The Crazy came for our thought leaders too!

FRIDAY, JULY 15, 2022

We were too soft to push back: How crazy was American upper-end journalism as of 1999?

To what extent had The Crazy extended its reach into the world of our own blue tribe? To what extent had The Crazy invaded our own tribe's culture—and thereby our national culture—without our admittedly brilliant tribunes saying so much as a word?

By the time that President Donald J. Trump was offering thoughts about how to fight Covid with Lysol, our slumbering tribe had begun to notice the role The Crazy was playing in our lives. But how far had the Crazy's reach extended back when the press corps was partying like it was 1999? 

How far had the Crazy's reach extended? We offer such comments by the upper-end press as the comments shown below—a tiny sampling of the full roster of The Crazy which was rolled out that year. 

These comments were made by highly-paid members of the upper-end, blue tribe mainstream press corps. We'll start with Mary McGrory, a Pulitzer-winning, long-time pillar of the insider press corps establishment. 

In late October 1999. Candidates Gore and Bradley staged the first Democratic debate of the 2000 White House campaign. The debate was broadcast by CNN. The candidates principally spoke about health care—and the upper-end press corps said this:

MCGRORY (10/31/99): Vice President Albert Gore came to his fateful encounter with newly menacing challenger Bill Bradley carrying heavy baggage. He was wearing an outfit that added to his problems when he stepped onstage at Dartmouth College: a brown suit, a gunmetal blue shirt, a red tie—and black boots.

Was it part of his reinvention strategy? Perhaps it was meant to be a ground-leveling statement—"I am not a well-dressed man." It is hard to imagine that he thought to ingratiate himself with the nation's earliest primary voters by trying to look like someone seeking employment at a country music radio station. Maybe it was the first step in shedding his Prince Albert image.

A hail of similar insults followed. Already, The Crazy was saddling us with "journalism" like that. 

McGrory avoided the health care discussion in this and in her subsequent column. Our own blue tribe's demented thought leaders said nothing about this lack of focus. They simply sat and stared.

In fact, it isn't true that our leaders said nothing. In fact, our tribe's thought leaders were pouring it on. 

By now, our tribe's thought leaders had been assailing Candidate Gore's disturbing wardrobe for roughly a month. Every part of the candidate's wardrobe was frisked by these subhuman creatures. This let the occasional sane observer see a blinfingly obvious fact:

The Crazy already prevailed.

The candidate was attacked for his suits, his boots, his polo shirts—for the height at which he was hemming his pants. He was assailed for the color of his suits, but also for the number of buttons observed on his suit jackets.

The candidate had actually worn one or more three-button suits! A crazy employee of NBC News described this offense against decency on his nightly NBC cable news program as he questioned a "body language" expert:

MATTHEWS (11/12/99): You know, there's been a lot of talk about the new costuming of Al Gore. You know, he used to wear blue suits like I do, or gray suits. Now he's wearing these new olive suits. He's taking up something rather unconventional, the three-button male suit jacket. 

I always– My joke is, “I'm Albert, I'll be your waiter tonight.” I mean, I don't know anybody who buttons all three buttons, even if they have them. What could that possibly be saying to women voters, three buttons?

DIMITRIUS: Well, I, I think that–

MATTHEWS: Is there some hidden Freudian deal here or what? I don't know. I mean, Navy guys used to have buttons on their pants. I don't know what it means. Go ahead.

For the record, Matthews was smuttily employing a theme which had come to dominate the story-telling of the upper-end mainstream press—the notion that Gore's wardrobe somehow represented a fiendish, sexualized attempt to attract female voters. 

To her credit, Jo-Ellen Dimitrius seemed puzzled by the lunacy of Chris Matthews' insinuations and questions. After some initial fumbling, she took a diplomatic approach to the problem, suggesting that Gore might understand that “olive green, dark green is much more approachable” than dark blue in a man’s suit. 

“Is that why Peter Pan wore green?” Matthews quickly and crazily asked. As Dimitrius fumbled again for an answer, her host finally asked a relevant question:

“How does my mind work that way?” he asked his puzzled guest.

Whatever the answer may have been, Matthews’ mind kept “working that way” all through the month of November. He raised the topic of Gore’s disturbing three-button suits on half a dozen Hardball programs, running through November 24. 

On five of these occasions, Matthews said the three-button suits made Gore look like a waiter. He told his “I’m Albert, I’ll be your waiter” joke on three different programs. 

Nor was Matthews the only major figure counting the number of buttons on Gore’s deeply troubling suits. On November 9, Arianna Huffington clownishly attacked the candidate for wearing four-button suits!

In fact, Gore hadn’t worn any four-button suits. Huffington had simply added a button, making her unadulterated nonsense stand out from the rapidly growing pack.

“The way he's now dressing makes a lot of people feel disconnected from him,” she told a panel of pundits on Geraldo Rivera’s nightly CNBC show, after miscounting the buttons. (Rivera's was one of the rare cable shows of the era whose host was defending Bill Clinton in the wake of his impeachment.)

Gore hadn’t worn any four-button suits. That just made the story sound better. 

Meanwhile, concerning the crazy claim that “the way [Gore was] now dressing makes a lot of people feel disconnected from him,” let it be said that Gore went on to win the New Hampshire primary and every other Democratic primary in that election cycle. (No other Democrat had ever won every contested primary.)

Apparently. Democratic voters hadn't felt quite as "disconnected" from Gore as Huffington had imagined. Nor was Huffington the only major observer who gave voice to such crazy thoughts about the way Gore's troubling suits were being viewed by the public.

On Sunday, November 28, the Washington Post's Marc Fisher went down this same path in a crazy profile of Gore in the newspaper's Sunday magazine. Fisher linked a viciously misogynist sets of attacks on a female adviser to Gore with a similar lunatic claim about the troubling suit Gore had worn at that first Democratic debate.

Fisher added a widespread claim his guild had adopted from the annals of pop psychology“—the endlessly-repeated claim that Candidate Gore "doesn't know who he is."

Had the candidate been duped by aides? Fisher asked. If not, he wasn't "fit to be president:"

FISHER (11/28/99): We have two choices: We can say Gore's a good man who's been duped by over-eager aides, or we can say this is a man who does not know himself, a man who is unknowable, unreadable and therefore not fit to be president.

A person who makes her living by writing pop philosophy about sex tells a man who would be president of the United States that he must be a different kind of man, that he must be more assertive, that he must wear a brown suit of a sort that is alien to virtually every American. And he says, "Okay."

To call him unreadable is to be charitable.

That was the end of Fisher's profile. According to Fisher, Gore had been wearing a brown suit "of a sort that was alien to virtually every American."

Fisher's statement about Gore's suit came live and direct from The Crazy. To this day, he writes lengthy, front-page pieces for the Washington Post.

It's impossible to fully convey the extent to which The Crazy had invaded our upper end (mainstream) press corps by this point in time. This manifest lunacy about Gore's wardrobe went on and on, then on and on, all through the mainstream press. 

On NBC cable, Brian Williams writhed and railed, night after night, about the way Gore was costuming himself in a way designed to woo female voters. No other journalist said a word about the manifest lunacy driving this onslaught. Already, The Crazy was in the saddle and was riding upper-end humankind.

We're sparing you the transcript of Chris Matthews' half-hour interview with Gennifer Flowers in August 1999. At that time, Flowers was offering a for-profit website devoted to recitations concerning Bill and Hillary Clinton's many murders.

Matthews went on and on, in embarrassing ways, about what a stone-cold super-babe Flowers so plainly was, especially compared to Hillary Clinton. Along the way, Flowers' performance with Matthews was so crazy that she was gifted with a full hour on Fox to discuss the Clintons' murders. 

She got the full hour on Hannity & Colmes, but she'd broken through on NBC cable. Before this lunacy jumped to Fox, our own blue tribe was performing a rendezvous with The Crazy.

It took our tribe a very long time to see that The Crazy surrounds us. This week, we've ended up with the Jill Biden breakfast tacos "scandal"—and truly, you simply can't get any dumber than to see a scandal in that.

Is there a way out of this mess? In this morning's New York Times, David Brooks sees a (possible) bad moon rising:

BROOKS (7/15/22): I’d like you to consider the possibility that the political changes that have rocked this country over the past six years will be nothing compared with the changes that will rock it over the next six. I’d like you to consider the possibility that we’re in some sort of prerevolutionary period—the kind of moment that often gives birth to something shocking and new.

Brooks poses the possibility that "the political changes that have rocked this country over the past six years will be nothing compared with the changes that will rock it over the next six." 

He considers the possibility that "we’re in some sort of prerevolutionary period—the kind of moment that often gives birth to something shocking and new."

Long ago and far away, classicist Norman O. Brown already said that he saw that coming. Among liberal intellectuals, Brown was very hot at the time. The year was 1966, and Norman O. Brown said this:

BROWN (1966): I sometimes think I see that societies originate in the discovery of some secret, some mystery; and end in exhaustion when there is no longer any secret, when the mystery has been divulged, that is to say profaned...And so there comes a time—I believe we are in such a time—when civilization has to be renewed by the discovery of some new mysteries, by the undemocratic but sovereign power of the imagination, by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of all mankind, the power which makes all things new.

Brown made those remarks in a Phi Beta Kappa address. We can't say we know exactly what he was talking about, but as our society breaks down around us, we highly self-impressed blue tribe members should remember this:

The Crazy came for us and our "thought leaders" too! This was abundantly clear by the late 1990s.

By the late 1990s, The Crazy was in the saddle among the people we're taught to respect. Our own allegedly brilliant blue tribe was simply too clueless to see this.

Maybe tomorrow: Jill Biden

Special bonus coverage: In the fall of 1999, the clothing campaign took many forms as journalists pounded away at Gore’s deeply troubling character through the medium of his wardrobe.

Example: 

Amid the various crazy claims concerning the candidate’s boots and suits, Brian Williams was treating himself to a small nervous breakdown concerning Gore’s polo shirts.

Candidates had campaigned in casual clothing for years, but Williams was suddenly troubled. Gore was “wearing polo shirts twenty-four hours a day,” the anchor groused on October 6, on his nightly "cable news" program. 

The polo shirts “don’t always look natural on him,” he weirdly complained two nights later. 

For whatever reason, Williams said Gore was wearing the polo shirts in an effort to attract female voters. The anchor repeatedly stated this theory, asking guests when Gore’s strategy would “all start becoming so transparent [that] no one is fooled” (October 6) or (October 8) whether the strategy was going to “become absolutely transparent when they go out into the hinterlands and try to sell it.” 

On and on the grumbling went. Incredibly, Williams raised the question of Gore’s polo shirts on five separate programs in one eight-day period, with two nights off for weekend rehab. 

Williams continued this stupid behavior into the next year. The Crazy was part of our national life. We liberals were simply too dumb to notice, too supine to push back.

This conduct by the upper-end press sent George W. Bush to the Oval Office, Alito to the Supreme Court. No one has ever discussed this obvious fact, and no one ever will.

The Crazy came for us long ago. Is there any hope of escape in (let's say) the next six years?

"If history has taught us anything..."

THURSDAY, JULY 14, 2022

...it doesn't seem to have taught us this: "If history has taught us anything," Al Pacino once famously said.

Pretending to be a mob boss, he continued his famous statement. With apologies for the ugliness of the sentiment he expressed, here is the fuller quotation, straight from The Godfather 2:

“If anything in this life is certain, if history has taught us anything, it is that you can kill anyone."

We apologize for the sentiment Pacino expressed. That said, we disagree with his assessment of the one thing we've been taught.

Has history taught us any one thing? Almost surely not. But if we were to nominate a candidate for this honor, we would nominate this:

If history has taught us anything, it is that it's very hard to hold a large continental nation (or empire) together.

Genghis Khan "united the tribes." His empire came apart. 

Years later, the Soviet Union came apart too, as quite a few others had done.

Given the way our globe's many tribes disagree about cultural matters—and given the way we tend to recoil against Others—it seems to be extremely hard to hold large empires together.

It's also hard to hold a large nation together. That's especially true in a world whose technologies have helped create such communication platforms as these:

Modern formats:
Local and national talk radio programs
Politically partisan "cable news" channels
The million sites of the Internet
And, of course, social media

A sprawling nation with those communication formats may find it hard to survive. It seems to us that, if contemporary history is teaching us anything, it may be trying to teach us that.

These thoughts have repeatedly come to mind this week. Tomorrow, we'll return to the recent hubbub about Jill Biden and the tacos—an incident which shows one of the ways our own blue tribe tends to split nations apart.

For today, we'll look at a couple of headlines from the New York Times. But history seems to be teaching us this:

In the modern context, it's very hard for large nations like ours to survive.

We start on the macro level, with headlines from a dispiriting report in the New York Times. When different tribes within a nation are exposed to vastly different statements of fact, results like these may well result—and large nations can fall apart:

As Faith Flags in U.S. Government, Many Voters Want to Upend the System
Desire for structural changes cuts across both parties, a Times/Siena College poll found, but for starkly different reasons. Even Democrats now question if the government is a force for good.

Faith in government is flagging from sea to shining sea! Reid Epstein's report starts like this:

EPSTEIN (7/14/22): A majority of American voters across nearly all demographics and ideologies believe their system of government does not work, with 58 percent of those interviewed for a New York Times/Siena College poll saying that the world’s oldest independent constitutional democracy needs major reforms or a complete overhaul.

The discontent among Republicans is driven by their widespread, unfounded doubts about the legitimacy of the nation’s elections. For Democrats, it is the realization that even though they control the White House and Congress, it is Republicans, joined with their allies in gerrymandered state legislatures and the Supreme Court, who are achieving long-sought political goals.

For Republicans, the distrust is a natural outgrowth of former President Donald J. Trump’s domination of the party and, to a large degree, American politics. After seven years in which he relentlessly attacked the country’s institutions, a broad majority of Republicans share his views on the 2020 election and its aftermath: Sixty-one percent said he was the legitimate winner...

Majorities in both major parties think the political system is failing. Troublingly, the two groups tend to have completely different ideas concerning what has gone wrong.

Republicans think the last election was rigged. No evidence to that effect has ever been presented, but Donald J. Trump just keeps making the claim, and it doesn't seem to occur to these voters that his claims are unfounded and unsupported and, for that blindingly obvious reason, should be assumed to be wrong.

Trump has never offered evidence in support of his claims! Twenty months have passed since the election occurred. No white paper has appeared.

Voters who believe in Trump don't seem to notice this fact, and our blue tribunes keep saying "lie." It's a word after which all discussion will stop, but our tribe dropped ancient warnings about the term all the way back in the Bush years.

Concerning the way large nations can come undone, consider this recent history:

As recently as the 1960s, it was remarkably hard to hear crazy accounts of major events. 

Citizens had a choice. They could listen to Walter Cronkite, or they could listen to David Brinkley. If you wanted to hear crazy claims, you had to search all about. 

As recently as the 1960s or even the 1980s, hearing The Crazy was hard.

We also had an external enemy—the vast and sprawling Soviet Union, which hadn't yet come undone. With an external enemy like that, it wasn't necessary to find Others on the domestic front. The Other was found Over There.

Today, recitation of bogus, even crazy claims is a giant industry. Thanks to our new information formats, different groups hear vastly different things. 

Our blue tribe hears one set of Storylines. The red tribe hears quite different things. 

Today's New York Times is clogged with reports which reflect this state of affairs. In such situations, things fall apart, as empires have done in the past.

Epstein's report describes the situation on the macro level. On the micro level, we hope Ray Epps is somehow able to sue Tucker Carlson for every dollar the disordered cable star has.

Epps made the unfortunate choice to attend Donald J. Trump's January 6 address. Propagandists seeking profit and fame pretty much took it from there.

As recently as a few weeks back, we saw Carlson play the Epps card all over again on his nightly "cable news" program. This morning, an informative New York Times report carries these very sad headlines:

A Trump Backer’s Downfall as the Target of a Jan. 6 Conspiracy Theory
Ray Epps became the unwitting face of an attempt by pro-Trump forces to promote the baseless idea that the F.B.I. was behind the attack on the Capitol.

According to people like Carlson, the FBI was behind the attack—and Epps was in their employ! So it goes when a fallen figure like Carlson has access to millions of viewers thanks to the technologies which have given us "cable news." 

Tens of millions of American citizens believe and trust Donald J. Trump. Tens of millions believe and trust Tucker Carlson. They get exposed to one set of "facts." Our tribe gets exposed to another.

It's hard to hold giant nations together even without such problems. Meanwhile, our own blue tribe keeps coming along with events like the Jill Biden ploy.

If you seek the benefits of wisdom, please repeat after us:

The other tribe tends to be very dumb, but no one is dumber than we are. 

It's hard for large nations to survive. If history has taught us bluebirds anything, it doesn't seem to have taught us this!

Tomorrow: You can't get dumber than this

BREAKING: We semi-agree with Abernathy...

WEDNESDAY, JULY 13, 2022

...concerning those rather brisk edits: A year or so back, the Washington Post added midwestern conservative Gary Abernathy to its roster of pundits.

We rarely agree with Abernathy. That said, here's his report card for Donald J. Trump, as seen in his latest column:

ABERNATHY (7/13/22): By insisting against all credible evidence that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent, President Donald Trump incited the Capitol riot, dangerously directed his anger toward his own vice president and, most damning of all, refused to participate in the peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 20, 2021.

Credit where due! Abernathy charges Donald J. Trump with insisting on a ridiculous claim; with inciting the Capitol riot; with putting Mike Pence's safety in danger' and with refusing to participate in the peaceful transfer of power.

We're not sure why the last of the four offenses is rated as the worst. But Abernathy can't exactly be accused of going easy on Trump.

Abernathy offers this assessment as part of a larger claim, in which he says that the January 6 committee hasn't turned up anything much that's new. Most specifically, "the effort to connect Trump to some grand conspiracy involving a shadowy network of fanatical backyard warriors and armchair militants is a bridge too far."

Or so Abernathy says.

Abernathy is referring to groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. In our view, the committee hasn't exactly made the link between Trump and those violent groups, but we're waiting to see if stronger evidence of some such pre-planning might surface.

In truth, we were most struck by a comment Abernathy made in his column about one aspect of the committee's work. This paragraph features a fairly silly complaint, followed by an observation we ourselves have made:

ABERNATHY: Of all the Trump tweets and sound bites routinely rolled out by the committee, it’s revealing that this part of Trump’s address to the Ellipse crowd on Jan. 6, 2021, is never presented: “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” On Tuesday, Trump’s replayed remarks were abruptly clipped just before he delivered that line once again. Why? Because Trump’s call to march peacefully to the Capitol undermines the narrative. Likewise, the sloppily edited video testimony of others is suspiciously clipped, sometimes midsentence. Someday, it will be informative to watch it in toto.

Should the committee play the (one) part of Trump's speech where he told his acolytes that they should proceed "peacefully?" 

Not necessarily, no. But we've been struck, as Abernathy has, by the way some bits of videotape have been (perhaps) "suspiciously clipped, sometimes midsentence." Like Abernathy, we have occasionally wondered how the statements in question might seem if viewed in their wider context.

(It has seemed to us that Ivanka Trump has been "quick-edited" a couple of times. It's surprising to us that the committee hasn't released transcripts of the wider contexts.)

Years ago, this sort of abrupt, mid-sentence clip was known as "the Maddow edit." We were surprised to learn that Abernathy has reacted this way, as we have, to some of the committee's clips.

I don't (yet) see it, Tapper says!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 13, 2022

Tapper, Gangel get it right: Did Donald J. Trump know that violent groups were going to invade the Capitol Building on January 6? Had that been a part of the plan?

Way back when, we identified that as the one question which remains concerning Trump's behavior and intent. Had he actually planned for the violence with these groups? Inquiring minds needed to know.

Last night, Jake Tapper and Jamie Gangel engaged in some heretical conduct.  Speaking on CNN, they said that, in their view, this question still hasn't been answered.

In our view, Donald J. Trump seems to be badly disordered. But did he plan for the violence which occurred on January 6?

On this point, we agree with Tapper and Gangel. As we noted yesterday afternoon, we thought the latest hearing by the January 6 Committee failed to establish this point. Indeed, we thought the committee failed to take us where they'd suggested they would.

Earlier, speaking with Cassidy Hutchinson, the committee had whetted our appetite. They'd floated testimony in which Hutchinson said that Mark Meadows may have communicated with the "war room" at the Willard Hotel on the evening of January 5.

(For the relevant transcript, see below.)

Within the novels our blue tribe constructs, this suggested nefarious intent—guilt—on Meadows' part. But what did Meadows actually say if he did speak to the war room? 

What did Meadows actually say if he spoke to the war room? During the hearing with Hutchinson, no evidence of that was supplied.

Through such means as that possible call to the war room, was "the Trump orbit" conspiring with such violent groups as the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys? Was Trump's chief of staff planning for a violent assault on the Capitol?

Everything is possible! But nothing is fact till it's shown.

Yesterday, we were struck—and disappointed—by the way the committee avoided this general question. Earlier teases were set aside. As a general matter, the war room was disappeared.

This doesn't mean that there wasn't a conspiracy to engage in violence; it simply means that no such conspiracy has been shown. And to their credit, Tapper and Gangel noted this fact at roughly 8:20 last night. 

Following a "hang him high" statement by Norm Eisen, their brief exchange went like this:

TAPPER (7/12/22): I have to say, though, and Jamie, I'm interested in what you think, I don't doubt that there were shenanigans with the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, and I see tenuous connections. But I have not seen enough evidence to know that, you know, that that was—that part of it was criminal intent, that Trump knew that these far-right militia groups were coming because of what he said. And you know what I mean? Like, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence about it.

GANGEL: I completely agree. We know that was, that the Proud Boys were acting as security guards—

TAPPER: Oath Keepers.

GANGEL: Oath Keepers, for Roger Stone. But I would say that, in general, the committee has underpromised and overdelivered. This was the one hearing where they said there was going to be a link with the Trump orbit. I didn't see it.

TAPPER: See you all again, shortly.

In Gangel's view, this was the hearing "where [the committee] said there was going to be a link with the Trump orbit" and those violent groups.

"I didn't see it," Gangel said. Tapper had voiced the same point.

In our view, Donald J. Trump is deeply disordered. As disordered people will do, he often surrounded himself with The Crazies—with Giuliani, Powell and Flynn.

His conduct had been bizarre—and grossly unacceptable—for at least seven years by this point. But was there a conspiracy between "the Trump orbit" and the Proud Boys / Oath Keepers coalition?

We thought that topic would be addressed yesterday. We were surprised—and disappointed—when it wasn't.

In closing, we offer you this:

In our view, Donald J. Trump is deeply disordered. That said, various elements of the upper-end press corps have long been journalistically disordered too.

For years, they chased after Clinton, Clinton and Gore. As a result of this group misconduct, Samuel Alito sits on the Supreme Court and Roe v. Wade is dead.

Today, they're uniform in their loathing of Trump—and they tend to jump beyond what they've actually shown in their pursuit of him. Dating to the Clinton / Gore / Clinton years, this is the way they tend to play the game once a target has been chosen.

Their novelizing is endless and far-reaching. Yesterday, their novelizing was on wide display. 

(We've been especially struck by the way they keep putting their thumbs on the scales concerning Meadows' conduct. It would take far too long to explain any of this.)

That said, our tribe is currently on their side. We're happy when they cut their many corners to hand us the simplified stories we like. 

We simply love our tribal novels. Being "human all too human," we don't notice—and we're happy— when corners are sanded, shaved, cut.

A pair of background transcripts: Last evening, the exchange between Tapper and Gangel followed a presentation by Norm Eisen. 

Eisen is, for better or worse, a CNN legal analyst. In this presentation, he engaged in the conduct typical of this large "cable news" class:

EISEN (7/12/22): Jake, we heard from Cassidy Hutchinson at the last hearing about Trump's violent intent—intent is so important in criminal cases, his violent intent on January 6th. 

They built a bridge today, from December 14, when, as we heard from Pat Cipollone, we see now why they wanted him and so many others, the legal avenues were exhausted.

He had a turning point on December 18th in this meeting. He chose the road of Team Crazy and then, December 19th, "Will be wild." That shows intent of the violence that we ultimately got on January 6th. We got a lot of premeditation, all of the planning.

So I think they added to the quantum of evidence. They're moving towards proof beyond a reasonable doubt of crime in these hearings.

Dating back through the Mueller years, the "hangin' prosecutors" of cable news have persistently assured us that criminal indictments of Trump are right around the corner. 

Trump's next crime is always visible to these pundits. Over time, their conduct has helped us understand why our prisons sometimes seem to be full of innocent people.

Eisen isn't a former prosecutor, but he tends to play one on TV. In that statement, he's saying that Trump's one tweet, "Will be wild," somehow shows that he wanted the violent assault on the Capitol Building. This follows the creed of this intrepid breed:

In all cases, every item will establish the target's guilt.

Eisen drew a ton of meaning—a ton of intent—from that three-word tweet. The debunking exchange between Tapper and Gangel followed Eisen's statement.

Concerning Meadows and the war room, here's an exchange between Liz Cheney and Cassidy Hutchinson from the previous hearing. Warning to us lovestruck liberals! The fact that Cheney makes a statement doesn't prove that the statement is true:

CHENEY (6/28/22): The night before January 6th, President Trump instructed his Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to contact both Roger Stone and Michael Flynn regarding what would play out the next day. Ms. Hutchinson, is it your understanding that President Trump asked Mark Meadows to speak with Roger Stone and General Flynn on January 5th?

 HUTCHINSON: That's correct. That is my understanding.

CHENEY: And Ms. Hutchinson, is it your understanding that Mr. Meadows called Mr. Stone on the 5th?

HUTCHINSON: I'm under the impression that Mr. Meadows did complete both a call to Mr. Stone and General Flynn the evening of the 5th.

CHENEY: And do you know what they talked about that evening, Ms. Hutchinson?

HUTCHINSON: I'm not sure.

CHENEY: Is it your understanding that Mr. Giuliani, Mr. Eastman, and others had set up what has been called, quote, a war room at the Willard Hotel on the night of the 5th?

HUTCHINSON: I was aware of that the night of the 5th.

CHENEY: And do you know if Mr. Meadows ever intended to go to the Willard Hotel on the night of the 5th?

HUTCHINSON: Mr. Meadows had a conversation with me where he wanted me to work with Secret Service on a movement from the White House to the Willard Hotel so he could attend the meeting or meetings with Mr. Giuliani and his associates in the war room.

CHENEY: And what was your view as to whether or not Mr. Meadows should go to the Willard that night?

HUTCHINSON: I had made it clear to Mr. Meadows that I didn't believe it was a smart idea for him to go to the Willard Hotel that night. I wasn't sure everything that was going on at the Willard Hotel, although I knew enough about what Mr. Giuliani and his associates were pushing during this period. I didn't think that it was something appropriate for the White House Chief of Staff to attend or to consider involvement in, and made that clear to Mr. Meadows.

Throughout the afternoon, he mentioned a few more times going up to the Willard Hotel that evening, and then eventually dropped the subject the night of the 5th and said that he would dial in instead.

According to Hutchinson, Meadows had wanted to go to the Willard; in the end, he may have "dialed in" instead. But what had Meadows planned to say when he went there?

Within our tribe, we were encouraged to assume that he wanted to say the worst. No evidence was offered to establish that point—and yesterday, this whole well-teased avenue completely disappeared.

We were disappointed by that. But when Tapper and Gangel noted this fact, we'd say they got it right!

Did Donald J. Trump plan, conspire, for the violence which occurred? 

In our view, that hasn't been established yet. Whatever the truth may turn out to be, we hope the committee delves further.

UPDATE: Depressingly dumb!

 TUESDAY, JULY 12, 2022

Life within our failing tribe is like a box of chocolates: Early this morning, we started to comment on the Jill Biden "tacos" tempest, via the incurably stupid Daily Beast.

(Headline: "Jill Biden Compares Hispanic Community to Breakfast Tacos." Warning: You need to watch the tape.)

We started out to comment on that. Overcome by the dumbness of our own tribe, we decided to let the day go.

By 1:20 PM, Margaret Hartmann of New York magazine was playing faithful obedient servant. To see her pretend, just click here.

Our team is very, very dumb. The fact that we all agree to play by these rules is very bad for the world.

BREAKING: We didn't have any fish today!

TUESDAY, JULY 12, 2022

We expect to have fish tomorrow: We didn't have any fish today. We expect have fish tomorrow.

We thought the January 6 committee was a bit short on fish today too. Links between Trump and violent groups-wise, we would have thought that they'd be able cast their nets a bit farther.

TOOK THE GODEL CHALLENGE: A roster of those who took the challenge!

MONDAY, JULY 11, 2022

Took it but seem to have failed: To us, it felt like a four-day weekend. Also, the weather in the Baltimore/Washington area was unseasonably superb.

Under the circumstances, we did what anyone else would have done over the recent July 4 weekend. We gifted ourselves with the ongoing pleasures of "The Gödel Challenge," resulting in this report.

Major figures have taken the Gödel Challenge. In its simplest form, the challenge consists in this:

At its simplest, the challenge consists in the attempt to explain Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem(s) in a way the general reader can understand.

As the days and weeks pass, we'll add a bit to that description of the Gödel Challenge. That said, major figures have taken the challenge. In our view, they seem to have failed.

Question! Since almost no one has ever heard of Kurt Gödel, why should such folderol matter?  

Given the way the world really works, it doesn't matter at all! Given the way we might wish the world worked, it matters for this reason:

Kurt Gödel (1906-1978) has often been described as "the greatest logician since Aristotle." Given the role logic is said to play in idealized pictures of human life, you'd almost think we'd want to know what he showed or proved.

Alas! We know of no one who has been able to explain that matter in a way the general reader can hope to understand. Today, we present a roster of some major figures who have taken the Gödel Challenge—who have taken the challenge and failed:

Professor Rebecca Goldstein:

Rebecca Goldstein took the challenge in her well-received book, Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel.

The book appeared in 2005, part of a larger series aimed at general readers. It was festooned with blurbs from leading intellectuals who testified to its lucidity. 

At the time, Goldstein was a philosophy professor at Barnard. She graduated as valedictorian from Barnard in 1972, then received her doctorate in philosophy from Princeton.

Aside from her work in philosophy, Goldstein is also a well-regarded novelist. In 2014, she received a MacArthur genius grant. 

Biographer Stephen Budiansky:

In 2021, Stephen Budiansky took the challenge in a similar biography aimed at general readers. His book was called Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel.

The book was favorably reviewed. Budiansky benefited from access to a wide array of private papers which has previously been inaccessible to Gödel scholars.

Professors Nagel and Newman:

Longer ago and farther away, Ernest Nagel and James Newman also took the challenge. Initially, they did so in an article for Scientific American. 

Nagel and Newman were highly regarded scholars in their respective fields. Later, their article was expanded into a short book, Gödel's Proof.

The book appeared in 1958, becoming an instant classic. In 2001, New York University Press published a slightly revised edition of the original text, describing the book as shown:

An accessible explanation of Kurt Gödel's groundbreaking work in mathematical logic

In 1931 Kurt Gödel published his fundamental paper, "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems." This revolutionary paper challenged certain basic assumptions underlying much research in mathematics and logic. Gödel received public recognition of his work in 1951 when he was awarded the first Albert Einstein Award for achievement in the natural sciences—perhaps the highest award of its kind in the United States. The award committee described his work in mathematical logic as "one of the greatest contributions to the sciences in recent times."

However, few mathematicians of the time were equipped to understand the young scholar's complex proof. Ernest Nagel and James Newman provide a readable and accessible explanation to both scholars and non-specialists of the main ideas and broad implications of Gödel's discovery. It offers every educated person with a taste for logic and philosophy the chance to understand a previously difficult and inaccessible subject.

New York University Press is proud to publish this special edition of one of its bestselling books. With a new introduction by Douglas R. Hofstadter, this book will appeal students, scholars, and professionals in the fields of mathematics, computer science, logic and philosophy, and science.

According to NYU Press, Gödel's Proof provides non-specialists with "a readable and accessible explanation of the main ideas and broad implications of Gödel's discovery." The overview notes that the new edition of the book included "a new introduction by Douglas R. Hofstadter."

"What is Gödel's work about?" Hofstadter asks at one point in that introduction. That said, Hofstadter was already very well known, and highly regarded, for having taken the challenge at an earlier point.

Professor Douglas Hofstadter:

Perhaps the best-known attempt at the Gödel Challenge came from Professor Hofstadter in his 1979 book, Gödel, Escher and Bach. 

The 777-page book won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction and the National Book Award for Science Hardcover. Hofstadter's explanation of Gödel's work was one of the building-bocks of the book—and Hofstadter didn't stop there. 

In 2001, Hofstadter took the challenge again, writing that preface to the latest edition of the Nagel and Newman book. Again, he tried to explain what Gödel had done in a way which would be accessible to the general reader.

Others have taken the Gödel Challenge over the many long years. That said, we'll be focusing on the efforts listed above as we attempt to discern if anyone has successfully taken this challenge.

Above, you see our roster. We've cited five highly-regarded scholars and writers who have taken the Gödel Challenge. But has anyone succeeded at this daunting task?

We're inclined to say that the answer is no. As we noted in our earlier post, we'll raise a related set of questions as we continue along with our quest. Our questions will go like this:

Do Gödel's theorems even make sense? Yes, the theorems are hard to explain. But is it possible that these famous theorems don't even make good sense, judged on their own terms?

That may seem like a ridiculous thought. For reasons we'll note as we proceed, we can't necessarily say that we automatically agree.

Our reasons for doubt will follow. We think this 20th-century story is wonderfully comic. It's anthropology all the way down!

Coming next: Expanding the terms of the Gödel Challenge

Earlier in this continuing series: 

TOOK THE GODEL CHALLENGE: To their credit, they took the challenge! See THE DAILY HOWLER, 7/5/22.

ERRORS: We pivot away from our tribe's mistakes in search of some comic relief! See THE DAILY HOWLER, 7/7/22.

 

BREAKING: Pamela Paul says Roberts should quit!

MONDAY, JULY 11, 2022

A look at all we have: In this morning's New York Times, opinion columnist Pamela Paul shows us what we're left with at this very late date. Her column appears beneath this headline:

If Only John Roberts Would Retire

Paul pictures a better world in which the Chief Justice retires at age 67, letting President Biden nominate his replacement. She seems to know that this ain't gonna happen—but at this point, it looks like this is pretty much all we have.

In print editions, Paul shares space on the opinions page with the latest column by Charles Blow. His headline is steeped in a somewhat extreme type of gloom:

We Are Political Hostages

By "we," Blow seems to mean people who aren't "white." Overall, his reasoning strikes us as possibly specious. Early on, he offers this:

BLOW (7/11/22): In November of 2019, Nate Cohn in The Times analyzed a number of surveys of swing-state voters and looked specifically at the “persuadable pool,” the 15 percent of voters in the battleground states who were undecided and still thinking of voting for Donald Trump or a Democrat.

He found, “As a group they are 57 percent male and 72 percent white.”

For most other people, “freedom of choice” in elections is an illusion. We are captives of the two-party system. We are political hostages.

Voters subject to oppression have only two choices: the benevolent captors (Democrats) or the cruel captors (Republicans).

Blow is employed at the highest level of American journalism. He's frequently featured on "cable news"—but he pictures himself trapped between two different groups of "captors."

These columns represent the best the Times can do. Stated a slightly different way, this is the best our team has!

It's been like this for a very long time. In its least mistakable manifestation, this dates back to the mainstream press corps' obsession with the deeply troubling wardrobe of Candidate Gore in 1999—with his suits, his boots, his polo shirts, the height at which he hemmed his pants, the number of buttons on his suit jackets (three), the color of his troubling wardrobe and what it all so plainly meant about his psychological problems and his fiendish electoral strategies. 

High-end "journalists" predating Paul and Blow never said boo as they and their colleagues mugged and clowned in this relentless war of propaganda and stupidification. After two years of this (and similar) group inanity, George W. Bush ended up in the Oval.

Alito went to the Court.

(Within the past year, we haven't been able to make ourselves refresh you about the astonishing nonsense concerning that candidate's clothes. We've found the prospect too depressing—but understand that this went on and on, then on and on, with no one saying so much as boo about the manifest nonsense. For the record, this lunacy came from the New York Times and the rest of the MSM, not from "the right-wing noise machine." Just for the record, the manifest lunacy to which we refer came from our own blue tribe.)

This morning, Pamela Paul wants Roberts to quit. Charles Blow gives us Blow in chains.

This is the best our tribe can do. Even at this very late date, this seems to be all we have.

Just for the record: Just for the record, exit polls in November 2020 estimated that 67 percent of voters nationwide were white. Cohn's estimate concerning the number of "persuadables" was only slightly higher than that.

This afternoon: This afternoon, we continue our award-winning occasional series, Took the Gödel Challenge. In theory, our series is aimed at the 12-year-old kid who is going to straighten things out.

Is "something wrong with" General Flynn?

FRIDAY, JULY 8, 2022

Gellman reports from the front:  In a new piece for The Atlantic, Barton Gellman asks what may be a very good question:

"What happened to Michael Flynn?"

As Gellman notes in some detail, Flynn was once a highly-regarded two-star general, serving in Special Operations in Iraq under Presidents Bush and Obama. As of 2009, “I thought, God, this guy is flipping magic," General Barry McCaffrey is quoted telling Gellman.

Flynn seemed to be magic—but that was then, and this is now. Recently, Gellman went to see Flynn on a current-day front. Here's what he says he saw:

GELLMAN (7/7/22): I went to hear him speak at the Trinity Gospel Temple in Canton, Ohio, where he served as mascot and majordomo of a traveling road show called “ReAwaken America.” It was a proudly mask-free event; anyone with a covered face was asked to leave. There would be six dozen speakers over two days, including MAGA stars such as Eric Trump, Mike Lindell, and Roger Stone. But Flynn was the big draw.

[...]

Some of the things he said fell into a category of assertion that his military-intelligence critics used to call “Flynn facts.” “Read some of The Federalist Papers,” Flynn told the crowd. “They’re simple; they’re amazing, amazing documents as to who we are.” He added, “Ben Franklin’s one of the ones that wrote some of this and argued some of it.” (No, he’s not.) Flynn attributed the nation’s founding to divine intervention, adding, “That’s why the word creator is even in our Constitution.” (It isn’t.)

What Flynn has is an everyman quality, according to Steve Bannon, who said he declined an invitation to join the tour. “Mike is authentic,” Bannon told me. “To them, he’s authentic. He’s a fighter. That’s big.” Flynn reminds Bannon, he said, of his Irish uncles and cousins: “He’s not pretentious. He’s one of them.”

If this was authenticity, though, it was authentically detached from reality. The animating ideas behind the “Great ReAwakening,” expounded by the various speakers, were (1) that forces loyal to Satan are stealing political power in rigged elections (2) on behalf of a global conspiracy masterminded by Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum, and Yuval Noah Harari, an Israeli public intellectual, and (3) that the cabal has fabricated the coronavirus pandemic as an excuse to mandate dangerous vaccines, which (4) make people sick and may secretly turn them into “transhumans” under the conspiracy’s remote control.

QAnon talking points pervade the “ReAwaken America” tour. In Canton, [emcee Clay] Clark got a rise from the crowd with a reference to “adrenochrome,” which QAnon myths describe as a drug that cannibalistic global elites harvest by torturing children.

At this juncture, we're forced to note a basic point. Gellman doesn't quote Flynn making these very strange assertions about the cannibalistic global elites torturing children to harvest that mythical drug. It's true that Flynn is on this tour. But Gellman doesn't quite him making these very odd statements.

In fact, after watching Flynn on the front, Gellman is only able to report him making some relatively harmless misstatements about the Federalist Papers and the Constitution. This is a major problem with Gellman's piece. It should have been addressed by the Atlantic's editors. 

A bit of a journalistic flimflam might seem to be underway here. Still and all, Gellman offers this chronicle of Flynn's past behaviors—and he poses a question as he does:

GELLMAN: He has baffled old comrades with his transformation since being fired as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014. He led chants to lock up Hillary Clinton in 2016. In 2020, he posted a video of himself taking an oath associated with QAnon. He has endorsed crackpot fabrications of the extreme right: that Italy used military satellites to switch votes from Trump to Biden in 2020, that COVID-19 was a hoax perpetrated by a malevolent global elite, that the vaccine infused recipients with microchips designed for mind control.

Has Flynn always been susceptible to paranoid conspiracies? Or did something happen along the way that fundamentally shifted his relationship to reality? In recent conversations I had with the former general’s close associates, some for attribution and some not, they offered a variety of theories.

Did "something happen" to General Flynn? Former associates voice various theories. Eventually, Gellman writes this:

GELLMAN: One after another in my interviews, people who know Flynn speculated about the possibility of cognitive decline or a psychological disorder, then shied away. McCaffrey was the only person prepared to say on the record, “I think he was having mental-health problems.”

Has there been a "cognitive decline" or the emergence of a "psychological disorder?" McCaffrey was willing to speak about "mental-health problems.” The discussion of same ended there.

Gellman pulls a bit of an okey-doke as he describes the current-day Flynn on the current-day front. He works hard to make readers think that Flynn said various things in his Canton speech which he apparently didn't say.

That said, is something wrong with General Flynn? Could there be some sort of cognitive issue? Some sort of psychological disorder or mental health problem?

Our journalists hate to explore such topics when discussing public figures. Nothing will make them go there.

In closing, though, we'll offer these questions with respect to the crazy claims to which the Canton crowd responded:

What would make anyone believe such claims? What are we to make of the fact that anyone, let alone a cheering crowd, could display such apparent disorder?

ERRORS: Ben Smith spoke with Tucker Carlson!

FRIDAY, JULY 8, 2022

We'd say the errors were general:  Even at the age of 46, Ben Smith has had a long career in and around the upper-end mainstream press corps.

According to the leading authority on the subject, he recently left the New York Times for the following reason:

In early January 2022, [Ben] Smith announced he would be leaving The New York Times to start a global news venture aimed at the 200 million college educated English readers. Justin B. Smith would lead the business side of the new venture and Ben would be the top editor. The news site claims to break news and supplant complex news stories. In a memo that Justin Smith sent to “close confidants,” he described a new company that would “reimagine quality global journalism” aimed at what he said was an "English-speaking, college-educated, professional class" that had "lost trust in all sources of news and information." The name of the new venture, Semafor, was announced in March 2022.

For a New York Times report on the Semafor site, you can just click here.

Yesterday morning, Semafor began its institutional roll-out with a two-hour series of interviews. You can watch the whole event just by clicking this. 

In the final interview of the day, Ben Smith spoke with (or at) Tucker Carlson for roughly twenty minutes. At the start of the session, Smith said this to Carlson:

"I’m just hoping you’ll let me ask questions and not steamroll me, because you’re a professional and I’m not.” 

It's true! As it turns out, Smith isn't a professional interviewer. We thought that fact became abundantly clear during the twenty-minute session.

With respect to that interview, we'd say the errors were general on both sides. We mainly despaired about Smith.

At present, we'd love to see a skillful interview with that same Tucker Carlson. At present, much of his program seems to emerge from a resentment so deep, and from a journalism so unkempt, that it makes each evening's program instantly unwatchable.

On occasion, Carlson's program doesn't strike us like that. On such occasions, Carlson seems to flirt with making sense, though even then he will tend to proceed so far over the top that we can't help wondering where all the thrashing comes from.

Early in yesterday's interview, Smith said he wasn't a professional at the interview game. During yesterday's twenty minutes, he demonstrated that fact with his constant interruptions of Carlson, and with some of the painfully childish ways he tried to establish and defend certain basic claims.

Does our nation have the skill to find its way out of our current situation? We're inclined to say that the answer is no, and it has looked that way for years.

Most evenings, Carlson strikes us as derangement-adjacent. Yesterday, Smith struck us as stunningly incompetent. Also, as deeply connected to deeply unhelpful tribalized thinking-points.

So it goes as we slide toward the sea. At this site, we may try again next week.

To watch the interview: To watch the interview, just click this. Move ahead to the 1:26:00 mark. 

The exchanges run twenty minutes. It's an embarrassing, failed attempt at human interaction.

Who lost south of Uvalde County?

THURSDAY, JULY 7, 2022

Insulting comments appear:  A few weeks ago, we offered an award-winning report which carried this tough-talking headline:

Who lost Uvalde County?

We noted the fact that Uvalde County, Texas is very heavily Hispanic—but the county voted for Donald J. Trump in the last two White House elections.

At issue was an important demographic fact. Hispanic voters in South Texas may be trending in a conservative direction. 

This flies in the face of conventional BlueTribeThink, according to which Hispanic voters were supposed to belong to us. This morning, a news report in the New York Times gives readers another chance to ponder this possible trend.

In her report, Jennifer Medina focuses on three Hispanic women who are running for Congress, as Republicans, in three South Texas districts. One of the three, Rep. Mayra Flores, has already won a special election and is currently serving in Congress. In this passage, Medina completes the roster, profiling the other two:

MEDINA (7/7/22): Two other Latina Republicans, Monica De La Cruz in McAllen and Cassy Garcia in Laredo, are also on the ballot in congressional races along the Mexican border. All three—G.O.P. officials have taken to calling them a “triple threat”—share right-wing views on immigration, the 2020 election and abortion, among other issues.

They share the same advisers, have held campaign rallies and fund-raisers together and have knocked on doors side by side. They accuse the Democratic Party of taking Hispanic voters for granted and view themselves, as do their supporters, as the embodiment of the American dream: Ms. Flores often speaks of working alongside her parents as a teenager in the cotton fields of the Texas Panhandle.

Ms. Flores, Ms. De La Cruz and Ms. Garcia grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, a working-class four-county region at the southernmost tip of Texas where Hispanics make up 93 percent of the population. All three are bilingual; Ms. Flores was born in Tamaulipas, Mexico, and the other two in South Texas. Only Ms. De La Cruz has been endorsed by Mr. Trump, yet they all remain outspoken advocates for him, his movement and his tough talk on restricting immigration and building the border wall.

Rep. Flores "worked alongside her parents in the cotton fields." We think of Woody Guthrie's lyrics:

I've mined in your mines, I've gathered in your corn.
I've been working, Mister, since the day I was born...

That said, do the three nominees actually share "right-wing views"—about abortion and immigration, to cite two of Medina's examples?

We don't know how to answer that question, in part because Medina never specifies their views. For our money, we'd be just as happy if Times reporters stayed away from such tangy language. We feel the same way about the language found in the report's dual headline:

The Rise of the Far-Right Latina
Representative Mayra Flores is one of three Republican Latinas vying to transform South Texas politics by shunning moderates and often embracing the extreme.

Based on Medina's report, Rep. Flores has embraced a lot of unfounded Trumpist views concerning stolen elections. But have she and the other nominees embraced "extreme" (or "far-right") views—about abortion and immigration, to again cite those two examples?

We have no idea. We think the Times should perhaps be a bit more careful about the language it uses in its news reports. Then again, we note the insulting remarks about these women found in comments to this news report—comments from members of our own largely infallible tribe.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but our tribe is nowhere near as moral and good as we relentlessly claim we are. When push comes to shove, we may tend to lose our sense of respect for people with backgrounds like these:

MEDINA: Ms. Flores, Ms. De La Cruz and Ms. Garcia grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, a working-class four-county region at the southernmost tip of Texas where Hispanics make up 93 percent of the population. All three are bilingual; Ms. Flores was born in Tamaulipas, Mexico, and the other two in South Texas. Only Ms. De La Cruz has been endorsed by Mr. Trump, yet they all remain outspoken advocates for him, his movement and his tough talk on restricting immigration and building the border wall.

The Rio Grande Valley has long been a politically liberal yet culturally conservative place. Church pews are packed on Sundays, American flags wave from their poles on front lawns and law enforcement is revered. Ms. Flores’s husband is a Border Patrol agent, a note she often emphasized on the campaign trail.

In 2020, the Valley’s conservative culture started to exert a greater influence on its politics. Mr. Trump flipped rural Zapata County and narrowed the Democratic margin of victory in the four Valley counties and in other border towns.

“Growing up down there, you always have closeted Republicans,” said Ms. Garcia, a former aide to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. “Now, the desire to embrace Republicans is really spreading. They feel a genuine sense of belonging.”

Are denizens of the Rio Grande Valley starting to feel a sense of belonging to the GOP? We don't know, but our tribe's frequent condescension toward South Texans and their cultural history could hurry that process along.

We tend to be especially shocked when such people support harder lines on immigration. In comments, we rarely wonder why they might hold such views. We just let the insults start.

Our tribe's condescension towards Others can sometimes tend to be strong. The Others can sometimes discern this. 

South Texas Hispanics are real people too. They're entitled to disagree with our own tribe's always infallible views. 

We wouldn't vote for Rep. Flores. We would be willing to show some respect for her region's cultural traditions. If we want Others to vote our way, we know that we have to persuade them.

ERRORS: We pivot away from our own tribe's mistakes...

THURSDAY, JULY 7, 2022

...in search of some comic relief:  Provisionally, we issue a promise!

We promise that, on the morrow, we'll return to this week's supposed project.

On Tuesday, we said that we would be suggesting that our own tribe's very occasional, tiny/small errors might help explain the unhelpful way our political leaders are viewed.

In truth, we find that project depressing. For today, we go in search of the comic relief which lets our species fight on.

For today, we'll move to the terrain of our second ongoing series, the collection called "Took the Gödel Challenge." We'll discuss a possible tiny/small error of judgment committed by Bertrand Russell before Gödel came along.

Our material will be drawn from Stephen Budiansky's well-received biography, Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt Gödel (2021). Budiansky's book will be one of the four or five texts on which we' focus in our forthcoming work.

For today, we'll focus on the comic relief Budiansky provides at one point in the book, courtesy of Lord Russell. At issue is the mammoth task Russell undertook near the turn of the twentieth century—the effort he took, with Alfred North Whitehead, "to show," in Budiansky's words, "that all of mathematics could be derived from the propositions of logic."

Is it true? Could "all of mathematics be derived from the propositions of logic?" 

We don't know it that could be done, nor do we have the slightest idea why anyone would want to do it. We're not even sure what this goal, as described, even means. 

Budiansky never much tries to explain that point. Like many others, he doesn't seem to realize that he's dealing here with a type of technical language—with the type of technical language that doesn't appear to be technical language.

We'll discuss such matters in future reports. For today, let's restrict ourselves the comic relief brought to a grateful world in Budiansky's book.

Russell and Whitehead had assigned themselves the somewhat murky task described above. Eventually, Gödel would enter the fray, allegedly establishing himself as "the greatest logician since Aristotle."

We're going to set that aside for later. For today, we'll move to the comic relief.

Russell and Whitehead had displayed the way "mathematics can be derived from the propositions of logic" in a three-volume work, Principia Mathematica, which began appearing in 1910. Eventually, Budiansky starts to discuss some of the problems with the monumental work, drawing on Lord Russell's admirable propensity for humorous self-denigration:

BUDIANSKY (page 108): Gödel placed himself at the very center of the storm over mathematical foundations, which had broken with a deeply unnerving discovery Bertrand Russell had made at the turn of the century while working on Principia Mathematica. Russell's idea had been to establish the soundness of mathematics by showing how it all could be reduced to principles of logic so self-evident as to be beyond dispute. Defining even the simplest operations of arithmetic in terms of what Russell called such "primitive" notions, however, was far from an obvious task. Even the notion of what a number is raised immediate problems. The laboriousness of the methodology and notation was all too evident in the (often remarked) fact that it took more than seven hundred pages to reach the conclusion "1 + 1 = 2," a result which Russell and Whitehead described as "occasionally useful."

Say what? It took more than seven hundred pages to demonstrate the soundness of 1 + 1 = 2? 

Arguably, a sensible person might start to wonder, at this point, about the soundness of the entire project. Soon, though, Budiansky was describing the "paradox" which brought Principia crashing down.

For today, we'll skip Budiansky's discussion of the wonderfully comical "set of all sets not members of themselves," the shoals upon which Russell came to believe that his ship had foundered. For today, we'll restrict ourselves to the most obvious points of comic relief.

Russell's handling of this troubling "set of all sets" would eventually bring Principia down. Along the way, his discovery of the troubling set had led to a conundrum known as "Russell's Paradox." 

Budiansky's play-by-play reads as shown:

BUDIANSKY (page 109): "Russell's Paradox," as it came to be known, echoed paradoxes that had been around since antiquity. The prototype is The Liar's Paradox, attributed to Epimenides the Cretan, who asserted, "All Cretans are liars." Russell noted that this was akin to the conundrum posed by a piece of paper on which the sentence "The statement on the other side of this paper is false" is written on one side, and "The statement on the other side of this paper is true" on the other.

"It seemed unworthy of a grown man to waste his time on such trivialities," Russell later recalled, and "at first I supposed that I should be able to overcome the contradiction quite easily, and that there was probably some trivial error in the reasoning." The more he thought about it, the more he realized it was a flaw in his whole project too deep to be ignored.

Say what? A silly parlor trick of the type described brought a giant philosophical undertaking crashing to the ground?

We honor Russell for his self-deprecation; we compliment Budiansky for including this comic relief in his well-received book. But what can it mean when historical giants of the world of upper-end academic philosophy find their mammoth undertakings stymied by "such trivialities" in what seem to be such blatantly silly ways? 

Could it suggest that something was wrong with the whole undertaking from the start—possibly with the whole cosseted upper-end academic culture from which this project emerged?

We'll set such questions aside for today. For today, Budiansky's flair for comic relief finally gives us this:

BUDIANSKY (pages 110-111): [T]here were other problems with the project which Russell himself recognized, and not long after finishing his herculean task he admitted feeling a deep sense of failure. The massive manuscript, with its complex notation which could only be written out laboriously by hand, had to be carted in a four-wheeler cab to the offices of Cambridge University Press when it was finally done. The press was so pessimistic about sale prospects that it demanded L600 to cover the anticipated loss; even with a grant from the Royal Society and other funding, Russell and his co-author Whitehead ended up earning "minus L50 apiece for ten years' work," Russell said. "This beats the record of Paradise Lost." A number of years later he told a friend, with his usual self-mocking humor, "I used to know only six people who had read the later parts of the book."

"One of those [six people] was Kurt Gödel," Budiansky notes at that point.

It took Russell 700 pages to establish that 1 + 1 = 2. The project was based on a ludicrous "triviality," and the reasoning was so laborious that the book, when finally done, had to be carted about in a four-wheeler cab—this monumental work of erudition which only six people had read all the way to the end.

Years later, Gödel turned his attention to this peculiar forcefield. Out of it came a famous theorem no one can explain to the general reader—the famous "incompleteness theorem[s]" which established its creator as "the greatest logician since Aristotle."

What does this say about one major part of the intellectual and cultural world within which we all live? In part, it says that Lord Russell had a good sense of humor, and we'll leave it right there for right now.

Russell came to see that there were problems with his mammoth undertaking! Errors, including those which may go unremarked, can form a very large part of the world, even within our own blue tribe, a social and cultural aggregation which is often perhaps somewhat landlocked and is famously quite self-impressed.

Much of the red tribe has lost its mind. But what's going on within ours?

Tomorrow: What we've provisionally promised

ERRORS: Our jalopy is pulled to the side of the road!

WEDNESDAY, JULY 6, 2022

Today we have sputtering parts:  Yesterday, we stated a premise. We said we'd start to answer a question about this recent piece of bad news:

ZENGERLE (7/3/22): In May, CNN asked 1,007 American voters for their opinions on the country’s two major political parties. After four years of Trump in the White House, an insurrection and unsuccessful attempt to overturn a presidential election and now a Republican Party that can be fairly described as a cult of personality and is moving further right on many of the same social issues, 46 percent of those surveyed considered the G.O.P. to be “too extreme.” But 48 percent of them viewed the Democratic Party the same way.

It was only one survey. But in that one survey, 48 percent of respondents described the Democratic Party as being "too extreme." 

That's where the really bad news comes in. Only 46 percent of respondents described the Trump-ruled GOP the same way!

To blue tribe voters, a survey result of that type may seem hard to believe. Yesterday, we suggested several possible explanations, even including the possibility that our own tribe's mistakes—our own unforced errors—have contributed to the way the Democratic Party is viewed.

We had some recent events in mind as possible illustrations. We were even thinking of citing some recent interviews with a major Democratic politician, in which she seemed to favor an unfettered right to abortion right up to, and right on through, the ninth month of pregnancy.

(For the record, we wouldn't be saying that some such position was "wrong." We'd merely be saying that such a position might help explain that recent survey result, a result which simply reflects the stated views of a wide range of respondents.)

As of this morning, we've finally decided to pull our sputtering jalopy to the side of the road for a time. We'd already been struck by something we saw on today's Morning Joe. After that, by a succession of news reports in today's New York Times.

We were struck by the way the framing of the national discourse continues to change before our eyes. Still, we hoped to force our jalopy onward—but then, we came upon this.

We came upon that (purported) letter to Slate—and good God, that whole thing is dumb! Still, that unparalleled dumbness is part of the fuel on which the new Slate frequently runs. And when Slate attempts to talk about policy, it will frequently huff like this.

We came upon that letter to Slate! Instantly, we pulled our car to the curb, smoke belching all around us.

The other tribe—the Trumpist red tribe—has provided a string of anthropology lessons over the past dozen years. (We're counting back to the time when Donald J. Trump, not yet a candidate, began to establish himself as king of the nation's birthers. He performed this task on Fox, with Greta van Susteren serving as his caddy)

We were very naive at that time. We found it hard to believe that so many people could be led to believe that Barack Obama had really been born in Kenya. Man [sic] is the rational animal!

That said, the capacity for crazy red tribe belief was just getting started. Since then, that tribe's crazy and/or unfounded belief has moved on to Pizzagate, then to the widespread belief that the last election was stolen.

Our own tribe's possible errors and oddnesses turn on matters of gender and race, the only topics we  claim to care about at this time.

For completely obvious reasons, gender and race are deeply sensitive topics. For that reason, our own tribe's possible errors and perceived extremes may be quite hard to discuss.

At one time, we would have thought our own blue tribe would be sharper than it actually is. After pulling our car to the side of the road, we now acknowledge that that was always a type of impossible pipedream.

Why did 48 percent of respondents describe the Democratic Party as being too extreme? Was it because those respondents are racist? Was it because of our own tribe's emerging positions, including our unforced mistakes?

We may try to restart the jalopy tomorrow. That said, we've begun to realize that we should have junked the car as essentially useless a long, long time ago.

The car was new and shiny once. But that was a long time ago.

Tomorrow: Will the jalopy start?

TOOK THE GODEL CHALLENGE: To their credit, they took the challenge!

TUESDAY, JULY 5, 2022

But did they succeed in their quest?: To their credit, against all odds, they took The Gödel Challenge.

That said, did they succeed in their attempts—in their attempts at the Gödel Challenge as we will define it? 

It seems to us that the answer is no. But to their credit, the challenge was taken. They gave the challenge a try.

In fact, quite a few people have taken the Gödel Challenge over the past fifty years. At issue is the so-called "incompleteness theorem" (or theorems) of Kurt Gödel, the logician, mathematician, and philosopher who published this theorem in 1931 at the age of 25.

As a result of this work, Gödel has often been called "the greatest logician since Aristotle." This would seem to suggest that his work was highly significant.

Gödel has often been called "the greatest logician since Aristotle!" But can anyone explain his work in a way non-specialists can understand?

In the course of the next few weeks (or months), we'll define the Gödel Challenge in a much more challenging way. We'll even ask this:

Is it possible that Gödel's work doesn't even make sense?

Such a suggestion may seem highly counterintuitive. Eventually, we'll go ahead and raise that possibility, even offering reasons for our concern. But for today, we'll settle for this opening parry:

Has anyone been able to explain Godel's work in a way non-specialists can understand?

Major players have taken the challenge, but has anyone succeeded? As we discuss this topic in the next few weeks, we'll focus on a relatively limited set of attempts.

In our next presentation in this series, we'll define the limited roster on whose efforts we'll focus. The people we'll list have all taken the challenge—but blurbs and book reviews to the side, has anyone ever succeeded at this Herculean task?

Later this week: The roster

ERRORS: Voters said Dems are too extreme!

TUESDAY, JULY 5, 2022

We can think of three possible reasons:  Last week, David Frum wrote an interesting article for The Atlantic.

In his article, Frum drew some connections between the long drive to outlaw alcohol (Prohibition) and the long drive, recently concluded, to repeal Roe v. Wade.

Once enacted, Prohibition fell apart rather quickly. So may new attempts to outlaw abortion—or at least, so Frum was prepared to suggest.

Frum's article was intriguing. On the downside, Charles Blow read the article, leading to a very strange—yet very typical—opinion column for the New York Times.

On Monday, Blow's column appeared online. One day earlier, in that same newspaper's Sunday Magazine, Jason Zengerle had penned a long analysis of the political dilemmas currently faced by the Democratic Party.

In various ways, modern-day Dems seem to be in a world of political hurt. 

Our nation's creaking electoral systems tilt the playing field against them in several major ways. Historical precedent suggests that Democrats will take a drubbing in November's congressional elections.

If that occurs, the Republican Party will take control of the House and nominal control of the Senate. In the face of this impending disaster, Zengerle's lengthy essay carried this dual headline:

The Vanishing Moderate Democrat
Their positions are popular. So why are they going extinct?

Zengerle's essay examined this central question: Should Democratic politicians adopt more moderate policy positions?

We won't attempt to answer that question; Zengerle didn't answer it either. For today, we'll merely cite this bit of news from a recent survey, news which may strike blue tribe voters as puzzling:

ZENGERLE (7/3/22): In May, CNN asked 1,007 American voters for their opinions on the country’s two major political parties. After four years of Trump in the White House, an insurrection and unsuccessful attempt to overturn a presidential election and now a Republican Party that can be fairly described as a cult of personality and is moving further right on many of the same social issues, 46 percent of those surveyed considered the G.O.P. to be “too extreme.” But 48 percent of them viewed the Democratic Party the same way.

To the average blue tribe voter, that result may be hard to fathom. By an admittedly slender margin, more respondents viewed the Democratic Party as "too extreme"—as compared to the GOP of one Donald J. Trump!

For the average blue tribe voter, that result may be hard to believe. For now, we'll offer two possible explanations for that puzzling result.

First, the comforting explanation: 

At present, our nation has divided itself into two warring tribes. The red tribe thinks our blue tribe is too extreme. Here within our own blue tribe, we think the same thing about Them.

That would be the tribally comforting point of view. We've simply split into two warring tribes. Each tribe thinks the worst of the other.

From our blue tribe's point of view, that's the comforting explanation. But a second possible explanation might go something like this:

Our blue tribe has made a lot of mistakes, and our errors have made us look bad. 

Why did 48% of respondents describe the Dems as "too extreme?" At this point, we'll offer a third possible explanation:

In part, those respondents were channeling crackpot propaganda offered by red tribe media. Without any question, a large amount of such mis- and disinformation is constantly out there.

(Also, we blue tribers like to tell ourselves that most of Those People are racists. That explains why people like Them would say that we're extreme!)

Once we note the fact that The Others are racists, we're up to four explanations! That said, is it possible that our own blue tribe just keeps insisting on scoring "own goals?" Is it possible that our well-intentioned, admittedly brilliant tribe keeps making unforced errors?

Was Charles Blow's somewhat peculiar column part of that ongoing pattern? Tomorrow, we'll start reviewing examples of behaviors and claims we might call "Our errors, ourselves."

Tomorrow: Some of what was actually said

Big papers still fight about Hutchinson's age!

SUNDAY, JULY 3, 2022

Still hazy after all these years: No, it doesn't exactly matter. That said, just how old is Cassidy Hutchinson, the former Mark Meadows aide?

In Saturday's print editions, the New York Times continued to say that she's now 26. But in the featured front-page report in this morning's Washington Post, she was still 25.

With respect to Hutchinson's credibility as a witness, it doesn't actually matter. Regarding somebody's journalism, it almost seems that it almost does.

One newspaper has to be wrong in what it's saying about the new arrival's age. It's always possible that neither newspaper really knows how old she is.

No, it doesn't actually matter. It does seem odd that, after almost a week, this initial stand-off remains. 

Twenty-five v. 26? It doesn't actually matter. We'll note a different part of this episode which seems more striking to us.

As far as we know, Hutchinson has been completely honest in everything she has told the January 6 committee. That doesn't mean that her powers of perception and recollection are infallible. It doesn't mean that she is immune from other possible sources of error. 

Obviously, one or more of her recollections might be imperfect, even wrong in some respect. It's also true that Hutchinson is a young person who few people previously knew—a witness without a track record.

Several major Trump aides who do know Hutchinson have vouched for her honesty. That includes Kayleigh McEnany, the former press secretary to Trump who was about as Trumpy along the way as being Trumpy gets.

Still, we've been surprised by the number of journalists who have treated Hutchinson's various statements as examples of established fact. Journalistically, a statement doesn't become a fact just because Hutchinson says it.

Journos have trusted new arrivals in the past only to see their statements and claims fall apart. We think, for example, of Kathleen Willey, but also of three or four young journalists who were just making [things] up.

We know of no reason to think that Hutchinson isn't a fully reliable witness. It's also true that a claim doesn't become a fact just because Hutchinson says it.

Even now, at the end of the week, our biggest newspapers can't even determine how old the new arrival is! It wouldn't be awful to add the following winged words—"According to Hutchinson's account"—to an array of press statements.

She seems to be offering her best recollections. Absent attempts at corroboration, such recollections aren't facts.

HOW WE GOT HERE: President Clinton's talking-point!

SATURDAY, JULY 2, 2022

Two out of three ain't half bad: Back in 1973, was Roe v. Wade correctly decided?

Inevitably, that calls for a subjective assessment. We don't have the expertise to speak to that point, which has been widely debated.

Let's move to a second question. Given the doctrine of stare decisis, should Roe v. Wade have been overturned last week?

We can't tell you that either. In the ultimate sense, neither can anyone else. We can tell you this:

In the most obvious sense, the route by which our blue tribe was handed last Friday's vast defeat runs through two presidential elections. As we've already noted, those two elections were these:

The 2000 election: Candidate Gore narrowly won the nationwide popular vote. Candidate Bush ended up in the White House. 

Before he was done, he had nominated two Supreme Court Justices: Justice Roberts and Justice Alito.

The 2016 election: Candidate Clinton won the nationwide popular vote by almost three million votes. Candidate Trump ended up in the White House.

Before he was done, he had nominated three Supreme Court Justices: Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett.

Four of those Justices voted to terminate Roe v. Wade. In the most obvious sense, we got here by losing those two elections—elections in which we won the nationwide popular vote! 

(So it goes with our creaking electoral systems.)

For the record, the ultimate way those elections were lost involves the early rise of The Crazy in modern American discourse. For the record, some of that early rise of The Crazy came from "the right-wing noise machine"—but a lot of it came from within the world of the upper-end mainstream press corps.

The Crazy was already active. Like the highly self-confident hare who managed to lose a race to the tortoise, our self-impressed tribe was too dumb to notice this fact, too lazy to push back in real time. 

In the mid-1990s, we let the very holy Reverend Falwell spread his claims about the Clintons' many murders. Rush Limbaugh floated the notion that Hillary killed Vince Foster.

Starting in 1999, we let a cabal of upper-end mainstream journalists invent Candidate Gore's many troubling "lies." We let them stage their endless nervous breakdowns about his troubling wardrobe.

In short, The Crazy was already on wide display before Candidate Trump came along! Our self-impressed tribe was too dumb to push back. It's a huge part of how we got here.

Out of all this, one thing is quite clear—presidential elections matter! So do the views and the viewpoints of our fellow citizens in the red tribe—the people who went out and voted for Candidates Bush and Trump.

You may not agree with their views and opinions, but they do have a right to their views. They're American citizens just like we are, and they won't be going away.

If we want to receive more votes, we have to win some such voters over. We have to persuade an array of our neighbors and friends—the very people we may be inclined to denigrate as Others.

How do we manage to win more votes? That's more an art than a science. 

Concerning the art of winning votes, let's return to a buzz phrase invented by the first Candidate Clinton. We refer to the campaign talking point in which he said he wanted abortion to be "safe, legal and rare."

As of 2019, that famous phrase had come under widespread review. It was widely noted that Candidate Hillary Clinton had dropped the part about abortion being "rare" during her run in 2016.  

The reasons for this rhetorical shift were widely discussed in 2019. To see the discussion published by Vox, you can just click here.

Concerning the original formulation, we would only say this:

President Clinton had given voice to a three-part dream. Two parts of his dream—"safe" and "legal"—were directed at Us and reflected our views. 

In the third part of his dream—the part in which he said the word "rare"—he was paying a bit of respect to the outlooks and views of The Others.

Safe, legal and rare! This was always a mere talking-point, a rhetorical bumper sticker. It wasn't a legislative proposal. It was simply something you said to present yourself to the voters.

Two of his points paid homage to Us—and, by traditional reckoning, two out of three ain't half bad! But by the time Campaign 2016 arrived, many of our blue tribe's activists were already rebelling against such acts of cultural deference. 

Even in our rhetorical talking points, we wanted it all our way.

As far as we know, Hillary Clinton didn't "lose" to Donald J. Trump because she abandoned the third part of her husband's talking point. (She had used the original formulation back in 2008.)

Beyond that, we aren't saying that anyone's particular view of abortion and abortion rights is "wrong." We're speaking to the politics, to the outreach—and to nothing else.

Within the past week, since last Friday's defeat, a famous phrase from American history has been rattling around in our heads. It's found in the very first paragraph of a famous American document, such as that document was:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind [sic] requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

The founders, such as they were, wanted to display a decent respect for the opinions of humankind. Within our blue tribe, it might not be the worst idea if we took that approach more often.

By normal reckoning, The Others are entitled to their viewpoints and views, just the way we are. By the rules of the game, if we want them to see the world our way, we have to go out and persuade them.

In large point, Bill Clinton was able to win by six and eight points because he was skilled at displaying a decent resect for the opinions of humankind—even for the opinions of people who weren't inclined to support him. So it was with his view of Arkansas' Pentecostals, a view we discussed last week. 

No, he didn't share their views, especially about abortion rights, but he was willing to say that he'd never met finer people. Similarly, he threw the pro-life crowd a bone when he added that third word: "rare."

Abortion never did become "rare" during the era is question. Nothing in President Clinton's proposals was designed to make it so. 

He was simply throwing The Others a bone, saying he didn't loathe them. Our tribe has been moving away from that stance as the tribalization of the past thirty years has advanced.

Our tribe has always been self-impressed. We're inclined to look down on The Others.

We've displayed this trait for the past many years. Now we've been handed a savage defeat, a bit like the hare who took a nap by the side of the road as the slow-moving tortoise blew past him. 

The hare was much too self-impressed. His arrogance brought on his defeat—and then too, it was quite unattractive.

We were too dumb and too lazy to stand up for Gore. Bush won, then gave us Alito! The same thing with Clinton and Trump!

HOW WE GOT HERE: It seemed like a very unusual profile!

FRIDAY, JULY 1, 2022

Who killed Roe v. Wade: On Tuesday afternoon, a new arrival on the front knocked Dobbs out of the news.

The previous Friday, there had been a different arrival on the front. On that day, the new arrival on the front had been the Dobbs decision itself. 

The Dobbs decision brought Roe v. Wade to an end. It constituted a terrible political defeat for our own flailing blue tribe.

Two days later, in its Sunday print editions, the New York Times published a very unusual profile. The profile was written by Elisabeth Dias, the newspaper's National Faith and Values Correspondent.

In some ways, the profile was a type of journalistic boilerplate. Headline included, the profile started like this:

For Conservative Christians, the End of Roe Was a Spiritual Victory

For nearly 50 years, conservative Christians marched, strategized and prayed. And then, on an ordinary Friday morning in June, the day they had dreamed of finally came.

Ending the constitutional right to abortion by overturning Roe v. Wade took a decades-long campaign, the culmination of potlucks in church gymnasiums and prayers in the Oval Office. It was the moment they long imagined, an outcome many refused to believe was impossible, the sign of a new America.

For many conservative believers and anti-abortion groups grounded in Catholic or evangelical principles, the Supreme Court’s decision was not just a political victory but a spiritual one.

“It is more than celebration,” said Archbishop William E. Lori, chairman of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Committee on Pro-Life Activities. “It is a moment of gratitude to the Lord, and gratitude to so many people, in the church and beyond the church, who have worked and prayed so hard for this day to come.”

For the record, we know of no reason to believe or assume that Dias shares the religious or political views of the people being profiled. That said, we were surprised to see this report in the New York Times.  It struck us as highly unusual.

In some ways, the profile was journalistic boilerplate—a bowl of tapioca. 

Over the course of nearly fifty years, a certain group had achieved a very large political win. In conventional journalistic fashion, the profile recorded the feelings of a few members of this group concerning their very big win. 

This is standard journalistic practice; there's nothing "wrong" with this practice. What surprised us was this fact:

The Dias profile treated these "conservative Christians" in much the way the New York Times would treat any other such group.

The profile treated these players as normal people, not as a gaggle of Others. To us, this seemed like unusual work by the Times, though we could always be wrong about that.

As journalism, the profile resembled a bowl of oatmeal. It's hardly surprising to learn that people feel elated in the aftermath of a large political win. 

(In a similar vein, it's hardly surprised to learn that people feel devastated when their homes have been swept away in a flood. But every time houses get swept away, CNN arrives at the scene to ask the people who lost their homes how they feel about it.)

The Dias profile was a form of boilerplate, but it seemed highly unusual to us. Our tribe has routinely tended to treat these political winners as Others—but now, the Others had achieved a big win, and the Times was willing to profile the group as it would any such group.

In some ways, this 49-year-old story represents a resurrection of the ancient tale about the tortoise and the hare. The over-confident, self-impressed hare slumbers and dozes during a race. 

Doggedly, the tortoise keeps at it, and the tortoise eventually wins.

In this case, the Christian conservatives who won the race are American citizens too. They aren't planning to go anywhere. At least according to basic theory, they have a right to their views.

At times, our tribe has been willing and able to show respect for those views, and for the people who hold them. At other times, perhaps maybe not. Could that possibly be part of the way our tribe ended up in this place?

We think there's a lot to learn from the results of this decades-long story. Rightly or wrongly, we were struck by the way the Times was willing to profile the group of players who ended up winning this race.

Tomorrow: "Safe, legal and rare?"

The new Supreme Court has done it again!

THURSDAY, JUNE 30, 2022

New Court, new political tasks: Returning to our sprawling campus, we learned that the new Supreme Court had done it again.

We'll characterize the new Supreme Court, and how we got it, on some other occasion. For now, we'll go with this statement by Chief Justice Roberts, as quoted in the New York Times:

LIPTAK (6/30/22): The question in the case, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, turned on the scope of the language of the Clean Air Act. Under it, he wrote, Congress had not clearly given the agency sweeping authority to regulate the energy industry.  

“Capping carbon dioxide emissions at a level that will force a nationwide transition away from the use of coal to generate electricity may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day,’ ” he wrote, quoting an earlier decision. But, he added, “a decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself, or an agency acting pursuant to a clear delegation from that representative body.”

As with Roe, so too here. Whatever you think of the Court's decision, our blue tribe is left with a political challenge, with the need to persuade many Others.

We're left with a political challenge. It's hard to succeed at such tasks.

HOW WE GOT HERE: We've been called away from our desk!

THURSDAY, JUNE 30, 2022

Will post this afternoon: Rather thoroughly, Tuesday's "new arrival on the front" has replaced the overthrow of Roe v. Wade as the "topic of general conversation."

(We're quoting Chekhov on the subject.)

We plan to complete our series on the overthrow of Roe—more specifically, on the question of how we got to this place. That said, we've been called away from our desk this morning on a mission of national import.

We expect to post this afternoon on the more current topic of conversation. As you may have noticed, novelization is everywhere, along with selective presentation of fact.

As we've often noted in recent years, these are anthropology lessons. According to major disconsolate experts, the pleasures of anthropology are pretty much all we have left!