Scapegoating and projection

In a Quillette article, the pseudonymous writer Lester Berg describes his bewilderment with leftist friends who attribute every personal disappointment to systemic abuse in general and Bad Orange Man in particular. I think he's describing the usefulness that makes scapegoating so popular as a political and psychological tool:

Here, at last, was somebody we could freely hate more that we hate each other or ourselves.

Isn't the same for hating the anonymous Jews who poisoned your well? Before they go completely around the bend and start shoving real individuals into gas chambers, most people find it hard to sustain that kind of venom about anyone with whom they are in personal contact. It's necessary to fix on some distant enemy who can be characterized as irretrievably evil, beyond the pale, outside all human norms of charity or civility.

If your life is awful and enough and you are too dishonest or cowardly to face what's wrong, then even if you don't have a Donald Trump in your life, it is essential to find one.  Otherwise you might have to talk to your lover, or your mother, or your boss about why you object, what price you will or won't pay to sustain the relationship, and what you're willing to do to fix it.  Sometimes we'll do anything to avoid telling someone face-to-face that we're angry and disappointed.  "I'm not mad at you!  I'm mad at Trump!"

Ice

If I lived somewhere that wouldn't instantly melt them, I'd definitely try these.

   

Bear Arms and Bare Arms

A Time To Go Home

Denmark declares at least parts of Somalia fit for refugees to return.

Following a review of the situation in Somalia, which began in 2017, residence permits will therefore be withdrawn for no less than 1,000 Somalis. “It is time for them to go home now,” Denmark states.

“If you no longer need our protection and your life and your health are no longer at risk in your homeland, you must of course return home and build up your country of origin”, says Minister for Migration Inger Støjberg, according to DR.

For those of you who can read Dansk, the original is here.

Seven Medieval Christmas Traditions

Medievalists.net wants to help if you'd like to do something very traditional. Your feast doesn't have to be fit for a king to be quite elaborate:

Even at a slightly lower level of wealth the Christmas meal was still elaborate. Richard of Swinfield, Bishop of Hereford, invited 41 guests to his Christmas feast in 1289. Over the three meals that were held that day, the guests ate two carcasses and three-quarters of beef, two calves, four does, four pigs, sixty fowls, eight partridges, two geese, along with bread and cheese. No one kept track of how much beer was drank, but the guests managed to consume 40 gallons of red wine and another four gallons of white.

There's quite a lot more, including Yule Goats and Icelandic Christmas Trolls.

Edward Abbey Was Right

I always liked Edward Abbey, and his anarchist tendencies aren't the thing I liked least about his work. In this piece, public lands advocate Amy Irvine writes a letter to the late author.

I think that we both understand the “other side” of this public-lands debate — by which I mean the self-proclaimed old-timers, the rural folk. Which is, of course, not the other side at all — not even the likes of Cliven Bundy and the guys who took over the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Most of today’s environmental groups won’t agree, but you might, when I say that sometimes I vote libertarian to help break up the country’s two-party gridlock, but also because I love the idea of what those guys did; I love the active resistance, the sticking it to institutions too large and lethargic to be effective. After all, the folks who have defied federal authority believe as you believed, that we might need the wild woolliness of the West “as a refuge from authoritarian government,” and “as bases for guerilla warfare against tyranny.”

The anti-federalist, Mormon part of me agrees with your words, their actions. But, for Bundy’s kind, the land’s not the thing either.... For me, it’s a matter of degrees. My grandfather, the other ranchers I’ve moved cows for — none of them sits on the extreme and hostile end of the spectrum. Besides, there are so few independent ranch outfits remaining they are hardly the main problem. But I’ll tell you what is:

I'll bet you won't guess what she comes up with.

Marines Testify Against Antifa

I guess their haircuts made them look like 'fascists' to some.

According to the Marines’ testimony, they were touring historical landmarks near Front and Chestnut streets when suspect Thomas Keenan approached them. Godinez testified that Keenan asked them “Are you proud?,” to which Godinez remembers responding “We are Marines.” Torres said that he remembers Keenan asking “Are you Proud Boys?,” an allusion to one of the alt-right groups behind the rally, and one that Torres said he didn’t understand. “I didn’t know what Proud Boys meant,” he said.

Whatever Keenan said, both Marines testified that Keenan, Massey, and approximately ten other people — men and women, some masked and some unmasked — then began attacking them with mace, punches, and kicks, and calling them “nazis” and “white supremacists.”

On the stand, Godinez said that he was “bewildered” by being called a white supremacist and immediately cried out, “I’m Mexican!” After that, as the attack continued, both men said that members of the group, including Keenan, repeatedly used ethnic slurs, including “spic” and “wetback,” against the Marines. (There was no testimony that Massey used any such language).

Relevant to yesterday's post about tools and equality, these Marines were at a substantial disadvantage because Marines today are small. Marines today are small because they adopted the Body Mass Index (BMI) standard some years ago, requiring Marines to maintain an "ideal" body weight even though professional athletes who engage in substantial strength training are often rated "overweight" or "obese" according to BMI. The Pentagon has been revising that policy, but its effects have been lasting, with only 2% of Marines qualifiying as 'overweight' under BMI. (Current policy allows high performers to be exempt from the fat/weight standards.)

Torres testified that Massey punched him “full force” repeatedly while he held his hands up above his face to protect himself, and the prosecutor used the opportunity to make it clear that while both Torres and Godinez are Marines, the suspects are significantly larger in both height and weight than the two of them.

Some of the Marines I knew back in the 1990s, before they went to the BMI standard, a small gang of no more than 10 or 12 would have hesitated to mess with those guys. Maybe we can get back to that.

15 Principles Against Economics

These are briefly stated objections to classical economic theory, which can be a powerful mode of criticism. Somewhat like the '95 Theses,' they intend to point out some glaring flaws in the way we think about markets. You may find some of them more successful than others.

Tools of Equality

A meditation on weakness as a relative state, and what can be done about that. What can be done, the author argues, is to carry a weapon. For many, the only weapon that equalizes is a handgun.

The foil here is Henry Rollins, a man of some good and some bad ideas. His devotion to personal strength as a source of self-actualization is worth hearing out. He wrote it down once, as a motivational speech, and here it is performed by someone else:



It turns out the argument isn't as simple as 'strong is better than weak.' The two authors have the same concerns. They are both concerned about attaining independence, overcoming fear, and being your own person in spite of others' violence and intimidation.

These are both the tools of equality, guns and weights. They are both ways of attaining different kinds of equality. The gun can make the small person equally capable of violence as the big one, and thus autonomous because they can no longer be pushed around. The weights bring autonomy by helping you to maximize your internal potential, which brings with it the confidence that you can survive and overcome challenges. It also brings a lot of practical independence: growing stronger makes you capable of carrying your own problems in very many ways.

My recommendation is to pursue both things.

'Bear arms, but also bare arms.'

Individuation

Does being an independent human being, or even nation, make it easier or harder to get along with neighbors?  Arguing in Harper's, French novelist Michel Houellebecq stirs up the chattering class by suggesting that Trump's nationalism is a good thing:

Nationalists can talk to one another; with internationalists, oddly enough, talking doesn’t work so well.

That's what I call a mentor

They have got to be kidding me.

I'll bet these guys could solve a little problem like an under-26 student who needs better health insurance.

Honestly, it sounds like the more fevered variety of spy thriller novel.

The right to choose

A super-liberal friend called in distress yesterday.  Her husband abruptly left the job that has supplied her family with employer-based health insurance for years--but no problem, right?  She can just sign herself and her post-college under 26 son up for Obamacare coverage. (Yeah, I know, unconstitutional, but we'll get to that later.)  Was I aware that the sign-up procedures are arcane, the choices are expensive and substantively awful, the subsidies are illusory, the deadline is tomorrow?  Her son is in post-grad school in another state; all the options for a single plan for the two of them are limited to a single state, there are few choices left in the "market."  How can this be?

Why, yes.  You may recall my anguish of several years ago, which frankly you showed little understanding of at the time.  And if I'm not mistaken, you still support the party that brought you this policy and hundreds of others cut from the same deranged cloth.  (But . . . Trump!  Also, did you know that Republicans commit voting infractions, and indulge in gerrymandering?)

We talked for a long time about the few, bad options she had for making the most of this crisis.  I found myself continually erupting in fury over how bad the individual market had become.  Yes, I know it's bad!  What have I been telling you!  My friend had remained fundamentally unaware of it in two ways:  by ignoring my experience--who wants to talk about ugly things?--and by enjoying employer-based coverage, which was supposed to be gutted by Obamacare, but Congress made the correct political calculation that it should infinitely delay the effective date of the benign new system for employer-based insurance, which is to say most voters.  Congratulations:  you have joined the ranks of the 3-5 million Americans who are self-employed or who retired before Medicare age.  Congress didn't delay the effective date for you suckers.  You are such a small voting bloc that you don't matter, and you will find that your friends, especially the progressive ones, have no idea what's happening to you in this dilemma and care less.

There is a terrible temptation to schadenfreude, which I fight off for one minute and fall into the next.  This is a real human being I care about, and I don't want to enjoy her distress.  At the same time I am incandescently angry that she is still retreating into banalities about the need for "society" to solve its problem of "cruelty," like that terrible man who's separating babies from their mothers at the border, or people who oppose a woman's right to choose--actually arrogating to themselves the right to make moral choices for others!  And everything would be fine if we just had free health care, as the sensible humane countries do.

I'm afraid I unloaded on her.  Well, at least after all these years I found the courage to tell her I was very, very angry with her for continuing to support the social policies that ripped such a scary hole in our lives and which, as far as I'm concerned, lead inevitably to eating zoo animals in the name of compassion.  (Oh, yes, that's awful, isn't it?  If only we could solve the problems of cruelty with better education.)  At the same time, I know she supports horrible policies without malice.  She is not someone who can think through the practical impact of a government solution.  She wants one that feels compassionate, not one that demonstrably improves the evils she worries about.  She is an artist, a good one, and she simply does not approach the world that way.

I found myself telling my friend to write a check to a real human being in need, with her own money.  I'll give her credit:  she was more grieved than huffy.  She found a sudden need to get off the phone and deal with a car repairman, but I know she'll call back and try to mend fences.  At least the air of stifling unreality that had crept over our recent conversations lifted a bit.  Being angry with your oldest friend is not a good thing, but hiding it doesn't help.  It only makes your heart go dead, and makes you want to start ducking your friend's calls.

OBAMACARE DEAD

"Oh, What a Day! What a Lovely Day!"

UPDATE: Bwhahahaha

Nothing has been more destructive to my family's finances than this stupid law. I lost the plan they promised I could keep, and then lost the plans I got instead four or five times. It's increased our health care expenses by fivefold, while largely eliminating non-emergency use of services because we spend so much on the premiums that we can't afford the sky-high deductibles. Last year I spent more money on health insurance than on any other thing: more than my mortgage, more even than taxes. We can't use it, because we've already spent so much on the premiums; and if we do end up in an emergency room, that's all going to be out of pocket anyway.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

The Old Swedish Spirit

A professor of chemistry at Lund University got a message from one of her students, who was visiting his home in the Middle East, that he might not make it back to class because ISIS had taken his village.

Upset that one of her students was threatened in this way, she dispatched a team of mercenaries to rescue him and his family.

Now we're talking.

Mark Steyn on Progress

It's too long to excerpt, but it won't take you long to read. It does sound like significant progress has been made in New Jersey, assuming that "progress" is simply a synonym for "change."

BB: Oscars Committee Names New Host: Jordan Peterson

“None of us here at the Academy have ever heard of Dr. Peterson, but judging by sheer number of books he sells, coupled with his popularity as a professor and speaker, we felt that he would be the perfect candidate,” AMPAS revealed in a press release Wednesday. “Plus, we have been informed that Dr. Peterson is a thought leader on the cutting edge of social issues such as intersectionality, patriarchy, transgenderism, white privilege, and socialism, making him an outstanding choice.”

The End of the Boy Scouts of America

They've largely succeeded in destroying one of the formative institutions of my youth.

The Boy Scouts of America is considering declaring bankruptcy, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

The Wednesday report comes in the wake of sinking membership and multiple controversies surrounding the 108-year-old organization, including sex abuse allegations and its controversial decision to change its program name from Boy Scouts to Scouts BSA and allow girls into that program....

As the organization has made decisions deemed to be more inclusive, such as allowing openly gay scouts in 2013 and scoutmasters in 2015 as well as the 2018 decision to allow girls, membership has continued to decline sharply, from over 4 million members at its peak to a claimed 2.3 million members at present.... Those numbers will likely continue to decline....

Additionally, the Boy Scouts have come under criticism of late for keeping records of sex abuse perpetrated by scoutmasters — called the “perversion files” — under wraps for decades instead of revealing them to the public.

I remember going to a state-level jamboree when I was ten or eleven, and being struck by all the Americana of the thing. There were hundreds of other boys in uniforms with American flags on the shoulders, and all sorts of knots and woodcraft, and the smell of pine wood fires by day and night. There was an astronaut who came not just to speak but to spend the day wandering around and meeting the boys, giving us a sense of what we as Americans might aspire to do if we worked hard. There were fireworks one night, and patriotic music.

It was one of two moments in my life when I felt the most patriotic, the other one coming many years later under fire in Iraq. I was there, I don't doubt in part, because of the impact made on me by the Boy Scout Handbook of my era. "Be always ready with your armor on," it said without irony, and, "Maintain the honor of your country with your life."

Somewhere between then and now, a lot of people decided to change the Boy Scouts from what it was to what it is. It looks likely to die of what has been done to it. With it will pass away one of the glories of my youth, one of the last institutions that shaped young men to seek high things like honor, duty, love of America, and the strength and skill to walk the Wild.

Speaking of Foreign Agents....

The problem with suddenly enforcing a long-unenforced law is that lots of people have been ignoring it. You may end up catching the very people you had hoped to help out.

A Few Pieces on General Flynn

I admired now-retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn during his time running intelligence in Afghanistan. I was thus really saddened to see both his failure to reform DIA, and the harm to his career it caused; but I was really sad to see him arrested and charged with being a foreign agent. The idea was that he was somehow involved in a quasi-treasonous conspiracy with the Russians.

Well, that turned out to be only sort-of true. The foreign government he was working for turned out to be not Russia but NATO ally Turkey; and the charge isn't so much that he was a spy as that he didn't file the right paperwork to lobby for a foreign government. Also, until that day the law had not been prosecuted as a rule; you just were required to go back and fill out the forms. The law was really on the books, even if it was unenforced, but it was a little unfair to make a special exception for this one guy -- especially in light of his history of genuinely excellent service in Afghanistan.

And then it turned out that the original frame was based on the Logan Act, that unconstitutional piece of nonsense that went unenforced for two centuries -- in spite of far grander and more obvious violations, by people who went on to become Senators and Secretaries of State.

So, at some point my sadness at Flynn's tragic downfall began to alter to a suspicion that he wasn't being fairly treated.

There is some new evidence coming to light now that makes clear that he really, really was not fairly treated. Even the scoundrels in the Mueller investigation have finally asked that he receive no jail time, perhaps in part out of a sense of guilt about what they've done to the man. Perhaps he should have known not to trust the FBI when they told him to meet with them without a lawyer; perhaps he should have known that he was subject to legal penalties for lying to them even if they characterized the meeting as a 'visit' rather than an 'interview,' and even if they didn't warn him about his liability. But he can't be held responsible for the fact that the FBI agents' conclusion that he was being open and forthcoming would be painted as 'lying,' or that he'd be forced by debt and massive overcharges to plead guilty to a crime that he plainly did not commit.

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial calling it entrapment. Sarah Carter has a story that says that the FBI mishandled evidence and rewrote the material statements about the interview months later. James Comey admitted that he took steps in the 'investigation' that were not standard.

The judge in the case has, a year after the guilty plea and at the sentencing hearing, suddenly had to demand that all exculpatory information be revealed to him by the prosecution.

I'm starting to think that the wrong man is in danger of prison time.

UPDATE: I'm going to forward one more just because I love the title: "James and the Giant Impeachment."

Appreciation

Sorry I have not been posting as much lately, but I have greatly appreciated all the posts from my co-bloggers. It's nice to feel the sense of community, and even if I haven't got something to say on a given day, I look forward to hearing from each of you. The comments, also, are a daily source of pleasure and a sense of camaraderie for me.

Thank you all for being a part of what we do here.