Sure Signs


— Anonymous (or maybe they just don’t want us to know who said it)

This week’s featured post is “Rating This Week’s Craziness“. It introduces the Weekly Sift’s Crazy Scale, for rating the relative danger posed by the sheer insanity of stories and events that need more than just a debunking.

If you’re wondering what I was up to last week when I didn’t put out a Sift. I was telling a Unitarian Universalist congregation how Universalism provides a religious unification of a bunch of positions that often get dismissed as “politically correct”.

This week everybody was talking about crazy stuff

In addition to the stuff that made it into the featured article, this NYT cartoon summarized a bunch of other crazy-sounding things that are really happening:

and Baltimore

The riots are over and the National Guard is packing up, but Baltimore gave rise to a lot of interesting public discussion (as well as a lot of complete crap).

For one thing, who knew street gangs were this articulate?

The NYT Magazine‘s “Our Demand is Simple: Stop Killing Us” is well worth your time. So is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Clock Didn’t Start With the Riots“, which makes this excellent point:

I read the governor in the New York Times today and he was saying in the paper that—you know, because it’s going to be a big day tomorrow—he was saying “violence will not be tolerated.” And I thought about that as a young man who’s from West Baltimore and grew up in West Baltimore and I thought about how violence was tolerated for all of my life here in West Baltimore. …

I don’t want to come off as if I’m sympathizing or saying that it is necessarily okay, to inflict violence just out of anger, no matter how legitimate that anger is. But I have a problem when you begin the clock with the violence on Tuesday. Because the fact of the matter is that the lives of black people in this city, the lives of black people in this country have been violent for a long time.

There’s a similar problem with all those columns about how street violence is the wrong way to make the point that police violence against already-subdued black men has got to stop. If we call for communities like Baltimore and Ferguson to quiet down, that’s got to be coupled with a commitment to start listening when they speak in softer voices. Otherwise we’re just saying: “Pipe down to make it easier for me to ignore you.”

Larry Wilmore makes this point humorously but effectively in his “Justice for Tamir Rice” piece. Tamar Rice is the 12-year-old who was playing with a toy gun in a public park near his home, when Cleveland police rolled up and killed him within seconds, all of which was captured on video. Cleveland has been peacefully waiting for some kind of resolution in this case for five months. With a Comedy Central lawyer standing over his shoulder to make sure he doesn’t actually call for violence, Wilmore observes that non-confrontation isn’t getting anything done.

There’s a self-fulfilling pattern here: If violence is the only kind of speech you’ll pay attention to, then sooner or later you’ll get violence.

Finally, there are all the white pundits saying or writing something along the lines of: We elected Obama to make race relations better, and they’ve gotten worse. Elspeth Reeve answers that point in The New Republic with “The White Man’s Bargain“. She starts with an NYT report quoting Republican strategist Rick Wilson:

A number of people “crafted this tacit bargain in their heads,” he said, speaking of Mr. Obama’s election. “This is going to be the end of the ugly parts of racial division in American.”

Reeve then raises this question about the “tacit bargain”:

What is being exchanged? Wilson is probably not saying people thought police would stop killing unarmed black kids because Obama was elected. Perhaps instead he is saying people thought black people would stop getting so mad when it happened. What he means is that people (and, let’s say this right here: white people) are eager to pay off the whole legacy-of-slavery-and-systemic-racism tab, to finally settle up and not have to think about social justice anymore. Wasn’t making a black guy president enough?

She goes through the long history of whites making imaginary bargains, which goes all the way back to slavery. She concludes:

What tacit bargainers have always been asking is: Isn’t there something else we can substitute for true equality? The answer is no.

and new presidential candidates

The big political news since the last Sift is that Bernie Sanders is running against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. So Hillary won’t simply be coronated, and somebody will make the case for real liberalism in this cycle.

I’m trying not to make the Sift all-2016 all-the-time, so I won’t get to Bernie’s announcement speech until next week. My snap reaction is that everybody left of Hillary should be happy that the primary campaign will keep her from drifting too far right. Beyond that, I need to decide how far my enthusiasm for Bernie should go: Will I vote for him in the New Hampshire primary? If do, is that because I’m making a statement or because I want him to get the nomination? If he did get nominated, would he stand a chance in the general election against, say, Jeb Bush or Scott Walker? Give me another week to think it through.

On the Republican side, Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, and Mike Huckabee all joined the race, which is getting unusually crowded. Rick Santorum announced a date for his announcement: May 27. (I don’t know why he hadn’t previously announced that he was going to announce the date of his announcement. It just came totally out of the blue.)

Again, it will take some time for me to add these candidates to my 2016 speech series. I do have a snap reaction to Carson: I’m not sure he understands his role in the Republican Party, which is to provide cover against accusations of racism, as Herman Cain did in 2012. White audiences can cheer Carson’s aggressive and disrespectful criticisms of President Obama without worrying about being called racists.

But as Obama starts to fade from the scene, that role becomes less important. If Carson wants to stay relevant, he’ll have to move on to providing cover for more general I’m-not-a-racist-but criticisms of the black community. His path forward is to say things about Baltimore that are more extreme than a white candidate can get away with. I’m not sure he realizes he signed up for that.

Fiorina, meanwhile, is well set up to provide the same service for sexist Republicans who need to trash Hillary. She could easily wind up with the VP nomination.

The religious right has Huckabee, Santorum, and Cruz to choose from. But in view of the bad advice God has given his family in the past, it’s Jeb Bush who should be pushed to spell out exactly what role God will play in his administration.

and you also might be interested in …

We’re about six weeks from a Supreme Court decision on King v. Burwell, the suit that might make ObamaCare subsidies illegal in about half the country. Congressional Republicans have written in the WaPo “Republicans have a plan to create a bridge away from Obamacare” so that millions of people would not instantly lose health insurance.

Unfortunately, only one relatively unimportant committee in the Senate and none in the House have held any public hearings about this plan. As for assembling a coalition in the House to pass it — the kind of thing John Boehner has not been particularly good at — there seems to be no motion at all. HuffPost’s Jonathan Cohn says what I’ve been thinking:

the absence of a public effort to match the public rhetoric matters only if Republicans are actually serious about passing a plan. They may not be. Their real goals may be purely cosmetic — to insulate the party from a political backlash should millions of people suddenly lose health insurance and, more immediately, to ease the anxiety of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, either of whom might hesitate to issue a ruling with such potentially devastating consequences to so many people.

Two weeks ago, I told you about a poll that showed how sensitive opinions on abortion are to how the question is phrased. (You get a more pro-life response if you phrase the question in terms of abstract right-and-wrong, and a more pro-choice response if you phrase it in terms of women’s rights.) Wednesday, the NYT’s Upshot blog described how poll results about abortion get less polarized as the questions focus on specific cases: Many people who say that abortion should be “illegal in all cases” will nonetheless say it should be legal if the mother will die. Conversely, many people who say it should be “legal in all cases” still think it should be illegal to abort a healthy fetus ready to be born.

That’s the extreme edge of a more general phenomenon: People who think they are diametrically opposed to each other on abortion often agree on a lot of specific cases. Apparently, much of the polarization centers on what comes to mind when you hear the word abortion. Do you think of a promiscuous woman who couldn’t be bothered to use birth control, and now wants to get rid of a problem-free pregnancy rather than offer a healthy baby to a couple who would give it a good life? Or do you think of woman carrying a child for her rapist, or facing serious health issues?

I think the winning choice-leaning argument goes something like this: Every woman, every family, and every pregnancy is different, so ideally the decision to carry a fetus to term would be made by the people involved, and not by a legislature or a court or a bureaucrat. But the decision to abort becomes more morally weighty the longer the fetus develops, so the law should push women to decide promptly, and demand higher levels of justification for later-term abortions.

Sweden seems to have it about right, in my opinion:


Wikipedia adds:

The issue is largely settled in Sweden and the question of the legality of abortion is not a highly controversial political issue. … Consensus in Sweden is in favour of preventing unwanted pregnancies by the use of birth control and the primary goal is not to lower the amount of abortions, but rather the goal is that all children that are born should be wanted.

In the Republican-controlled Congress, climate-change denial is a two-step dance:

  1. Claim that the science isn’t settled yet, so more research is necessary before we take any action.
  2. Defund that research.

and let’s close with something fantastic

like Key & Peele’s musical trip to Negrotown, where you can wear your hoodie and not get shot.

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  • tfm1066  On May 11, 2015 at 2:28 pm

    The Nordic countries seem usually to get governing right, perhaps because they institutionalize reasoning, debate, and consensus. Your comments about the Swedish solution of the abortion conundrum is a fine example. I wish we in the U.S. could emulate them.

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