Month: January 2022

I keep thinking about Democrats vs. Republicans and why some things that seem so obvious to me are just as obviously not widely accepted among my fellow liberals. We all agree that Trump is a racist, a buffoon, a narcissist, and a vindictive prick, but too many of us spend all our time being performatively outraged about this so that we can avoid dealing with the real flashing red siren Trump represents: namely that lots of people vote for him anyway. Let's say that again: despite the fact that even a lot of his supporters understand just how appalling Trump is, they'd still rather vote for him than for a Democrat.

Why? I was brought up to believe in evolution, quantum mechanics, and the median voter theorem. However, the usual interpretation of the MVT is that a winning candidate is the one closest to the median voter. This implicitly assumes that the comparison is a positive one: the winning candidate is the one who has the most in common with the median voter.

I've always thought it's the other way around: we vote more against the party (or candidate) we hate rather than for the party we like. The median voter theorem still holds, but my version tells us that the losing candidate is the one who's closest to what the median voter hates. This is a little different from the usual MVT since what we like and what we hate aren't necessarily mirror images.

Are you with me so far? The upshot of this is that for a Democratic candidate to win, he or she needs to convince voters to hate Republicans more than their opponent convinces them to hate Democrats. In a nutshell, negative advertising works. The dark side is more powerful than you know.

So if Trump is as bad as we think—and he is—liberals should be aghast that a fair number of centrists hate us even more than they hate Trump. How can this be? It's unsurprising that Trump has a base, since both parties have a base that hates the other side with a passion. But in that middle ground, what is it about liberals that scares so many relatively moderate folks into voting against us even if it means voting for Trump or one of his spear carriers? And how have Republicans been so successful in demonizing us? Is it solely messaging? Certainly Fox News has a lot of influence. Or is it also related to our actual policy positions on emotionally-laden topics like immigration, guns, wokeness, and so forth?

God knows I've made it clear that I think Fox News is responsible for a lot of this. But all of it? That strikes me as unlikely, and it hardly matters anyway since Fox News isn't going anywhere. Like it or not, the plain reality is that lots of non-insane people find us really scary. On the mirror side, the kinds of scariness we throw at the Trumpies just isn't hitting the mark. Centrists already know Trump is a racist, a buffoon, a narcissist, and a vindictive prick. They already know this, but they've decided that even though he's a son of a bitch, at least he's their son of a bitch. They know no such thing about liberals.

Life should be good for liberals right now. The Republican Party has gone insane and is led by a guy who makes Ted Cruz look like George Washington. We should be kicking their asses all over the place. But we're not. We've tossed away the chance of a lifetime.

Figuring out what our problem is requires lots of dispassionate, clear-eyed thinking in response to a simple question: What is it about us that scares so many people? I sure wish that weren't in such short supply.

Big news! I received a 1923-S penny in change today:

This penny is 99 years old. But why did I notice it?

Well, several years ago I embarked on an experiment: How long would it take me to fill up a 1959-2018¹ penny book using only pennies received in change? The answer remains indeterminate because I still have two empty spots left (1961 and 1968-S)² and have made no progress over the past year.³ At this point, I think that it might well take decades.

Anyway, the point of all this is that to complete the experiment I have to examine every penny I get from cashiers. That's how I noticed this one. It is, I think, the oldest penny I've ever received in change.

¹Of course, now it's a 1959-2022 penny book. But the recent pennies are obviously not a problem.

²Not counting the stupid 2009 Lincoln anniversary pennies, of which there are eight. I have five of them.

³I was so close a few weeks ago to getting the 1968 penny. But it was just my fading near vision fooling me. It was a 1968-D.

On Saturday I decided to spend the day driving around taking pictures, something I haven't done for a while. I drove here and there up the coast, in the end taking longer than I intended. This meant that by the time I finally headed home it was near sunset and I got lots of beautiful sunset pictures over the Pacific Ocean. Like this one. Totally first class.

Ginia Bellafante writes today:

Earlier this week, Mayor Eric Adams released a 15-page document, “The Blueprint to End Gun Violence,” with the purpose of alleviating a “public health crisis that continues to threaten every corner of the city.” The plan was prompted by the rise in violent crime that has...

Hold on. Just for the record, here is major crime in New York City:

Let's continue:

In 2020, the number of shootings in New York more than doubled to 1,531 over the previous year; then they climbed again, to 1,877 in 2021, the highest figure in decades. One problem for the mayor is that these statistics are not imprinted on all New Yorkers — particularly those still working at home in moneyed neighborhoods to which they have more or less retreated....In effect, Mr. Adams is left selling aggressive policing policies in a post-George Floyd world to a host of constituents who do not necessarily recognize the urgency.

New York City is like the rest of the country: Murder has increased a lot—by 66% since 2017—but violent crime in general has increased only slightly.

Democrats lost a lot of credibility in the 1970s for dismissing public fears of rising crime, and they shouldn't make the same mistake today. That said, fighting crime, first and foremost, requires understanding crime. Today we don't have a crime problem, we have a murder problem, and understanding that is the first step to figuring out how to fight it. Everyone who writes about crime needs to get on board with this.

Viet Thanh Nguyen writes in the New York Times about a book he read as a teenager:

When I was 12 or 13 years old, I was not prepared for the racism, the brutality or the sexual assault in Larry Heinemann’s 1974 novel, “Close Quarters.” Mr. Heinemann, a combat veteran of the war in Vietnam, wrote about a nice, average American man who goes to war and becomes a remorseless killer. In the book’s climax, the protagonist and other nice, average American soldiers gang-rape a Vietnamese prostitute they call Claymore Face.

As a Vietnamese American teenager, it was horrifying for me to realize that this was how some Americans saw Vietnamese people — and therefore me. I returned the book to the library, hating both it and Mr. Heinemann.

Nguyen's main point here is that he didn't ask for the book to be removed from the library and doesn't believe any book should be removed from a library. But as an aside, he also writes this:

Years later, I wrote my own novel about the same war, “The Sympathizer.”

While working on it, I reread “Close Quarters.” That’s when I realized I’d misconstrued Mr. Heinemann’s intentions. He wasn’t endorsing what he depicted. He wanted to show that war brutalized soldiers, as well as the civilians caught in their path. The novel was a damning indictment of American warfare and the racist attitudes held by some nice, average Americans that led to slaughter and rape. Mr. Heinemann revealed America’s heart of darkness.

This is what much of the "book banning" battle misses: there will always be legitimate arguments over what kinds of books are appropriate for children. In this case, it wasn't just the racism and brutality that the teenage Nguyen was unprepared for. He was also too young to understand what the point of all that racism and brutality was. He misunderstood the book completely.

This is common among books written for adults. Can a 13-year-old really understand the antisemitic brutality and racism of Maus? How about the soft-focus treatment of slavery in Gone With the Wind? Do either of them belong in a school library? How about in a classroom, where a teacher can explain them (as in the case of Maus in McMinn County)? Can we continue to teach Huckleberry Finn, complete with the n-word on every page? Or do we have to teach a bowdlerized version? Or not teach it at all, even with the best explanation in the world?

Different communities are always going to have different answers to these questions. Sometimes they're driven by bad intentions, other times by the best of intentions. And every once in a while, they suddenly spark a national furor even though nothing especially new or different is happening.

Right now we're having one of those national furors over a tiny handful of incidents. But it will go away soon enough if we all just calm down and ignore it. Even Fox News can't keep this going forever if liberals don't take the bait to go nuts over it.

I keep hearing that Omicron is milder than Delta, and that seems to be true for people who have been vaxxed and boosted. But overall, it's hard to square this with the numbers we're seeing. Hospitalizations peaked at a far higher number than last year, when no one at all was vaccinated. The death rate is still lower than last year so far, but not by much.

Looking at these charts, Omicron looks like it peaks quickly and then declines rapidly. That's great! But while it's around it sure doesn't seem especially mild.

I have been playing around with my flash unit because that's what one does when one has a new toy. The result is cat ballet. I bet Willow can't match this.

What in the actual hell is going on with Ukraine? Here's a brief rundown:

• Russia masses 100,000 troops on Ukraine's border. An invasion seems imminent.
• At a press conference, President Biden plays down the crisis.
• Ukrainian officials are unnerved by this, but then heartened when Biden "clarifies" what he meant.
• Nevertheless, everyone goes nuts and Ukraine turns into the latest dick measuring contest among military hawks.
• Biden sends a list of negotiating demands to the Russians. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky says he's seen it and is happy with it.
• Then, today, Zelensky suddenly asks everyone to calm down. “If you look only at the satellites you will see the increase in troops and you can’t assess whether this is just a threat of attack or just a simple rotation,” he said. “Our professional people look deep into it.”

Just a "simple rotation"? I'm no expert on Russian military activities, but as near as I can tell Putin has "rotated" nearly the entire Western and Southern military districts to the border of Ukraine.

Zelensky apparently wants everyone to back off and just give him lots of jet planes. That's not going to happen, and I doubt that Ukraine has hundreds of trained pilots around to fly them anyway. So that's just a weird nonstarter.

This whole thing is the damnedest game of chicken I've seen in a while. Putin says he wants NATO to agree to stop expansion on Russia's border. That primarily means Finland, Belarus, Ukraine, and Georgia:

Naturally, the NATO position is that it's up to us who we invite to join our club, but the weird thing is that Russia's position really ought to be perfectly acceptable to the NATO states. I've always supported the post-1991 expansion of NATO, but it's gone as far as it should. The farther away from the core NATO countries we get, the farther we are from countries that truly have any kind of strategic value or cultural connection to us. How serious are we about having, say, a treaty obligation to defend Ukraine if Belarus gets frisky?

So we're stuck in this odd position: halting the expansion of NATO is probably good for NATO, but we can't allow it to look as though Putin is coercing us into it. So our public stance—which is more etched in stone with every passing day—is the exact opposite of our national interest.

I have no idea how this turns out.

I've always hated flash photography, and the era of the iPhone has only intensified my feelings. All those flat, overexposed, artificially sharp faces drive me bananas. The last time I personally owned a flash unit was in high school.

But now I have a problem. We don't allow Charlie outside, which means I have to take indoor pictures of him. And this is not like taking a picture of a cathedral or something similar, where I can put the camera on a tripod. This is action photography! Unfortunately, the ambient light in my house—like all houses—is lousy because it's dim and it's all overhead. Cats move around a lot, which means pictures are often blurred and shadowy.

So I need a flash unit. The problem is that the light from a flash unit is collimated, which is why flash pictures look unnaturally sharp when the flash is pointed directly at the subject. It's also what produces sharp shadows in the background. The answer is an external flash unit with a bounce head. With the flash aimed at the ceiling and the light bouncing around the room, illumination is even; faces are properly exposed; and shadows are soft.

So that's what I got. The one I chose arrived defective, which seemed like a bad omen, so I returned it and went out to my local camera store and bought whatever they recommended. As it turned out, they only had one that was suitable for my needs, so that's what they recommended.

And it works fine. Here is Charlie, captured via a Godox V1 with a bounce head.

I'm not in favor of bluenoses haunting school libraries and demanding the removal of anything they find offensive. Honest!

Still, for the folks yelling about "book burners" and whatnot, a quick note: you realize, don't you, that every school library has a school librarian who makes judgments about which books to buy? And those judgments depend a lot on the community the school is in. This has been true forever.

In other words, local decisions about which books to buy and which books to get rid of are baked into the cake and always have been. In rural communities, it's more likely that sexually explicit books will never be purchased or will be the eventual target of removal. In urban communities, it's more likely that old books which treat race or sex or gender in ways no longer considered acceptable will be tossed out.

It's fine to fight over this. That's the American way. But please understand that it's way, way less important than you probably think. Deciding which books are and aren't suitable for children happens in millions of households and thousands of libraries every single day. Maybe in yours, in fact.