On Regretting the Loss of Thoughtful Disagreement

One of the saddest things about the current administration is that it has forced once-principled and intelligent conservatives to start spouting total nonsense.  Most of this comes as obeisance to an unstable and vengeful leader… more on that a little later.

One change is a new obsession with disjunctive thinking: every question must be answered with “black” or “white.”  There is no allowance for grey, or (especially) for qualifiers.  For example, Curmie recently saw an argument centered on whether someone supported deporting people who are in the country illegally.  Naturally, the only acceptable answer was “yes” according the racists and other right-wing zealots. 

Curmie won’t speak for all liberals, some of whom might indeed say “no” to that question, but his response is “yes, if…”  If they are indeed undocumented (remember that there were American citizens sent to “Alligator Alcatraz”), if they don’t have green cards and work permits, if they aren’t already in the process of applying for asylum and/or citizenship, if they’re afforded due process, then there’s no objection here. 

Well, actually, that’s not quite true.  Curmie would still disapprove of deporting those who have lived here for decades, contributed to their communities and to American culture, and have no criminal convictions.  Unless aggravated in some way (returning after being deported, for example), simply being in the country illegally is a Class C misdemeanor, the equivalent of a speeding ticket.  Perhaps it shouldn’t be that way, but it is.  Several states have a statute of limitations of under ten years for rape, but there’s none for a C misdemeanor?  Curmie would ask you to make it make sense, Gentle Reader, but he’d rather not subject you to that level of mental gymnastics.

Nor does agreement that some undocumented people should indeed be deported mean that ICE ought to be able to randomly tackle and detain anyone who looks or sounds Hispanic, which they’re doing with grim regularity.  And let’s drop the bullshit about how such-and-such a suspect “attacked” officers who were “just doing their duty.”  If that were true, then there would be video footage of the attack, but Curmie has literally never seen anyone do that except in obvious self-defense.  (Oops, I stand corrected: there was that guy who tossed a sandwich at a CPB agent.  A grand jury appropriately refused to indict him for a felony.)  

There is, however, plenty of footage of ICE agents tackling elderly citizens (!) without cause, shooting a pepper ball directly into the face of a minister who was <checks notes> praying, dragging a woman (a citizen) out of her car after they rammed it for the apparent crime of DWL (Driving While Latina), and so on.  Oh, and (of course), they lied about what happened.  Oh, and this just in: tear-gassing little kids in Hallowe’en costumes.

Sometimes, but only sometimes, ICE might be able to cobble together a complaint for resisting arrest.  Attacking them?  Nope.  They’re bullies and therefore cowards (hence the masks), and they’ll cheerfully lie to continue their cosplay as actual law enforcement.  The idea that these assholes have immunity from arrest and prosecution, as Reichsmarschall Stephen Miller proclaims, should send a shiver up the spine of every American; the fact that it doesn’t is truly horrifying.

It’s unlikely that Curmie will be attacked by masked men with high-end weaponry but without identification, a warrant, or probable cause.  His ancestors (well, most of them), after all, were from places like England, Wales, Ireland, and the Netherlands instead of Africa, the Middle East, or one of those places where they speak (gasp!) Romance languages.  But should it happen, you can bet that he’ll do what he can to defend himself.  He’ll lose the fight, of course, but he does know how to fight dirty, and with luck there might be someone other than just Curmie who regrets the encounter.

Another variation on the theme is what Curmie calls Trump Derangement Derangement (TDD).  This manifests as an unwillingness to recognize that some of the criticisms of Dear Ruler are not merely plausible but in fact objectively correct.  Did he lie about “not interfering” with the East Wing for the Epstein Ballroom vanity project over-priced boondoggle bunker upgrade corporate bribe White House renovations?  Yes.  Full stop.  Oh, but… you see… he broke the law avoided going through the normal planning process for such projects because doing that would have held up the project for so long it might not have even been completed during his presidency.  Curmie thinks that if the new ballroom is such a good idea, whoever 48 turns out to be would cheerfully complete the process for the good of the country.

Did the Manchurian Cantaloupe scuttle a 2024 bi-partisan bill to address the problems associated with the southern border because he’d rather have a campaign issue than a solution?  Yes, and it’s GOP legislators, not (just) Curmie who say so.  Less certain, but still more than plausible, is the argument that the settlement between Israel and Hamas is virtually identical to one proposed by Biden and subsequently rejected by Netanyahu because he wanted Trump to get the credit.  (Trump deserves at least some credit either way, of course, but quite likely not as much as he’s claiming for himself.)

Indeed, ignoring laws, even SCOTUS rulings, that Dear Leader considers inconvenient is standard procedure for this administration, and with both houses of Congress dominated by GOP boot-lickers, he’s likely to continue getting away with it, even on those rare occasions when this SCOTUS actually decides to uphold the Constitution.

One of the more interesting variations on TDD is the assertion that people don’t dislike Trump’s policies; they dislike him.  Well, it’s true that Curmie dislikes him.  He tends not to have a particularly high opinion of rapists, grifters, embezzlers, pathological liars, and those with so high an opinion of themselves that Narcissus had to call a press conference to say, “Hey, c’mon, I’m not as bad as that.  Don’t compare me to that guy.”  As for the other part, Curmie won’t pretend to speak for everyone to the left of Tommy Tuberville, but he very much dislikes virtually every policy of this administration.

A few examples: pretending to be targeting the “worst of the worst” when the majority of those detained have no criminal record; allowing incompetent idiots like Hegseth, Patel, and Kennedy to keep their jobs (appointing them to begin with was bad enough); cutting funding to about every program designed to help everyday people—the FAA, CDC, FEMA, NOAA, SNAP, ACA, Medicaid, medical research, research grants to universities, etc.—while lining the pockets of his fellow billionaires; turning Elon Musk’s unvetted minions loose on the private records of every American; using the military against our own citizens; sinking foreign-owned fishing vessels in international waters based on speculation (at best); abrogating this country’s responsibility to defend Ukraine (part of the deal for them to abandon nuclear weapons) because Uncle Vladimir said to… There’s more, of course, but this paragraph is long enough already.

There’s also the problem of exaggeration.  No, Bernie Sanders is not a communist just because he thinks that poor people ought to be able to afford food and shelter.  But at one level, this is the same kind of enflamed rhetoric that characterizes a lot of political speech… as Curmie demonstrated above in referring to the abominable Stephen Miller.

A more complex problem because it requires a projection of long-term vs. short-term effectiveness comes in economic policy.  Raising tariffs, for example, may seem like a good idea in the near term, but there are several inevitable results.  Some things just can’t be created here: think coffee, for example.  Also, if the price of some imported product goes up 10%, US competitors will cheerfully raise their prices by 5% and still get a greater market share.  In both cases, prices go up.  And, of course, other countries are likely to impose their own retaliatory tariffs, making it harder to export American goods, especially agricultural products.  Ask soybean farmers what they think of these policies.  Or, in a variation on the theme, talk to cattle farmers who hear the guy they voted for suggesting a significant increase in importing Argentinian beef.

Similarly, cutting ACA subsidies doesn’t hurt just those directly affected.  Those folks can’t afford health care, so they don’t get it.  They show up at work with communicable diseases.  Small-town hospitals go out of business.  Doctors charge the rest of us more to make up for lost patients.  How is any of this good news?

We could also, of course, address the internal contradictions in so many policy decisions.  Let’s take that Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, for example.  It insists on a de facto quota system based on ideology, but is radically opposed to DEI, i.e., diversity, equity and inclusion.  It demands that international students open their social media accounts to governmental snooping. 

It pretends to support free speech, but seeks to punish universities which allow protests against what some students perceive as Israeli genocide.  The key word in the previous sentence is “allow.”  A university need not encourage such protests, merely allow them in the spirit of First Amendment principles and that “broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints” the Compact purports to endorse to run afoul of this administration’s attempts at controlling what can be discussed on university campuses.  Curmie could go on, but he hopes the point has been made. 

There was a time, not that long ago, when genuine, honest, debate could happen, when it was possible to see the point of view of someone whose stance on abortion or gun control, for example, was different from one’s own.  There’s a limit to that viewpoint, however.  The Republican Party is now completely subservient to the petulance and vindictiveness of a delirious despot-wannabe, and they’ll say or do anything to prove their allegiance to him. 

Either that, or they truly believe that Americans ought not to have access to disaster relief if they happen to live in a “blue state,” that there’s not a problem with reverse Robin Hood policies designed to steal from the poor to give to the rich, that protecting a pedophile is more important than representing the people, that health insurance premiums increasing by over $50 a day (!) is quite all right…  Again, there’s more, but we’ll leave it at that.

The idiocy and intentional cruelty of those policies is transparent to anyone who can out-think a rutabaga, but debating those issues is an exercise in futility because the first tenet of MAGA-dom is never to admit anything.  The rhetoric on either side doesn’t matter; policy does.  There’s plenty to distrust on both sides of the political aisle, but mud-slinging isn’t the answer.  (Yes, Curmie is aware of the irony of this statement appearing in this essay.)  The truth always seeks to be free.  It will find its way out.  In the meantime: resist by whatever (legal and ethical) means necessary… and ultimately vote the bastards out.

There Is No Job 3

 

There are other things to write about today.  There is nothing else to write about today.

For the second time in this brief New Year, one of our greatest cities is under attack.  Last week, it was New Orleans; now it’s Los Angeles.  Curmie isn’t going to pretend that there aren’t other issues, other crises, out there… but right now the fires around Los Angeles are the story.

Curmie has spent little time in that area—roughly 6/100 of 1% of his life—but, of course, he has numerous friends there.  As might be expected from his line of work, Curmie knows colleagues at area universities, former classmates and students, and of course folks in a totally different profession who just happen to be located in that particular urban area instead of in Pittsburgh or Atlanta or wherever.

One of those friends recently posted on Facebook that she and her partner “are safe and evacuated.  EXHAUSTED keeping up with these fires. It’s like WHACK-A-MOLE.”  [Edit: here’s part of a more recent post by a different friend: “Everyone is on edge. No one really feels safe because just when you take a breath, another fire randomly appears. We’re all in shock. We can’t let our guard down. It’s not over.”]  That is the issue here.  Not just the destruction of property, not just loss of life (although that’s obviously the worst part of the ordeal)—the exhaustion, the not knowing, the stress, and the loss.

Naturally, as has been the case with every headline-making tragedy in recent years, the Manchurian Cantaloupe has taken every opportunity to politicize the event, blaming everyone from Governor Gavin Newsom to the firefighters themselves for failing to anticipate a literally unprecedented catastrophe.  Virtually no rain in months, coupled with hurricane force winds… that’s a recipe for disaster if some idiot drops a lit cigarette or whatever (we know the fire started in a residential area, not that unraked forest we heard a lot about last time).  Curmie here antiphrastically avoids using the phrase “climate change.”

And, of course, we heard nothing about how the Republican governors of those states battered by hurricanes this fall should have been better prepared.  No, there was Trump, interfering in the relief effort and suggesting that FEMA workers were the enemy. 

Of course, our less than beloved President-elect has a somewhat less than amicable relationship with the truth.  Curmie rather suspects that if Mr. Trump were to utter an entire paragraph that was both coherent and honest, the result would be something akin to the Wicked Witch of the West being doused with water.  Here’s a rebuttal from Brian Krassenstein, who at least apparently knows more about what’s going on than either Trump or Curmie do:

After millions of views spreading lies about the Palisades firefighters lacking water because of regulations, the boring truth comes late like usual and wont be shared. Here it is: 

1 - Reservoirs and water tanks were at normal levels and completely full before the fire. 

2 - All 114 city water supply tanks were fully stocked pre-fire. 

3 - A 15-hour surge at four times normal demand reduced water pressure. 

4 - High demand at lower elevations slowed refilling tanks at higher elevations. 

5 - This unprecedented fire was fueled by 8 months of no rain and 85 MPH winds. Water is being brought in continuously. 

6 - Even if, like Trump claimed, the protection of the Delta Smelt caused over regulation by California, it's the FEDERAL Endangered Species Act that requires the protection of endangered species like the Delta Smelt and their habitats, not Gavin Newsom or California.

Here's the thing.  Perhaps, perhaps, there is a grain of truth in Trump’s allegations (insert stopped clock analogy here).  Apparently many insurance companies recently (before this situation, but recently) dropped coverage in the area because of the high risks involved.  If they could anticipate disaster, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that state officials should have been able to do so, as well.  Of course, Curmie’s own homeowner’s policy was cancelled a few years ago because… wait for it… there were apparently newly-discovered 30-year-old trees on the property.  (They also sent out an “inspector” who claimed to have found “mildew”; it was dirt.)

Irrespective of the legitimacy of the critique, however, the time for that reflection has not yet arrived.  Job 1: get people to safety.  Job 2: do what we can to protect property—homes, businesses, etc.  As of now, as the title of this piece suggests: There Is No Job 3.   

Curmie was about to say that all he can do, Gentle Reader, is to send good and healing thoughts to those whose lives and property are in danger, and thanks and admiration to the fire-fighters and others who are struggling to limit the damage.  That isn’t quite the case, though.  He can also help a little: here’s a link to make a donation to the cause.  Curmie contributed; you know Donald Trump won’t.  We can’t even get him to STFU.

When Curmie and the Insurance Companies Agree...

Curmie is a great believer in expertise. That doesn’t mean that those who lack it should automatically and uncritically submit to authority, but given a choice, and the proverbial all other things being equal, I’ll trust my mechanic to fix my car and my doctor to explain that pain in my chest. [Curmie doesn’t really have a pain in his chest. That would imply he has a heart.]

I’ve been talking about this phenomenon for a long time, e.g., this commentary on the Palin candidacy in ‘08:

Nor do I see the advantage to having someone “like me” in positions of responsibility: I don't want that in my plumber, my arborist, or my dental hygienist: why should I want it in a Vice President? Worse yet, why should I be interested in someone less knowledgeable about the issues than I am? If I'm better with an axe than anyone I could hire would be, I'll chop my own damned firewood.

More recently, I differentiated between two definitions of “authority,” suggesting that deference to a skill-set makes sense, but bowing to power doesn’t:

If I were on the [Texas] Board [of Education], I’d yield to child development experts on when certain ideas should best be introduced; I’d yield to historians and other social scientists on who’s more important than whom and what’s more important than what; I’d yield to elementary and high school teachers on what works in their classrooms. To the right-wing indoctrinators who, alas, comprise the majority of the TBOE, however, I’d yield on not one damned thing. Which, my friends, is why I have no future in politics.

One incident I didn’t write about was shortly after one of those innumerable times (can’t remember which one) when the Fox/GOP mouthpieces bellowed yet again that some action by the Obama administration would destroy the American corporation. You know, all that Kenyan Marxist Muslim crap. The same day, I received e-mails from a brokerage and a mutual fund company—you know, people whose job it is to make money for their clients (and who know they’ll be out of work if they don’t)—talking about what great new opportunities the new policy presented. Turns out, they were right. The Dow is up over 90% since President Obama took office; the Nasdaq is up over 141%; the Standard & Poor’s index is up just under 103%. Worst damned socialist ever. But that’s not what this piece is about.

What this is about is a recent story in USA Today by Victor Epstein of the Des Moines Register: it turns out that the people whose job it is to determine risks and attempt to make money by predicting that risk accurately—insurance companies—are refusing to renew the policies of Kansas schools which allow teachers and custodians to carry firearms under a new state law that the escapees from the lunatic asylum state legislature passed last winter, ostensibly to make schools “safer.” The new policy went into effect last week.

It's not a political decision, but a financial one based on the riskier climate it estimates would be created, the insurer said.

“We've been writing school business for almost 40 years, and one of the underwriting guidelines we follow for schools is that any on-site armed security should be provided by uniformed, qualified law enforcement officers,” said Mick Lovell, EMC's vice president for business development. “Our guidelines have not recently changed.”

EMC insures between 85 and 90% of Kansas schools; two other companies, Continental Western Group and Wright Specialty Insurance, have taken similar stances.

Bob Skow, the chief executive officer of the Independent Insurance Agents of Iowa, said, “It's one thing to have a trained peace officer with a gun in school; it's a completely different situation when you have a custodian or a teacher with a gun. That changes the risk of insuring a school and magnifies it considerably.” Yes, “Magnifies it considerably.”

What this means, in simple terms, is that companies whose financial stability depends on an accurate assessment of risk are overwhelmingly of the opinion that arming teachers increases the risk of casualties in the school environment. If there’s one industry that isn’t going to be accused of abandoning the profit motive, the insurance business would have to be it. If the professional assessors at EMC and other companies thought they could make money by insuring schools under the new statute, you can bet they’d do so. But they think the new policy so significantly increases risk that even raising premiums isn’t enough.

Of course, the NRA, whose smirking and stolid physiognomy can be readily perceived, only partially hidden by the shadows surrounding this legislation, has never paid any attention to reality, but this ought to at least dampen their Wild West-style rhetoric about how arming everybody is somehow going to make us safer. They won’t, of course: they’ll blat all the louder. In the unlikely event that they present any actual evidence to support their claims, I’ll listen. But I strongly suspect I won’t have to worry about making good on that promise.

Finally (almost), we turn to one Forrest Knox, the state senator who sponsored the bill in question. “I’m not an insurance expert, but it's hard for me to believe that if schools and other public buildings allow law-abiding citizens to carry that that increases risk—it’s news to me.” No, sir, you’re not an expert—you don’t have to tell us that; as I tell students all the time, I don’t care what you believe—tell me what you think; and if it’s really “news to [you]” that the evidence doesn’t actually support your position, then you have raised ignorance to an art form. Either that, or you’re a flat-out liar. Probably both.