Regarding snowflakes...

Snowflakes and human beings have both differences and similarities. Let’s look at a few.

Snowflakes, like human beings, are unique and individual.

Snowflakes, like human beings, are fragile.

Snowflakes, like human beings, can be weak as individuals but can have incredible strength in numbers.

Snowflakes, like human beings, are ephemeral.

Of course, there are obvious differences between snowflakes and people; snowflakes are white where people come in all colors, snowflakes cannot hold opinions where people can and must; snowflakes cannot act with a will where people have that power; snowflakes cannot make choices where people must do so continually.

But snowflakes have neither morals nor ethics, and they do not have accountability.

People can have morals, ethics, and accountability. People must make decisions about where they fall, and must bear the responsibility for their chosen direction. And make no mistake...choosing to call someone a name is choosing a direction.

If you wish to insult or belittle me, that is your choice but it is my choice how I respond, or indeed whether I respond at all. But in truth, I’m not likely to find a comparison with a snowflake all that insulting. Or intimidating.

I understand something about snowflakes, and I am unlikely to be insulted by being called one. But perhaps you have something in mind beyond calling me a tiny ice crystal, though I cannot imagine my reaction being any different, your intent notwithstanding.

If, for example, you intend to belittle me then I feel no need to respond, since your need to belittle me makes you look rather pathetic in my eyes. And, frankly, I cannot understand why you should find my self-image so important to your self-image. But if you choose to give me this power over you, so be it. That’s your choice.

The Blues Viking 

The opinions expressed here are mine and if you don't like then you can get your own damn blog.

On stranger, or at least less obedient, tides

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King Canute couldn’t order back the tides. That does not mean he shouldn’t have tried.

The other day I got into a discussion with a conservative acquaintance who commented that my standing in the way of Trump and the inevitable repeal of he ACA put me in the place of King Canute trying to order back the tide. I felt that he deserved a better answer than I could give at the time, and this is it.

The story, as it’s generally now told, is that King Canute (Knut the Great, 995-1035 CE) went to the seaside and tried to order back the tide. He failed, of course, and was forced to acknowledge that there was a power greater than him. But as the story originally said (at least as it was first recorded in the twelfth century) Canute was a pious man who went to the shore with the intent of demonstrating that no mere king had the power to command the works of God. Which he did.

(Perhaps the story was changed to belittle Canute, who was a Dane and thus an immigrant among the Britons.)

In any case, the story is almost certainly apocryphal and has no news value since someone made it all up.

But if I were making up this story, I’d tell it a bit differently. In my version, Canute orders one of his solders to stand at the water’s edge and face the tide, and not to move until ordered to do so. Canute then roars at the ocean, ordering it to withdraw or face his wrath. The ocean, of course, pays no attention. The solder is drowned.

At this point there are several ways you can take the story. You can make it all about the solder, who faced his death with honor (very Klingon, don’t you think?). Or you can have Canute go full Caligula and order his troops to attack the ocean with their swords, and after a lot of splashing about declare a victory and order his troops to gather seashells as “tribute” from his preferred defeated deity (thus making the story The Madness of King Canute). Or here’s a good one...Canute is destroyed by guilt over the loss of the solder’s life and flees to a monastery, and spends the rest of his life as a penitent doing the sackcloth-and-ashes bit.

But my story wouldn’t be about either Canute of the solder that died in the surf. My story would be about a witness, someone who watched Canute’s spectacle and came away with Canute’s message of unchanging inevitability, but later found enough of a reason to stand against an incoming tide (any incoming tide) and drew inspiration from the story of that solder on Canute’s beach, and stood their ground...knowing that even in failure they might inspire the one who might one day win out against overwhelming odds. And maybe if enough people believed likewise the tide would change...as, eventually, tides must.

(At this point I should observe that simply waiting for change is certainly a viable option...but if people are going to die, then standing against the incoming tide becomes a moral act.)

The thing about the tide is that it always goes out just as swiftly as it comes in. You can either wait for it to change, letting yourself be carried by forces you do not control, and hope that wherever you end up will be better, or you can stand your ground.

You might think this last a foolish, pointless gesture, and maybe it is, but maybe not. You’ve certainly heard of Canute’s erroneous legacy, but just because “everyone knows” a thing, that doesn’t make it so...perhaps you can turn the tide. And perhaps not, but there may be someone else willing to stand against it, maybe a lot of someones, and your defiance might give them the courage to try.

You might think you have to keep swimming to keep your head above water, but sometimes drowning is preferable to being carried along with the tide.

The Blues Viking
The opinions expressed here are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.


King Canute on Wikipedia

King Canute and the waves on Wikipedia

The title of this article refers to Tim Powers’ novel On Stranger Tides rather than the Pirates of the Caribbean movie that was loosely based on the book. The book didn't have Jack Sparrow in it. It's well worth a read.
On Stranger Tides on Wikipedia
On Stranger Tides on Amazon.com

"I am not a number, I am a free man!"

The problem with reducing people to data is that you reduce people to data.

I haven’t done much blogging of late, and for that I apologize. (One of the few people who actually read what I write here said something about that the other day.) Actually, I wasn’t writing this as a blog post but as a meme, but it got a bit long for that, and I didn't want to cut it. Read and enjoy, or ignore and move on, as you please.

We often label people according to what we think they should be based on their politics, or according to what we think their politics should be based on who they are (or rather, who we perceive them to be). We are often dismayed be the very existence of things like gay republicans, gun-owning democrats, conservative women, progressive billionaires, and so on. We wonder how they can possibly vote against their own self-interest. We wonder if they realize that by voting the way they do they could be voting against causes that they, or their own particular group, cherish.

But that’s the trap. Not a trap for them, but a trap for us all.

We’re great at pigeonholing people in this country. We like to classify people according to broad demographics and assume, from whatever group we’ve put them in, that we know all there is to know about them. We build complex models of human behavior that tell us what they’ll buy, who they’ll vote for, what television programs they watch, what toothpaste they use, and so on.

While this is certainly a valid approach when dealing with millions of people, it is far less reliable when dealing with individuals. Unfortunately, the principle power-groups in this country, corporations and political parties, have spent so much time developing this process that the individuals that make up these power-groups tend to see all of reality in that way, and dismiss any variations on the individual level as aberrant data.

They never consider how individuals might feel about being classified as aberrant data. This is because data does not feel, cannot feel; data is data. Numbers. Numbers cannot feel, cannot consider, cannot reason, cannot alter themselves in any way; numbers simply are. They are used to keep count but do not, themselves, count.

The real problem is that we all think that way; to some extent, we all reduce people to mere data. Maybe it’s because we live in a society so dominated by a few small powerful groups, such as political parties and corporations, groups that find it much easier to deal with data on millions than with the needs of an individual. Or perhaps we’re all just too lazy to get to know people more than superficially. Whatever the reason, we all do it.

We all look at people in a way that pigeonholes them as a liberal or conservative, a republican or a democrat, gay or straight, hawk or dove, and so on. We assume that if a person is a progressive that they must be totally anti-gun, that if a person is conservative that they must be vehemently anti-gay, that if a person is religious that they must be doggedly anti-science.

This is, of course, absolute crap. No position, no opinion, no philosophy can be assumed with regard to an individual. When you do, you’re reducing the status of that individual to that of a number. And that’s insulting.

Individuals, understandably, do not relish being reduced to numbers, to mere data points that are counted but do not count.

The Blues Viking
The opinions expressed here are mine and if you don't like them you can get your own damn blog.


The title for this article comes from the opening to the '60s British TV series "The Prisoner". But of course you knew that. 
 

The Reality Trap

If your goals are entirely realistic, achieving them requires little effort. What then are they worth?

One of my favorite quotes is from a poem by Robert Browning (though the poem itself isn’t really one of my favorites):

“Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what's a heaven for?”
 
Robert Browning, Andrea del Sarto

I really wish Hillary Clinton would take this to heart.

(As for the implied sexism that could be read into “...his grasp,” let’s leave that alone, shall we?)

Throughout the campaign, Hillary Clinton has referred to many of Bernie Sanders’ positions as “unrealistic”, saying that he would never be able to accomplish them, that her positions were more attainable and thus more realistic. What she has failed to understand is that a good many of us don’t want a president who is only willing to fight the easy battles, that will only reach for the reachable stars.

One other thing that she hasn’t understood: Constantly modifying your position to suit what the electorate appears to want can undermine your candidacy. Frankly, her positions on many issues have hardly been as constant as the northern star, and deriving her actual beliefs from what she says has often been something of a challenge.

Her stand on the minimum wage is a good case in point. From the outset, her true position on this has been difficult to discern. Nationally, there is a strong effort to bring the minimum wage up to a level at which people can actually live; Hillary, while perhaps not seeking to undermine this ideal has never been entirely clear on her stance on people living above the poverty line, and the fact that she has had to continually “clarify” (change) this stance hasn’t helped.

First she came out against a $15 minimum wage and only supported $12, despite the fact that $12 is still below the poverty level. Then she appeared to support $15. Then she came out with a complicated and unworkable plan in which the minimum wage would be raised to $15 except where it wasn’t (it seems to me that this plan is specifically designed to keep the minimum wage lowest where it is needed most).

Hillary’s supporters all claim that her overly complex plan is more realistic, and that’s the problem; in this context, “realistic” is a trap.

People who settle for what they can get seldom make history; more often, it is made by people demanding what is right. History is not made by people who will only work within their boundaries, but by people who reach beyond them. There is an insidious nature to boundaries; if you accept them as such, then you become willing to settle for what’s within them rather than allowing yourself to hope for what the boundaries have convinced you that you cannot have,

I do not want a president who will stay within the boundaries; I want a president who does not believe in boundaries. I do not want a president who will only demand what’s reasonable; I want a president who will demand what’s right, and “reasonable” be hanged. I want a president who will fight for what the people need in spite of the odds, not one who will only take up a fight that he/she thinks is winnable.

I want a President who is more concerned about my needs than about his/her legacy.

Once upon a time I thought that Barack Obama would be the President I hoped for, and largely he was. If he fell short of my expectations in some areas, perhaps that’s the nature of politics and politicians. We all have to look at the candidate in front of us and judge them based on what we see, on how they present themselves to us, and hope that the president they will become will match what we saw. We hope that their promise matches the reality of their presidency.

I cannot think of a single case where a candidate’s promise fully matched the reality of their presidency, but for me Barack Obama came closer than most and I honor him for this, even though I still complain about his shortcomings as president. I’m just grateful that his shortcomings didn’t turn out to be as short as they might have been.

Hillary Clinton is another matter. The “promise” of her candidacy I see more as a threat to what I believe in, but far less so than the threat of Donald Trump and that’s what is deciding my vote right now. But my “support” for her is tempered by my disregard; in fact it cannot truly be said that I really support her at all.

This then is the tragedy of Hillary Clinton; if she’s going to become the president and succeed in the job, she’s going to need the support of people like me and right now that support is entirely hers to gain, if she just reaches past herself to grab it.

But I don’t see that happening. I don’t see her reaching beyond what’s within her grasp. And this is her tragedy; right now we need a President who will do precisely that. Her chief electoral advantage is that she isn’t Donald Trump, but her chief failing is that she isn’t the president we need.

The Blues Viking
The thoughts expressed here are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.

In the absence of a better option...

Yes, I would vote for Clinton over Trump...but that means that my vote is hers to lose. And she hasn’t done anything to gain it other than not being Donald Trump.

This is what I fear:

Hillary Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee, despite her consistently poling as a weaker Democratic candidate than Bernie Sanders against Donald Trump. Those of us who backed Bernie, most of us anyway, resign ourselves to voting for a candidate we cannot fully support and cast our votes for her, but she proves unable to inspire Sanders supporters to be enthusiastic about her candidacy. She proves unable to inspire the same sort of willingness to evangelize that so defined Bernie Sanders’ campaign. She continues to think that our support, our enthusiasm, our devotion are hers by right. Worse, she builds her campaign on fear, making “If not me, then Trump!” her rallying cry.

The election comes along, and Donald Trump wins.

And Hillary and her supporters blame Bernie’s supporters for the defeat, saying it’s because we weren’t enthusiastic enough.

Well, if that’s what happens then that’s what happens. She may get my vote just by becoming the Democratic candidate, but my enthusiastic support is hers to earn. Or not. And so far, she hasn’t.

And for that matter, my vote is hers to lose; she still might lose it. Hillary Clinton (IMHO) is the sort of person to take the support of all persons Democratic Party as hers by right, without considering that we, the people who she’s relying upon to vote her into office, might feel differently.

If Hillary Clinton wants the support of the millions of people who invested their hopes, their dreams, and their hard-earned money in Bernie Sanders, millions of people who like me believe (still) that he was the better, stronger candidate, then she’s going to have to work at it. If she expects our support to just fall into her lap then she is going to be disappointed. And so are the millions of people in this country who are forced to rely on her to defeat Donald Trump.

That’s the big flaw in Hillary Clinton’s campaign; to be victorious, she has to depend on the support of legions of people who don’t think she’s the best person for the job. Like me.

Much of my lack of faith in Hillary Clinton comes from her lack of faith in democracy. Throughout the primary process she has seemed to rely on superdelegates and shenanigans to carry her to the nomination; her margin in the popular vote was rather slim, and I am far from convinced that it wouldn’t have been different without the media anointing her as the Heir Apparent and proclaiming her the victor long before she’d won anything (she still hasn’t). If her approach to the “democratic process” has been to keep it from being democratic, what does that say for a Hillary Clinton presidency?

Here’s the thing; though I am unenthusiastic for her now, that could change. I do believe that she is capable of becoming a candidate that I can support unreservedly. I believe that she is capable of not only saying the right things but meaning them. So far, I haven’t seen that anywhere in the primary process. I hope that I will see it if she becomes the nominee.

As things stand now, if Hillary Clinton wins the nomination she’ll have my vote but she’ll have to work to keep it. She’ll have to work at not drifting to the right on issues that I care about. She’ll have to work at not being a paid spokesperson for her corporate sponsors. In short, she’ll have to work at not being the Hillary Clinton that, as things stand now, I do not entirely trust.

And I am not alone. I know a good many Sanders supporters who are prepared to vote for Clinton if it comes down to her or Trump, but who can’t bring themselves to support her beyond what they give her in the voting booth. Until November, we are all going to be keeping a skeptical eye on her; if she shows signs of becoming much less of a progressive, then I’m not the only one who’ll be rethinking that vote.

Let me be clear: I want to be able to support the Democratic nominee. Given what’s at stake and the character (or lack of it) of Donald Trump, I am willing to cast my vote on a lesser-of-two-evils basis, and I honestly believe that a Clinton presidency would be far less disastrous than a Trump presidency. That’s what I believe now, anyway. If she gains the nomination and then begins to drift away from the left, as I fear she may, then I may have to revisit the issue of which evil is actually lesser.

The Blues Viking
The opinions expressed here are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.

A question of rights...

...and of rights and lefts, and of rights and wrongs...and why it’s important that we find an answer.

With all this talk about guns and “gun rights”, it’s time that someone pointed out that the Second Amendment does not mention guns. Not once. “Arms,” yes, but never guns.

Someone with a knife or a pointed stick is “armed.” And so is someone with a gun...but the Bill of Rights is very non-specific about what kind of “arms” it covers. and its no good saying, “Well, that's how people were armed back then!” Remember that in post-revolutionary America, when the Bill of Rights was written, a sword was still something that a solder could be expected to carry and use. Pikes were still issued, and would still be issued as late as the American Civil War.

If we say that this right must cover guns since guns are obviously arms, then what is to prevent private citizens from possessing nuclear weapons (other than the expense)? Then there’s the other side of that coin: If we accept that some restrictions/regulations as to the type of weapons that are acceptable for private ownership, and since there is no specific provision for guns made in the Second Amendment, how can you say that the right to carry firearms is guaranteed by the Constitution?

The “right to bear arms” spelled out in the Second Amendment could thus be interpreted as applying to firearms only at the government’s discretion. As long as you are permitted the right to carry a knife or a stick then it could be legitimately be argued that your “right to bear arms” is still being protected, even as specific types of arms (or the length of your knife) may be restricted for your use or even forbidden to you outright.

(One other observation about the Second Amendment: To some people the Second Amendment is forthright and unambiguous. To others its meaning is as clear as mud at midnight. To my thinking, the fact that there are two so widely divergent opinions on the Second Amendment, both of them widely held and vociferously defended, belies the idea of the amendment being at all unambiguous.)

Now, I am not advocating such a radical change in how the Second Amendment is interpreted. (Though is it really all that radical?) What I AM saying is that the “clear-cut language of the Constitution” (as I have heard it called) isn’t all that clear-cut, and what is needed RIGHT NOW is a national dialog on what the Second Amendment actually means. Because in the end it means as much, or as little, as we all agree that it means...and right now, there’s not a lot of agreement on this issue. And there needs to be.

These then are the two extremes, mutually exclusive and mutually antagonistic, neither of which I find all that appealing:

Position One: Since guns are not specifically mentioned in the Bill of Rights then the right to bear them is not guaranteed.

Position Two: The right to own and carry guns is covered under the definition of “arms” and every other type of weapon, from bolas to battleships, should be permitted without let or hindrance.

Obviously there must be some middle ground somewhere, and somewhere there must be a position that most of us can agree to defend; but the power of the gun industry, wielded through the NRA, is preventing us from finding it. Or even looking for it. As desperately as a national dialog on this issue is needed, the NRA and its allies are dedicated to preventing that from happening, and keep trying to force society to one extreme while liberals and progressives (and, admittedly, this group usually includes me) keep trying to force society to the other extreme.

What we’ve done is replace the search for common ground with extremism, and every day that we’re prevented from searching for that common ground we become more accustomed to the extremes being the only positions available to us. And when one extreme position fails us then we rush headlong to the other side, ignoring the fact that we’d all really rather be somewhere in the middle if we gave it any thought. But extremism discourages thought, even as it discourages centrist opinions.

I don’t like extremes or extremists, and I really hate being forced to one extreme because I find the other abhorrent. I hate being told that gun control (or, indeed, any issue) is a “you’re either with us or against us” proposition, and I hate being prevented from exploring solutions that don’t entirely mesh with one or the other extreme. I hate being in the middle of a battlefield, with each side telling me that I need to run to their trenches and help them defend their position if I want to be safe. And I hate that as long as you’re in the trenches for one side or the other then you’re not looking for a way to stop the fighting.

As far as I’m concerned, the extremists can hang by their extremities until the damned things fall off.  The truth is, neither side can defend their entrenched positions unless a lot of us are willing to help them do it. The more of us who are willing to seek solutions, the fewer there will be to defend entrenched orthodoxy. And obviously, the more of us looking for solutions the better our chances of finding them.

The safety of the trenches is illusory; you’re forced to defend a position you did not choose, perpetuating a fight that cannot be won without great loss, gaining some protection from the enemy by defending a fixed position on which the opposition can train all of their guns.

Which I’m no longer sure they have a Constitutional right to.

The Blues Viking
The opinions expressed here are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.

Trump vs. Clinton vs. Us

In the wake of Donald Trump’s latest racist comments, everyone is talking about him. Which is kind of what both parties want, so that everyone will ignore the monster that’s about to eat them.

June 7, 2016

”In recent days, Trump has been accusing U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is overseeing a lawsuit against Trump University, of being biased because of his Mexican heritage. The judge was born in Indiana” (Bloomberg Politics)

I find it interesting that Paul Ryan would publicly disavow Donald Trump’s statement...

"Claiming a person can’t do their job because of their race is certainly the textbook definition of a racist comment." (Paul Ryan, June 7, 2016)

...and I entirely agree with that, but at the same time Ryan declared his continued support for Trump.

“But Ryan quickly added that Trump would give Republicans a better chance of getting their legislative agenda enacted than would his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.”
(Bloomberg Politics, ibid.)

What fascinates me is that such an obviously racist statement as Trump made would, in previous elections, all but disqualify him from the Presidency; in this election, however, even conservative politicians who strongly and publicly disagree with this racism are more than willing to continue supporting Donald Trump.

This speaks more to the Republican Party’s inherent racism than it speaks to Trump’s.

But perhaps more importantly, it speaks to the deeply felt Republican hatred of Hillary Clinton that they would continue to embrace such a man just because he now represents their best chance of keeping her out of the White House.

The Republican Party is obviously prepared to embrace any extremism in order to defeat Hillary Clinton in the general election. But (and I say this as a Bernie Sanders supporter) I find it even more disturbing that this attitude and its emphasis on defeating Hillary Clinton at any cost, lionizing Trump as Donald the Hillary Slayer, has had the effect of further strengthening her campaign and causing her to be seen even more as Hillary the Trump Slayer.

And it bothers me that I see this same “her-or-him uber alles” attitude occurring on both sides of the aisle. I see Democrats willing to compromise their positions on things like Citizens United, which once upon a time was universally and vehemently opposed by the entire left, becoming tolerated by a more corporate-friendly Hillary Clinton. I hear the statements she has made regarding her willingness to compromise on abortion rights, and it sends shivers down my spine.

And I hear once-proud Progressives making excuses for her, willing to support her no matter how far she strays from their ideals, because they feel that she’s their best hope against Trump.

(To be fair, that’s not the only reason Clinton supporters have for being Clinton supporters, and I will admit that some of their reasons for being so are good ones. But I more often hear that “it’s her turn!” or “it’s time a woman was President!” and these are poor reasons for supporting any candidate, in my view.)

I see opposition to either candidate from within their respective parties being squelched by the parties themselves. I see opposition to either of their favored candidates being treated as party disloyalty. And I see these attitudes as being destructive to their parties.

I think we need to get beyond thinking about this election as one candidate vs. the other, or as one party vs. the other. I think that this election has become more of a clash of personalities than a clash if ideas, that we are choosing a leader without regard to what that person actually represents, solely on the basis of how much we like them.

I realize that this isn’t the first national election that could be described thus, but never more so. I realize that this is something we have allowed to happen gradually, and now the monster is loose.

I think that the harm that these two people may do to their respective parties is potentially immeasurable. For this reason I can respect the Republican establishment for their efforts to stop the Trump juggernaut, even if they have soiled themselves while trying to embrace the monster that is devouring them. I cannot respect the Democratic Party for its unashamed efforts to enshrine Hillary Clinton so far in advance of its own nomination process being complete; they have their own monster devouring them, but they’ve been more than willing all along to feed it their own flesh just to guarantee its victory.

I can’t speak to the Republican Party’s problems other than to point to them and say, “Hey...you’ve got a problem!” I’m more involved with the Democratic Party, even if it’s only as one of its lowliest supporters, the very sort that the party is trying so desperately to ignore. Not only can I point at the problem, I can give my opinion as to what’s causing it, and perhaps what might be done about it.

To that point I will only say this: Perhaps we, as Democrats, liberals, and progressives, need to realize that it’s not Donald Trump that we need fear will cost us the Presidency...it’s Hillary Clinton, whether she wins or loses, that may cost us everything we have.

The Blues Viking
The opinions expressed here are mine and if you don't like them you can get your own damn blog.