already tried to ban alcohol and it just didn’t work; it was too well-ingrained in our society (and not just ours, either). Has it become the same for pot? I tend to think so. Since the 1960s it’s become almost a mainstream drug. Whether that means we should legalize it or just decriminalize it (two different things) I don’t know.

But I think it’s too late to do much else other than one of those two, and we’ll reap the consequences. In fact, I think we’ve already reaped some of the consequences of increasing pot use, and they’re not good. I’ve written about this before—for example, here, in which I quoted some research results:

The findings showed habitual marijuana users made repeated errors even when told that they were wrong. Users also had more trouble maintaining a set of rules, suggesting an inability to maintain focus. Early-onset users and those who used the most marijuana had the most trouble with the test, making more than twice as many errors and fewer correct responses than later-onset smokers.

In my opinion, if you re-conceptualize the movie “Idiocracy” as being about a society taken over by stoners, you get the picture. That’s an exaggeration of course, but it’s the trend I see.

Therapy wars: psychoanalysis vs. cognitive behavioral therapy

The New Neo Posted on by

This is one of those articles that Pocket seems to think I would be interested in, and they weren’t mistaken. It compares psychoanalysis to cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for treating emotional problems.

It’s not a bad article at all, but I have a few things to add. The field of therapy has become so complex over time that those are just two of an almost countless array of therapies available out there. Those two are among the more extreme examples of opposing genres: psychoanalysis being the ultimate long-term “talk” depth therapy focused on the irrational and hidden aspects of the human mind and heart, and CBT being short-term and emphasizing ways of dealing with problems by correcting cognitive errors.

Back when I was in school to learn to be a family therapist (which by the way is a very different approach than either of those, and differs in general from techniques of individual therapy), I came to some conclusions about all of this.

The summary version is that therapy can be approached from any dimension: behavioral (action-oriented), emotional (feeling-oriented), or cognitive (thought-oriented). All three dimensions are interrelated and each influences the others, so that whichever one the therapist enters on and concentrates on, it has a ripple effect on the other two. For different clients different approaches can be best; there are no hard and fast rules about it. And different therapists are drawn to working in ways that happen to suit them, so they pick and choose as well.

But overall, the most important factor is the relationship between therapist and client. Some “click” and some do not. It’s not as simple as liking or not liking, either. It’s difficult to define and quantify, but it matters greatly.

The article touches on that towards the end:

…[M]many scholars have been drawn to what has become known as the “dodo-bird verdict”: the idea, supported by some studies, that the specific kind of therapy makes little difference. (The name comes from the Dodo’s pronouncement in Alice in Wonderland: “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”) What seems to matter much more is the presence of a compassionate, dedicated therapist, and a patient committed to change; if one therapy is better than all others for all or even most problems, it has yet to be discovered.

My sentiments exactly.

Another theory on why time seems to go more quickly as we get older

The New Neo Posted on by

This:

Time is happening in the mind’s eye. It is related to the number of mental images the brain encounters and organizes and the state of our brains as we age. When we get older, the rate at which changes in mental images are perceived decreases because of several transforming physical features, including vision, brain complexity, and later in life, degradation of the pathways that transmit information. And this shift in image processing leads to the sense of time speeding up.

Perhaps that’s part of it.

But I believe the larger part of it is a combination of other factors. The first is that as we age each passing unit of time becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of the amount of time we’ve already lived. The second is that we are quite aware that the number of days we have left on earth is growing shorter and may even be quite short, as opposed to an earlier perception that we have lots and lots of time left. The third is the absence of novelty in the lives of many people as they grow old; the days all tend to blur together.

Beto O’Rourke: on a slow news day…

The New Neo Posted on by

…Beto O’Rourke instagramming his dental cleaning is a big story.

I kid you not.

This sort of thing promises to be the wave of the future in political campaigns.

Right now O’Rourke’s main activity since losing his Senate race seems to be running for president in 2020. Or maybe vice president, but nobody actually owns up to running for vice president. I would take O’Rourke very seriously, based on his 2018 Senate campaign, in which social media was a big deal in his gaining support:

O’Rourke ran his [2018 Senate] campaign without professional pollsters or consultants, and relied on volunteers with no experience running a political campaign. His campaign employed the use of mass text messages. According to the 2018 third-quarter report from the FEC, his campaign spent US$7.3 million on digital advertising alone (in contrast with Cruz’s $251,000). His first ad was filmed on an iPhone.

He posted to social media daily, including Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, and livestreamed his activities traveling the state, such as skateboarding in a Whataburger parking lot, washing clothes at a laundromat, and “blockwalking” in his constituents’ neighborhoods. He encouraged supporters to post selfies they had taken with him to social media. Some of his videos went viral, including his position on NFL players “taking a knee” and police brutality against unarmed black men. Supporters said O’Rourke’s “promise of compassion”, more than any specific policy position, drew their support.

O’Rourke understands the shallow nature of modern-day campaigning, the importance of social media, and his own appeal, which seems to be based on appearance, demeanor, and (dare I say it?) charisma.

O’Rourke was running against Ted Cruz, who sorely lacks those particular strengths. You might say that this was a contest of opposites. Cruz won, but Texas is somewhat different than the US, and O’Rourke’s charms might do well on a national stage (Trudeau comes to mind).

He certainly had no problem with fundraising;

O’Rourke raised more than $38 million in the third quarter, three times Cruz’s totals for the same period. It is the most raised in a U.S. Senate race in history. According to his campaign, the donations came from 802,836 individual contributions, mostly from Texas. When asked if he would share the funds with Democrats in other races, he declined, saying that he wanted to honor “the commitment that those who’ve contributed to this campaign have made to me.”

That kind of devotion seems Obamaesque.

Singing prodigies: Jeffrey Li

The New Neo Posted on by

Child singers are an interesting phenomenon. Some people like them; some don’t. Child singers can’t bring the depth of feeling to a song that someone with greater life experience can.

Or can they? At least, a few of them?

At 10 years of age, Jeffrey Li sang with an aching purity of tone and tremendous sincerity of delivery. This is a clip from some Asian talent show, seemingly for kids (with some strange shenanigans from the audience). The girl singing the duet with Li, Celine Tam, is around 7 years old here. She has a nice voice, too. But to me, Li is the undisputed star .

Please watch the whole thing, because one of the highlights occurs when they start their duet at around 2:33. I defy anyone not to get a little shiver at that point. And their pianissimo ending is superb as well:

At 13 years of age, Li is still great, singing the same song alone. But maybe not quite as great (here the audience screams in a distracting way, but Li doesn’t lose his composure):

And I love the reaction of Li’s parents as they listen.

Sooner or later Li’s voice will change as he goes through puberty. He may still sing very well, like Aled Jones before him. But as with Aled, he probably won’t be quite as good as he was as a child.